Picked from the Prairie Province 235 



short, bronzy plains-grass creeps to the edge of 

 moist, boggy soil, and there the growth changes. A 

 few yards beyond the firm ground begins a region 

 of reeds which spreads for many miles. In most 

 places the line between grass and reeds is sharply 

 defined by a margin of the blackest of yielding ooze, 

 beloved of the Wilson snipe and his nearest kin. 

 The reeds are a marvel of rank luxuriance. A tall 

 man standing in a canoe occasionally can peer across 

 leagues of lonesomeness, the brown monotony only 

 broken by the winding streaks of channels and the 

 flash of half-revealed ponds. A tenderfoot probably 

 would exclaim, " Get me out of this grass cemetery, 

 for surely here nature has died." 



During a ten minutes' scrutiny he might see no 

 sign of life, yet his idea of that damp desolation 

 would be farther from the truth than if he had 

 purposely striven to guess wrong, and not only 

 wrong, but as far wrong as his most strenuous 

 effort at imagination possibly could carry him. 

 Silent as is the scene, lifeless as leagues of it ap- 

 pear, the quivering reeds screen thousands upon 

 thousands of wild, free things, as yet almost igno- 

 rant of human methods and which spend lazy, dreamy 

 weeks in fat content. The only magicians who can 

 rouse these few folk are two : the one, a lath-lean, 

 umber-visaged, shock-haired Breed; the other, one 

 of those canvas-covered whites who seem to be ever- 

 lastingly driven into the drowsy corners of creation. 



The " silent, smoky savage " of a Breed seldom 

 incites to riot. He hunts of necessity, and until 

 he has had much to do with the white brother, 

 seldom sees the sporting side. To him, cartridges 



