The Bleaker The Situation, So It Is Near A
Stream Border, The Better The Cassiope Loves It.
Yet I
have not found it on the polished glacier slips, but where the
country rock cleaves and splinters in the high windy headlands that
the wild sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the white bells
swing over matted, mossy foliage.
On Oppapago, which is also
called Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the beds of cassiope
the ice-worn, stony hollows where the big-horns cradle their young.
These are above the wolf's quest and the eagle's wont, and though
the heather beds are softer, they are neither so dry nor so warm,
and here only the stars go by. No other animal of any pretensions
makes a habitat of the alpine regions. Now and then one gets a
hint of some small, brown creature, rat or mouse kind, that slips
secretly among the rocks; no others adapt themselves to desertness
of aridity or altitude so readily as these ground inhabiting,
graminivorous species. If there is an open stream the trout go up
the lake as far as the water breeds food for them, but the ousel
goes farthest, for pure love of it.
Since no lake can be at the highest point, it is possible to
find plant life higher than the water borders; grasses perhaps the
highest, gilias, royal blue trusses of polymonium, rosy plats of
Sierra primroses. What one has to get used to in flowers at high
altitudes is the bleaching of the sun.
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