pre-eminently so, possessing every squirrelish attribute, fully developed and concentrated.  He is the squirrel of squirrels, flashing from branch to branch of his favorite evergreens, crisp and glossy and sound as a sunbeam.  He stirs the leaves like a rustling breeze, darting across openings in arrowy lines, launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden zigzags, and swirling in giddy loops and spirals around the trunks, now on his haunches, now on his head, yet ever graceful and performing all his feats of strength and skill without apparent effort.  One never tires of this bright spark of life, the brave little voice crying in the wilderness.  His varied, piney gossip is as savory to the air as balsam to the palate.  Some of his notes are almost flutelike in softness, while others prick and tingle like thistles.  He is the mockingbird of squirrels, barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, whistling like a blackbird or linnet, while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a jay.  A small thing, but filling and animating all the woods.

Nor is there any lack of wings, notwithstanding few are to be seen on short, noisy rambles.  The ousel sweetens the shady glens and canyons where waterfalls abound, and every grove or forest, however silent it may seem when we chance to pay it a hasty visit, has its singers,—­ thrushes, linnets, warblers,—­while hummingbirds glint and hover about the fringing masses of bloom around stream and meadow openings.  But few of these will show themselves or sing their songs to those who are ever in haste and getting lost, going in gangs formidable in color and accoutrements, laughing, hallooing, breaking limbs off the trees as they pass, awkwardly struggling through briery thickets, entangled like blue-bottles in spider webs, and stopping from time to time to fire off their guns and pistols for the sake of the echoes, thus frightening all the life about them for miles.  It is this class of hunters and travelers who report that there are “no birds in the woods or game animals of any kind larger than mosquitoes.”

Besides the singing birds mentioned above, the handsome Oregon grouse may be found in the thick woods, also the dusky grouse and Franklin’s grouse, and in some places the beautiful mountain partridge, or quail.  The white-tailed ptarmigan lives on the lofty snow peaks above the timber, and the prairie chicken and sage cock on the broad Columbia plains from the Cascade Range back to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  The bald eagle is very common along the Columbia River, or wherever fish, especially salmon, are plentiful, while swans, herons, cranes, pelicans, geese, ducks of many species, and water birds in general abound in the lake region, on the main streams, and along the coast, stirring the waters and sky into fine, lively pictures, greatly to the delight of wandering lovers of wildness.

XXIII