meals for meat-eaters. In flight they seem to rebound from the earth of
their own elasticity, but keep a sober pace going to the spring. It is
the young watercress that tempts them and the pleasures of society, for
they seldom drink. Even in localities where there are flowing streams
they seem to prefer the moisture that collects on herbage, and after
rains may be seen rising on their haunches to drink delicately the clear
drops caught in the tops of the young sage. But drink they must, as I
have often seen them mornings and evenings at the rill that goes by my
door. Wait long enough at the Lone Tree Spring and sooner or later they
will all come in. But here their matings are accomplished, and though
they are fearful of so little as a cloud shadow or blown leaf, they
contrive to have some playful hours. At the spring the bobcat drops down
upon them from the black rock, and the red fox picks them up returning
in the dark. By day the hawk and eagle overshadow them, and the coyote
has all times and seasons for his own.

Cattle, when there are any in the Ceriso, drink morning and evening,
spending the night on the warm last lighted slopes of neighboring hills,
stirring with the peep o' day. In these half wild spotted steers the
habits of an earlier lineage persist. It must be long since they have
made beds for themselves, but before lying down they turn themselves
round and round as dogs do. They choose bare and stony ground, exposed
fronts of westward facing hills, and lie down in companies. Usually by
the end of the summer the cattle have been driven or gone of their own
choosing to the mountain meadows. One year a maverick yearling, strayed
or overlooked by the vaqueros, kept on until the season's end, and so
betrayed another visitor to the spring that else I might have missed. On
a certain morning the half-eaten carcass lay at the foot of the black
rock, and in moist earth by the rill of the spring, the foot-pads of a
cougar, puma, mountain lion, or whatever the beast is rightly called.