One Day On Beetle Rock
by Sally Carrighar
To Beetle Rock, in the High Sierra, the city folk come in summer to camp, to rest, and to look at the magnificent sky over their heads and the broad sweep of the valley 6,500 feet below them. But they see little of the life that lies about them in the bush and tress--the life, by turns tense, dramatic, playful, happy, hunger-driven, and danger-threatened, of the birds and animals to whom Beetle Rock is home.This is the life which Sally Carrighar opens to us in these singing pages. Writing with the skill of a first-rate novelist and with the accuracy and judgment of a first-rate naturalist, she shows us what happens to the whole animal community--more than fifty species--of the Rock during one typical day. It is June 18, high tide of the animals' year. For those twenty-four hours we follow the hunts and foragings, the games and rests, the escapes and friendships of nine creatures: a weasel and her brood, a lizard, a jay, a deer mouse, a chickaree, a Sierra grouse, a...