"Of course," said Jack, "you know just as well as I do that I haven't any stuffing tools with me, or any tools for blowing eggs, or anything to carry bird skins and eggs in if I had them. Of course, if we were to put such things on the packs they'd get broken and smashed up in forty ways and wouldn't be worth throwing away."
"No," said Hugh, "I don't reckon they would."
"Well," sighed Jack, "it's mighty aggravating to sit here and look at all these birds and think that there must be lots of their eggs all about and I can't get hold of them."
"I'll allow that must be pretty aggravating," said Hugh; "but if you wanted to go off to collect bird skins and eggs why didn't you think of it before you started out from the States, and bring along with you the tools you wanted to use? Suppose I had started from the ranch to trap beaver, and had come down here without any traps, what would you have thought of me?"
"Well," said Jack, "I suppose I'd have thought you were a pretty queer trapper."
"I reckon so," said Hugh, "and I think you're a pretty queer bird collector, as yet. You may become a good one later, though."
It soon grew too dark to distinguish the birds, and the two returned to camp, where they built up a big fire, for the night was chilly. Several times after the fire began to blaze up, they saw an owl fly into the circle of light and pass once or twice about the fire and then out into the darkness again.
"What gets me, Hugh," said Jack, after they had settled themselves comfortably by the fire, and Hugh's pipe was going well; "what gets me, is what has become of all the animals and birds that used to inhabit all this country? Of course, when I first came out here I saw antelope and buffalo in wonderful numbers, and there are lots of them now, but there must have been a time, say a hundred or two hundred years ago, when perhaps there was just as many buffalo and elk and deer in Illinois or Ohio as there were in Wyoming and Montana when I came West. Now, of course, all those animals have disappeared from that country, and in the same way birds have disappeared. There must be places still all over the West here where birds come and breed, just as thickly as they do on these little ponds that we've been looking at to-night. And in old times they may have bred just as thickly in the swamps of Illinois and Ohio as they do here in this valley. What's become of them all?"
Hugh did not answer, but made with his hand the sign for "gone under," meaning dead.
"Yes," Jack went on, "I suppose they are, but is that what is going to happen to all the wild animals and birds in this country? Is the whole of North America going to be swept bare of all the birds and animals that belong to it, and just have nothing in it except sheep and cattle and dogs and things? That's the way it seems to me, but I hope that's not the way it's going to be."