riumph over everything the wilderness may offer. Evidently
their lives are not bitter.

The largest of the canon animals one is likely to see is the wild sheep,
or Rocky Mountain bighorn, a most admirable beast, with limbs that never
fail, at home on the most nerve-trying precipices, acquainted with all
the springs and passes and broken-down jumpable places in the sheer
ribbon cliffs, bounding from crag to crag in easy grace and confidence
of strength, his great horns held high above his shoulders, wild red
blood beating and hissing through every fiber of him like the wind
through a quivering mountain pine.

Deer also are occasionally met in the canon, making their way to the river
when the wells of the plateau are dry. Along the short spring streams
beavers are still busy, as is shown by the cotton-wood 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, bob cats, 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, humming-birds, 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 canon 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 canon on their adventurous
voyage of discovery thirty-three 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. As the flood
rushes past us, heavy-laden with desert mud, we naturally think of its
sources, its countless silvery branches outspread on thousands of snowy
mountains along the crest of the c