CHAPTER I Adventures Without a Man HOW IS your own imagination, to-day? I hope it is good and strong, because you will need to use it now. The most surprising things used to happen, right here in the West, with no man here to see them. Mother Earth and her elder children had the most extraordinary adventures before the first man came. Our eyes, if we will only use them, come to the help of our imagination here. Down in the Red Deer Valley of Alberta monsters used to live, more huge and wonderful than dragons in a fairy tale. No human eyes ever saw them in life. No men lived here, or anywhere on earth, so long, long ago. But we ourselves can see those very beasts, their huge old bones and awful teeth; yes, the very pattern of their skin, printed on the soft mud they sank and died in,—mud now hardened into rock. Many of these monstrous skeletons have been put together and set up in museums. Every year more come into sight, as the river undermines its banks and the rock breaks up and wears away. You can see these creatures, dead, with your eyes. Now set your imagination to work, and see them alive. What a picture! A dense jungle, of waving horsetail reeds and rushes tall as our poplars, of spreading tree-ferns, of towering trees like tropical palms. Here and there, an open stretch of gleaming, stagnant water. Flitting overhead are curious birds with rows of sharp teeth in their long beaks, and still more curious reptiles of the air with fleshy wings, like overgrown bats. What are they looking down at? There is a stir among the greenery. A lizard, fifty feet long, is wallowing in his muddy bed; his head appears, with dull eyes looking out from a stupid little brain; then his neck, longer than any giraffe’s. We call him the Gigantosaurus, or giant lizard. He seizes a tree with his forepaws, bends it down, and begins to munch the leaves and twigs. [Illustration] _Very Early Westerners,_ _Corythosaurus and Gorgosaurus_ Suddenly he stops, looks round in alarm, and dives. Too late. Another huge lizard comes crashing and splashing through the greenery,—not quite so big, but fierce and strong, his mighty jaws grinning with terrible fangs. It is the Tyrannosaurus. He throws himself on the poor leaf-eater, and bites and tears, and tears and bites, till the helpless monster lies dead in the swamp. A whole tribe of the conqueror’s family, and other flesh-eaters of all sizes and many curious shapes, creep up and share the feast, till nothing is left but the bones—for us to discover, a few million years later, and collect for our museums.