The summer showers leave no wake.

Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August
weather. Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs

about the lake gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away
harmlessly. Sometimes one has the good fortune from a

heather-grown headland to watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air.
Out over meadow or lake region begins a little darkling of the

sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a smokiness such as spirits
materialize from in witch stories.

It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret
canons. Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind

comes up and drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull
lake pitted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such

rains relieve like tears.
The same season brings the rains that have work to do,

ploughing storms that alter the face of things. These come
with thunder and the play of live fire along the rocks. They come

with great winds that try the pines for their work upon the seas
and strike out the unfit. They shake down avalanches of splinters

from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden floods like battle
fronts in the canons against towns, trees, and boulders. They

would be kind if they could, but have more important matters. Such
storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not rain,

rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer. After
such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles

away is white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.
All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in

the geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries. I
remember one night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by

the houseless cry of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family,
had been buried under a slide of broken boulders on the slope of

Kearsarge. We had heard the heavy detonation of the slide about
the hour of the alpenglow, a pale rosy interval in a darkling air,

and judged he must have come from hunting to the ruined cliff and
paced the night out before it, crying a very human woe. I

remember, too, in that same season of storms, a lake made milky
white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay washed into it

by a fury of rain, with the trout floating in it belly up,
stunned by the shock of the sudden flood. But there were

trout enough for what was left of the lake next year and the
beginning of a meadow about its upper rim. What taxed me most in

the wreck of one of my favorite canons by cloud-burst was to see a
bobcat mother mouthing her drowned kittens in the ruined lair built

in the wash, far above the limit of accustomed waters, but not far
enough for the unexpected. After a time you get the point of view

of gods about these things to save you from being too pitiful.
The great snows that come at the beginning of winter, before

there is yet any snow except the perpetual high banks, are best
worth while to watch. These come often before the late bloomers

are gone and while the migratory birds are still in the piney
woods. Down in the valley you see little but the flocking of

blackbirds in the streets, or the low flight of mallards over the
tulares, and the gathering of clouds behind Williamson. First

there is a waitingstillness in the wood; the pine-trees creak
although there is no wind, the sky glowers, the firs rock by the

water borders. The noise of the creek rises insistently and falls
off a full note like a child abashed by sudden silence in the room.

This changing of the stream-tone following tardily the changes of
the sun on melting snows is most meaningful of wood notes. After

it runs a little trumpeter wind to cry the wild creatures to their
holes. Sometimes the warning hangs in the air for days

with increasing stillness. Only Clark's crow and the strident jays
make light of it; only they can afford to. The cattle get down to

the foothills and ground-inhabiting creatures make fast their
doors. It grows chill, blind clouds fumble in the canons; there

will be a roll of thunder, perhaps, or a flurry of rain, but mostly
the snow is born in the air with quietness and the sense of strong

white pinions softly stirred. It increases, is wet and clogging,
and makes a white night of midday.

There is seldom any wind with first snows, more often rain,
but later, when there is already a smooth foot or two over all the

slopes, the drifts begin. The late snows are fine and dry, mere
ice granules at the wind's will. Keen mornings after a storm they

are blown out in wreaths and banners from the high ridges sifting
into the canons.

Once in a year or so we have a "big snow." The cloud tents
are widened out to shut in the valley and an outlying range or two

and are drawn tight against the sun. Such a storm begins warm,
with a dry white mist that fills and fills between the ridges, and

the air is thick with formless groaning. Now for days you get no
hint of the neighboring ranges until the snows begin to lighten and

some shouldering peak lifts through a rent. Mornings after the
heavy snows are steely blue, two-edged with cold, divinely fresh

and still, and these are times to go up to the pine borders. There
you may find floundering in the unstable drifts "tainted wethers"

of the wild sheep, faint from age and hunger; easy prey.
Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and once

we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white glare.
No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver

fir. The star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft
wreaths--droop and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point

of overloading is reached, there is a soft sough and muffled
drooping, the boughs recover, and the weighting goes on until the

drifts have reached the midmost whorls and covered up the branches.
When the snows are particularly wet and heavy they spread over the

young firs in green-ribbed tents wherein harbor winter loving
birds.

All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent.
East and east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges,

desertward, and no rain breaks over them, except from some
far-strayed cloud or roving wind from the California Gulf, and

these only in winter. In summer the sky travails with thunderings
and the flare of sheet lightnings to win a few blistering big

drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a torrent. But you
have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you

have known a desert wind. One expects it at the turn of the two
seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves. Along the

edge of the mesa where it drops off to the valley, dust
devils begin to rise white and steady, fanning out at the top like

the genii out of the Fisherman's bottle. One supposes the Indians
might have learned the use of smoke signals from these dust pillars

as they learn most things direct from the tutelage of the earth.
The air begins to move fluently, blowing hot and cold between the

ranges. Far south rises a murk of sand against the sky; it grows,
the wind shakes itself, and has a smell of earth. The cloud of

small dust takes on the color of gold and shuts out the
neighborhood, the push of the wind is unsparing. Only man of all

folk is foolish enough to stir abroad in it. But being in a house
is really much worse; no relief from the dust, and a great fear of

the creaking timbers. There is no looking ahead in such a wind,
and the bite of the small sharp sand on exposed skin is keener than

any insect sting. One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind
wears one to the point of exhaustion very soon, but there is dread,

in open sand stretches sometimes justified, of being over blown by