On the wildest and most desolate peaks and rock piles is found the cony or pika or "rock rabbit" as it is variously called. It is small, only six inches or so in length, tailless but with large round ears and soft grayish fur like a rabbit's.
The jumping mouse is interesting. It may be seen sometimes at evening in swampy areas and meadows. It is yellowish above, whitish below, with an extremely long tail. It travels by long leaps, takes readily to the water and is an expert swimmer. The meadow mice are bluish grey and are found in swampy 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.