Song of the High Peaks 1 Cycles and Seasons 5 Bedrock: The First Story 6 The Rising of the Sun and the Running of the Deer: A Glacier Year 39 Plant-and-Animal Communities 43 Over Going-to-the-Sun Road 44 Groves and Grasslands: The Prairie Sea 46 The Forest 70 Scrub Forest 105 Tundra 109 Water Communities 114 Shooting Stars 121 Appendix 125 Pictorial Features The Mountains of Glacier 10 The Forests of Glacier 48 The Vital Predator 78 Protective Coloration 84 _Ursus arctos horribilus:_ The Vulnerable King 88 Bald Eagles and Kokanee Salmon: A Recent Gathering 92 A Triumph of Many Colors 96 Fire Succession: Key to Continuity 100 Illustrations by Celia Strain/Morgan-Burchette Assoc. [Illustration: Soaring eagle] Song of the High Peaks April again and the wind turns on the Great Plains. Wedges of geese, high and determined, began this storm of spring, their voices sharp as the morning frost. Sicklebills cry to claim the land, sandhill cranes wheel and talk overhead, and everywhere the killdeer shout. Pasqueflowers push the bleak soil aside, beginning the westward rush that I must join, seeking again the sight of mountains. In Glacier National Park the land is folded up. On the east, Chief Mountain, Curly Bear, and Rising Wolf break the prairie’s hold. When the early French fur trappers saw these peaks glistening in the distance with summer-long snows and perpetual ice, they named this region “the land of shining mountains.” But for all the ice and snow that reflect the summer sun, the park’s present glaciers are but snowflakes compared to the mighty rivers of ice that carved this land. Glaciation, the magnificent sculptor, left its bold signature everywhere, and this park honors with its name the force that shaped it.