Along The Short Spring
Streams Beavers Are Still Busy, As Is Shown By The Cottonwood And
Willow Timber They Have Cut And Peeled, Found In All The River Drift-Heaps.
In the most barren cliffs and gulches there dwell a multitude
of lesser animals, well-dressed, clear-eyed, happy little beasts - wood
rats, kangaroo rats, gophers, wood mice, skunks, rabbits, bobcats, and
many others, gathering food, or dozing in their sun-warmed dens.
Lizards, too, of every kind and color are here enjoying life on the
hot cliffs, and making the brightest of them brighter.
Nor is there any lack of feathered people. The golden eagle may be
seen, and the osprey, hawks, jays, hummingbirds, the mourning dove,
and cheery familiar singers - the black-headed grosbeak, robin,
bluebird, Townsend's thrush, and many warblers, sailing the sky and
enlivening the rocks and bushes through all the canyon wilderness.
Here at Hance's river camp or a few miles above it brave Powell and
his brave men passed their first night in the canyon on the
adventurous voyage of discovery thirty-three[34] years ago. They
faced a thousand dangers, open or hidden, now in their boats gladly
sliding down swift, smooth reaches, now rolled over and over in back-combing surges of rough, roaring cataracts, sucked under in eddies,
swimming like beavers, tossed and beaten like castaway drift - stout-hearted, undaunted, doing their work through it all. After a month of
this they floated smoothly out of the dark, gloomy, roaring abyss into
light and safety two hundred miles below.
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