8 ©be Marbler 



followed the rich green line of the creek, with its rushes, rank grasses and 

 cress, far out among the gradually levelling hills; until it was utterly lost 

 amono- the gumbo buttes that marge the bad-land reaches along the Power 

 River. I sauntered down the connecting ridge to the Sister Butte. An old 

 cattle bedding-ground lay close along its deeply hollowed edge. The butte's 

 over-hano-iug brow looked down on me. Its mysteries of habitancy held mc 

 mute; wondering. 



But along its many, many crevices and tiny pot-holes hovered and 

 flitted the dazzling blueness of the violet-green swallows. [Q] Manifestly, 

 they were, — soma of them, — still searching for nesting sites. A few barn 

 swallows mingled among them. A white-throated swift or two chattered 

 out his watchman's-rattle of a note amid the sweet voices of the swallow 

 folk. 



It was to be my last visit to this enchanted place. Is it any wonder 

 that I was sad of heart? The very fact that a curious reach of great, hollow- 

 ed rock, (which I had seen, parallelling the one of my exploiting ;) held 

 hieroglyphics more varied and interesting than those I had found, lay un- 

 explored, — as testified a cow-boy who watched the camera work with all the 

 gravity and aloofness of his clan — added regret to my wistfulness. But I 

 went away. The young Krider Hawk sat beside me on the buggy seat, 

 silent and uncaring. His two long-time companions had their bellies full, 

 to all seeming. For both the parents, quietly soaring higher and higher, 

 above the rocks, were seeming to me as if, like the aborigines, of long ago, 

 whose charcoal-darkened etchings upon the stone had made monumental the 

 fortress of my Krider Hawks, were, from far aloft, paying their proud hom- 

 age to the sun: whose disk was steadily falling down behind the great strong, 

 sturdy silence of the serried rocks. 



X— Note, Page 6— Dr. L. B. Bishop considers the young Krider Hawk figures in this article as being 

 "inclined to ca/uj-its": [the Western Red -tail.] Not strange, this ; calurus quite unquestionably nests 

 in the Sheridan Region, to the Northwest. 



Q— Note. Page 8— In Wyoming, as a rule, the Northern Violet-green Swallow occurs in groups of two 

 or three pairs, at the most. This was the only case wherever I found them flocking. There were, at the 

 mouth of Skull Creek, about seventy birds habiting this one'rock. 



