378 THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFOBNIA 



and would have to be taken into account in the es 

 tablishment of bee-ranches. In the deepest thick 

 ets I found wood-rat villages groups of huts four 

 to six feet high, built of sticks and leaves in rough, 

 tapering piles, like musk-rat cabins. I noticed a 

 good many bees, too, most of them wild. The tame 

 honey-bees seemed languid and wing-weary, as if 

 they had come all the way up from the flowerless 

 valley. 



After reaching the summit I had time to make 

 only a hasty survey of the basin, now glowing in 

 the sunset gold, before hastening down into one of 

 the tributary canons in search of water. Emerg 

 ing from a particularly tedious breadth of chapar 

 ral, I found myself free and erect in a beautiful 

 park-like grove of Mountain Live Oak, where the 

 ground was planted with aspidiums and brier-roses, 

 while the glossy foliage made a close canopy over 

 head, leaving the gray dividing trunks bare to show 

 the beauty of their interlacing arches. The bot 

 tom of the canon was dry where I first reached it, 

 but a bunch of scarlet mimulus indicated water at 

 no great distance, and I soon discovered about a 

 bucketful in a hollow of the rock. This, however, 

 was full of dead bees, wasps, beetles, and leaves, 

 well steeped and simmered, and would, therefore, re 

 quire boiling and filtering through fresh charcoal 

 before it could be made available. Tracing the dry 

 channel about a mile farther down to its junction 

 with a larger tributary canon, I at length discov 

 ered a lot of boulder pools, clear as crystal, brim 

 ming full, and linked together by glistening stream 

 lets just strong enough to sing audibly. Flowers in 



