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Title: The Land of Little Rain

Author: Mary Austin

Release date: July 9, 2008 [eBook #365]
                Most recently updated: September 28, 2009

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Judith Boss, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN ***




Produced by Judith Boss





THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

by Mary Austin


TO EVE

"The Comfortress of Unsuccess"






CONTENTS


          Preface
          The Land of Little Rain
          Water Trails of the Ceriso
          The Scavengers
          The Pocket Hunter
          Shoshone Land
          Jimville--A Bret Harte Town
          My Neighbor's Field
          The Mesa Trail
          The Basket Maker
          The Streets of the Mountains
          Water Borders
          Other Water Borders
          Nurslings of the Sky
          The Little Town of the Grape Vines




PREFACE

I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every
man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names him.
Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear, according as he
is called by friend or enemy, and Scar-Face to those who knew him by
the eye's grasp only. No other fashion, I think, sets so well with the
various natures that inhabit in us, and if you agree with me you will
understand why so few names are written here as they appear in the
geography. For if I love a lake known by the name of the man who
discovered it, which endears itself by reason of the close-locked pines
it nourishes about its borders, you may look in my account to find it so
described. But if the Indians have been there before me, you shall have
their name, which is always beautifully fit and does not originate in
the poor human desire for perpetuity.

Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces
which are above all compassing of words, and have a certain fame as of
the nobly great to whom we give no familiar names. Guided by these you
may reach my country and find or not find, according as it lieth in you,
much that is set down here. And more. The earth is no wanton to give up
all her best to every comer, but keeps a sweet, separate intimacy
for each. But if you do not find it all as I write, think me not less
dependable nor yourself less clever. There is a sort of pretense allowed
in matters of the heart, as one should say by way of illustration,
"I know a man who..." and so give up his dearest experience without
betrayal. And I am in no mind to direct you to delectable places toward
which you will hold yourself less tenderly than I. So by this fashion
of naming I keep faith with the land and annex to my own estate a very
great territory to which none has a surer title.

The country where you may have sight and touch of that which is written
lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite--east and south over
a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death Valley, and on
illimitably into the Mojave Desert. You may come into the borders of
it from the south by a stage journey that has the effect of involving
a great lapse of time, or from the north by rail, dropping out of the
overland route at Reno. The best of all ways is over the Sierra passes
by pack and trail, seeing and believing. But the real heart and core of
the country are not to be come at in a month's vacation. One must summer
and winter with the land and wait its occasions. Pine woods that take
two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots that lie by in
the sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs that grow fifty years
before flowering,--these do not scrape acquaintance. But if ever you
come beyond the borders as far as the town that lies in a hill dimple at
the foot of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have knocked at the
door of the brown house under the willow-tree at the end of the village
street, and there you shall have such news of the land, of its trails
and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to another.




THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN

East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and
south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders.

Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into
the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the
limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is
the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports
no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not
proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the
soil.

This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt,
burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring
to the snowline. Between the hills lie high level-looking plains full
of intolerable sun glare, or narrow valleys drowned in a blue haze.
The hill surface is streaked with ash drift and black, unweathered lava
flows. After rains water accumulates in the hollows of small closed
valleys, and, evaporating, leaves hard dry levels of pure desertness
that get the local name of dry lakes. Where the mountains are steep
and the rains heavy, the pool is never quite dry, but dark and bitter,
rimmed about with the efflorescence of alkaline deposits. A thin crust
of it lies along the marsh over the vegetating area, which has neither
beauty nor freshness. In the broad wastes open to the wind the sand
drifts in hummocks about the stubby shrubs, and between them the soil
shows saline traces. The sculpture of the hills here is more wind than
water work, though the quick storms do sometimes scar them past many a
year's redeeming. In all the Western desert edges there are essays in
miniature at the famed, terrible Grand Canon, to which, if you keep on
long enough in this country, you will come at last.

Since this is a hill country one expects to find springs, but not
to depend upon them; for when found they are often brackish and
unwholesome, or maddening, slow dribbles in a thirsty soil. Here you
find the hot sink of Death Valley, or high rolling districts where
the air has always a tang of frost. Here are the long heavy winds and
breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust devils dance, whirling
up into a wide, pale sky. Here you have no rain when all the earth cries
for it, or quick downpours called cloud-bursts for violence. A land of
lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited
must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so there would be little
told of it.

