or is a rich umber red. Sometimes in the early morning or the late
afternoon, when all the rest of the forest is cast in shadow, these
massive trunks will glow as though incandescent. The Trail, wonderful
always, here seems to pass through the outer portals of the great
flaming regions where dwell the risings and fallings of days.

As you follow the Trail up, you will enter also the permanent
dwelling-places of the seasons. With us each visits for the space of a
few months, then steals away to give place to the next. Whither they
go you have not known until you have traveled the high mountains.
Summer lives in the valley; that you know. Then a little higher you
are in the spring-time, even in August. Melting patches of snow linger
under the heavy firs; the earth is soggy with half-absorbed snow-water,
trickling with exotic little rills that do not belong; grasses of the
year before float like drowned hair in pellucid pools with an air of
permanence, except for the one fact; fresh green things are sprouting
bravely; through bare branches trickles a shower of bursting buds,
larger at the top, as though the Sower had in passing scattered them
from above. Birds of extraordinary cheerfulness sing merrily to new
and doubtful flowers. The air tastes cold, but the sun is warm. The
great spring humming and promise is in the air. And a few thousand
feet higher you wallow over the surface of drifts while a winter wind
searches your bones. I used to think that Santa Claus dwelt at the
North Pole. Now I am convinced that he has a workshop somewhere among
the great mountains where dwell the Seasons, and that his reindeer paw
for grazing in the alpine meadows below the highest peaks.

Here the birds migrate up and down instead of south and north. It must
be a great saving of trouble to them, and undoubtedly those who have
discovered it maintain toward the unenlightened the same delighted and
fraternal secrecy with which you and I guard the knowledge of a good
trout-stream. When you can migrate adequately in a single day, why
spend a month at it?

Also do I remember certain spruce woods with openings where the sun
shone through. The shadows were very black, the sunlight very white.
As I looked back I could see the pack-horses alternately suffer eclipse
and illumination in a strange flickering manner good to behold. The
dust of the trail eddied and billowed lazily in the sun, each mote
flashing as though with life; then