If you remain perfectly
motionless, he will come nearer and nearer, and probably set your flesh
a-tingle by frisking across your body. Once, while I was seated at the
foot of a Hemlock Spruce in one of the most inaccessible of the San
Joaquin yosemites engaged in sketching, a reckless fellow came up behind
me, passed under my bended arm, and jumped on my paper. And one warm
afternoon, while an old friend of mine was reading out in the shade of
his cabin, one of his Douglas neighbors jumped from the gable upon his
head, and then with admirable assurance ran down over his shoulder and
on to the book he held in his hand.
Our Douglas enjoys a large social circle; for, besides his numerous
relatives, _Sciurus fossor, Tamias quadrivitatus, T. Townsendii,
Spermophilus Beccheyi, S. Douglasii_, he maintains intimate relations
with the nut-eating birds, particularly the Clark Crow (_Picicorvus
columbianus_) and the numerous woodpeckers and jays. The two
spermophiles are astonishingly abundant in the lowlands and lower
foot-hills, but more and more sparingly distributed up through the
Douglas domains,--seldom venturing higher than six or seven thousand
feet above the level of the sea.
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