82 On the trail of vanishing birds 



ciety on its panels, a small trailer loaded with camping gear, and 

 a sedan with the U.S. Government shield gleaming conspicuously 

 on each side. The station wagon had a Texas license plate and the 

 government car had the official U.S. plates fore and aft. We 

 needed no banner to announce our mission, for these good people 

 were so well informed and so keenly aware of the whooping-crane 

 situation that they spotted us at once. 



Meadow Lake is on the edge of "the boosh," to use the local 

 pronunciation, and at that time had many of the aspects of a 

 frontier town the muddy, unpaved streets, one-story frame build- 

 ings, primitive hotel accommodations, and a cheerful, friendly 

 populace. We made friends at once with Jim Barnett, the District 

 Game Superintendent, and met the members of his field staff. 

 Maps were poured over, migration reports discussed, and a great 

 deal of speculating indulged in. Mrs. Barnett, as a schoolteacher, 

 was greatly interested in our two children, then nine and fourteen. 

 What were we doing about their schooling? I felt that as a teacher 

 she considered this question more important than the location of 

 the whooping crane's nesting grounds. My wife explained that 

 like many American families wandering over the face of the 

 globe with small children in tow, we kept up their studies by cor- 

 respondence with a private school at home. She sat them down 

 each morning after breakfast in hotel rooms, roadside cabins, 

 the back seats of automobiles, and, later on, in tents in the bush 

 and heard their lessons. They loved it and not only kept up with 

 their normal studies, but were usually ahead of the average stu- 

 dents in their respective grades when they returned at last to a 

 more settled existence. 



After my talks with Jim Barnett and his crew, I decided on 

 Flotten Lake for our base camp. At that time, Flotten, 45 miles 

 north of Meadow Lake, was the outer limit of travel by car in 

 Saskatchewan. It is situated at latitude 54 37' north, longitude 

 10829 / west, in a mixed woodland region of the so-called Boreal 

 Forest. In other words, "the boosh." More important, it had a 

 virtually uninhabited shoreline, deep water for landing our plane, 

 and no resident Indians to complicate matters. And it lay as close 

 to the outermost edge or jumping-off place on the migration route 



