Page:The Way of the Wild (1930).pdf/185

 awakened by the bellowing of great alligators and the incessant tumult of tall white egrets roosting in thousands in a black gum bay near by, mounted his wiry Chickasaw pony and rode out in advance of his comrades to get meat, his larder being empty. In a land of miraculous plenty, where the poorest man—provided he could shoot—might dine on the choicest of meats, Burliegh craved plain and common food. Surfeited with venison and bears' paws, with wood duck and wild turkey, he yearned for a breakfast of roasted rabbit.

Leaving camp, he rode along the outer edge of the canebrake through wild pea vines and dark green rushes as high as his horse's back. Away to his right stretched a long narrow prairie, two miles long and half a mile wide, a natural meadow reaching deep into the virgin forest, which walled it in on either side. Down this green vista Burliegh's gaze roved casually, viewing familiar things—deer grazing in herds of thirty or forty, a droveof fifty wild black cattle, a flock of ten thousand passenger pigeons flying like the wind, a swarm of vultures crowding about a carcass, a lordly bull elk striding through a group of whitetails toward the forest's rim. On the prairie the pea-vine growth was luxuriant, but not so tall, and in the moister places it was supplanted by short vivid green grass. One such spot, an acre or more in extent, gleamed