shape, some three or four feet in diameter, and exceedingly light in structure, over and over it rolls across the plain!  If the wind happens to increase, the whole flock migrates, bounding merrily along at a good rate of speed.  Nothing more terrifying to the unaccustomed equine can be imagined than thirty or forty of these formidable-looking monsters charging down upon him, bouncing several feet from the surface of the earth.  The experienced horse treats them with the contempt such light-minded senility deserves, and wades through their phantom attack indifferent.  After the breeze has died the debauched old tumbleweeds are everywhere to be seen, piled up against brush, choking the ditches, filling the roads.  Their beautiful spherical shapes have been frayed out so that they look sodden and weary and done up.  But their seeds have been scattered abroad over the land.

Wherever we found water, there we found ducks.  The irrigating ditches contained many bands of a dozen or fifteen; the overflow ponds had each its little flock.  The sky, too, was rarely empty of them; and the cries of the snow geese and the calls of sandhill cranes were rarely still.  I remarked on this abundance.

“Ducks!” replied the Captain, wonderingly.  “Why, you haven’t begun to see ducks!  Come with me.”

Thereupon we turned sharp to the left.  After ten minutes I made out from a slight rise above the plain a black patch lying across the distance.  It seemed to cover a hundred acres or so, and to represent a sort of growth we had not before encountered.

“That,” said the Captain, indicating, “is a pond covered with ducks.”

I did not believe it.  We dropped below the line of sight and rode steadily forward.

All at once a mighty roar burst on our ears, like the rush of a heavy train over a high trestle; and immediately the air ahead of us was filled with ducks towering.  They mounted, and wheeled, and circled back or darted away.  The sky became fairly obscured with them in the sense that it seemed inconceivable that hither space could contain another bird.  Before the retina of the eye they swarmed exactly as a nearer cloud of mosquitoes would appear.

Hardly had the shock of this first stupendous rise of wildfowl spent itself before another and larger flight roared up.  It seemed that all the ducks in the world must be a-wing; and yet, even after that, a third body arose, its rush sounding like the abrupt, overwhelming noise of a cataract in a sudden shift of wind.  I should be afraid to guess how many ducks had been on that lake.  Its surface was literally covered, so that nowhere did a glint of water show.  I suppose it would be a simple matter to compute within a few thousand how many ducks would occupy so much space; but of what avail?  Mere numbers would convey no impression of the effect.  Rather fill the cup of heaven with myriads thick as a swarm of gnats against the sun.  They swung and circled back and forth before making up their minds to be off, crossing and recrossing the various lines of flight.  The first thrice-repeated roar of rising had given place to the clear, sustained whistling of wings, low, penetrating, inspiring.  In the last flight had been a band of several hundred snow geese; and against the whiteness of their plumage the sun shone.