74 Life in the Open 



Southern States. An average run of this club after a 

 fox, is given as three hours, the fox being generally 

 treed four times in this time, and often killed in the open 

 after a run of perhaps three hundred yards. 



While fox-hunting may be had in summer and as the 

 latter wanes in October, it is better in the winter when 

 the land is green and the herbage in secluded places 

 damp, holding the scent. Then the country is ablaze 

 with colour. The mesa, cafion, arroyo, and mountain 

 slope each has its special floral offering to delight the 

 hunter, and life in the open can be had in all the term 

 implies. Immediately after the first rain is doubtless 

 the most favourable season. The land is still warm and 

 dry. Perhaps in mid October, there is no suspicion of a 

 change, and a thick golden haze hangs in the valleys, so 

 that one seems to see the mountains through opalescent 

 lace. The nights are a little cooler, the wind has about 

 died away, and for days flocks of geese and cranes have 

 been seen flying south along the Sierra Madre. 



You are familiar with the fog that comes in from the 

 sea against the wind at night in an altogether incompre- 

 hensible fashion, going out against the sea breeze in the 

 morning, the tonic of Southern California, the balance 

 wheel, the only fog in the world possibly that is 

 purely harmless, crepuscular, nocturnal, and other things. 

 But one day this fog, in a long, feathery, fan-shaped 

 finger, is seen creeping along the slope of the Sierras 

 in the morning. From my home in the San Gabriel at 

 Pasadena, it appears to come up the Santa Ana River 



