"No," said Fannin, "crows know too much for that. They only get together and follow them when they come down to the flats looking for clams. They have learned that the hogs turn up a great deal of stuff that they themselves like; and they have become regular attendants on them. You know it isn't so very long since they didn't have any loose hogs in this country. It is only within the last few years that they have turned them out to look out for themselves."
"Well," said Hugh, "of course there's lots of difference in size, but these crows flapping about these hogs remind me more than anything of the way the buffalo birds act out on the prairie. They are just as familiar and at home with the buffalo and cattle and horses as these crows are with the hogs here."
"It's comical," said Fannin, "how familiar any set of birds will get with animals and people or anything else, just as soon as they find that they don't hurt them."
They were now at the mouth of Burrard Inlet and had only a few miles more to go before reaching Hastings where Fannin lived, and where their canoe voyage would end. They had been about a month afloat.
The sand flats, over whose shoal waters the canoe was passing, seemed to be the home of a multitude of flat fish or flounders. They lay on the bottom, and so closely resembled it in color that it was impossible at the distance of a few feet to distinguish them from the sand. The fish remained absolutely motionless until the bow of the canoe was within two or three feet of them; and then they swam quickly away with a flapping motion that did not seem to carry them off very rapidly as compared with the arrow-like darting motions of most fish; but they stirred up a cloud of sand and mud that effectually concealed them.
"These flat fish are mighty queer animals, Mr. Fannin," remarked Jack. "They don't look to me like anything I have ever seen before in the world."
"No," said Fannin, "I guess they are not. They are mighty queer kind of fish; and, if I understand it right, they are all skewed around."
"How do you mean?" asked Jack.
"Why," said Fannin, "I understand when they are hatched they are right side up like other fish; but soon after that they have to lie on their side. That covers one of their eyes, and that eye works its way up through the head onto the top; so that, as a matter of fact, the two eyes on a flat fish which you see when you are looking down on him are both of them looking out of the same side of the head. What looks to you and me like the back, is really his side, and what looks to you and me like his white belly is really his other side. I don't understand about it very clearly, but there's a man back East who has worked that whole thing out. Somebody sent me a copy of his paper one time, and I guess I have got it somewhere in the shop now."