etween 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 black-tail 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,
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 eves 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
bu