Enos A. Mills

“ The beaver has a rich birthright, though born in a windowless hut of mud. Close to the primitive place of his birth the wild folk of both woods and water meet and often mingle; around it are the ever-changing, never-ending scenes and silences of the water or the shore. He grows up with the many-sided wild, playing amid the enameled flowers, the great boulders,—the Ice King's marbles,—and the fallen logs in the edge of the mysterious forest; learning to swim and slide; listening to the strong, harmonious stir of wind and water; living with the stars in the sky and the stars in the pond ”

“ As the oldest settler upon the earth—the pioneer of pioneers—it knows the stories of centuries. At the dead lips of the Sphinx you listen in vain, but beneath a Big Tree the ages speak and the centuries shift their scenes. The Big Trees carry within their untranslated scrolls that which may enrich the literature of the world. Within a Big Tree's brave breast are more materials of fact and fancy than in the ocean's coral cove, or in the murmuring sea-shell on the shore.
In the forest, around the foot of a tree, rages an endless and ever-changing struggle for existence. ”

“ As soon as a dam is completed, it becomes a wilderness highway. It is used day and night. Across it go bears and lions, rabbits and wolves, mice and porcupines; chipmunks use it for a bridge, birds alight upon it, trout attempt to leap it, and in the evening the graceful deer cast their reflections with the willows in its quiet pond. Across it dash pursuer and pursued. Upon it take place battles and courtships. Often it is torn by hoof and claw. Death struggles stain it with blood. Many a drama, romantic and picturesque, fierce and wild, is staged upon the beaver dam. ”

“ There are more than twice as many peaks of fourteen thousand feet in Colorado as in all the other States of the Union. An enormous area is entirely above the limits of tree-growth; but these heights above the timber-line are far from being barren and lifeless. Covering these mountains with robes of beauty are forests, lakes, meadows, brilliant flowers, moorlands, and vine-like streams that cling to the very summits. This entire mountain realm is delightfully rich in plant and animal life, from the lowest meadows to the summits of the highest peaks. ”

“ He knows when each article of diet is in season and where in his home territory, or out of it, this abounds. In berry time look for a bear in a berry-patch. Like an enthusiastic fisherman he impatiently waits for the open season—spawning-time—and is on hand early to start fishing.
Perhaps it would be well if we could think of the grizzly as being largely vegetarian. He digs up roots; feeds on weeds, tender shoots of shrubbery, fungi, mushrooms, berries, seeds, rose-hips, pine-nuts, and acorns; and also eats bark like a rabbit and grass like a grass-eater. ”

“ During most of the year the great silent plains are at rest in tawny and gray brown. The dreamy, sunny distances show only moving cloud shadows. A brief barrage of dust storm sometimes sweeps across or a wild drive of tumbleweeds with a front from horizon to horizon goes bounding and rolling toward the rim, where they go over and vanish. But these endless distances are palpitating with flowers and song when the young antelope are born.
One May morning a flock of blackbirds alighted upon a leafy cottonwood tree—a lone tuft in an empire of treeless distances. ”

“ The squirrels from the tree-tops kept a rattling rain of cones on the leaf-strewn forest floor, the cheery chipmunk foraged and frolicked among the withered leaves and plants, while aspens with leaves of gold fell before the ivory sickles of the beaver. Splendid glimpses, grand views, I had of this strange harvest-home. How busy the beavers were! They were busy in the grove on the steep mountainside; they tugged logs along the runways; they hurried them across the water-basins, wrestled with them in canals, and merrily piled them by the rude house in the water. ”

“ The mountains do not stand a storm well. A hard rain will dissolve ridges, lay bare new strata, undermine and overturn cliffs. It seems almost a land of enchantment, where old landmarks may disappear in a single storm, or an impressive landscape come forth in a night. Here the god of erosion works incessantly and rapidly, dissecting the earth and the rocks. During a single storm a hilltop may dissolve, a mountain-side be fluted with slides, a grove be overturned and swept away by an avalanche, or a lake be buried forever. ”

“ I never see a little tree bursting from the earth, peeping confidingly up among the withered leaves, without wondering how long it will live, what trials or triumphs it will have. I always hope that it will be a home for the birds. I always hope that it will find life worth living, and that it will live long to better and to beautify the earth.
In spring, summer, autumn, and winter, the broadleaf forest is a picture gallery, a fine-arts hall. In winter, abloom with snow flowers or in penciled tracery against the sky, how trustfully it sleeps! ”

“ Through the seasons and through the years Scotch and I wandered in the wilds and enjoyed nature together. Though we were often wet, hungry, or cold, he never ceased to be cheerful. Through the scenes and the silences we went side by side; side by side in the lonely night we gazed into the camp-fire, and in feeling lived strangely through "yesterday's seven thousand years" together.
He was only a puppy the first time that he went with me to enjoy the woods. During this trip we came upon an unextinguished camp-fire that was spreading and about to become a forest fire. ”

