Sitting Islanded On Some Gray Peak Above The Encompassing
Wood, The Soul Is Lifted Up To Sing The Iliad Of The Pines.
They
have no voice but the wind, and no sound of them rises up to the
high places.
But the waters, the evidences of their power, that go
down the steep and stony ways, the outlets of ice-bordered pools,
the young rivers swaying with the force of their running, they sing
and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the noise of it far
outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning towers
how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how they
fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them
countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad
by them.
Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a
sense of pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any,
are home dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking
asp. They grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems
have a permanent curve toward the down slope, as you may also see
in hillside pines, where they have borne the weight of sagging
drifts.
Well up from the valley, at the confluence of canons, are
delectable summer meadows. Fireweed flames about them against the
gray boulders; streams are open, go smoothly about the glacier
slips and make deep bluish pools for trout. Pines raise statelier
shafts and give themselves room to grow,--gentians, shinleaf, and
little grass of Parnassus in their golden checkered shadows; the
meadow is white with violets and all outdoors keeps the clock. For
example, when the ripples at the ford of the creek raise a clear
half tone,--sign that the snow water has come down from the heated
high ridges,--it is time to light the evening fire. When it drops
off a note--but you will not know it except the Douglas squirrel
tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial
gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint
of the nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it
flashes from Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it
to the westering peaks. The high rills wake and run, the birds
begin. But down three thousand feet in the canon, where you stir
the fire under the cooking pot, it will not be day for an hour. It
goes on, the play of light across the high places, rosy, purpling,
tender, glint and glow, thunder and windy flood, like the grave,
exulting talk of elders above a merry game.
Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the
streets of the mountains. As for me, once set above the
country of the silver firs, I must go on until I find white
columbine. Around the amphitheatres of the lake regions and above
them to the limit of perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in
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.
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