mpy places. The wood mice are pure white below,
brown above and are found everywhere.

Quite a number of badgers are to be found in the Tahoe region, and
they must find abundance of good food, for the specimens I have seen
were rolling in fat, and as broad backed as a fourteen inch board.

Several times, also, have I seen porcupines, one of them, weighing
fully twenty-five pounds, on the slopes of Mt. Watson, waddling
along as if he were a small bear. They live on the tender bark of the
mountain and tamarack pines, sometimes girdling the trees and causing
them to die. They are slow-gaited creatures, easily caught by dogs,
but with their needle spines, and the sharp, quick-slapping action of
their tails, by means of which they can thrust, insert, inject--which
is the better word?--a score or more of these spines into a dog's
face, they are antagonists whose prowess cannot be ignored.

Very few people would think of the porcupine as an animal destructive
to forest trees, yet one of the Tahoe Forest rangers reports that in
the spring of 1913 fifty young trees, averaging thirty feet high, were
killed or ruined by porcupines stripping them of their bark.
Sometimes as many as ninety per cent. of the young trees growing on
a burned-over area are thus destroyed. They travel and feed at night,
hence the ordinary observer would never know their habits.

The bushy-tailed woodrat proves itself a nuisance about the houses
where it is as omnivorous an eater as is its far-removed cousin, the
house rat. The gopher is one of the mammals whose mark is more often
seen than the creature itself. It lives like the mole in underground
burrows, coming to the surface only to push up the dirt that it has
been digging.

CHAPTER XXXIV

THE SQUAW VALLEY MINING EXCITEMENT

The Tahoe region was once thrilled through and through by a real
mining excitement that belonged to itself alone. It had felt the
wonderful activity that resulted from the discovery of the Comstock
lode in Virginia City. It had seen its southern border crowded with
miners and prospectors hurrying to the new field, and later had heard
the blasting and picking, the shoveling and dumping of rocks while the
road from Placerville was being constructed.

It had seen another road built up from Carson over the King's Canyon
grade, and lumber mills established at Glenbrook in order to supply
the mines with timbers for their tunnels and excavations, as the
valuable ore and