A cold fall storm was driving down from the north and overtook him in the salt-marsh country of Western Kansas. The water-fowl scurried ahead of it. Every pond and slough, each broad prairie lake and marshy bottom was covered with members of the feathered horde en route to the winter quarters on the Gulf. Flock followed flock in an endless procession, streaking the sky. The prairies were covered with feeding geese. Great white cranes stalked majestically in the open flats, traveling in bands of hundreds, and at night the wild whoops of overhead squadrons almost drowned the clamor of oncoming hordes of geese. This evidence of abundance cheered him. He estimated that he saw over a million birds a day; and he reflected that everywhere east and west of him this great migration was going on; the east coast and the west, the Mississippi flyway and the course of every inland river; all were experiencing this same deluge of birds headed into the south. Nowhere had he seen so much bird life except during the pigeon flights in the hardwood country of his boyhood home. There he had seen the skies blackened with wild pigeons, had seen limbs broken from the trees by the sheer weight of thousands of roosting birds. The shock of finding the buffalo gone from the plains in a few short years was counteracted by this fresh evidence of plenty. It was in Dodge that his trail crossed that of Hanson, a man from his old outfit. Hanson, with a younger man named Rice, was hunting antelope for the hides. The two spoke of old friends. Cleve had gone to the lumber camps of the northwest coast, Hanson informed, and McCann to the hardwood belt to the east. They had quit the hunting. Antelope were fleet and it was difficult to stalk them in the flats. Hanson had known the time when all hands might kill and skin an average of twenty buffalo to the man each day. He now lamented the necessity of hunting the wary pronghorn for less than a dollar a hide. A man was doing well to average four a day. “The old days are gone,” he said. “Things are different now. It’s hard pickings for a man to make a living in times like these.” But Rice looked forth on the world with the optimism of youth. It was a land of plenty in which he lived. He had planned a hunt in the hills of Western Colorado and urged Woodson to throw in with them. “There’s millions of deer up there,” he said. “They’re paying three dollars apiece for venison saddles at the mines. I’ve seen ten thousand mule deer boiling through the passes, all in sight at once, when they gathered from the Gore Range and the Rabbit Ear to drift down to the Oak Hills for the winter. There’s deer without end. I hunted up there last year. We loaded thirty four-horse freight-wagons with deer saddles, high as we could lash ’em on, all from a two-day kill in one pass as they came streaming down, a thousand to the band. There’s good money in meat-hunting for the mines. You better throw in with us, Mart, and come along.”