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Show 276 TALES OF THE COLORADO PIONEERS. a heavy plunge, and a little later V. K. brought in for our breakfast the first deer of the hunt. " Besides a great many deer, as the result of our rifles, we found in the willows and on the hill-sides grouse as large as turkey hens, on the lakes splendid ducks, and in the streams trout enough to satisfy any number of ravenous appetites. "One night, by moonlight, we watched the beavers at work. One morning at sunrise, we were a few feet above the clouds; below us it was snowing; before us, as far as the eye could reach, in great, rolling masses, that were brilliantly white in the morning sun, were the clouds that to us looked like a sea of snow, with here and there a rocky island, as some mountain, taller than its companions, reared its head above the storm. " The greatest evidence of the former Indian occupants was in the lower part of the country, through which the deer in great numbers pass every spring and fall. There was a V-shaped fence of stone, each arm of the V being a stone fence fully fifteen miles long; the V opening towards the mountains from which the deer came, and the point of the V, instead of being closed, was open for the deer to pass, and in cunningly dug holes would be seated the Indians to kill them. The fence, which had been built entirely by the squaws, was to turn the deer all to this one point, and though it was merely a succession of stone piles, anything that has the appearance of having been made by man is as effectual a barrier to deer as the tallest fence. "Another cunning device of the Indians is seen wherever there are rocks; when they see a rock about the size of a man's body, they place another about the size of a man's head on top. It is done to accustom the deer to |