nd
cooked our supper in the gloaming among some rocks by the bank of the
brawling stream, we turned into the cabin for the night, more than
grateful for a shelter from the chill winds scurrying down from the
snow-capped mountains. The shack nestled at the foot of Mount Kelso,
which we had also mistaken for Gray's Peak. As we sat by the light of a
tallow candle, beguiling the evening with conversation, the miner told
us that the mountain jays, colloquially called "camp robbers," were
common around his cabin, especially in winter; but familiar as they
were, he had never been able to find a nest. The one thing about which
they insist on the utmost privacy is their nesting places. My friend
also told me that a couple of gray squirrels made the woods around his
camp their home. The jays would frequently carry morsels of food up to
the branches of the pines, and stow them in some crevice for future use,
whereupon the squirrels, always on the lookout for their own interests,
would scuttle up the tree and steal the hidden provender, eating it with
many a chuckle of self-congratulation.

Had not the weather turned so cold during the night, we might have slept
quite comfortably in the miner's shack, but I must confess that, though
it was the twenty-eighth of June and I had a small mountain of cover
over me, I shivered a good deal toward morning. An hour or so after
daylight four or five mountain jays came to the cabin for their
breakfast, flitting to the ground and greedily devouring such tidbits as
they could find. They were not in the least shy. But where were their
nests? That was the question that most deeply interested me. During the
next few days I made many a long and toilsome search for them in the
woods and ravines and on the steep mountain sides, but none of the birds
invited me to their houses. These birds know how to keep a secret.
Anything but feathered Apollos, they have a kind of ghoulish aspect,
making you think of the apparitional as they move in their noiseless way
among the shadowing pines. There is a look in their dark, deep-set eyes
and about their thick, clumpy heads which gives you a feeling that they
might be equal to any imaginable act of cruelty. Yet I cannot say I
dislike these mountain roustabouts, for some of their talk among
themselves is very tender and affectionate, proving that, "whatever
brawls disturb the street," there are love and concord in jay household
circles. That surely is a virtue to be