He saw them once drenched with rain; but mostly they lay warm under the hot sunshine of summer.

He saw them darkling with night shadows, he saw them silvered with morning fogs which turned rose tinted with the first rays of sunrise, he saw them lie soft-shaded in the sunset's after glow, saw them held in the unearthly beauty of the full moonlight.
Like the deer and the bear down there, his head was lifted often to look and to sniff the wind that blew strongly over the peak.

For now the winds came too often tainted with the smoke of burning pines.

The blue haze of the far distance deepened with the thickening air.

Four times in the last ten days he had swung the pointer over the mapped table and sighted it upon brown puffballs that rose over the treetops--the first betraying marks of the licking flames below.