en logs and
under the spreading boughs, while here and there we came to an opening
sufficiently spacious for standpoints, where the trees around their
margins might be seen from top to bottom. The winter sunshine streamed
through the clustered spires, glinting and breaking into a fine dust of
spangles on the spiky leaves and beads of amber gum, and bringing out
the reds and grays and yellows of the lichened boles which had been
freshened by the late storm; while the tip of every spire looking up
through the shadows was dipped in deepest blue.

The ground was strewn with burs and needles and fallen trees; and, down
in the dells, on the north side of the dome, where strips of aspen are
imbedded in the spruces, every breeze sent the ripe leaves flying, some
lodging in the spruce boughs, making them bloom again, while the fresh
snow beneath looked like a fine painting.

Around the dome and well up toward the summit of the main peak, the
snow-shed was well marked with tracks of the mule deer and the pretty
stitching and embroidery of field mice, squirrels, and grouse; and on
the way back to camp I came across a strange track, somewhat like that
of a small bear, but more spreading at the toes. It proved to be that
of a wolverine. In my conversations with hunters, both Indians and white
men assure me that there are no bears in Nevada, notwithstanding the
abundance of pine-nuts, of which they are so fond, and the accessibility
of these basin ranges from their favorite haunts in the Sierra Nevada
and Wahsatch Mountains. The mule deer, antelope, wild sheep, wolverine,
and two species of wolves are all of the larger animals that I have seen
or heard of in the State.

XV. Glacial Phenomena in Nevada [20]

The monuments of the Ice Age in the Great Basin have been greatly
obscured and broken, many of the more ancient of them having perished
altogether, leaving scarce a mark, however faint, of their existence--a
condition of things due not alone to the long-continued action of
post-glacial agents, but also in great part to the perishable character
of the rocks of which they were made. The bottoms of the main valleys,
once grooved and planished like the glacier pavements of the Sierra,
lie buried beneath sediments and detritus derived from the adjacent
mountains, and now form the arid sage plains; characteristic U-shaped
canyons have become V-shaped by the deepening of their bottoms and
straightening of their sides, and dec