is a spoil sport. It grows thickly to choke the stream that
feeds it; grudges it the sky and space for angler's rod and fly. The
willows do better; painted-cup, cypripedium, and the hollow stalks of
span-broad white umbels, find a footing among their stems. But in
general the steep plunges, the white swirls, green and tawny pools, the
gliding hush of waters between the meadows and the mesas afford little
fishing and few flowers.

One looks for these to begin again when once free of the rifted canon
walls; the high note of babble and laughter falls off to the steadier
mellow tone of a stream that knows its purpose and reflects the sky.

OTHER WATER BORDERS

It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to
become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They
go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands in their own
boulder fenced gullies--but how much farther in the man-made waterways.
It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated
waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves.
One needs to have known an irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to
have lived by it, to mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning,
rising and falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far
across the valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke,
the shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons
stalking the little glinting weirs across the field.

Perhaps to get into the mood of the waterways one needs to have seen old
Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with his gun, guarding his
water-right toward the end of a dry summer. Amos owned the half of Tule
Creek and the other half pertained to the neighboring Greenfields ranch.
Years of a "short water crop," that is, when too little snow fell on the
high pine ridges, or, falling, melted too early, Amos held that it took
all the water that came down to make his half, and maintained it with a
Winchester and a deadly aim. Jesus Montana, first proprietor of
Greenfields,--you can see at once that Judson had the racial
advantage,--contesting the right with him, walked into five of Judson's
bullets and his eternal possessions on the same occasion. That was the
Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later
one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot
one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might beco