t the
north end every bird that frequents the Central States is to be found.
Here grow in profusion many orchids, fringed gentians, cardinal
flowers, turtle heads, starry campions, purple gerardias, and grass of
Parnassus. In one season I have located here almost every flower named
in the botanies as native to these regions and several that I can find
in no book in my library.

"But this change of territory involves the purchase of fifteen acres of
forest and orchard land, on a lake shore in marsh country. It means the
building of a permanent, all-year-round home, which will provide the
comforts of life for my family and furnish a workshop consisting of a
library, a photographic darkroom and negative closet, and a printing
room for me. I could live in such a home as I could provide on the
income from my nature work alone; but when my working grounds were
cleared, drained and ploughed up, literally wiped from the face of the
earth, I never could have moved to new country had it not been for the
earnings of the novels, which I now spend, and always have spent, in
great part UPON MY NATURE WORK. Based on this plan of work and life I
have written ten books, and 'please God I live so long,' I shall write
ten more. Possibly every one of them will be located in northern
Indiana. Each one will be filled with all the field and woods
legitimately falling to its location and peopled with the best men and
women I have known."

Chapter 1

THE RAT-CATCHERS OF THE WABASH

"Hey, you swate-scented little heart-warmer!" cried Jimmy Malone, as he
lifted his tenth trap, weighted with a struggling muskrat, from the
Wabash. "Varmint you may be to all the rist of creation, but you mane a
night at Casey's to me."

Jimmy whistled softly as he reset the trap. For the moment he forgot
that he was five miles from home, that it was a mile farther to the end
of his line at the lower curve of Horseshoe Bend, that his feet and
fingers were almost freezing, and that every rat of the ten now in the
bag on his back had made him thirstier. He shivered as the cold wind
sweeping the curves of the river struck him; but when an unusually
heavy gust dropped the ice and snow from a branch above him on the back
of his head, he laughed, as he ducked and cried: "Kape your snowballing
till the Fourth of July, will you!"

"Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!" remarked a tiny gray bird on the tree above him.
Jimmy glanced up. "Chickie, Chickie, Chickie," he said. "I can