Waterfowl 53 



to the ranch. Being young and fat it was excellent 

 eating. 



The third goose I killed with the rifle was of a 

 different kind. I had been out after antelopes, start- 

 ing before there was any light in the heavens, and 

 pushing straight out toward the rolling prairie. Af- 

 ter two or three hours, when the sun was well up, 

 I neared where a creek ran in a broad, shallow valley. 

 I had seen no game, and before coming up to the 

 crest of the divide beyond which lay the creek bot- 

 tom, I dismounted and crawled up to it, so as to see 

 if any animal had come down to drink. Field- 

 glasses are almost always carried while hunting on 

 the plains, as the distances at which one can see game 

 are so enormous. On looking over the crest with 

 the glasses the valley of the creek for about a mile 

 was stretched before me. At my feet the low hills 

 came closer together than in other places, and 

 shelved abruptly down to the bed of the valley, where 

 there was a small grove of box-alders and cotton- 

 woods. The beavers had, in times gone by, built a 

 large dam at this place across the creek, which must 

 have produced a great back-flow and made a regular 

 little lake in the times of freshets. But the dam 

 was now broken, and the beavers, or most of them, 

 gone, and in the place of the lake was a long green 

 meadow. Glancing toward this, my eye was at once 

 caught by a row of white objects stretched straight 

 across it, and another look showed me that they 

 were snow-geese. They were feeding, and were 

 moving abreast of one another slowly down the 



