ve since seen them as large as bushel baskets. His tiny
fields lay between bowlders; some of them were but a few inches square,
others a foot, several a yard, perhaps.

I was interested to learn if the little haycocks were blown away by the
timberline gales, so returned later, not really expecting to find them.
Nor were they in the same location, but their owners, not the wind, had
moved them. Evidently, as soon as the hay was cured, it was stored for
safe-keeping, usually beneath the overhang of a rock, away from the
wind.

I was then curious to see how the cony would transport his hay in
winter. Many of his under-rock passages would, at that season, be
filled with snow, forcing him to appear on the surface where the wind
was often strong enough to blow me over, to say nothing of what it
would do to the little midget in fur with a load of hay attached. He
met the storm situation easily. Whenever he exhausted one hayloft, he
moved his home to another. Thus he solved the transportation question
and gained a new home at the same time. Several times, upon digging
beneath the slide rock, I discovered cony dens, merely openings far
down between the jumbled rocks, beyond the reach of wind and weather.
They were of great variety, large, small, wide, narrow; all ready to
move into. They were the conies' castles, ready refuges from enemies,
their devious passages as effective as drawbridge or portcullis.

The cony is something like the heaver far down on the flats below;
working at top speed when he does work, and then resting for many
months. Outside the brief harvest period I have found him sitting idly
atop a rock, napping in the sun, dreaming apparently; thus for days and
months he is idle, always harmless--a condition that does not apply to
human beings under similar circumstances. He is energetic, ambitious,
courageous, and acrobatic. He is the scout of the mountain top, always
alert and friendly.

The altitude zone of the cony I found to be between eleven and thirteen
thousand feet. He and the Bighorn, ptarmigan, weasels and foxes are
mountain-top dwellers throughout the year. Marmots hibernate during
the long alpine winters. But the cony I have seen on sunny days in
January; his welcome "squee-ek," piercing the roar of the wind, has
greeted me on the lonely storm-swept heights when not another living
thing was in sight.

But in spite of his living in the out-of-the-way world the cony has
enemies for w