This is the country of three seasons. From June on to November it lies
hot, still, and unbearable, sick with violent unrelieving storms; then
on until April, chill, quiescent, drinking its scant rain and scanter
snows; from April to the hot season again, blossoming, radiant, and
seductive. These months are only approximate; later or earlier the
rain-laden wind may drift up the water gate of the Colorado from the
Gulf, and the land sets its seasons by the rain.

The desert floras shame us with their cheerful adaptations to the
seasonal limitations. Their whole duty is to flower and fruit, and they
do it hardly, or with tropical luxuriance, as the rain admits. It is
recorded in the report of the Death Valley expedition that after a
year of abundant rains, on the Colorado desert was found a specimen
of Amaranthus ten feet high. A year later the same species in the same
place matured in the drought at four inches. One hopes the land may
breed like qualities in her human offspring, not tritely to "try," but
to do. Seldom does the desert herb attain the full stature of the type.
Extreme aridity and extreme altitude have the same dwarfing effect, so
that we find in the high Sierras and in Death Valley related species in
miniature that reach a comely growth in mean temperatures. Very fertile
are the desert plants in expedients to prevent evaporation, turning
their foliage edge-wise toward the sun, growing silky hairs, exuding
viscid gum. The wind, which has a long sweep, harries and helps them. It
rolls up dunes about the stocky stems, encompassing and protective, and
above the dunes, which may be, as with the mesquite, three times as high
as a man, the blossoming twigs flourish and bear fruit.

There are many areas in the desert where drinkable water lies within a
few feet of the surface, indicated by the mesquite and the bunch grass
(Sporobolus airoides). It is this nearness of unimagined help that makes
the tragedy of desert deaths. It is related that the final breakdown of
that hapless party that gave Death Valley its forbidding name occurred
in a locality where shallow wells would have saved them. But how were
they to know that? Properly equipped it is possible to go safely across
that ghastly sink, yet every year it takes its toll of death, and yet
men find there sun-dried mummies, of whom no trace or recollection is
preserved. To underestimate one's thirst, to pass a given landmark to
the right or left, to find a dry spring where one looked for running
water--there is no help for any of these things.

Along springs and sunken watercourses one is surprised to find such
water-loving plants as grow widely in moist ground, but the true desert
breeds its own kind, each in its particular habitat. The angle of the
slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure of the soil determines
the plant. South-looking hills are nearly bare, and the lower tree-line
higher here by a thousand feet. Canons running east and west will have
one wall naked and one clothed. Around dry lakes and marshes the herbage
preserves a set and orderly arrangement. Most species have well-defined
areas of growth, the best index the voiceless land can give the traveler
of his whereabouts.

If you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins with the
creosote. This immortal shrub spreads down into Death Valley and up to
the lower timberline, odorous and medicinal as you might guess from
the name, wandlike, with shining fretted foliage. Its vivid green is
grateful to the eye in a wilderness of gray and greenish white shrubs.
In the spring it exudes a resinous gum which the Indians of those parts
know how to use with pulverized rock for cementing arrow points to
shafts. Trust Indians not to miss any virtues of the plant world!

Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth
of the tree yuccas. Tormented, thin forests of it stalk drearily in the
high mesas, particularly in that triangular slip that fans out eastward
from the meeting of the Sierras and coastwise hills where the first
swings across the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. The yucca
bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with
age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom. After death, which
is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly
power to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. Before the yucca has come to
flower, while yet its bloom is a creamy cone-shaped bud of the size of
a small cabbage, full of sugary sap, the Indians twist it deftly out of
its fence of daggers and roast it for their own delectation.

So it is that in those parts where man inhabits one sees young plants
of Yucca arborensis infrequently. Other yuccas, cacti, low herbs, a
thousand sorts, one finds journeying east from the coastwise hills.
There is neither poverty of soil nor species to account for the
sparseness of desert growth, but simply that each plant requires more
room. So much earth must be preempted to extract so much moisture.
The real struggle for existence, the real brain of the plant, is
underground; above there is room for a rounded perfect growth. In Death
Valley, reputed the very core of desolation, are nearly two hundred
identified species.

