cannot cope
with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over the mountains
that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly deep among the
lower rifts. I have a pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that were
borne as late as a year ago by a very monarch of the flock whom death
overtook at the mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow. He met it
as a king should, with no vain effort or trembling, and it was wholly
kind to take him so with four of his following rather than that the
night prowlers should find him.

There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one looks to
find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather. Light feet of
hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a wondrously plain
track in the snow. We used to look and look at the beginning of winter
for the birds to come down from the pine lands; looked in the orchard
and stubble; looked north and south on the mesa for their migratory
passing, and wondered that they never came. Busy little grosbeaks picked
about the kitchen doors, and woodpeckers tapped the eaves of the farm
buildings, but we saw hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer
canons. After a while when we grew bold to tempt the snow borders we
found them in the street of the mountains. In the thick pine woods where
the overlapping boughs hung with snow-wreaths make wind-proof shelter
tents, in a very community of dwelling, winter the bird-folk who get
their living from the persisting cones and the larvae harboring bark.
Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow chambers of the chaparral.
Consider how it must be in a hill-slope overgrown with stout-twigged,
partly evergreen shrubs, more than man high, and as thick as a hedge.
Not all the canon's sifting of snow can fill the intricate spaces of
the hill tangles. Here and there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch
of buckthorn, makes an opening to communicating rooms and runways deep
under the snow.

The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and ghostly,
but serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and the
wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that live plants,
especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off heat; the snow
wall melts earliest from within and hollows to thinnness before there is
a hint of spring in the air. But you think of these things afterward.
Up in the street it has the effect of being done consciously; the
buckthorns lean to each o