The California Condor 



in the cliff, and is lost to view. One minute, two, three, elapses. It has 

 happened! She's on, boys! 



Only two thousand feet above us; but if I were to stop to rehearse 

 to you the arduous details of that climb, and of our sufferings, camera- 

 laden, poked, prodded, buffeted, and gouged, as we made our way upward 

 through an all but impenetrable thicket of buckthorn, you would chuck 

 this volume into the fire-place and bolt for the door. It is yours to gather 

 only the sweets. The actual foot of that rock-wall was sweet. We 

 could have kissed it or bathed it with our tears. The half-cylinder- 

 shaped wall was a promising place, stately and frowning not only, but 

 full of rifts and caves, soft places in the sandstone scored out by the 

 elements, or once occupied by a softer substance now decayed or leached 

 out. We peered cautiously around the side where we had seen the Condor 

 disappear, but we could not see all of the wall nearest us. Kelly, there- 

 fore, crossed to the opposite base of the curve and looked intently while 



"THE HEAD OF A CONDOR THRUST ANXIOUSLY FORTH" 



Photo by the Author 



I shouted. Again and again I shouted, but no bird appeared. Finally 

 Kelly caught a flash of color at the mouth of an obscure hole far up the 

 cliff-side. He called me over and I confirmed it — the head of a Condor 

 thrust anxiously forth from the mouth of the hole, and then withdrawn — a 

 hole so small that I should not have looked for a falcon in it. 



