As Snap lay awake at night he heard far up among the stars the clang, it seemed to him, of trumpets, as if an army passed by to battle; or, again, a strange, solemn cry, not from quite such a height, smote his ear: 'honk, honk, ha, ha,' it seemed to say--a strange, unearthly call, from things passing and unseen. At morning, too, before dawn, he heard these cries, and a strange, swift, whistling sound would rush over the roof of the log-house. The sky seemed haunted in these late autumn days. One morning as the mists rose Snap got a glimpse of these passing armies of the air. Far away up in the clouds was a great V-shaped body of birds, the point of the V a single swan cleaving his way westward from his summer haunts in the Arctic Circle to the warmer regions of British Columbia and the mud-flats of the mouth of the Frazer River. On other days he saw Canada geese in thousands, and snow geese (or wavies) in hundreds of thousands, all passing on the same great high-road from Hudson Bay to the West. 'Snap,' said old Wharton one morning, 'hurry up, I've just seen a gang of wavies go up the crik, flying pretty low down. I reckon they aren't going far, and young wavy is mighty good eating.' Snap was not long getting the big duck-gun down from its peg on the beam, nor long in loading it with a great charge of shot as big as small peas. 'It ain't like shooting quail, you see,' said Wharton, 'these wavies want almost as much killing as a grizzly.' 'What are you going to take, Dick?' asked Snap. 'Oh, I'll just take the Winchester,' replied his friend; 'you let me have the first cut at them with a ball, and then as they get up let 'em have both barrels of your blunderbuss right in the thick of them.' 'All right, come along,' urged Snap. 'No hurry, my boy; they have come a longish way, those wavies, and I guess they'll take a goodish time lunching on them mud-flats and beaver meadows,' replied his less excitable companion, whose eyes nevertheless gleamed with all the excitement of a genuine wild-fowler. By-and-by, as the two hurried down the river-bed, they could hear a loud and excited gabbling, a thousand geese all talking at once. 'Talking like senators,' muttered old Dick; 'one would think they were paid for the job, but I expect as they've seen some country to talk about in the last day or two, between this and Hudson.' 'Last two or three days! why, how fast do they fly, Dick?' whispered Snap. 'Wal,' replied he, 'I guess I never travelled with them much, but I should say about sixty miles more or less an hour, and they'll keep it up too; but dry up now, for the cunning varmint put out regular scouts, and they'll hear us talking a quarter of a mile off.' Round the mud-flats and hollows which the geese were on was a fringe of brush and reeds. Through this the two gunners forced their way. As they did so the gabbling ceased as if by magic.