the Rocky Mountains are now. That is the only place where the
country that is now the United States of America stuck up out of the
water. Everywhere else were the waves of the sea. There were no people,
even on the Rocky Mountain Islands. None at all.

No, the creatures that visited those island shores in those old days
were not people, but birds. Nearly as large as men they were, and they
had teeth on their long slender jaws, and they had no wings. They came
to the islands, perhaps, only at nesting-time; for their legs and feet
were fitted for swimming and not walking, and they lived upon fish in
the sea. So they dwelt, with no man to see them, on the water that
stretched from sea to sea; and what their voices were like, no man
knows.

A million years, perhaps, passed by, and then another million, and maybe
another million still; and the birds without wings and with teeth were
no more. In their places were other birds, much smaller--birds with
wings and no teeth; but something like them, for all that: for their
feet also were fitted for swimming and not walking, and they, too,
visited the shore little, if at all, except at nesting-time, and they
lived upon fish in the water.

And what their voices were like, all men may know who will go to the
wilderness lakes and listen; for, wonderful as it may seem, these second
birds have come down to us through perhaps a million years, and live
to-day, giving a strange clear cry before a storm, and at other times
calling weirdly in lone places, so that men who are within hearing
always say, "The loons are laughing."

Gavia was a loon who had spent the winter of 1919-1920 on the Atlantic
Ocean. There had hardly been, perhaps, in a million years a handsomer
loon afloat on any sea. Even in her winter coat she was beautiful; and
when she put on her spring suit, she was lovelier still.

She and her mate had enjoyed the sea-fishing and had joined a company of
forty for swimming parties and other loon festivities; for life on the
ocean waves has many interests, and there is never a lack of
entertainment. The salt-water bathing, diving, and such other activities
as the sea affords, were pleasant for them all. Then, too, the winter
months made a chance for rest, a change from home-duties, and a freedom
from looking out for the children, that gave the loons a care-free
manner as they rode the waves far out at sea.

[Illustration: Immer Lake.]

Considering all this, it seems strange