March brought the
wild geese honking northward, and great flocks of snow-white swans came
daily out of the southern horizon to sail overhead and lose themselves
along the Upper Coast, for it was mating and nesting time, and the heat
of the south had driven them early from its broad lagoons.
Every evening Tenas would roll himself in his blanket bed, while he
chatted about the migrating birds, and longed for the time when he would
be a great hunter, able to shoot the game as they flitted southward with
their large families in September.
"_Then_, Hoolool, we will have something better to eat than the smoked
salmon," he would say.
"Yes, little loved one," she would reply, "and you are growing so fast,
so big, that the time will not be long now before you can hunt down the
wild birds for your Hoolool to eat, eh, little Spring Eyes? But now you
must go to sleep; perhaps you will dream of the great flocks of the fat,
young, grey geese you are to get us for food."
"I'll tell you if I do; I'll tell you in the morning if I dream of the
little geese," he would reply, his voice trailing away into dreamland as
his eyes blinked themselves to sleep.
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