Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/219

 rest! " We

were on the edge of an opening ; a little prairie of a thousand acres, inclining south, with tall, very tall grass, and a little stream straying from where we stood to wander through the meadow. A wall of pines stood thick and strong around our little Eden, and when we had unsaddled our tired animals and taken the aparrajo from the little packer, we turned them loose in the little Paradise, without even so much as a lariat or hackamoor to restrain them.

The sun had just retired from the body of the mountain, but it was evident that all day long he rested here and made glad the earth; for crickets sang in the grass as they sing under the hearthstones in the cabins of the west, and little birds started up from the edge of the valley that were not to be found in the forest.

An elk came out from the fringe of the wood, threw his antlers back on his shoulders with his brown nose lifted, and blew a blast as he turned to fly that made the horses jerk their heads from the grass, and start and wheel around with fright. Brown deer came out, too, as if to take a walk in the mea dow beneath the moon, but snuffed a breath from the intruders and turned away. Bears came out two by two in single file, but did not seem to notice us.

Some men say that the bear is deprived of the sense of smell in the wild state. A mistake. He relies as much on his nose as the deer ; perhaps more, for his little black eyes are so small that they surely are not equal to the great liquid eyes of the buck, which