as come
down from the heated high ridges,--it is time to light the evening fire.
When it drops off a note--but you will not know it except the Douglas
squirrel tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial
gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint of the
nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it flashes from
Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it to the westering
peaks. The high rills wake and run, the birds begin. But down three
thousand feet in the canon, where you stir the fire under the cooking
pot, it will not be day for an hour. It goes on, the play of light
across the high places, rosy, purpling, tender, glint and glow, thunder
and windy flood, like the grave, exulting talk of elders above a merry
game.

Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the streets
of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the
silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine. Around the
amphitheatres of the lake regions and above them to the limit of
perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in splintered rock wastes. The
crowds of them, the airy spread of sepals, the pale purity of the petal
spurs, the quivering swing of bloom, obsesses the sense. One must learn
to spare a little of the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all
one's purse in one shop. There is always another year, and another.

Lingering on in the alpine regions until the first full snow, which
is often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good company.
First snows are soft and clogging and make laborious paths. Then it is
the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of the wood, below the
limit of early storms. Early winter and early spring one may have sight
or track of deer and bear and bighorn, cougar and bobcat, about the
thickets of buckthorn on open slopes between the black pines. But when
the ice crust is firm above the twenty foot drifts, they range far and
forage where they will. Often in midwinter will come, now and then, a
long fall of soft snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust,
and work a real hardship for the dwellers of these streets. When such a
storm portends the weather-wise blacktail will go down across the valley
and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than suffices
to nourish the sparsely growing pines. But the bighorn, the wild sheep,
able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress,