their food
was mostly on the lower slopes, with nothing except the wild sheep
to tempt them higher. Even these were brought within reach without
excessive climbing during the storms of winter.

On the north side of Shasta, near Sheep Rock, there is a long cavern,
sloping to the northward, nearly a mile in length, thirty or forty feet
wide, and fifty feet or more in height, regular in form and direction
like a railroad tunnel, and probably formed by the flowing away of a
current of lava after the hardening of the surface. At the mouth of this
cave, where the light and shelter is good, I found many of the heads and
horns of the wild sheep, and the remains of campfires, no doubt those of
Indian hunters who in stormy weather had camped there and feasted after
the fatigues of the chase. A wild picture that must have formed on a
dark night--the glow of the fire, the circle of crouching savages around
it seen through the smoke, the dead game, and the weird darkness and
half-darkness of the walls of the cavern, a picture of cave-dwellers at
home in the stone age!

Interest in hunting is almost universal, so deeply is it rooted as
an inherited instinct ever ready to rise and make itself known. Fine
scenery may not stir a fiber of mind or body, but how quick and how true
is the excitement of the pursuit of game! Then up flames the slumbering
volcano of ancient wildness, all that has been done by church and school
through centuries of cultivation is for the moment destroyed, and
the decent gentleman or devout saint becomes a howling, bloodthirsty,
demented savage. It is not long since we all were cavemen and followed
game for food as truly as wildcat or wolf, and the long repression of
civilization seems to make the rebound to savage love of blood all the
more violent. This frenzy, fortunately, does not last long in its most
exaggerated form, and after a season of wildness refined gentlemen
from cities are not more cruel than hunters and trappers who kill for a
living.

Dwelling apart in the depths of the woods are the various kinds of
mountaineers,--hunters, prospectors, and the like,--rare men, "queer
characters," and well worth knowing. Their cabins are located with
reference to game and the ledges to be examined, and are constructed
almost as simply as those of the wood rats made of sticks laid across
each other without compass or square. But they afford good shelter from
storms, and so are "square" with the need of their b