“ Mother Nature is quietly singing, singing soft and low while the breezes pause and play in the pines. From the past one has been ever coming, with the future destined ever to go when, with centuries of worshipful silence, one waits for the winds in the pines. Ever the good old world grows 254 better both with songs and with silence in the pines.
Here the energy and eloquence of silence was at its best. That all-pervading presence called silence has its happy home within the forest. Silence sounds rhythmic to all, and attunes all minds to the strange message, the rhapsody of the universe. ”

“ The leaping, eager flames threw wavering lights across the lake on the steeply rising heights beyond. These brought the alarm cry of a coyote, with many an answer and echo, and the mocking laughter of a fox.
Even these wild voices in the primeval night were neither so strange nor so eloquent as the storm-made and resolute tree-forms that rose, peered, and vanished where my firelight fell and changed.
At most timber-lines the high winds always blow from one direction. On the eastern slope of the Colorado divide they are westerly, down the mountain. ”

“ THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN GOAT As a flock of wild goats wound in and out among the crevasses and crossed the slender ice bridges of a glacier on Mount Rainier they appeared for all the world like a party of skillful mountain climbers.
Not until I had studied them for a few seconds through my field glasses did I realize that they were goats. There were twenty-seven of them, nannies, billies, and kids, strung out in a crooked line, single file. Once safely across this glacier they lingered to look round. The kids played, the old goats had friendly bouts, and one or two couples scratched each other. ”

“ He often saw victor and victim and the endless drama of the wilderness.
The trail is followed by wild life, and along it the wild flowers fill the wild gardens. It has the spirit of the primal outdoors. It extends away ever to the golden age. Many a night this way across the earth is as thick with fireflies as the great Milky Way across the sky with stars. The moon, the white aspens, and the dark spruces pile it with romantic shades, and on a sunny day it is often touched by the fleeting shadow of an eagle in the sky. ”

“ Advancing was akin to swimming a whirlpool or to wrestling one's way up a slope despite the ceaseless opposition of a vigorous, tireless opponent.
At last I crawled and climbed up to the buzzing cups of the meter. So swiftly were they rotating they formed a blurred circle, like a fast-revolving life-preserver. The meter showed that the wind was passing with a speed of from one hundred and sixty-five to one hundred and seventy miles an hour. The meter blew up—or, rather, flew to pieces—during a swifter spurt. ”

“ I had lost my ten-foot staff in the snow-slide, and feeling for precipices without it would probably bring me out upon another snow-cornice, so I took no chances.
I was twelve thousand five hundred feet above sea-level when the clouds broke up, and from this great height I looked down upon what seemed to be the margin of the polar world. It was intensely cold, but the sun shone with dazzling glare, and the wilderness of snowy peaks came out like a grand and jagged ice-field in the far south. Halos and peculiarly luminous balls floated through the color-tinged and electrical air. ”

“ Many a camp-fire I have had in the alpine outskirts of the forest. I remember especially one night, when I camped alone where pioneer trees, rusty cliffs, a wild lake-shore, and a subdued, far-off waterfall furnished sights and sounds as wild as though man had not yet appeared on earth. This night, for a time, a cave man directed my imagination, and it ran riot in primeval fields. After indulging these prehistoric visions, I made a great camp-fire with a monumental pile of tree-trunks and limbs on the shore of the lake, close to the cliff. ”

“ I was in Big Elk Park, seated on a rock pile, and was nearly concealed by drooping tree limbs. Behind me rose the forested Twin Peaks, and before me a ragged-edged mountain meadow lay in the forest; and across this meadow the lion crawled.
The colt kicked up its heels as it ran merry circles round its mother. This beautiful bay mare, like her colt, was born in unfenced scenes and had never felt the hand of man. She had marked capability and the keenness exacted by wilderness environment. ”

“ If we should lose the hospitality of the trees and the friendship of the forest, our race too would be lost, and the desert's pale, sad sky would come to hover above a rounded, lifeless world. The trees are friends of mankind.
The forest that you see on the heights across the valley, that stands so steadfast upon the billowed and broken slopes, that drapes the dales and distances with peaceful, purple folds, and makes complete with grace and grandeur a hanging garden of the hills—this is the forest that sheltered our ancestors through the past's slow-changing years. ”

“ These birds, the ptarmigan and the ouzel, along with the willow thrush, who sings out his melody amid the shadows of the pines, who puts his woods into song,—these birds of the mountains are with me when memory takes me back a solitary visitor to the lonely places of the Rockies.
The birds of the Rockies, as well as the bigger folk who live there, have ways of their own which distinguish them from their kind in the East. They sing with more enthusiasm, but with the same subtle tone that everywhere tells that all is right with the world, and makes all to the manner born glad to be alive. ”