But by the end of May the soil, plants, and sky seem to have been baked in an oven.

Most of the plants crumble to dust beneath the foot, and the ground is full of cracks; while the thirsty traveler gazes with eager longing through the burning glare to the snowy summits looming like hazy clouds in the distance.
The trees, mostly _Quercus Douglasii_ and _Pinus Sabiniana_, thirty to forty feet high, with thin, pale-green foliage, stand far apart and cast but little shade.

Lizards glide about on the rocks enjoying a constitution that no drought can dry, and ants in amazing numbers, whose tiny sparks of life seem to burn the brighter with the increasing heat, ramble industriously in long trains in search of food.
Crows, ravens, magpies--friends in distress--gather on the ground beneath the best shade-trees, panting with drooping wings and bills wide open, scarce a note from any of them during the midday hours.

Quails, too, seek the shade during the heat of the day about tepid pools in the channels of the larger mid-river streams.

Rabbits scurry from thicket to thicket among the ceanothus bushes, and occasionally a long-eared hare is seen cantering gracefully across the wider openings.