Very clean and handsome, quite belying his relationship in appearance, is Clark’s crow, that scavenger and plunderer of mountain camps.  It is permissible to call him by his common name, “Camp Robber:”  he has earned it.  Not content with refuse, he pecks open meal sacks, filches whole potatoes, is a gormand for bacon, drills holes in packing cases, and is daunted by nothing short of tin.  All the while he does not neglect to vituperate the chipmunks and sparrows that whisk off crumbs of comfort from under the camper’s feet.  The Camp Robber’s gray coat, black and white barred wings, and slender bill, with certain tricks of perching, accuse him of attempts to pass himself off among woodpeckers; but his behavior is all crow.  He frequents the higher pine belts, and has a noisy strident call like a jay’s, and how clean he and the frisk-tailed chipmunks keep the camp!  No crumb or paring or bit of eggshell goes amiss.

High as the camp may be, so it is not above timber-line, it is not too high for the coyote, the bobcat, or the wolf.  It is the complaint of the ordinary camper that the woods are too still, depleted of wild life.  But what dead body of wild thing, or neglected game untouched by its kind, do you find?  And put out offal away from camp over night, and look next day at the foot tracks where it lay.

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise.  Being so well warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid.  The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other.  That is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man.  There is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the forest floor.

THE POCKET HUNTER

I remember very well when I first met him.  Walking in the evening glow to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I sniffed the unmistakable odor of burning sage.  It is a smell that carries far and indicates usually the nearness of a campoodie, but on the level mesa nothing taller showed than Diana’s sage.  Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the friendly scrub.  He sat tailorwise in the sand, with his coffee-pot on the coals, his supper ready to hand in the frying pan, and himself in a mood for talk.  His pack burros in hobbles strayed off to hunt for a wetter mouthful than the sage afforded, and gave him no concern.