Page:Life Amongst the Modocs.djvu/227



CHAPTER XVII.

THE LOST CABIN.

HE snow began to fall, and Paquita

did not return.

Elk came down from the mountain

towards spring, and we could shoot them from the cabin door. At this season of the year, as well as late in the fall, they are found in herds of hundreds together.

It seems odd to say that they should go up further into the mountains as winter approaches, instead of down into the foot-hills and plains below, as do the deer, but it is true. There are warm springs in fact, all mountain springs are warmer in the winter than in the summer up the mountain, where vine- maple, a kind of water-cress, and wild swamp berries grow in the warm marshes or on the edges, and here the elk subsist. When the maple and grasses of one marsh are consumed, they break through the snow in single file, led in turns by the bulls, to