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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is the chill east wind that comes creeping up the cañons from the bleak plains and prairies of the lowlands, which bring the blizzards. One rare, windless day upon the heights, my little hay-making friend, the cony, greeted me with an enthusiastic "squee-ek." He was sunning himself upon a rock and looked so sleek and plump I knew his harvest had been bountiful.
From somewhere below us came the distant "squee-ek" of a relative, followed shortly by the shrill whistle of a marmot. The cony sat up suddenly, awake and alertly watching. The signals were repeated. Instantly the little fellow departed from his outpost and hurried away, circling the bowlder, leaping to another, disappearing in the rocks and reappearing again.
It was not long before I discovered that nearly all birds and animals live at a certain zone of altitude, rarely straying above or below it. Occasionally I heard a queer "squee-ek." It sounded close, yet its maker was invisible. Many times I looked up, searching the air overhead for the elusive "squee-eker."
In winter his feathered foes depart, but the foxes remain, as do the weasels. Sitting motionless in the midst of jumbled rocks I have faded into the bowlder fields, and thus have been able to watch the cony and his enemies. Usually his "squee-ek" announced the appearance of a foe before I discovered it.
Then, if the enemy was a bird or a beast, he merely hugged the rock, watching alertly until he was discovered, then flipped out of sight to the safety of rocky retreat, giving a defiant "squee-ek" as he went. But if a weasel appeared... I sat watching a cony one day in early fall as he lay in the sunshine upon a bowlder.
At last I came upon a bunch of grass, no larger than a water pail, and stopped to examine it. Grass and flowers had been piled loosely in an irregular heap, resembling a miniature haystack. "Something making a nest," I observed aloud. "Squee-ek," denied a shrill voice almost at my elbow.
But the cony I have seen on sunny days in January; his welcome "squee-ek," piercing the roar of the wind, has greeted me on the lonely storm-swept heights when not another living thing was in sight. But in spite of his living in the out-of-the-way world the cony has enemies for whom he is always watching. In summer there are hawks and eagles, foxes and coyotes.
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