ng surroundings there is a choice of locations.
There is never going to be any communism of mountain herbage, their
affinities are too sure. Full in the runnels of snow water on gravelly,
open spaces in the shadow of a drift, one looks to find buttercups,
frozen knee-deep by night, and owning no desire but to ripen their fruit
above the icy bath. Soppy little plants of the portulaca and small, fine
ferns shiver under the drip of falls and in dribbling crevices. The
bleaker the situation, so it is near a stream border, the better the
cassiope loves it. Yet I have not found it on the polished glacier
slips, but where the country rock cleaves and splinters in the high
windy headlands that the wild sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the
white bells swing over matted, mossy foliage. On Oppapago, which is also
called Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the beds of cassiope the
ice-worn, stony hollows where the bighorns cradle their young. These are
above the wolf's quest and the eagle's wont, and though the heather beds
are softer, they are neither so dry nor so warm, and here only the stars
go by. No other animal of any pretensions makes a habitat of the alpine
regions. Now and then one gets a hint of some small, brown creature, rat
or mouse kind, that slips secretly among the rocks; no others adapt
themselves to desertness of aridity or altitude so readily as these
ground inhabiting, graminivorous species. If there is an open stream the
trout go up the lake as far as the water breeds food for them, but the
ousel goes farthest, for pure love of it.

Since no lake can be at the highest point, it is possible to find plant
life higher than the water borders; grasses perhaps the highest, gilias,
royal blue trusses of polymonium, rosy plats of Sierra primroses. What
one has to get used to in flowers at high altitudes is the bleaching of
the sun. Hardly do they hold their virgin color for a day, and this
early fading before their function is performed gives them a pitiful
appearance not according with their hardihood. The color scheme runs
along the high ridges from blue to rosy purple, carmine and coral red;
along the water borders it is chiefly white and yellow where the mimulus
makes a vivid note, running into red when the two schemes meet and mix
about the borders of the meadows, at the upper limit of the columbine.

Here is the fashion in which a mountain stream gets down from the
perennial pastures of the snow to its p