Anyone who has camped in high country knows the strange hours after dark, when every sound seems to belong to something unseen. Ethel Romig Fuller's "Rain in High Mountains" turns that experience into a small ghost story with no ghost in it: a flock of sheep descends on a campsite, grazes all night, and by morning has left no trace at all. The central idea is the unreliability of the senses at night, and, beyond that, the way a wild place can seem to produce its own legends. The mountain does not explain itself. It simply leaves the campers, and the reader, holding a mystery.
The poem is built in two stanzas that mirror each other like night and day. The first is all sound and motion. The south wind "herded a mass / Of wooly clouds," and at once the weather becomes livestock: clouds are sheep, the wind is a shepherd, and Hell-gate Pass is the pen they pour out of. The choice of verb matters, because "herded" and later "scrambling flock" give the sky an almost comic busyness. Then comes the single sharpest image in the poem, the lead ewe, "Ebon as sin, and as ugly too." That line is a jolt. After the soft, woolly clouds, a black sheep with a faintly moral, faintly sinister edge appears, and the name "Hell-gate" begins to echo. Yet the tone stays playful rather than frightening, as if the speaker enjoys the shiver.
The second stanza answers the first with daylight and absence. The meadow "lay / As flowery bright as yesterday," and the poet lists the flowers that should have been destroyed: "No lily trampled, no lupin brushed, / Not a columbine or an aster crushed." The sheer particularity of those names, the plain botanical nouns, makes the missing damage feel like evidence. A real flock would have left wreckage, and the catalogue of unharmed blooms is the poem's way of saying so. The line "Wasn't it strange" is the only moment the speaker steps forward and addresses us directly, inviting us to share the puzzlement. The poem's logic is that of someone who trusts what they heard and saw, and cannot reconcile it with what they find.
The sound-world is where Fuller is most inventive. At night the campers hear stamping, then "a cropping of Alpine flowers," and finally "a tinkle we couldn't say whether / Was brook, or bell, on an old bell-wether." That ambiguity is the heart of the poem. A bell-wether is the lead sheep of a flock, the one wearing the bell, and the rhyme of "whether" with "bell-wether" is a neat bit of wordplay that also enacts the doubt, since the question of "whether" is answered by the very word that names the bell. The final stanza returns to it: "Only a bell that was likely a brook / On its singing way in a riffled crook." The order has reversed. At night the sound was possibly a bell; by day it is probably water. Daylight reasoning wins, but only just, and the "likely" keeps the door ajar.
Formally, the poem moves in tidy rhyming couplets (pass/mass, ewe/too, below/snow), with a loose, bouncing rhythm that suits a tale told around a fire. Lines run on, using enjambment, so the sentences tumble forward the way the flock tumbles down the slope. The ellipses and dashes of the printed text add a breathy, half-whispered quality. Notice also how the couplets tighten at the end: the last image, "a wisp of a wooly tail / Vanishing over Hell-gate trail," is so brief and so visual that the poem seems to vanish with it, like the flock.
The title is worth a second look. "Rain in High Mountains" never mentions rain directly, which suggests the whole episode may be the clouds themselves, descending as mist or shower and lifting again by morning. The sheep may be weather, and the weather may be the sheep. The poem never insists on that reading, and that restraint is what makes it linger. It gives us a rational answer and a magical one, and lets us choose.