ll-branched,
one-leaf pines. That is the sort of tree to know at sight, for the
globose, resin-dripping cones have palatable, nourishing kernels, the
main harvest of the Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing
accommodatingly below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the
valley-ward slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts
with the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon the
wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here begins the
manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the sharp waste of
boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek, ruddy,
chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the
million unregarded trumpets of the coral-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 ou