While I was busy with my own breakfast I heard the thudding fall of two or three heavy cones from a Yellow Pine near me.

I stole noiselessly forward within about twenty feet of the base of it to observe.

In a few moments down came the Douglas.

The breakfast-burs he had cut off had rolled on the gently sloping ground into a clump of ceanothus bushes, but he seemed to know exactly where they were, for he found them at once, apparently without searching for them.

They were more than twice as heavy as himself, but after turning them into the right position for getting a good hold with his long sickle-teeth he managed to drag them up to the foot of the tree from which he had cut them, moving backward.