They Make The
Most Of Their Midday Hour, And Tinkle All Night Thinly Under The
Ice.
An ear laid to the snow catches a muffled hint of their
eternal busyness fifteen or twenty feet under the canon
drifts, and long before any appreciable spring thaw, the sagging
edges of the snow bridges mark out the place of their running.
One
who ventures to look for it finds the immediate source of the
spring freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed with the reek of
melting drifts, all the gravelly flats in a swirl of waters. But
later, in June or July, when the camping season begins, there runs
the stream away full and singing, with no visible reinforcement
other than an icy trickle from some high, belated dot of snow.
Oftenest the stream drops bodily from the bleak bowl of some alpine
lake; sometimes breaks out of a hillside as a spring where the ear
can trace it under the rubble of loose stones to the neighborhood
of some blind pool. But that leaves the lakes to be accounted for.
The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid,
unwinking, also unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and
stony brows is guessed at. It is always a favorite local tradition
that one or another of the blind lakes is bottomless. Often they
lie in such deep cairns of broken boulders that one never gets
quite to them, or gets away unhurt. One such drops below the
plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds over, perilously,
nearing the pass.
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