Honey in the Horn

The creek-meadow in season was full of flowers—wild daisies, lamb-tongues, cat-ears, big patches of camas lilies as blue as the ocean with a cloud shadowing it, and big stands of wild iris and wild lilac and buttercups and St. John’s wort. It was well-watered—too blamed well in the muddy season—and around the springs were thickets of whistle-willow and wild crabapple; and there were long swales of alder and sweetbrier and wild blackberry clumped out so rank and heavy that, in all the years the valley had been settled, nobody had ever explored them all. When the natural feed in the mountains snowed under late in the year, deer used to come down and graze the swales and swipe salt from the domestic stock; and blue grouse and topknot-quail boarded in all the brush-piles and thorn-heaps by the hundreds all the year round.