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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