Page:Bird-lore Vol 01.djvu/60



LOUD CAP INN, the loghouse hotel fastened down with cables high on the north side of Mount Hood, is too near timber-line to claim a great variety of feathered guests, but Oregon Jays and Clark′s Crows or Nutcrackers are regular pensioners of the house. The usual shooting by tourists does not menace them, for the nature-loving mountaineers, who keep the Inn and act as guides to the summit, guard most loyally both birds and beasts. They like to tell of a noble Eagle which used to fly up the canon and circle over the glacier every day, and they recall with pleasure the snowy morning when an old Blue Grouse brought her brood to the Inn, and the birds ate the wheat that was thrown them with the confidence of chickens. The Grouse were, apparently, regular neighbors of the Inn, and while there I had the pleasure of seeing a grown family. They fed on the slope close above me with the unconcern of domestic fowls, conversing in turkey-like monosyllables as they moved about, and two of them came within a few feet and looked up at me—that not forty rods from the Inn! The pleasure of the sight was doubled by the reflection that such things could be so near a hotel, even on a remote mountain.

CLOUD CAP INN It was delightful to see how familiarly birds gathered about the house. You could sit in the front doorway and when not absorbed in looking oft on the three wonderful snow peaks—St. Helens, Rainier, and Adams—rising above the Cascade range, could watch Oregon Juncos, Steller′s Jays, Oregon Jays, and Nutcrackers coming down to drink at the hydrant twenty feet away; while the Ruby Kinglet and 

(46)