Above the lower tree-line, which is also the snowline, mapped out
abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of pinon, juniper,
branched nearly to the ground, lilac and sage, and scattering white
pines.

There is no special preponderance of self-fertilized or wind-fertilized
plants, but everywhere the demand for and evidence of insect life. Now
where there are seeds and insects there will be birds and small mammals
and where these are, will come the slinking, sharp-toothed kind that
prey on them. Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you
cannot go so far that life and death are not before you. Painted lizards
slip in and out of rock crevices, and pant on the white hot sands.
Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub; woodpeckers befriend
the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music
of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down,
there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy things
dart across the open places, or sit motionless in the conning towers of
the creosote. The poet may have "named all the birds without a gun,"
but not the fairy-footed, ground-inhabiting, furtive, small folk of the
rainless regions. They are too many and too swift; how many you would
not believe without seeing the footprint tracings in the sand. They
are nearly all night workers, finding the days too hot and white. In
mid-desert where there are no cattle, there are no birds of carrion,
but if you go far in that direction the chances are that you will find
yourself shadowed by their tilted wings. Nothing so large as a man can
move unspied upon in that country, and they know well how the land deals
with strangers. There are hints to be had here of the way in which a
land forces new habits on its dwellers. The quick increase of suns at
the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and effects
a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes necessary to
keep eggs cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling spring in the Little
Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair
of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender
weed. I never caught them sitting except near night, but at mid-day they
stood, or drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully parted bills,
between their treasure and the sun. Sometimes both of them together with
wings spread and half lifted continued a spot of shade in a temperature
that constrained me at last in a fellow feeling to spare them a bit of
canvas for permanent shelter. There was a fence in that country shutting
in a cattle range, and along its fifteen miles of posts one could be
sure of finding a bird or two in every strip of shadow; sometimes the
sparrow and the hawk, with wings trailed and beaks parted, drooping in
the white truce of noon.

If one is inclined to wonder at first how so many dwellers came to be in
the loneliest land that ever came out of God's hands, what they do there
and why stay, one does not wonder so much after having lived there. None
other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The
rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the
spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once
inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that
you have not done it. Men who have lived there, miners and cattlemen,
will tell you this, not so fluently, but emphatically, cursing the land
and going back to it. For one thing there is the divinest, cleanest
air to be breathed anywhere in God's world. Some day the world will
understand that, and the little oases on the windy tops of hills will
harbor for healing its ailing, house-weary broods. There is promise
there of great wealth in ores and earths, which is no wealth by reason
of being so far removed from water and workable conditions, but men are
bewitched by it and tempted to try the impossible.

You should hear Salty Williams tell how he used to drive eighteen and
twenty-mule teams from the borax marsh to Mojave, ninety miles, with the
trail wagon full of water barrels. Hot days the mules would go so mad
for drink that the clank of the water bucket set them into an uproar
of hideous, maimed noises, and a tangle of harness chains, while Salty
would sit on the high seat with the sun glare heavy in his eyes, dealing
out curses of pacification in a level, uninterested voice until the
clamor fell off from sheer exhaustion. There was a line of shallow
graves along that road; they used to count on dropping a man or two of
every new gang of coolies brought out in the hot season. But when he
lost his swamper, smitten without warning at the noon halt, Salty quit
his job; he said it was "too durn hot." The swamper he buried by the way
with stones upon him to keep the coyotes from digging him up, and seven
years later I read the penciled lines on the pine head-board, still
bright and unweathered.

But before that, driving up on the Mojave stage, I met Salty again
crossing Indian Wells, his face from the high seat, tanned and ruddy
as a harvest moon, looming through the golden dust above his eighteen
mules. The land had called him.

