on the bush their webs are spread upon, immediately
bounce themselves up and down on their elastic threads so rapidly that
only a blur is visible. The wild Indian power of escaping observation,
even where there is little or no cover to hide in, was probably slowly
acquired in hard hunting and fighting lessons while trying to approach
game, take enemies by surprise, or get safely away when compelled to
retreat. And this experience transmitted through many generations seems
at length to have become what is vaguely called instinct.

How smooth and changeless seems the surface of the mountains about us!
Scarce a track is to be found beyond the range of the sheep except on
small open spots on the sides of the streams, or where the forest
carpets are thin or wanting. On the smoothest of these open strips and
patches deer tracks may be seen, and the great suggestive footprints of
bears, which, with those of the many small animals, are scarce enough to
answer as a kind of light ornamental stitching or embroidery. Along the
main ridges and larger branches of the river Indian trails may be
traced, but they are not nearly as distinct as one would expect to find
them. How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows,
probably a great many, extending far beyond the time that Columbus
touched our shores, and it seems strange that heavier marks have not
been made. Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than
the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly
longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments,
excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve
their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

How different are most of those of the white man, especially on the
lower gold region--roads blasted in the solid rock, wild streams dammed
and tamed and turned out of their channels and led along the sides of
canyons and valleys to work in mines like slaves. Crossing from ridge to
ridge, high in the air, on long straddling trestles as if flowing on
stilts, or down and up across valleys and hills, imprisoned in iron
pipes to strike and wash away hills and miles of the skin of the
mountain's face, riddling, stripping every gold gully and flat. These
are the white man's marks made in a few feverish years, to say nothing
of mills, fields, villages, scattered hundreds of miles along the flank
of the Range. Long will it be ere these marks are effaced