At the summit grow the mosses. Battered by the wind, dried by the sun, they lose the fresh green tint they wear in the valleys and on the brink of the springs. They are reddened with tawny hues, and their smooth filaments have the reflexes of a wolf’s fur. Others, yellowed and pale, cover with their sickly colors the bleeding crevices. Then there are gray ones, almost white, which grow like remnants of hair upon the bald rocks. Far away, upon the back of the mountain, all these tints are mingled, and the shaded fur emits a wild gleam.
The last growths are reddish crusts, stuck to the walls of rock, seeming to form part of the stone, and which you might take, not for a plant, but for a scurf. Cold, dryness, and the height have by degrees transformed or killed vegetation.
V.
The climate shapes and produces animals as well as plants.
The bear is a serious beast, a thorough mountaineer, curious to behold in his great-coat of felted hair, yellowish or grayish in color. It seems formed for its domicile and its domicile for it. Its heavy fur is an excellent mantle against the snow. The mountaineers think it so good, that they borrow it from him as often as they can, and he thinks it so good that he defends it against them to the best of his ability. He likes to live alone, and the gorges of the heights are as solitary as he wishes.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The hollow trees afford him a ready-made house; as these are for the most part beeches and oaks, he finds in them at once food and shelter. For the rest, brave, prudent, and robust, he is an estimable animal; his only faults are that he eats his little ones, when he runs across them, and that he is a poor dancer.