30 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON 



ledge was a gray blur that I made out to be a 

 nest — an ancient nest, I should say, from the 

 stains below it on the face of the rock. 



A fleck of black high up against the cliff, he 

 yet seemed to fill the canon. The shadow of his 

 wings, as he flew out in the sky to watch us pass, 

 spread up and down the valley. The smoke of 

 our engine would quickly disappear, but the 

 shadow of the raven's authority was the very air 

 of these cliffs and bluffs and buttes, the spell that 

 we had felt since the mighty walls had first shut 

 in about us. 



Or did I imagine it all? This is a treeless 

 country, green with grass, yet, as for animal life, 

 an almost uninhabited country. When Lewis and 

 Clark passed here, they could find no sticks for 

 camp-fires and lived on dog-meat — so utterly 

 without life were the hills and headlands of the 

 river. Such lack of wild life had seemed incredi- 

 ble ; but no longer so after entering the canon of 

 the Deschutes. A deep, unnatural silence filled the 

 vast spaces between the beetling walls and smoth- 

 ered the roar of the rumbling train. The river, one 

 of the best trout streams in the world, broke white 

 and loud over a hundred stony shallows, but what 



