ueer thing when she put a
"horse-fiddle" into the larynx of this bird--but it is not ours to ask
the reason why, simply to study her as she is. In marked contrast with
the harsh calls of these mountain hobos were the roulades of the sweet
and musical ruby-crowned kinglets, which had absented themselves from
the lower altitudes, but were abundant in the timber belts about ten
thousand feet up the range and still higher.

[Illustration: _Red-naped Sapsuckers_

"_Chiselling grubs out of the bark_"]

On the border of the lake, among some gnarly pines, I stumbled upon a
woodpecker that was entirely new to my eastern eyes--one that I had not
seen in my previous touring among the heights of the Rockies. He was
sedulously pursuing his vocation--a divine call, no doubt--of chiselling
grubs out of the bark of the pine trees, making the chips fly, and
producing at intervals that musical snare-drumming which always sets
the poet to dreaming of sylvan solitudes. What was the bird? The
red-naped sapsucker, a beautifully habited Chesterfield in plumes. He
presently ambled up the steep mountain side, and buried himself in the
pine forest, and I saw him no more, and none of his kith.

When I climbed up over a tangle of rocks to a woodsy ravine far above
the lake, it seemed at first as if there were no birds in the place,
that it was given up entirely to solitude; but the winged creatures were
only shy and cautious for the nonce, waiting to learn something about
the errand and disposition of their uninvited, or, rather, self-invited,
guest, before they ventured to give him a greeting. Presently they
discovered that he was not a collector, hunter, nest-robber, or ogre of
any other kind, and there was the swish of wings around me, and a medley
of chirps and songs filled the sequestered spot. Away up here the
gray-headed juncos were trilling like warblers, and hopping about on
their pine-needle carpet, creeping in and out among the rocks, hunting
for tidbits. Here also was the mountain chickadee, found at this season
in the heights hard by the alpine zone, singing his dulcet minor strain,
"Te-te-re-e-e, te-eet," sometimes adding another "te-eet" by way of
special emphasis and adornment. Oh, the sweet little piper piping only
for Pan! The loneliness of the place was accentuated by the sad cadenzas
of the mountain hermit thrushes. Swallows of some kind--cliff-swallows,
no doubt--were silently weaving invisible filigree across the sky above