The palpable sense of mystery in the desert air breeds fables, chiefly
of lost treasure. Somewhere within its stark borders, if one believes
report, is a hill strewn with nuggets; one seamed with virgin silver; an
old clayey water-bed where Indians scooped up earth to make cooking pots
and shaped them reeking with grains of pure gold. Old miners drifting
about the desert edges, weathered into the semblance of the tawny hills,
will tell you tales like these convincingly. After a little sojourn in
that land you will believe them on their own account. It is a question
whether it is not better to be bitten by the little horned snake of
the desert that goes sidewise and strikes without coiling, than by the
tradition of a lost mine.

And yet--and yet--is it not perhaps to satisfy expectation that one
falls into the tragic key in writing of desertness? The more you wish of
it the more you get, and in the mean time lose much of pleasantness. In
that country which begins at the foot of the east slope of the Sierras
and spreads out by less and less lofty hill ranges toward the Great
Basin, it is possible to live with great zest, to have red blood and
delicate joys, to pass and repass about one's daily performance an area
that would make an Atlantic seaboard State, and that with no peril, and,
according to our way of thought, no particular difficulty. At any rate,
it was not people who went into the desert merely to write it up who
invented the fabled Hassaympa, of whose waters, if any drink, they
can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color
of romance. I, who must have drunk of it in my twice seven years'
wanderings, am assured that it is worth while.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep
breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one
with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a
desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the
stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured.
They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately
service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky,
they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie
out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub
from you and howls and howls.




WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO

By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Ceriso are worn to
a white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint and fanwise toward
the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel. But however faint to
man-sight, they are sufficiently plain to the furred and feathered folk
who travel them. Getting down to the eye level of rat and squirrel kind,
one perceives what might easily be wide and winding roads to us if they
occurred in thick plantations of trees three times the height of a man.
It needs but a slender thread of barrenness to make a mouse trail in the
forest of the sod. To the little people the water trails are as country
roads, with scents as signboards.

It seems that man-height is the least fortunate of all heights from
which to study trails. It is better to go up the front of some tall
hill, say the spur of Black Mountain, looking back and down across the
hollow of the Ceriso. Strange how long the soil keeps the impression of
any continuous treading, even after grass has overgrown it. Twenty years
since, a brief heyday of mining at Black Mountain made a stage road
across the Ceriso, yet the parallel lines that are the wheel traces show
from the height dark and well defined. Afoot in the Ceriso one looks in
vain for any sign of it. So all the paths that wild creatures use going
down to the Lone Tree Spring are mapped out whitely from this level,
which is also the level of the hawks.

There is little water in the Ceriso at the best of times, and that
little brackish and smelling vilely, but by a lone juniper where the
rim of the Ceriso breaks away to the lower country, there is a perpetual
rill of fresh sweet drink in the midst of lush grass and watercress. In
the dry season there is no water else for a man's long journey of a
day. East to the foot of Black Mountain, and north and south without
counting, are the burrows of small rodents, rat and squirrel kind. Under
the sage are the shallow forms of the jackrabbits, and in the dry
banks of washes, and among the strewn fragments of black rock, lairs of
bobcat, fox, and coyote.

The coyote is your true water-witch, one who snuffs and paws, snuffs and
paws again at the smallest spot of moisture-scented earth until he has
freed the blind water from the soil. Many water-holes are no more than
this detected by the lean hobo of the hills in localities where not even
an Indian would look for it.

It is the opinion of many wise and busy people that the hill-folk pass
the ten-month interval between the end and renewal of winter rains, with
no drink; but your true idler, with days and nights to spend beside the
water trails, will not subscribe to it. The trails begin, as I said,
very far back in the Ceriso, faintly, and converge in one span broad,
white, hard-trodden way in the gully of the spring. And why trails if
there are no travelers in that direction?

I have yet to find the land not scarred by the thin, far roadways of
rabbits and what not of furry folks that run in them. Venture to look
for some seldom-touched water-hole, and so long as the trails run with
your general direction make sure you are right, but if they begin to
cross yours at never so slight an angle, to converge toward a point left
or right of your objective, no matter what the maps say, or your memory,
trust them; they know.

It is very still in the Ceriso by day, so that were it not for the
evidence of those white beaten ways, it might be the desert it looks.
The sun is hot in the dry season, and the days are filled with the
glare of it. Now and again some unseen coyote signals his pack in a
long-drawn, dolorous whine that comes from no determinate point, but
nothing stirs much before mid-afternoon. It is a sign when there begin
to be hawks skimming above the sage that the little people are going
about their business.

