14 THE (A.U DD U5B°O"N 3BaU Th hia 
the hay and rubbing their sides against the uprights, and it was I alone 
who heard the mice scurrying and squeaking all through the night. 
To get across the river we had to borrow a boat and, to make return 
of it, one was chosen by lot to re-cross the stream, walk three miles to the 
bridge and three more to rejoin his companions. Meanwhile there was 
shelter to be thought of. In a woodlot near the river lay piled cord-wood. 
Three pairs of hands rearranged these to make a three-sided shelter. Poles, 
covered with the weather-matted top layer of a hay-stack, shut out the sky, 
and more hay made a bed. 
With all this we were not too busy to preclude the finding of a horned 
owl’s nest and to bring the newly-fledged young into camp. Supper done 
we were ready, literally, to hit the hay; but hardly had we done so when 
there burst from overhead a challenging and soul-terrifying ‘‘Hoo-Hoo- 
Ah-h!”—a sound which continued for most of the night. (We liberated the 
young owls the next day.) While this was going on the night grew so cold 
that we were compelled to build a big fire before our shelter, standing 
watch, turn about, to keep it going. 
Morning sunshine set all aright and, what with bread (without butter), 
fried salt pork and coffee, we made a rapturous meal and joyfully discussed 
our position. To use our one rubber blanket to cover all three, each rolled 
in his own woolen one, was folly. One might have known that to use the 
rubber one to close the opening of the shelter would be the most effective. 
And so it proved. 
Prairie chickens were booming, meadowlarks singing, red-tails calling, 
chewinks scuttling in the dry leaves; the marsh hawk quartered over the 
dead slough grass, and boys with full bellies and an endless week of days 
ahead were lusty and loud in their bantering and horse-play. 
Skins had to be made, eggs blown, guns cleaned, rabbits shot and 
dressed, partly at least—but what’s a hair or two when one is eating hare 
anyway’? Water had to be brought from the brook (not so much for wash- 
ing, either), there was wood to gather and fresh hay to be carried in for 
bedding. (Oh, you modern campers-out, see what you miss!) 
The osage orange hedges are gone, alas! The shrikes must adapt 
themselves to less formidable chevaux-de-frise and less convenient meat- 
hooks. And the little quail, who could feed for miles without leaving their 
shelter, now must dart ever more furtively beneath a less protective cover. 
And is there a Cooper’s hawk left there—that swift-striking “blue darter” 
whose destructiveness of poultry must, to his great disadvantage, be set over 
against the thrill of his bold, predaceous presence. And the owls are gone, 
and the wolves whose cubs the old Frenchman took each year from their 
cave and claimed the bounty and let the old ones go free that they might, 
another year, give him more revenue. But still on the pastures and prairies 
of the Illinois country are born, each year, a new generation of Bartramian 
sandpipers, shore larks, yellow-winged sparrows and grass finches—the 
names by which we knew them in a day long gone. . % 
Iroquois—Kankakee: stirring and historic names. Where the two 
streams join there was, in that day, a great pasture and down to its green 
