e the hummocks of Lupinus ornatus run a delicate
gamut from silvery green of spring to silvery white of winter foliage.
They look in fullest leaf, except for color, most like the huddled huts
of the campoodie, and the largest of them might be a man's length in
diameter. In their season, which is after the gilias are at their best,
and before the larkspurs are ripe for pollen gathering, every terminal
whorl of the lupin sends up its blossom stalk, not holding any constant
blue, but paling and purpling to guide the friendly bee to virginal
honey sips, or away from the perfected and depleted flower. The length
of the blossom stalk conforms to the rounded contour of the plant,
and of these there will be a million moving indescribably in the airy
current that flows down the swale of the wash.

There is always a little wind on the mesa, a sliding current of cooler
air going down the face of the mountain of its own momentum, but not to
disturb the silence of great space. Passing the wide mouths of canons,
one gets the effect of whatever is doing in them, openly or behind a
screen of cloud,--thunder of falls, wind in the pine leaves, or rush
and roar of rain. The rumor of tumult grows and dies in passing, as
from open doors gaping on a village street, but does not impinge on the
effect of solitariness.

In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for stillness, but the night
silence breaks into certain mellow or poignant notes. Late afternoons
the burrowing owls may be seen blinking at the doors of their hummocks
with perhaps four or five elfish nestlings arow, and by twilight begin a
soft whoo-oo-ing, rounder, sweeter, more incessant in mating time. It is
not possible to disassociate the call of the burrowing owl from the
late slant light of the mesa. If the fine vibrations which are the
golden-violet glow of spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it
would be just that mellow double note breaking along the blossom-tops.
While the glow holds one sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings
after prey, and on into the dark hears their soft pus-ssh! clearing out
of the trail ahead. Maybe the pinpoint shriek of field mouse or kangaroo
rat that pricks the wakeful pauses of the night is extorted by these
mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just as like to be the work of
the red fox on his twenty-mile constitutional.

Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours, and both
killers for the pure love of slaughte