m
the distance comes a peculiar cry, a short squeak uttered every ten or
fifteen seconds. You stop, perhaps search with your eye the remote
hillside, but you are looking too far afield. Glance toward the tumbled
rock piles, look at every high point. There on top of one you note a
little gray lump, like a bump of moss, the size of your fist, clinging
to the point of the rock. Fix your glasses on it, and you will see
plainly that the squeak is made by this tiny creature, like a
quarter-grown Rabbit with short, round, white-rimmed ears and no
visible tail. This is the curious little animal that cannot be happy
anywhere but in the slide rock; this is the Calling Hare. "Little Chief
Hare" is its Indian name, but it has many others of much currency, such
as "Pika," and "Starved Rat," the latter because it is never fat. The
driver calls it a "Coney," or "Rock Rabbit." In its colour, size, shape,
and habits it differs from all other creatures in the region; it is
impossible to mistake it. Though a distant kinsman of the Rabbits, it is
unlike them in looks and ways. Thus it has, as noted, the very
un-rabbit-like habit of squeaking from some high lookout. This is
doubtless a call of alarm to let the rest of the company know that there
is danger about, for the Coney is a gregarious creature; there may be a
hundred of them in the rock-slide.

Some years ago, in Colorado, I sketched one of the Coneys by help of a
field glass. He was putting all the force of his energetic little soul
into the utterance of an alarm cry for the benefit of his people.

But the most interesting habit of this un-rabbity Rabbit is its way of
preparing for winter.

[Illustration]

When the grass, the mountain dandelions, and the peavines are at their
best growth for making hay, the Coney, with his kind, goes warily from
his stronghold in the rocks to the nearest stretch of herbage, and there
cuts as much as he can carry of the richest growths; then laden with a
bundle as big as himself, and very much longer, he makes for the rocks,
and on some flat open place spreads the herbage out to be cured for his
winter hay. Out in full blaze of the sun he leave it, and if some
inconsiderate rock comes in between, to cast a shadow on his hay
a-curing, he moves the one that is easiest to move; he never neglects
his hay. When dry enough to be safe, he packs it away into his barn, the
barn being a sheltered crevice in the rocks where the weather cannot
harm it, and