Stones Begin To Roll Into The Crevasses
And Into New Positions, Sliding Against Each Other, Half Turning Over
Or Falling On Moraine Ridges.
Mud pellets with small pebbles slip and
roll slowly from ice-hummocks again and again.
How often and by how
many ways are boulders finished and finally brought to anything like
permanent form and place in beds for farms and fields, forests and
gardens. Into crevasses and out again, into moraines, shifted and
reinforced and reformed by avalanches, melting from pedestals, etc.
Rain, frost, and dew help in the work; they are swept in rills,
caught and ground in pot-hole mills. Moraines of washed pebbles, like
those on glacier margins, are formed by snow avalanches deposited in
crevasses, then weathered out and projected on the ice as shallow
raised moraines. There is one such at this camp.
A ptarmigan is on a rock twenty yards distant, as if on show. It has
red over the eye, a white line, not conspicuous, over the red, belly
white, white markings over the upper parts on ground of brown and
black wings, mostly white as seen when flying, but the coverts the
same as the rest of the body. Only about three inches of the folded
primaries show white. The breast seems to have golden iridescent
colors, white under the wings. It allowed me to approach within
twenty feet. It walked down a sixty degree slope of the rock, took
flight with a few whirring wing-beats, then sailed with wings
perfectly motionless four hundred yards down a gentle grade, and
vanished over the brow of a cliff.
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