th certain tricks of perching,
accuse him of attempts to pass himself off among woodpeckers; but his
behavior is all crow. He frequents the higher pine belts, and has a
noisy strident call like a jay's, and how clean he and the frisk-tailed
chipmunks keep the camp! No crumb or paring or bit of eggshell goes
amiss.

High as the camp may be, so it is not above timberline, it is not too
high for the coyote, the bobcat, or the wolf. It is the complaint of the
ordinary camper that the woods are too still, depleted of wild life. But
what dead body of wild thing, or neglected game untouched by its kind,
do you find? And put out offal away from camp over night, and look next
day at the foot tracks where it lay.

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other
except the bear makes so much noise. Being so well warned beforehand,
it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely
hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his
kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it
all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There
is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like
disfigurement on the forest floor.

THE POCKET HUNTER

I remember very well when I first met him. Walking in the evening glow
to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I sniffed the unmistakable
odor of burning sage. It is a smell that carries far and indicates
usually the nearness of a campoodie, but on the level mesa nothing
taller showed than Diana's sage. Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk
under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at
the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the
friendly scrub. He sat tailor-wise in the sand, with his coffee-pot on
the coals, his supper ready to hand in the frying-pan, and himself in
a mood for talk. His pack burros in hobbles strayed off to hunt for a
wetter mouthful than the sage afforded, and gave him no concern.

We came upon him often after that, threading the windy passes, or by
water-holes in the desert hills, and got to know much of his way of
life. He was a small, bowed man, with a face and manner and speech of
no character at all, as if he had that faculty of small hunted things of
taking on the protective color of his surroundings. His clothes were of
no fashion that I could remember, except that they bore liberal markings
o