A CURIOUS EXPERIENCE 321 



shrouding the mountainsides and valleys, the 

 clear brooks, the wealth of wild flowers, make up 

 a landscape as lovely as it is varied. Here the 

 game — bighorn and white goat-antelope, moose, 

 wapiti, and black-tail deer and white-tail deer — 

 flourish unmolested. The flora and fauna are 

 boreal, but boreal in the sense that the Rocky 

 Mountains are boreal as far south as Arizona; 

 the crimson paint-brush that colors the hill- 

 sides, the water-ousel in the rapid torrents — 

 these and most of the trees and flowers and birds 

 suggest those of the mountains which are riven 

 asunder by the profound gorges of the Colorado 

 rather than those which dwell among the lower 

 and more rounded Eastern hill-masses from 

 which the springs find their way into the rivers 

 that flow down to the North Atlantic. Around 

 these and similar great nurseries of game, the 

 hunting is still good in places; although there 

 has been a mistaken lenity shown in permitting 

 the Indians to butcher mountain-sheep and 

 deer to the point of local extermination, and 

 although, as is probably inevitable in all new 

 communities, the game laws are enforced chiefly 

 at the expense of visiting sportsmen, rather 

 than at the expense of the real enemies of the 

 game, the professional meat and hide hunters 

 who slaughter for the profit. 



