22 WATCHED BY WILD ANIMALS 
Numbers of conies were “Skee-eking” and 
scampering. Weasels were hurrying away from 
the danger zone. Possibly a number of each 
had been crushed. 
The conies thus driven forth probably found 
other dens near by, and a number I am certain 
found welcome and refuge for the night in the 
dens of conies in undisturbed rocks within a 
stone’s throw of the bottom of the slide. 
The upper limits of the inhabited cony zone 
present a barren appearance. Whether slide 
or moraine, the surface is mostly a jumble of 
rocks, time-stained and lifeless. But there are 
spaces, a few square feet, along narrow ledges 
or in little wind-blown or water-placed piles 
of soil, which produce dwarfed shrubs, grasses, 
and vigorous plants and wild flowers. 
Dried food in the form of hay is what enables 
the cony to endure the long winters and to live 
merrily in the very frontier of warm-blooded 
life. In this zone he lives leisurely. 
Rocky placed his haystack between boulders, 
beneath the edge of the big flat rock on which 
he sat for hours daily, except during hay- 
making time. As soon as the stack was dry 
he carried the hay down into his underground 
house and stacked it in one or more of the rock- 
walled rooms. It appears that all cony stacks 
are placed by the entrance of the den, and in 
