One cold afternoon, while hunting along the river-bank,
he noticed a plain-feathered little bird skipping
about in the shallows, and immediately raised his
gun. But just then the confiding songster began
to sing, and after listening to his summery melody
the charmed hunter turned away, saying, “Bless
your little heart, I can’t shoot you, not even
for Tom.”
[Illustration: YOSEMITE BIRDS, SNOW-BOUND AT
THE FOOT OF INDIAN CANON.]
Even so far north as icy Alaska, I have found my glad
singer. When I was exploring the glaciers between
Mount Fairweather and the Stikeen River, one cold
day in November, after trying in vain to force a way
through the innumerable icebergs of Sum Dum Bay to
the great glaciers at the head of it, I was weary
and baffled and sat resting in my canoe convinced
at last that I would have to leave this part of my
work for another year. Then I began to plan my
escape to open water before the young ice which was
beginning to form should shut me in. While I thus
lingered drifting with the bergs, in the midst of these
gloomy forebodings and all the terrible glacial desolation
and grandeur, I suddenly heard the well-known whir
of an Ouzel’s wings, and, looking up, saw my
little comforter coming straight across the ice from
the shore. In a second or two he was with me,
flying three times round my head with a happy salute,
as if saying, “Cheer up, old friend; you see
I’m here, and all’s well.”
Then he flew back to the shore, alighted on the topmost
jag of a stranded iceberg, and began to nod and bow
as though he were on one of his favorite boulders
in the midst of a sunny Sierra cascade.
The species is distributed all along the mountain-ranges
of the Pacific Coast from Alaska to Mexico, and east
to the Rocky Mountains. Nevertheless, it is as
yet comparatively little known. Audubon and Wilson
did not meet it. Swainson was, I believe, the
first naturalist to describe a specimen from Mexico.
Specimens were shortly afterward procured by Drummond
near the sources of the Athabasca River, between the
fifty-fourth and fifty-sixth parallels; and it has
been collected by nearly all of the numerous exploring
expeditions undertaken of late through our Western
States and Territories; for it never fails to engage
the attention of naturalists in a very particular manner.
Such, then, is our little cinclus, beloved of every
one who is so fortunate as to know him. Tracing
on strong wing every curve of the most precipitous
torrents from one extremity of the Sierra to the other;
not fearing to follow them through their darkest gorges
and coldest snow-tunnels; acquainted with every waterfall,
echoing their divine music; and throughout the whole
of their beautiful lives interpreting all that we
in our unbelief call terrible in the utterances of
torrents and storms, as only varied expressions of
God’s eternal love.
THE WILD SHEEP
(Ovis montana)
