roper level and identity as an
irrigating ditch. It slips stilly by the glacier scoured rim of an ice
bordered pool, drops over sheer, broken ledges to another pool, gathers
itself, plunges headlong on a rocky ripple slope, finds a lake again,
reinforced, roars downward to a pot-hole, foams and bridles, glides a
tranquil reach in some still meadow, tumbles into a sharp groove between
hill flanks, curdles under the stream tangles, and so arrives at the
open country and steadier going. Meadows, little strips of alpine
freshness, begin before the timber-line is reached. Here one treads on a
carpet of dwarf willows, downy catkins of creditable size and the
greatest economy of foliage and stems. No other plant of high altitudes
knows its business so well.

It hugs the ground, grows roots from stem joints where no roots should
be, grows a slender leaf or two and twice as many erect full catkins
that rarely, even in that short growing season, fail of fruit. Dipping
over banks in the inlets of the creeks, the fortunate find the rosy
apples of the miniature manzanita, barely, but always quite
sufficiently, borne above the spongy sod. It does not do to be anything
but humble in the alpine regions, but not fearful. I have pawed about
for hours in the chill sward of meadows where one might properly expect
to get one's death, and got no harm from it, except it might be Oliver
Twist's complaint. One comes soon after this to shrubby willows, and
where willows are trout may be confidently looked for in most Sierra
streams. There is no accounting for their distribution; though provident
anglers have assisted nature of late, one still comes upon roaring brown
waters where trout might very well be, but are not.

The highest limit of conifers--in the middle Sierras, the white bark
pine--is not along the water border. They come to it about the level of
the heather, but they have no such affinity for dampness as the tamarack
pines. Scarcely any bird-note breaks the stillness of the timber-line,
but chipmunks inhabit here, as may be guessed by the gnawed ruddy cones
of the pines, and lowering hours the woodchucks come down to the water.
On a little spit of land running into Windy Lake we found one summer the
evidence of a tragedy; a pair of sheep's horns not fully grown caught in
the crotch of a pine where the living sheep must have lodged them. The
trunk of the tree had quite closed over them, and the skull bones
crumbled away from the weat