d
the younger children had retired to rest, Mr and Mrs Ross and the boys
went out into the capacious kitchen to hear old Kinesasis give his
version of the goose hunt. To please the old man, Mr Ross filled a
beautiful calumet and presented it to him as a gift in addition to his
wages, for his thoughtful care of the dogs while under his charge at the
island. For some minutes he smoked his new pipe in silence. Indians
are the least demonstrative people in the world, and Kinesasis was one
of them. He was never known to say "Thank you" in his life, and yet
none could be more grateful or pleased than he to have his faithful
services thus recognised. Mr Ross thoroughly understood him, and the
grateful look in his expressive eyes as he received the pipe from Mr
Ross's hand was all that was expected or that would be received.
Without one word of reference to the pipe, Kinesasis began about the
wild geese. Here is his story, which was a sort of monologue. He said:

"I have been much thinking about it, and I feel that it is my fault that
the young geese could not go south with the old ones when the call came
in the voice of the North Wind that it was time to go. I well remember
that last spring, when in the big boat I carried the dogs out to the
island, we saw some geese flying around that island where we caught the
young ones to-day. We could not get a shot at the old geese then, they
were so wary, but we pulled ashore, and there among the rushes we found
some nests full of eggs. Of course, we took the eggs and ate them. No
doubt those old geese when they returned, after we had gone, were very
angry at our taking the eggs, but they were not discouraged, and so they
went to work and filled up their nests with another setting of eggs and
hatched them out. But they had lost a full month of time, and there was
not enough warm weather left for these broods of young geese to grow
strong to rise up in the air when the call came to fly away to the South
Land."

For a few minutes he puffed away vigorously at his calumet, and then
continuing his story said: "Wild geese are strange things. I have hid
myself from them and watched them years ago, when they were more
plentiful and hatched their young at many places around our lakes and
rivers here. Then we had only bows and arrows, and so did not kill as
many as we do now. Their greatest enemies were the foxes, but no fox
would dare attack a goose on her nest or a brood of youn