MYay, 1919 A RETURN TO THE DAKOTA LAKE REGION 113:
seem, they were not quite Swallow-like enough to get on the wing. After flying back and forth over the surface for some time, the gray-winged flock took a turn in the sky; then suddenly, with one accord they swept down, fairly dropped down, to the water. When finally leaving they made a charming picture, the whole band of gray wings trooping up toward the sunpath.
While the Black Terns had been going through their evolutions, they had been watched by a group of Canvasbacks and other large Ducks which lay at ease on the water, phlegmatic Ducks to whom the performances of the nervous aeronauts must have been as edifying as the evolutions of aeroplanes to earth-bound multitudes. Besides the Terns, Franklin Gulls also flew down the Coulee—once, from high in the sky they swept down low over it—and one night on their way to the lake, a large mixed flock of Franklin Gulls and Black Terns made the sky over the pasture a moving picture of weaving wings. The next morning a flock of the Terns was beating low over a strip of plowed ground back of the Coulee, dropping down to pick up insects as they had over the water. Another time a party of Franklin Gulls was sitting near together, part of them bathing in the Coulee.
When sitting on the highest bench overlooking the big bend, one morning, I was idly watching the six or eight horse reapers and binders of the surrounding acres—one farmer was harvesting with three of the great machines, having borrowed one of a neighbor!—and before my eyes level-topped grain fields were changing to stubble fields dotted with sheaves of wheat, when suddenly a loud splash below brought me to my feet on the edge of the bank. In a line leading from the water to the bank, the tules shook and bent down—some one was coming! Peering down where the approaching bird or beast must show through the marsh grass, I discovered the striped nose of a large badger! As he started to climb up the hill I bethought me of the great hole in the grass at my feet, and in a moment more, up came the badger, swinging down his burrow like a flash, so near I could almost have touched him. Growling and sounds of digging then came up from the cavern. Was the hole being enlarged in view of the enemy on the rampart above? When the noise had stopped and I was leaving, I leaned over and peered down into the burrow again, and back in the shadow of the doorway saw dimly What seemed to be a large light-colored head—so it was a case of the watcher watched!
Two days later I heard a snarl from the badger below, but that was all. His cave had been well located, in a strip of prairie left between the wheat fields and the Coulee, a strip in which sagebrush and a patch of silver leaf made a last stand against the advance of civilization; and in which let us hope he might well be left undisturbed to carry on his good work of ridding the fields of destructive rodents.
Following this strip of prairie around a bend of the Coulee one day, I came upon a mound of soft earth a yard or more across, marked with foot- prints and having a hole so large that it proclaimed badgers. At the same time I began to hear queer animal noises, and the Redwings in the tules on the edge of the Coulee began fussing. Then the grass tops next the tules began to shake, and the shaking passed up a line toward me until at last I saw white-tipped hairs. By this time the noises from two approaching combatants were so angry and threatening, with snappy barks and snarls, that I stepped a little to one side. On their way toward me one of the belligerents caught sight of me and ran off in the grass, but the other one climbed up on a second mound and
