r in the woods hereabouts,
taking shelter in dense tufted branches of fir and yellow pine during
snowstorms, and feeding on the young buds of these trees. Their legs are
feathered down to their toes, and I have never heard of their suffering
in any sort of weather. Able to live on pine and fir buds, they are
forever independent in the matter of food, which troubles so many of us
and controls our movements. Gladly, if I could, I would live forever on
pine buds, however full of turpentine and pitch, for the sake of this
grand independence. Just to think of our sufferings last month merely
for grist-mill flour. Man seems to have more difficulty in gaining food
than any other of the Lord's creatures. For many in towns it is a
consuming, lifelong struggle; for others, the danger of coming to want
is so great, the deadly habit of endless hoarding for the future is
formed, which smothers all real life, and is continued long after every
reasonable need has been over-supplied.

On Mount Hoffman I saw a curious dove-colored bird that seemed half
woodpecker, half magpie, or crow. It screams something like a crow, but
flies like a woodpecker, and has a long, straight bill, with which I saw
it opening the cones of the mountain and white-barked pines. It seems
to keep to the heights, though no doubt it comes down for shelter during
winter, if not for food. So far as food is concerned, these
bird-mountaineers, I guess, can glean nuts enough, even in winter, from
the different kinds of conifers; for always there are a few that have
been unable to fly out of the cones and remain for hungry winter
gleaners.

CHAPTER VII

A STRANGE EXPERIENCE

_August 2._ Clouds and showers, about the same as yesterday. Sketching
all day on the North Dome until four or five o'clock in the afternoon,
when, as I was busily employed thinking only of the glorious Yosemite
landscape, trying to draw every tree and every line and feature of the
rocks, I was suddenly, and without warning, possessed with the notion
that my friend, Professor J. D. Butler, of the State University of
Wisconsin, was below me in the valley, and I jumped up full of the idea
of meeting him, with almost as much startling excitement as if he had
suddenly touched me to make me look up. Leaving my work without the
slightest deliberation, I ran down the western slope of the Dome and
along the brink of the valley wall, looking for a way to the bottom,
until I came to a side canyon