A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in
close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The
water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the
yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow
pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes
curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on
the valley side the water is lined with trees—willows fresh
and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf
junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores
with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that
arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the
leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great
skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the
brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats
are covered with the night tracks of ’coons, and with the
spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-
wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.