We have fallen on a very careless usage, speaking of wild creatures as
if they were bound by some such limitation as hampers clockwork. When we
say of one and another, they are night prowlers, it is perhaps true only
as the things they feed upon are more easily come by in the dark, and
they know well how to adjust themselves to conditions wherein food is
more plentiful by day. And their accustomed performance is very much
a matter of keen eye, keener scent, quick ear, and a better memory of
sights and sounds than man dares boast. Watch a coyote come out of his
lair and cast about in his mind where he will go for his daily killing.
You cannot very well tell what decides him, but very easily that he has
decided. He trots or breaks into short gallops, with very perceptible
pauses to look up and about at landmarks, alters his tack a little,
looking forward and back to steer his proper course.

I am persuaded that the coyotes in my valley, which is narrow and beset
with steep, sharp hills, in long passages steer by the pinnacles of
the sky-line, going with head cocked to one side to keep to the left or
right of such and such a promontory.

I have trailed a coyote often, going across country, perhaps to where
some slant-winged scavenger hanging in the air signaled prospect of
a dinner, and found his track such as a man, a very intelligent man
accustomed to a hill country, and a little cautious, would make to the
same point. Here a detour to avoid a stretch of too little cover, there
a pause on the rim of a gully to pick the better way,--and it is usually
the best way,--and making his point with the greatest economy of effort.
Since the time of Seyavi the deer have shifted their feeding ground
across the valley at the beginning of deep snows, by way of the Black
Rock, fording the river at Charley's Butte, and making straight for the
mouth of the canon that is the easiest going to the winter pastures on
Waban. So they still cross, though whatever trail they had has been long
broken by ploughed ground; but from the mouth of Tinpah Creek, where
the deer come out of the Sierras, it is easily seen that the creek, the
point of Black Rock, and Charley's Butte are in line with the wide bulk
of shade that is the foot of Waban Pass. And along with this the deer
have learned that Charley's Butte is almost the only possible ford,
and all the shortest crossing of the valley. It seems that the wild
creatures have learned all that is important to their way of life
except the changes of the moon. I have seen some prowling fox or coyote,
surprised by its sudden rising from behind the mountain wall, slink in
its increasing glow, watch it furtively from the cover of near-by brush,
unprepared and half uncertain of its identity until it rode clear of the
peaks, and finally make off with all the air of one caught napping by an
ancient joke. The moon in its wanderings must be a sort of exasperation
to cunning beasts, likely to spoil by untimely risings some fore-planned
mischief.

But to take the trail again; the coyotes that are astir in the Ceriso of
late afternoons, harrying the rabbits from their shallow forms, and the
hawks that sweep and swing above them, are not there from any mechanical
promptings of instinct, but because they know of old experience that the
small fry are about to take to seed gathering and the water trails. The
rabbits begin it, taking the trail with long, light leaps, one eye and
ear cocked to the hills from whence a coyote might descend upon them at
any moment. Rabbits are a foolish people. They do not fight except with
their own kind, nor use their paws except for feet, and appear to have
no reason for existence but to furnish meals for meat-eaters. In flight
they seem to rebound from the earth of their own elasticity, but keep a
sober pace going to the spring. It is the young watercress that tempts
them and the pleasures of society, for they seldom drink. Even in
localities where there are flowing streams they seem to prefer the
moisture that collects on herbage, and after rains may be seen rising on
their haunches to drink delicately the clear drops caught in the tops of
the young sage. But drink they must, as I have often seen them mornings
and evenings at the rill that goes by my door. Wait long enough at the
Lone Tree Spring and sooner or later they will all come in. But here
their matings are accomplished, and though they are fearful of so little
as a cloud shadow or blown leaf, they contrive to have some playful
hours. At the spring the bobcat drops down upon them from the black
rock, and the red fox picks them up returning in the dark. By day the
hawk and eagle overshadow them, and the coyote has all times and seasons
for his own.

