The Common Honeybees, Gone Wild In This Sweet Wilderness, Gather Tons
Of Honey Into The Hollows Of The Trees And
Rocks, clambering eagerly
through bramble and hucklebloom, shaking the clustered bells of the
generous manzanita, now humming aloft among polleny
Willows and firs,
now down on the ashy ground among small gilias and buttercups, and
anon plunging into banks of snowy cherry and buckthorn. They consider
the lilies and roll into them, pushing their blunt polleny faces
against them like babies on their mother's bosom; and fondly, too,
with eternal love does Mother Nature clasp her small bee-babies and
suckle them, multitudes at once, on her warm Shasta breast. Besides
the common honeybee there are many others here, fine, burly, mossy
fellows, such as were nourished on the mountains many a flowery
century before the advent of the domestic species - bumblebees, mason-bees, carpenter-bees, and leaf-cutters. Butterflies, too, and moths
of every size and pattern; some wide-winged like bats, flapping slowly
and sailing in easy curves; others like small flying violets shaking
about loosely in short zigzag flights close to the flowers, feasting
in plenty night and day.
Deer in great abundance come to Shasta from the warmer foothills every
spring to feed in the rich, cool pastures, and bring forth their young
in the ceanothus tangles of the chaparral zone, retiring again before
the snowstorms of winter, mostly to the southward and westward of the
mountain. In like manner the wild sheep of the adjacent region seek
the lofty inaccessible crags of the summit as the snow melts, and are
driven down to the lower spurs and ridges where there is but little
snow, to the north and east of Shasta.
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