splintered rock wastes. The crowds of them, the airy spread of
sepals, the pale purity of the petal spurs, the quivering swing of

bloom, obsesses the sense. One must learn to spare a little of the
pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all one's purse in one

shop. There is always another year, and another.
Lingering on in the alpine regions until the first full snow,

which is often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good
company. First snows are soft and clogging and make laborious

paths. Then it is the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of
the wood, below the limit of early storms. Early winter and early

spring one may have sight or track of deer and bear and bighorn,
cougar and bobcat, about the thickets of buckthorn on open slopes

between the black pines. But when the ice crust is firm above the
twenty foot drifts, they range far and forage where they will.

Often in midwinter will come, now and then, a long fall of soft
snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust, and work a real

hardship for the dwellers of these streets. When such a storm
portends the weather-wise blacktail will go down across the valley

and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than
suffices to nourish the sparsely growing pines. But the

bighorn, the wild sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms with no
signs of stress, cannot cope with the loose shifty snow. Never

such a storm goes over the mountains that the Indians do not
catch them floundering belly deep among the lower rifts. I have a

pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that were borne as late as a
year ago by a very monarch of the flock whom death overtook at the

mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow. He met it as a king
should, with no vain effort or trembling, and it was wholly kind to

take him so with four of his following rather than that the night
prowlers should find him.

There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one
looks to find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather.

Light feet of hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a
wondrously plain track in the snow. We used to look and look at

the beginning of winter for the birds to come down from the pine
lands; looked in the orchard and stubble; looked north and south

on the mesa for their migratory passing, and wondered that they
never came. Busy little grosbeaks picked about the kitchen doors,

and woodpeckers tapped the eaves of the farm buildings, but we saw
hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer canons. After a

while when we grew bold to tempt the snow borders we found them in
the street of the mountains. In the thick pine woods where

the overlapping boughs hung with snow-wreaths make wind-proof
shelter tents, in a very community of dwelling, winter the

bird-folk who get their living from the persisting cones and the
larvae harboring bark. Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow

chambers of the chaparral. Consider how it must be in a hill-slope
overgrown with stout-twigged, partlyevergreen shrubs, more than

man high, and as thick as a hedge. Not all the canon's sifting of
snow can fill the intricate spaces of the hill tangles. Here and

there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch of buckthorn, makes an
opening to communicating rooms and runways deep under the snow.

The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and
ghostly, but serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries,

and the wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that
live plants, especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off

heat; the snow wall melts earliest from within and hollows to
thinnness before there is a hint of spring in the air. But you

think of these things afterward. Up in the street it has the
effect of being done consciously; the buckthorns lean to each other

and the drift to them, the little birds run in and out of their
appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness. They give almost no

tokens of distress, and even if the winter tries them too much you
are not to pity them. You of the house habit can hardly understand

the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor of being
comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an

exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things
understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with

the greater ease. The business that goes on in the street of the
mountain is tremendous, world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels,

and red deer, children crying small wares and playing in the
street, but they do not obstruct its affairs. Summer is their

holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the street, "I have need of
a great work and no more playing."

But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure
kindness. They are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the

nobler plan which they accept with a dignity the rest of us have
not yet learned.

WATER BORDERS
I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and

find it pertinent to my subject,--Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits
eastward and solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and

above a range of little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave
aspect as of some woman you might have known, looking out across

the grassy barrows of her dead. From twin gray lakes under its
noble brow stream down incessant white and tumbling waters.

"Mahala all time cry," said Winnenap', drawing furrows in his
rugged, wrinkled cheeks.

The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears,
patent to the understanding but mysterious to the sense. They are

always at it, but one so seldom catches them in the act. Here in
the valley there is no cessation of waters even in the season when

the niggard frost gives them scant leave to run. They make the
most of their midday hour, and tinkle all night thinly under the

ice. An ear laid to the snow catches a muffled hint of their
eternal busyness fifteen or twenty feet under the canon

drifts, and long before any appreciable spring thaw, the sagging
edges of the snow bridges mark out the place of their running. One

who ventures to look for it finds the immediate source of the
spring freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed with the reek of

melting drifts, all the gravelly flats in a swirl of waters. But
later, in June or July, when the camping season begins, there runs

the stream away full and singing, with no visible reinforcement
other than an icy trickle from some high, belated dot of snow.

Oftenest the stream drops bodily from the bleak bowl of some alpine
lake; sometimes breaks out of a hillside as a spring where the ear

can trace it under the rubble of loose stones to the neighborhood
of some blind pool. But that leaves the lakes to be accounted for.

The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid,
unwinking, also unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and

stony brows is guessed at. It is always a favorite local tradition
that one or another of the blind lakes is bottomless. Often they

lie in such deep cairns of broken boulders that one never gets
quite to them, or gets away unhurt. One such drops below the

plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds over, perilously,
nearing the pass. It lies still and wickedly green in its

sharp-lipped cap, and the guides of that region love to
tell of the packs and pack animals it has swallowed up.

But the lakes of Oppapago are perhaps not so deep, less green
than gray, and better befriended. The ousel haunts them, while

still hang about their coasts the thin undercut drifts that never
quite leave the high altitudes. In and out of the bluish ice caves

he flits and sings, and his singing heard from above is sweet and
uncanny like the Nixie's chord. One finds butterflies, too, about

these high, sharp regions which might be called desolate, but will
not by me who love them. This is above timber-line but not too

high for comforting by succulent small herbs and golden tufted
grass. A granite mountain does not crumble with alacrity, but once

resolved to soil makes the best of it. Every handful of loose
gravel not wholly water leached affords a plant footing, and even