Tom Slade at Bear Mountain by Percy Keese Fitzhugh

I have told you of the geography of Rattlesnake Gulch; I must now tell you something of its immediate neighborhood. I never knew and I do not know now, whether the name Rattlesnake Gulch pertains to the little wild hollow where the cabin stood or to the larger gap of land in which it lay. It was, as one might say, a gulch within a gulch. Only the larger gulch is not so easy to present to the mind's eye. I find myself writing of these places in the past tense, for they seem to me now all as part of a tale that is told. You must, somehow, be made to see this wild section clearly, if you are to understand what happened there.

If some wide railroad cut were overgrown and cluttered with rock and crazy trees and tangled brush for a couple of hundred feet or so, that would be something like the immediate neighborhood of old Buck's cabin. Through this miniature jungle a stream had once flowed, and the old stream bed was a very chaos of rock and tangled undergrowth; a chaotic gully. On its damp bottom, underneath the rank growth, no ray of sunlight ever penetrated. A strange kind of life thrived here, slugs and little red lizards which hid under stones and scooted when such a refuge was removed by some alien hand or foot from the world above. So much you already know.