Indigo jays.
Warblers.
The beautiful mountain-quail loves to scramble over these stones, especially when they are in the water; and the mountain-quail is here. This is his abiding-place, and you are sure to see him, for he has a curiosity akin to that of the antelope and must get on a bowlder or a log to look at you. And this is the home of hundreds of woodpeckers that seem to spend their entire lives in pounding holes in the pine-trees and then pounding acorns into the holes. It is a very thrifty practice and provides against winter consumption, only the squirrels consume the greater part of the acorns if the blue-jays do not get ahead of them. For here lives the ordinary blue-jay and also his mountain cousin, the crested jay, with a coat so blue that it might better be called indigo. A beautiful bird, but with a jangling note that rasps the air with discord. His chief occupation seems to be climbing pine-trees as by the rungs of a ladder. There are sweeter notes from the warblers, the nuthatches, and the chickadees. But no desert-bird comes up so high; and as for the common lawn and field birds like the robin and the thrush, they do not fancy the pines.
The mountain-air.
The dwarf pine.
Upward, still upward, under the spreading arms of the pines! How silent the forest save for the soughing of the wind through the pine needles and the jangle of the jays! And how thin and clear the mountain-air! How white the sunlight falling upon the moss-covered rocks! It must be that we have risen out of the dust-laden atmosphere of the desert. And out of its heat too. The air feels as though blown to us from snow-banks, and indeed, they are in the gullies lying on either side of us. For now we are coming close to the peak. The bushes have been dwindling away for some time past, and the pines have been growing thinner in body, fewer in number, smaller in size. A dwarf pine begins to show itself—a scraggly tempest-fighting tree, designed by Nature to grow among the bowlders of the higher peaks and to be the first to stop the slides of snow. The hardy grasses fight beside it, and with them is the little snow-bird, fighting for life too.
The summit.
Upward, still upward, until great spaces begin to show through the trees and the ground flattens and becomes a floor of rock. In the barrancas on the north side the snow still lies in banks, but on the south side, where the sun falls all day, the ground is bare. You are now above the timber line. Nothing shows but wrecked and shattered strata of rock with patches of stunted grass. The top is only barren stone. The uppermost peak, which you have perhaps seen from the desert a hundred miles away looking like a sharp spine of granite shot up in the air, turns out to be something more of a dome than a spine—a rounded knob of gray granite which you have no difficulty in ascending.
The look upward at the sky.
The dark-blue dome.