58 Birds of Lakeside and Prairie 



over the lake. It was on that day, which had opened with a 

 spring-like mildness, that the steamship Chicora, plying Lake 

 Michigan, went down to destruction. The air was filled with 

 particles of snow that cut like sleet. I reached a field finally 

 where the storm had full sweep, and was compelled to brace 

 myself to resist its force. I edged into it as best I could, and 

 before I had made many yards I found that even in the 

 tempest I had bird companions. A flock of snow buntings 

 were whirling over a depression in the prairie. The wind 

 tossed them about almost at will, but in some way they man- 

 aged to hold their place over the same low spot in the field. 

 They went to the ground finally, but as I passed them they 

 rose in a body and went hurtling down the wind. What I 

 saw was but little more than some streaks in the snow-laden 

 air. A blizzard is of but little more moment to a snow bunt- 

 ing than a zephyr. How the wind did hurl them! They 

 were not more than four feet above the ground, and were 

 being borne straight at a close board fence. I thought they 

 were about to be dashed headlong against it, but the buntings 

 had ridden on the breast of a storm before. When within a 

 few feet of the fence they rose and went scuttling over the 

 top, showing white against the treetops beyond. 



I was forced by the storm to follow in the wake of the 

 snow buntings. I had been wondering all the morning at the 

 absence of the chickadee. I found him and a dozen of his 

 brothers working their way through the branches of a grove 

 of oaks near the little railroad station of Ravinia. Wind and 

 weather are nothing to the chickadees. They must feel some- 

 thing like a contempt for their relatives who must needs go 

 south at the first pinch of Jack Frost's fingers. The chicka- 



