are epochal and whose
yesterdays are lives.

* * * * *

Waiting for the suburban car that night in the little Lake town, I
mentioned the flying wedge.

"Why, those are Jack Miner's geese," remarked a voice of the
waiting-room.

I ignored a reply. A local witticism past doubt--the cut-up of the
place. Jack Miner, as I saw it, might own Pelee Island, Lake Erie or the
District of Columbia, but no man's pronoun of possession has any
business relation to a flock of wild geese, the same being about the
wildest things we have left. I recalled the crippled goose which the
farmer's boy chased around a hay-stack for the better part of a June
afternoon, and only saw once; the goose being detained that particular
once with the dog of the establishment. This dog ranged the countryside
for many years thereafter, but couldn't be coaxed past a load of hay,
and was even sceptical of corn-shocks. I knew, moreover, that the geese
are shot at from the Gulf rice-marshes to the icy Labradors; that they
fly slightly higher since the common use of smokeless instead of black
powder.

Yet the stranger hadn't been humorous. Any of his fellow townsmen would
have made the same remark. In fact, I had the good fortune a few weeks
afterward to see several hundred wild geese playing and feeding on Jack
Miner's farm--within a hundred feet of his door-step, many of them.

Years ago, a winter came on to stay before the corn was all in--a patch
of corn on a remote backfield of Jack Miner's farm. A small flock of
geese flying North in March, knew as much about the loss as Jack did. A
farm-hand was first to note their call, and got such a case of
_wanderlust_ when he observed the geese that he kept on going without
return to the house. He wrote, however, this significant news:

"Jack: Wild guse on your pleace. Leve corn on wood-lot. He come back
mabe. Steve."

Jack Miner did just that; and the next year he left the corn a little
nearer the house and so on. Meanwhile he made a law that you couldn't
come onto his place with a shotgun. He couldn't stop the townspeople
from taking a shot at the small flocks as they passed over, from the
farm feeding ground to the Lake, but the geese didn't seem to expect
that of Jack. He says they would miss it, if the shooting stopped, and
get stale; and then it does a similar lot for the town in the critical
month of April.

Finally Jack built a large concrete pond on his house acres,