Cattle, when there are any in the Ceriso, drink morning and evening,
spending the night on the warm last lighted slopes of neighboring hills,
stirring with the peep o' day. In these half wild spotted steers the
habits of an earlier lineage persist. It must be long since they have
made beds for themselves, but before lying down they turn themselves
round and round as dogs do. They choose bare and stony ground, exposed
fronts of westward facing hills, and lie down in companies. Usually by
the end of the summer the cattle have been driven or gone of their own
choosing to the mountain meadows. One year a maverick yearling, strayed
or overlooked by the vaqueros, kept on until the season's end, and so
betrayed another visitor to the spring that else I might have missed.
On a certain morning the half-eaten carcass lay at the foot of the black
rock, and in moist earth by the rill of the spring, the foot-pads of a
cougar, puma, mountain lion, or whatever the beast is rightly called.
The kill must have been made early in the evening, for it appeared that
the cougar had been twice to the spring; and since the meat-eater drinks
little until he has eaten, he must have fed and drunk, and after an
interval of lying up in the black rock, had eaten and drunk again. There
was no knowing how far he had come, but if he came again the second
night he found that the coyotes had left him very little of his kill.

Nobody ventures to say how infrequently and at what hour the small fry
visit the spring. There are such numbers of them that if each came once
between the last of spring and the first of winter rains, there would
still be water trails. I have seen badgers drinking about the hour when
the light takes on the yellow tinge it has from coming slantwise through
the hills. They find out shallow places, and are loath to wet their
feet. Rats and chipmunks have been observed visiting the spring as late
as nine o'clock mornings.

The larger spermophiles that live near the spring and keep awake to work
all day, come and go at no particular hour, drinking sparingly. At long
intervals on half-lighted days, meadow and field mice steal delicately
along the trail. These visitors are all too small to be watched
carefully at night, but for evidence of their frequent coming there are
the trails that may be traced miles out among the crisping grasses. On
rare nights, in the places where no grass grows between the shrubs, and
the sand silvers whitely to the moon, one sees them whisking to and fro
on innumerable errands of seed gathering, but the chief witnesses of
their presence near the spring are the elf owls. Those burrow-haunting,
speckled fluffs of greediness begin a twilight flitting toward the
spring, feeding as they go on grasshoppers, lizards, and small, swift
creatures, diving into burrows to catch field mice asleep, battling with
chipmunks at their own doors, and getting down in great numbers toward
the long juniper. Now owls do not love water greatly on its own account.
Not to my knowledge have I caught one drinking or bathing, though on
night wanderings across the mesa they flit up from under the horse's
feet along stream borders. Their presence near the spring in great
numbers would indicate the presence of the things they feed upon. All
night the rustle and soft hooting keeps on in the neighborhood of the
spring, with seldom small shrieks of mortal agony. It is clear day
before they have all gotten back to their particular hummocks, and if
one follows cautiously, not to frighten them into some near-by burrow,
it is possible to trail them far up the slope.

The crested quail that troop in the Ceriso are the happiest frequenters
of the water trails. There is no furtiveness about their morning drink.
About the time the burrowers and all that feed upon them are addressing
themselves to sleep, great flocks pour down the trails with that
peculiar melting motion of moving quail, twittering, shoving, and
shouldering. They splatter into the shallows, drink daintily, shake out
small showers over their perfect coats, and melt away again into the
scrub, preening and pranking, with soft contented noises.

After the quail, sparrows and ground-inhabiting birds bathe with the
utmost frankness and a great deal of splutter; and here in the heart of
noon hawks resort, sitting panting, with wings aslant, and a truce to
all hostilities because of the heat. One summer there came a road-runner
up from the lower valley, peeking and prying, and he had never any
patience with the water baths of the sparrows. His own ablutions were
performed in the clean, hopeful dust of the chaparral; and whenever
he happened on their morning splatterings, he would depress his glossy
crest, slant his shining tail to the level of his body, until he looked
most like some bright venomous snake, daunting them with shrill abuse
and feint of battle. Then suddenly he would go tilting and balancing
down the gully in fine disdain, only to return in a day or two to make
sure the foolish bodies were still at it.

