Prairie chickens came strolling in family flocks about the shanty, picking seeds and grasshoppers like domestic fowls, and they became still more abundant as wheat-and corn-fields were multiplied, but also wilder, of course, when every shotgun in the country was aimed at them.  The booming of the males during the mating-season was one of the loudest and strangest of the early spring sounds, being easily heard on calm mornings at a distance of a half or three fourths of a mile.  As soon as the snow was off the ground, they assembled in flocks of a dozen or two on an open spot, usually on the side of a ploughed field, ruffled up their feathers, inflated the curious colored sacks on the sides of their necks, and strutted about with queer gestures something like turkey gobblers, uttering strange loud, rounded, drumming calls,—­boom! boom! boom! interrupted by choking sounds.  My brother Daniel caught one while she was sitting on her nest in our corn-field.  The young are just like domestic chicks, run with the mother as soon as hatched, and stay with her until autumn, feeding on the ground, never taking wing unless disturbed.  In winter, when full-grown, they assemble in large flocks, fly about sundown to selected roosting-places on tall trees, and to feeding-places in the morning,—­unhusked corn-fields, if any are to be found in the neighborhood, or thickets of dwarf birch and willows, the buds of which furnish a considerable part of their food when snow covers the ground.

The wild rice-marshes along the Fox River and around Pucaway Lake were the summer homes of millions of ducks, and in the Indian summer, when the rice was ripe, they grew very fat.  The magnificent mallards in particular afforded our Yankee neighbors royal feasts almost without price, for often as many as a half-dozen were killed at a shot, but we seldom were allowed a single hour for hunting and so got very few.  The autumn duck season was a glad time for the Indians also, for they feasted and grew fat not only on the ducks but on the wild rice, large quantities of which they gathered as they glided through the midst of the generous crop in canoes, bending down handfuls over the sides, and beating out the grain with small paddles.

The warmth of the deep spring fountains of the creek in our meadow kept it open all the year, and a few pairs of wood ducks, the most beautiful, we thought, of all the ducks, wintered in it.  I well remember the first specimen I ever saw.  Father shot it in the creek during a snowstorm, brought it into the house, and called us around him, saying:  “Come, bairns, and admire the work of God displayed in this bonnie bird.  Naebody but God could paint feathers like these.  Juist look at the colors, hoo they shine, and hoo fine they overlap and blend thegether like the colors o’ the rainbow.”  And we all agreed that never, never before had we seen so awfu’ bonnie a bird.  A pair nested every year in the hollow top of an oak stump about fifteen