that flushes the
snow. There are miles of wild roses, pink bells of huckleberry and sweet
manzanita, every bell a honey-cup, plants that tell of the north and
of the south; tall nodding lilies, the crimson sarcodes, rhododendron,
cassiope, and blessed linnaea; phlox, calycanthus, plum, cherry,
crataegus, spiraea, mints, and clovers in endless variety; ivesia,
larkspur, and columbine; golden aplopappus, linosyris [5], bahia,
wyethia, arnica, brodiaea, etc.,--making sheets and beds of light
edgings of bloom in lavish abundance for the myriads of the air
dependent on their bounty.

The common honeybees, gone wild in this sweet wilderness, gather tons
of honey into the hollows of the trees and rocks, clambering eagerly
through bramble and hucklebloom, shaking the clustered bells of the
generous manzanita, now humming aloft among polleny willows and firs,
now down on the ashy ground among small gilias and buttercups, and anon
plunging into banks of snowy cherry and buckthorn. They consider the
lilies and roll into them, pushing their blunt polleny faces against
them like babies on their mother's bosom; and fondly, too, with eternal
love does Mother Nature clasp her small bee-babies and suckle them,
multitudes at once, on her warm Shasta breast. Besides the common
honeybee there are many others here, fine, burly, mossy fellows, such as
were nourished on the mountains many a flowery century before the advent
of the domestic species--bumblebees, mason-bees, carpenter-bees, and
leaf-cutters. Butterflies, too, and moths of every size and pattern;
some wide-winged like bats, flapping slowly and sailing in easy curves;
others like small flying violets shaking about loosely in short zigzag
flights close to the flowers, feasting in plenty night and day.

Deer in great abundance come to Shasta from the warmer foothills every
spring to feed in the rich, cool pastures, and bring forth their young
in the ceanothus tangles of the chaparral zone, retiring again before
the snowstorms of winter, mostly to the southward and westward of the
mountain. In like manner the wild sheep of the adjacent region seek the
lofty inaccessible crags of the summit as the snow melts, and are driven
down to the lower spurs and ridges where there is but little snow, to
the north and east of Shasta.

Bears, too, roam this foodful wilderness, feeding on grass, clover,
berries, nuts, ant eggs, fish, flesh, or fowl,--whatever comes in their
way,--with but littl