WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Ceriso are worn to
a white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint and fanwise toward
the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel. But however faint to
man-sight, they are sufficiently plain to the furred and feathered folk
who travel them. Getting down to the eye level of rat and squirrel kind,
one perceives what might easily be wide and winding roads to us if they
occurred in thick plantations of trees three times the height of a man.
It needs but a slender thread of barrenness to make a mouse trail in the
forest of the sod. To the little people the water trails are as country
roads, with scents as signboards.

It seems that man-height is the least fortunate of all heights from
which to study trails. It is better to go up the front of some tall
hill, say the spur of Black Mountain, looking back and down across the
hollow of the Ceriso. Strange how long the soil keeps the impression of
any continuous treading, even after grass has overgrown it. Twenty years
since, a brief heyday of mining at Black Mountain made a stage road
across the Ceriso, yet the parallel lines that are the wheel traces show
from the height dark and well defined. Afoot in the Ceriso one looks in
vain for any sign of it. So all the paths that wild creatures use going
down to the Lone Tree Spring are mapped out whitely from this level,
which is also the level of the hawks.

There is little water in the Ceriso at the best of times, and that
little brackish and smelling vilely, but by a lone juniper where the rim
of the Ceriso breaks away to the lower country, there is a perpetual
rill of fresh sweet drink in the midst of lush grass and watercress. In