SPRING-SUMMER OF THE ALPS 103 



and carried to their tunnels in a sand-bank and given 

 to the slow death of being eaten alive. One such 

 bank swarms with the active little wasps, so that you 

 could scarcely point out a site where one more tunnel 

 could be driven. Two days ago not an insect stirred 

 there. Thus does life awake, once the signal of winter's 

 departure has been given. 



Man is perforce a migrant in these high valleys. 

 Tradition derives the inhabitants of our own particular 

 region from the Huns that Attila persecuted and drove 

 from the plains. Nomad blood is scarcely needed to 

 account for migration to and from such a winter- 

 smitten district. To the sound of cow-bells they 

 come at their appointed season from the lower levels 

 of their winter sojourn to the greenest and most 

 flowery slopes beneath the snow. These closely 

 packed summer villages, tenanted only by care-takers 

 in winter, dot the May levels, while ever higher and 

 higher around them are to be seen the barns which 

 tourists call chalets, which house cattle and cowherd 

 in the cold nights that must be expected all the year 

 round. The truly Alpine pastures and their barns 

 will remain in deep snow for another month, and will 

 scarcely be grazed before August. But every day 

 the mellow jangle of the cow-bell goes a little higher 

 among the bell-gentians and the yellow stars of 

 Bethlehem, and the pine-groves, where the ponderous 

 nut-cracker and the jay revel in the return of con- 

 tinuous sunshine. 



