red pentstemon. Wild life is likely to be busiest about the lower
pine borders. One looks in hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild
honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of jays, the hurry and stir
of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous and hot. The roar
of the stream fills up the morning and evening intervals, and at
night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets. It is worth
watching the year round in the purlieus of the long-leafed pines.
One month or another you set sight or trail of most roving mountain
dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows, and more
bloom than you can properly appreciate.

Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains,
water has the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the
shortest passage. Where the rifts are narrow, and some of
the Sierra canons are not a stone's throw from wall to wall, the
best trail for foot or horse winds considerably above the
watercourses; but in a country of cone-bearers there is usually a
good strip of swardy sod along the canon floor. Pine woods, the
short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high Sierras, are sombre,
rooted in the litter of a thousand years, hushed, and corrective to
the spirit. The trail passes insensibly into them from the black
pines and a thin belt of firs. You look back as you rise, and
strain for glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter
Lake, and tender cloud films on the farther ranges. For such
pictures the pine branches make a noble frame. Presently they
close in wholly; they draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks,
giving up the trail indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You
get a kind of impatience with their locked ranks, until you come
out lastly on some high, windy dome and see what they are about.
They troop thickly up the open ways, river banks, and brook