off close to his
head. Could any simpler, smaller pleasure than his be discovered? Yet he
is fat and merry; undoubtedly he enjoys his every day on earth, and is
as unwilling as any of us to end the tale. We can explain him only if we
credit him with a philosophic power to discover happiness within in
spite of all the cold unfriendly world about him.

THE WHISTLER IN THE ROCKS

[Illustration]

When the far-off squirrel ancestor of Yek-yek took to the plains for a
range, another of the family selected the rocky hills.

He developed bigger claws for the harder digging, redder colour for the
red-orange surroundings, and a far louder and longer cry for signalling
across the peaks and canyons, and so became the bigger, handsomer, more
important creature we call the Mountain Whistler, Yellow Marmot or
Orange Woodchuck.

In all of the rugged mountain parts of the Yellowstone one may hear his
peculiar, shrill whistle, especially in the warm mornings.

[Illustration]

You carefully locate the direction of the note and proceed to climb
toward it. You may have an hour's hard work before you sight the
orange-breasted Whistler among the tumbled mass of rocks that surround
his home, for it is a far-reaching sound, heard half a mile away at
times.

Those who know the Groundhog of the East would recognize in the Rock
Woodchuck its Western cousin, a little bigger, yellower, and brighter in
its colours, living in the rocks and blessed with a whistle that would
fill a small boy with envy. Now, lest the critical should object to the
combination name of "Rock Woodchuck," it is well to remind them that
"Woodchuck" has nothing to do with either "wood" or "chucking," but is
our corrupted form of an Indian name "Ot-choeck," which is sometimes
written also "We-jack."

In the ridge of broken rocks just back of Yancey's is a colony of the
Whistlers; and there as I sat sketching one day, with my camera at hand,
one poked his head up near me and gave me the pose that is seen in the
photograph.

THE PACK-RAT AND HIS MUSEUM

Among my school fellows was a boy named Waddy who had a mania for
collecting odds, ends, curios, bits of brass or china, shiny things,
pebbles, fungus, old prints, bones, business cards, carved peach stones,
twisted roots, distorted marbles, or freak buttons. Anything odd or
glittering was his especial joy. He had no theory about these things.
He did not do anything in particular with them. He found gratification