Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The Angler's Story THE nights grow cold in September and October around the Klamath country. The days were still radiant and warm, but the summit of Pitt—a splendid volcano cone,—over to the west, was now always white with snow. The pines and other trees looked darker, in the shadows which raced across the lake of dreams, the rays that painted the Modoc hills with vermilion were deeper in tint and tone. The tules had been nipped by the frost and had lost their vivid greens, and hung in the wind, or crackled as the ducks and geese rustled through them, like banners in red and gold. The water of the thousand springs grew cooler, and one imagined a greater, stronger flow. Ducks, geese, jacksnipe were going south; long lines could be seen every day, above the black forests of the Cascade, and every little river, inlet, and bay had its voyagers, while out in the lake proper, great ghostly cotton- like masses told of the white pelican already thinking of some warmer clime. A great change was imminent, and it did not require a conjurer among the anglers, or a great prophetic soul, to say that it was winter. Yet winter was weeks away; these were only the premonitory symptoms, and they drove us to the big log hunting lodge o' nights and to our little camps among the trees, where we piled on the logs of Oregon pine and revelled in its roar. Sometimes we sat and listened to the strange sounds of the forest, the weird note of an owl, the cry of a mountain lion, perhaps, or the fiercer growl and menace of two limbs which smote one another and snarled as only two dead limbs can, on a cold dry night when the sky is clear, and each star is like a steel facet in the sky. I have often wondered why some hunter who writes of the woods has never thought to translate the voices ...