About half-past eight, two or three five-year-olds,
one a little colored girl, came into the schoolroom
of the kindergarten with a great chatter of voices,
going across to the cloakroom to hang up their hats
and coats as they had been taught.
Half way across the room one of them stopped and put
her small nose in the air, crying, “Um-o-o,
what a funnee smell!” The others began to sniff
the air as well, and one, the daughter of a butcher,
exclaimed, “’Tsmells like my pa’s
shop,” adding in the next breath, “Look,
what’s the matter with the kittee?”
In fact, the cat was acting strangely. He lay
quite flat on the floor, his nose pressed close to
the crevice under the door of the little cloakroom,
winding his tail slowly back and forth, excited, very
eager. At times he would draw back and make a
strange little clacking noise down in his throat.
“Ain’t he funnee?” said the little
girl again. The cat slunk swiftly away as the
children came up. Then the tallest of the little
girls swung the door of the little cloakroom wide
open and they all ran in.
The day was very hot, and the silence of high noon
lay close and thick between the steep slopes of the
canyons like an invisible, muffling fluid. At
intervals the drone of an insect bored the air and
trailed slowly to silence again. Everywhere were
pungent, aromatic smells. The vast, moveless
heat seemed to distil countless odors from the brush—odors
of warm sap, of pine needles, and of tar-weed, and
above all the medicinal odor of witch hazel.
As far as one could look, uncounted multitudes of
trees and manzanita bushes were quietly and motionlessly
growing, growing, growing. A tremendous, immeasurable
Life pushed steadily heavenward without a sound, without
a motion. At turns of the road, on the higher
points, canyons disclosed themselves far away, gigantic
grooves in the landscape, deep blue in the distance,
opening one into another, ocean-deep, silent, huge,
and suggestive of colossal primeval forces held in
reserve. At their bottoms they were solid, massive;
on their crests they broke delicately into fine serrated
edges where the pines and redwoods outlined their million
of tops against the high white horizon. Here
and there the mountains lifted themselves out of the
narrow river beds in groups like giant lions rearing
their heads after drinking. The entire region
was untamed. In some places east of the Mississippi
nature is cosey, intimate, small, and homelike, like
a good-natured housewife. In Placer County, California,
she is a vast, unconquered brute of the Pliocene epoch,
savage, sullen, and magnificently indifferent to man.
But there were men in these mountains, like lice on
mammoths’ hides, fighting them stubbornly, now
with hydraulic “monitors,” now with drill
and dynamite, boring into the vitals of them, or tearing
away great yellow gravelly scars in the flanks of
them, sucking their blood, extracting gold.
