There
You May Find Floundering In The Unstable Drifts "Tainted Wethers"
Of The Wild Sheep, Faint From Age And Hunger; Easy Prey.
Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and once
we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white glare.
No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver
fir. The star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft
wreaths--droop and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point
of overloading is reached, there is a soft sough and muffled
drooping, the boughs recover, and the weighting goes on until the
drifts have reached the midmost whorls and covered up the branches.
When the snows are particularly wet and heavy they spread over the
young firs in green-ribbed tents wherein harbor winter loving
birds.
All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent.
East and east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges,
desertward, and no rain breaks over them, except from some
far-strayed cloud or roving wind from the California Gulf, and
these only in winter. In summer the sky travails with thunderings
and the flare of sheet lightnings to win a few blistering big
drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a torrent. But you
have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you
have known a desert wind. One expects it at the turn of the two
seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves.
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