stures they had enjoyed last
summer. Soon the whole flock seemed to be hopefully excited, the mothers
calling their lambs, the lambs replying in tones wonderfully human,
their fondly quavering calls interrupted now and then by hastily
snatched mouthfuls of withered grass. Amid all this seeming babel of
baas as they streamed over the hills every mother and child recognized
each other's voice. In case a tired lamb, half asleep in the smothering
dust, should fail to answer, its mother would come running back through
the flock toward the spot whence its last response was heard, and
refused to be comforted until she found it, the one of a thousand,
though to our eyes and ears all seemed alike.

The flock traveled at the rate of about a mile an hour, outspread in the
form of an irregular triangle, about a hundred yards wide at the base,
and a hundred and fifty yards long, with a crooked, ever-changing point
made up of the strongest foragers, called the "leaders," which, with the
most active of those scattered along the ragged sides of the "main
body," hastily explored nooks in the rocks and bushes for grass and
leaves; the lambs and feeble old mothers dawdling in the rear were
called the "tail end."

[Illustration: _Sheep in the Mountains_]

About noon the heat was hard to bear; the poor sheep panted pitifully
and tried to stop in the shade of every tree they came to, while we
gazed with eager longing through the dim burning glare toward the snowy
mountains and streams, though not one was in sight. The landscape is
only wavering foothills roughened here and there with bushes and trees
and outcropping masses of slate. The trees, mostly the blue oak
(_Quercus Douglasii_), are about thirty to forty feet high, with pale
blue-green leaves and white bark, sparsely planted on the thinnest soil
or in crevices of rocks beyond the reach of grass fires. The slates in
many places rise abruptly through the tawny grass in sharp
lichen-covered slabs like tombstones in deserted burying-grounds. With
the exception of the oak and four or five species of manzanita and
ceanothus, the vegetation of the foothills is mostly the same as that of
the plains. I saw this region in the early spring, when it was a
charming landscape garden full of birds and bees and flowers. Now the
scorching weather makes everything dreary. The ground is full of cracks,
lizards glide about on the rocks, and ants in amazing numbers, whose
tiny sparks of life only burn