shed glacier
slips, but where the country rock cleaves and splinters in the high
windy headlands that the wild sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the
white bells swing over matted, mossy foliage. On Oppapago, which is also
called Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the beds of cassiope the
ice-worn, stony hollows where the big-horns cradle their young.

These are above the wolf's quest and the eagle's wont, and though the
heather beds are softer, they are neither so dry nor so warm, and here
only the stars go by. No other animal of any pretensions makes a habitat
of the alpine regions. Now and then one gets a hint of some small, brown
creature, rat or mouse kind, that slips secretly among the rocks; no
others adapt themselves to desertness of aridity or altitude so readily
as these ground inhabiting, graminivorous species. If there is an open
stream the trout go up the lake as far as the water breeds food for
them, but the ousel goes farthest, for pure love of it.

Since no lake can be at the highest point, it is possible to find plant
life higher than the water borders; grasses perhaps the highest, gilias,
royal blue trusses of polymonium, rosy plats of Sierra primroses. What
one has to get used to in flowers at high altitudes is the bleaching
of the sun. Hardly do they hold their virgin color for a day, and this
early fading before their function is performed gives them a pitiful
appearance not according with their hardihood. The color scheme runs
along the high ridges from blue to rosy purple, carmine and coral red;
along the water borders it is chiefly white and yellow where the mimulus
makes a vivid note, running into red when the two schemes meet and mix
about the borders of the meadows, at the upper limit of the columbine.

Here is the fashion in which a mountain stream gets down from the
perennial pastures of the snow to its proper level and identity as an
irrigating ditch. It slips stilly by the glacier scoured rim of an ice
bordered pool, drops over sheer, broken ledges to another pool, gathers
itself, plunges headlong on a rocky ripple slope, finds a lake again,
reinforced, roars downward to a pothole, foams and bridles, glides a
tranquil reach in some still meadow, tumbles into a sharp groove between
hill flanks, curdles under the stream tangles, and so arrives at the
open country and steadier going. Meadows, little strips of alpine
freshness, begin before the timberline is reached. Here one treads on