HUNTING IN THE S ELK IRKS. 15? 



Iween the trunks of two gnarled, wind-beaten 

 trees, a pine and a cottonwood, we looked out 

 across the lake. The little bay in our front, 

 in which we bathed and swam, was some- 

 times glassily calm ; and again heavy wind 

 squalls arose, and the surf beat strongly on 

 the beach where our boat was drawn up. 

 Now and then great checker-back loons 

 drifted buoyantly by, stopping with bold curi- 

 osity to peer at the white tent gleaming 

 between the tree-trunks, and at the smoke 

 curling above their tops; and they called to 

 one another, both at dawn and in the day- 

 time, with shrieks of unearthly laughter. 

 Troops of noisy, parti-colored Clark's crows 

 circled over tlie tree-tops or hung from among 

 the pine cones ; jays and chickadees came 

 round camp, and woodpeckers hammered 

 lustily in the dead timber. Two or three 

 times parties of Indians passed down the 

 lake, in strangely shaped bark canoes, with 

 peaked, projecting prows and sterns; craft 

 utterly unlike the graceful, feather-floating 

 birdies so beloved by both the red and the 

 white woodsmen of the northeast. Once a 

 couple of white men, in a dugout or pirogue 

 made out of a cottonwood log, stopped to 

 get lunch. They were mining prospectors, 

 French Canadians by birth, but beaten into 

 the usual frontier-mining stamp ; doomed to 

 wander their lives long, ever hoping, in the 

 quest for metal wealth. 



With these exceptions there was nothing to 

 break the silent loneliness of the great lake. 

 Shrouded as we were in the dense forest, and 

 at the foot of the first steep hills, we could 



