144 HUNTING TRIPS 



Salt, like tea, I had carried with me, and it 

 was not long before two of the birds, 

 plucked and cleaned, were split open and 

 roasting before the fire. And to me they 

 seemed most delicious food, although, i 

 in November the sharp-tails, while keeping 

 their game flavor, have begun to be dry and 

 tough, most unlike the tender and juicy 

 young of August and September. 



The best day's work I ever did after 

 sharp-tails was in the course of the wagon 

 trip, already mentioned, which my brother 

 and I made through the fertile farming 

 country to the eastward. We had stopped 

 over night with a Norwegian settler who 

 had taken and adapted to a farmhouse an 

 old log trading-post of one of the fur com- 

 panies, lying in the timber which fringed 

 a river, and so stoutly built as to have 

 successfully withstood the assaults of time. 

 We were travelling in a light covered 

 wagon, in which we could drive anywhere 

 over the prairie. Our dogs would have 

 made an Eastern sportsman blush, for when 



