Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/109

 not only for safety's sake but also to clear the uppermost stratum of the morming mist spread like a blue-gray blanket over the forest, shutting it completely from view. Always old Sanute, jealous of his leadership, held the van, but the rest of the flock maintained no fixed or regular order. Sometimes they swept along over a broad curving front nearly five hundred feet from flank to flank. Again for a space they were strung out in single file or in two long, crooked, converging lines somewhat resembling the wedge-shaped formation of migrating geese; but generally they flew in a loose, rather irregular phalanx, perhaps four times as long as it was wide.

When they had left the denser forest behind them and were approaching the edge of the bay, the mist blanket seemed to slide away from under them and they looked down upon a green smiling country where patches of woodland alternated with cultivated fields. Here Sanute mounted fifty feet higher, and all his followers mounted after him. Thus, when they sighted the little house where Red Cam Reppington the hunter lived alone near the edge of Little Raccoon Swamp, they were well above shotgun range.

Red Cam, up earlier than usual, saw them when they were yet half a mile away. He knew that every morning the ibis army passed over his house en route from their secret sleeping place in the deep