Post 01063
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Two fawns and their mother lay dead at the foot of a cliff. Either blinded or terrorized by fire or smoke, they apparently had leaped or fallen to death. As I gained the top in climbing to investigate, an eagle swooped angrily at me from a topless trunk. Her mate with scorched feathers lay on the rocks near by. On returning a few days later I found her still watching the lifeless one from the same perch in the dead tree.
In the heart of the burned tract was a thirty-or-forty-acre tract of forest that had escaped the fire. It was surrounded with wide though broken barriers of rock ledges. In this green oasis were numerous wild-folk refugees. Chipmunks, rats, woodchucks, and birds were startlingly abundant, but no big game. Apparently the home people had welcomed the refugees, or had received them indifferently. The only fight noticed was between mountain rats. However, this crowding and overrunning of territory when the exciting fire was over, probably made many terrible pages of animal history, before exodus and death brought a normal readjustment of life to the territory.
Wandering on across the burn toward the fire-line, I came to the place where a ragged-edged and beautiful glacier meadow had reposed, a poetic park among the spruces dark and tall. Commonly these meadows are sufficiently saturated to defy fire, but this one was burning, though slowly and with but little blaze or smoke. The fire was working toward the centre from the edges and eating downward from one to three feet. This kind of meadow usually carries a covering stratum of a kind of peat or turf which is composed almost entirely of matted grass or sedge roots that are almost free from earthy or mineral matter. These meadows lack warmth or soil sufficient to germinate tree seeds or to grow trees. Often they remain beautiful treeless gardens for generations, while wind and wash slowly bring sediment, or until a flood or landslip brings soil. The deep burning of the surface and the consequent deposit of ash on the new surface probably offered an abiding-place to the next adventurous tree seeds. Glacier meadows occasionally have this kind of ending.