e. It is seldom so cold,
however, as to prevent his going out to his stores when hungry.

Once as I lay storm-bound on the upper edge of the timber line on Mount
Shasta, the thermometer nearly at zero and the sky thick with driving
snow, a Douglas came bravely out several times from one of the lower
hollows of a Dwarf Pine near my camp, faced the wind without seeming to
feel it much, frisked lightly about over the mealy snow, and dug his way
down to some hidden seeds with wonderful precision, as if to his eyes
the thick snow-covering were glass.

No other of the Sierra animals of my acquaintance is better fed, not
even the deer, amid abundance of sweet herbs and shrubs, or the mountain
sheep, or omnivorous bears. His food consists of grass-seeds, berries,
hazel-nuts, chinquapins, and the nuts and seeds of all the coniferous
trees without exception,--Pine, Fir, Spruce, Libocedrus, Juniper, and
Sequoia,--he is fond of them all, and they all agree with him, green or
ripe. No cone is too large for him to manage, none so small as to be
beneath his notice. The smaller ones, such as those of the Hemlock, and
the Douglas Spruce, and the Two-leaved Pine, he cuts off and eats on a
branch of the tree, without allowing them to fall; beginning at the
bottom of the cone and cutting away the scales to expose the seeds; not
gnawing by guess, like a bear, but turning them round and round in
regular order, in compliance with their spiral arrangement.

When thus employed, his location in the tree is betrayed by a dribble of
scales, shells, and seed-wings, and, every few minutes, by the fall of
the stripped axis of the cone. Then of course he is ready for another,
and if you are watching you may catch a glimpse of him as he glides
silently out to the end of a branch and see him examining the
cone-clusters until he finds one to his mind; then, leaning over, pull
back the springy needles out of his way, grasp the cone with his paws to
prevent its falling, snip it off in an incredibly short time, seize it
with jaws grotesquely stretched, and return to his chosen seat near the
trunk. But the immense size of the cones of the Sugar Pine--from fifteen
to twenty inches in length--and those of the Jeffrey variety of the
Yellow Pine compel him to adopt a quite different method. He cuts them
off without attempting to hold them, then goes down and drags them from
where they have chanced to fall up to the bare, swelling ground around
the instep of th