No other of the Sierra animals of my acquaintance is better fed, not even the deer, amid abundance of sweet herbs and shrubs, or the mountain sheep, or omnivorous bears.  His food consists of grass-seeds, berries, hazel-nuts, chinquapins, and the nuts and seeds of all the coniferous trees without exception,—­Pine, Fir, Spruce, Libocedrus, Juniper, and Sequoia,—­he is fond of them all, and they all agree with him, green or ripe.  No cone is too large for him to manage, none so small as to be beneath his notice.  The smaller ones, such as those of the Hemlock, and the Douglas Spruce, and the Two-leaved Pine, he cuts off and eats on a branch of the tree, without allowing them to fall; beginning at the bottom of the cone and cutting away the scales to expose the seeds; not gnawing by guess, like a bear, but turning them round and round in regular order, in compliance with their spiral arrangement.

When thus employed, his location in the tree is betrayed by a dribble of scales, shells, and seed-wings, and, every few minutes, by the fall of the stripped axis of the cone.  Then of course he is ready for another, and if you are watching you may catch a glimpse of him as he glides silently out to the end of a branch and see him examining the cone-clusters until he finds one to his mind; then, leaning over, pull back the springy needles out of his way, grasp the cone with his paws to prevent its falling, snip it off in an incredibly short time, seize it with jaws grotesquely stretched, and return to his chosen seat near the trunk.  But the immense size of the cones of the Sugar Pine—­from fifteen to twenty inches in length—­and those of the Jeffrey variety of the Yellow Pine compel him to adopt a quite different method.  He cuts them off without attempting to hold them, then goes down and drags them from where they have chanced to fall up to the bare, swelling ground around the instep of the tree, where he demolishes them in the same methodical way, beginning at the bottom and following the scale-spirals to the top.

[Illustration:  SEEDS, WINGS, AND SCALE OF SUGAR PINE. (NAT.  SIZE.)]

From a single Sugar Pine cone he gets from two to four hundred seeds about half the size of a hazel-nut, so that in a few minutes he can procure enough to last a week.  He seems, however, to prefer those of the two Silver First above all others; perhaps because they are most easily obtained, as the scales drop off when ripe without needing to be cut.  Both species are filled with an exceedingly pungent, aromatic oil, which spices all his flesh, and is of itself sufficient to account for his lightning energy.

You may easily know this little workman by his chips.  On sunny hillsides around the principal trees they lie in big piles,—­bushels and basketfuls of them, all fresh and clean, making the most beautiful kitchen-middens imaginable.  The brown and yellow scales and nut-shells are as abundant and as delicately penciled and tinted as the shells along the sea-shore; while the beautiful red and purple seed-wings mingled with them would lead one to fancy that innumerable butterflies had there met their fate.