284: DATS OUT OF DOORS. 



As I round the wooded bends and weedy corners, I 

 conjure up this ancient man, and people the near-by hills 

 with him and his, picturing to myself what time the first 

 Indian summer dimmed the near distance with its golden 

 mists. Not strictly speaking an " Indian " summer then, 

 but the mellowing of an ice-age autumn. This, when the 

 river was a mightier stream, and the first tide of the creek 

 was yet to flow. 



And later, when the black mud that now makes these 

 wide, weedy meadows was being slowly laid down, yet 

 another folk were here, and after them the Indian. 

 There is something mysterious in the human mind that 

 it rebels the instant that man's antiquity is broached. The 

 mammoth and mastodon, the moose, reindeer, and ex- 

 tinct great beaver, they are all well known, and none 

 doubt their place in the earth's geological history ; there 

 are the same evidences of men, earlier in time than the 

 Indian, mingled with the animals I have named, yet the 

 statement makes men still shrug their shoulders. The 

 just law that sauce for the goose should be sauce for the 

 gander, fails for once. Bones of mammals are as old as 

 the deposits that contain them ; but bones of men must be 

 intrusive objects. Why, must be, has never been explained. 

 Superstition has such a grip upon the world, it may yet 

 die in ignorance. 



But let us to a more pleasant subject, where rancorous 

 discussion can not creep in. The dreamy days of this 

 short season do not have a depressing effect upon animal 

 life. I startle the wary wild duck as I round a jutting 

 bush-clad point, and its clear alarm cry goes bounding up 

 the valley until lost in the open meadows. The foraging 

 musk-rats cross the creek before me, bearing calamus 

 roots upon, if not above, the surface of the water ; but 

 more delightful than all else to see or hear now, are the 

 close-gathered redwings that fill the whole valley with 



