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, partly evergreen 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.
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