One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog.  No rational creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that dog’s at Silverado.  Every whiz of the rattle made him bound.  His eyes rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat.  One of our great mysteries was his terror of the mountain.  A little away above our nook, the azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased.  Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs.  Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused there till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain.  There was here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing became Chuchu’s terror.  He was an excellent master of that composite language in which dogs communicate with men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that there was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and that I still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and make a bee-line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after him.  What was he afraid of?  There were admittedly brown bears and California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe’s poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban, who dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by moonlight, face to face with such a tartar.  Something at least there must have been:  some hairy, dangerous brute lodged permanently among the rocks a little to the north-west of Silverado, spending his summer thereabout, with wife and family.

And there was, or there had been, another animal.  Once, under the broad daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor’s bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air and sun:  a pigmy kangaroo.  I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects; had never heard of such a beast; thought myself face to face with some incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality in science.  Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than when I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with sunshine.  His long hind legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown accident.  But the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal; and my discovery was nothing.