Ahead of the girls lay a wide rolling meadow of well-watered green grasses with a profusion of lavender irises, transitory and beautiful, poking above the green carpet. The cougar, keeping his long muscular body close to the ground, came down from the ridge and cautiously worked his way into the tall grass where he could watch these two noisy intruders. Their movements didn’t appear to be too threatening, still he didn’t want them wandering in territory he had marked as his own.

Stephanie McClintock, tall for her twelve years, was all elbows and knees though quite pretty, especially her brunette hair and dark eyes. Stephanie carried a presence about her which drew favorable attention wherever she went. The other girl, Adriana Kramer, blonde and fair skinned, was also an attractive girl, though she still retained some of her baby fat and worried about that. Fortunate enough to have acquired natural artistic talent, Adriana was constantly drawing or sketching with wonderful results.

The girls had already gone over a mile from their homes, forgetting about time and distance as they compared the spring flowers with those in the book of California wildflowers Stephanie carried. They were lucky because they had found a few yellow bush poppies and then some golden eardrops, those heart-shaped flowers whose petals faced upward. Adriana made quick sketches of the flowers as they identified them, but neither girl wanted to take any home because they were aware of how frail these flowers could be.

* * *

Living in the shadow of the Sierra Nevadas one could feel the continent, knowing this was the last tall rise of mountains before a leveling off into rich farmland stretching to the vast Pacific in one direction and the continent reaching across plains and mountains in the other. Most people realized how fortunate they were and lived with that awareness. Others accepted the mountains and fast moving streams as features that would last forever so ignored everything except their moment to moment concerns. Not until an earthquake, an avalanche, or some other danger slid down from the high country, did they pause to worry about such occurrences. What better, more precarious and beautiful place could one find to live?