Soppy Little Plants Of The
Portulaca And Small, Fine Ferns Shiver Under The Drip Of Falls And
In Dribbling Crevices.
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. Hardly do they hold their
virgin color for a day, and this early fading before their function
is performed gives them a pitiful appearance not according
with their hardihood. The color scheme runs along the high ridges
from blue to rosy purple, carmine and coral red; along the water
borders it is chiefly white and yellow where the mimulus makes a
vivid note, running into red when the two schemes meet and mix
about the borders of the meadows, at the upper limit of the
columbine.
Here is the fashion in which a mountain stream gets down from
the perennial pastures of the snow to its proper level and identity
as an irrigating ditch. It slips stilly by the glacier scoured rim
of an ice bordered pool, drops over sheer, broken ledges to another
pool, gathers itself, plunges headlong on a rocky ripple slope,
finds a lake again, reinforced, roars downward to a pothole, foams
and bridles, glides a tranquil reach in some still meadow, tumbles
into a sharp groove between hill flanks, curdles under the stream
tangles, and so arrives at the open country and steadier going.
Meadows, little strips of alpine freshness, begin before the
timberline is reached. Here one treads on a carpet of dwarf
willows, downy catkins of creditable size and the greatest economy
of foliage and stems. No other plant of high altitudes knows its
business so well. It hugs the ground, grows roots from stem joints
where no roots should be, grows a slender leaf or two and twice as
many erect full catkins that rarely, even in that short
growing season, fail of fruit. Dipping over banks in the inlets of
the creeks, the fortunate find the rosy apples of the miniature
manzanita, barely, but always quite sufficiently, borne above the
spongy sod. It does not do to be anything but humble in the alpine
regions, but not fearful. I have pawed about for hours in the
chill sward of meadows where one might properly expect to get one's
death, and got no harm from it, except it might be Oliver Twist's
complaint. One comes soon after this to shrubby willows, and where
willows are trout may be confidently looked for in most Sierra
streams. There is no accounting for their distribution; though
provident anglers have assisted nature of late, one still comes
upon roaring brown waters where trout might very well be, but are
not.
The highest limit of conifers--in the middle Sierras, the
white bark pine--is not along the water border. They come to it
about the level of the heather, but they have no such affinity for
dampness as the tamarack pines. Scarcely any bird-note breaks the
stillness of the timber-line, but chipmunks inhabit here, as may be
guessed by the gnawed ruddy cones of the pines, and lowering hours
the woodchucks come down to the water. On a little spit of land
running into Windy Lake we found one summer the evidence of a
tragedy; a pair of sheep's horns not fully grown caught in the
crotch of a pine where the living sheep must have lodged
them. The trunk of the tree had quite closed over them, and the
skull bones crumbled away from the weathered horn cases. We hoped
it was not too far out of the running of night prowlers to have put
a speedy end to the long agony, but we could not be sure. I never
liked the spit of Windy Lake again.
It seems that all snow nourished plants count nothing so
excellent in their kind as to be forehanded with their bloom,
working secretly to that end under the high piled winters. The
heathers begin by the lake borders, while little sodden drifts
still shelter under their branches. I have seen the tiniest of
them (Kalmia glauca) blooming, and with well-formed fruit,
a foot away from a snowbank from which it could hardly have emerged
within a week. Somehow the soul of the heather has entered into
the blood of the English-speaking. "And oh! is that heather?" they
say; and the most indifferent ends by picking a sprig of it in a
hushed, wondering way. One must suppose that the root of their
respective races issued from the glacial borders at about the same
epoch, and remember their origin.
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