Otherwise Read Online Free Page A

of waterbirds in spring.
    Big Slough, as it was known locally, was really a lake about six miles long and a mile wide. Although the prolonged drought had turned much of the surrounding country into a dust bowl and reduced the slough itself to little more than a huge alkaline puddle, its murky water still stood knee-deep even among the broad beds of reeds and cattails fringing its shores.
    And it was overflowing with life.
    Out in the middle, several hundred whistling swans formed a raft so dense it looked like an ice floe. The swans were surrounded by milling multitudes of ducks, geese, grebes, coots, and other waterfowl, some swimming, some diving, others in free flight. We stood at the edge of the rushes and marvelled at the spectacle.
    In the southern sky, a heavy-flying wedge of massive white birds with huge heads and jet-black wings was descending like a ghostly phalanx of pterodactyls from Jurassic times. They were white pelicans – fliers whose antiquity stretches back to the age of dinosaurs. There was a wild flurry on the slough as lesser birds scattered to get out of the way and the pelicans planed grandly down to obscure the surface in a curtain of spray.
    We worked our way around the slough’s perimeter to a stretch of muddy foreshore almost hidden beneath a horde of godwits, curlews, avocets, and smaller shorebirds.
    The Others were everywhere in such abundance and variety that I gave up trying to keep track of their kinds and numbers. Our ears were filled with the rush of wings and the cacophony of avian voices gabbling about food, sex, travel, and whatever else birds talk about. With Mutt and Rex plunging after us, we waded out into the reed beds, where we were assailed by mobs of red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds defending nesting territories. Muskrat houses covered with fresh layers of swamp muck stood among the rushes. Each mound seemed to have a pair of grebes or coots nesting upon it. Marsh wrens were weaving their delicate hanging nests on cattail stems while unseen sora rails yammered at us for trespassing on their watery turf.
    On our way back to camp, we had to wait while Rex and Mutt excavated hillocks of soft mud pushed up by pocket gophers. Although the dogs did not uncover any of these secretive little mammals, they did unearth scores of yellow-spotted tiger salamanders who were using the gopher burrows as covered ways through which to travel to the slough where they would spawn.
    When we got back to camp the emerald-leafed poplars were alive with waves of warblers and other small songbirds. Branches overhead were illuminated by the azure flash of mountain bluebirds, the orange challenge of orioles, and the flame of rose-breasted grosbeaks.
    We were too tired to pay them much attention. When a skein of sandhill cranes flew low overhead trumpeting their sonorous calls, I looked up only briefly before falling back in a drift of cotton snow to wonder aloud if we would ever again see such a multitude of living creatures as we had seen thisday. Bruce was lying near me chewing on a twig. He spat it out to say, ”Dunno. Maybe. If we was awful lucky.”
    Six days later the Model A came puttering back to the campsite, and it was then – at that hour and in that place – that I really bade farewell to the prairie world – to Bruce and Murray and to all the Others with whom I had lived some of the best years of my life.

– 2 –
GO EAST YOUNG MAN
    A ngus was born at about the same time as the gasoline engine was invented but he nourished the conviction that the fates had chosen the wind as Man’s prime mover. Though circumstances forced him to accept the machine age, he never rejected the old gods. When, in 1919, he felt compelled to buy a motor vehicle he chose a topless Model T Ford truck completely open to the weather. This was succeeded in 1934 by an almost equally breezy Model A roadster with a folding canvas hood over the front seat and no shelter of any kind for the occupants of the