God's Country by James Oliver Curwood — Read

To-day is Sunday, and I have just returned from a week's hike up the mysterious little creek that runs past my cabin. It seems good to be home again, and Nuts and Spoony and Wild Bill, the blue jay, have given me a royal welcome, and I am almost convinced my pop-eyed moose-bird friends are trying to tell me who was the thief in my cabin while I was gone. On that "to-morrow" when I had promised myself another day of writing, the _Wanderlust_ came to me, and I packed up a kit and a week's supply of grub and started out to explore my creek. It is a very individual sort of creek -- it has character, even, if it hasn't a name. It comes out of deep, dark, and unexplored masses of forest to the north, and I have fancied it bringing down all sorts of romance and tragedy out of the hidden places if it could only talk. So I went to the end of it to find out its secrets for myself. And there was so much of interest that I could fill a book with it. I don't think any other white feet have ever traveled up this creek, which I now call "Lonesome. " Surely not even an Indian has been along it for at least a generation, for I did not find the mark of an ax or sign of a fire or vestige of deadfall or trap-house.

But it did take me forty miles back into a country of such savage wilderness and dense forests that I have almost determined to build me another cabin there a little later, if for no other reason than to live for a while with the hundreds of owls that inhabit certain parts of it. I have never seen so many owls anywhere in the Northland, and I figure this is because the big snow-shoe rabbits have been multiplying for several years past, and now exist there literally in thousands. At many places along the creek, the earth was beaten hard by their furred feet. By all the signs, I have predicted that next year, or the year after, the "seven-year rabbit-plague" will come along and kill off ninety out of every hundred. Then the owls will scatter, and most of the lynxes and foxes and wolves will wander off into other hunting grounds, for the rabbit is the staff of life of the flesh-eating birds and beasts of the big northern forests, just as all the world over wheat is the mainstay of human stomachs.