Out on the Ceriso about five miles, and wholly out of sight of it, near
where the immemorial foot trail goes up from Saline Flat toward Black
Mountain, is a water sign worth turning out of the trail to see. It is
a laid circle of stones large enough not to be disturbed by any ordinary
hap, with an opening flanked by two parallel rows of similar stones,
between which were an arrow placed, touching the opposite rim of the
circle, thus it would point as the crow flies to the spring. It is the
old, indubitable water mark of the Shoshones. One still finds it in the
desert ranges in Salt Wells and Mesquite valleys, and along the slopes
of Waban. On the other side of Ceriso, where the black rock begins,
about a mile from the spring, is the work of an older, forgotten people.
The rock hereabout is all volcanic, fracturing with a crystalline
whitish surface, but weathered outside to furnace blackness. Around
the spring, where must have been a gathering place of the tribes, it is
scored over with strange pictures and symbols that have no meaning to
the Indians of the present day; but out where the rock begins, there is
carved into the white heart of it a pointing arrow over the symbol
for distance and a circle full of wavy lines reading thus: "In this
direction three [units of measurement unknown] is a spring of sweet
water; look for it."




THE SCAVENGERS

Fifty-seven buzzards, one on each of fifty-seven fence posts at the
rancho El Tejon, on a mirage-breeding September morning, sat solemnly
while the white tilted travelers' vans lumbered down the Canada de los
Uvas. After three hours they had only clapped their wings, or exchanged
posts. The season's end in the vast dim valley of the San Joaquin is
palpitatingly hot, and the air breathes like cotton wool. Through it
all the buzzards sit on the fences and low hummocks, with wings spread
fanwise for air. There is no end to them, and they smell to heaven.
Their heads droop, and all their communication is a rare, horrid croak.

The increase of wild creatures is in proportion to the things they
feed upon: the more carrion the more buzzards. The end of the third
successive dry year bred them beyond belief. The first year quail mated
sparingly; the second year the wild oats matured no seed; the third,
cattle died in their tracks with their heads towards the stopped
watercourses. And that year the scavengers were as black as the plague
all across the mesa and up the treeless, tumbled hills. On clear days
they betook themselves to the upper air, where they hung motionless for
hours. That year there were vultures among them, distinguished by the
white patches under the wings. All their offensiveness notwithstanding,
they have a stately flight. They must also have what pass for good
qualities among themselves, for they are social, not to say clannish.

It is a very squalid tragedy,--that of the dying brutes and the
scavenger birds. Death by starvation is slow. The heavy-headed,
rack-boned cattle totter in the fruitless trails; they stand for long,
patient intervals; they lie down and do not rise. There is fear in
their eyes when they are first stricken, but afterward only intolerable
weariness. I suppose the dumb creatures know nearly as much of death
as do their betters, who have only the more imagination. Their
even-breathing submission after the first agony is their tribute to
its inevitableness. It needs a nice discrimination to say which of
the basket-ribbed cattle is likest to afford the next meal, but the
scavengers make few mistakes. One stoops to the quarry and the flock
follows.

Cattle once down may be days in dying. They stretch out their necks
along the ground, and roll up their slow eyes at longer intervals. The
buzzards have all the time, and no beak is dropped or talon struck until
the breath is wholly passed. It is doubtless the economy of nature to
have the scavengers by to clean up the carrion, but a wolf at the throat
would be a shorter agony than the long stalking and sometime perchings
of these loathsome watchers. Suppose now it were a man in this
long-drawn, hungrily spied upon distress! When Timmie O'Shea was lost on
Armogosa Flats for three days without water, Long Tom Basset found him,
not by any trail, but by making straight away for the points where he
saw buzzards stooping. He could hear the beat of their wings, Tom said,
and trod on their shadows, but O'Shea was past recalling what he thought
about things after the second day. My friend Ewan told me, among other
things, when he came back from San Juan Hill, that not all the carnage
of battle turned his bowels as the sight of slant black wings rising
flockwise before the burial squad.

There are three kinds of noises buzzards make,--it is impossible to call
them notes,--raucous and elemental. There is a short croak of alarm,
and the same syllable in a modified tone to serve all the purposes of
ordinary conversation. The old birds make a kind of throaty chuckling
to their young, but if they have any love song I have not heard it.
The young yawp in the nest a little, with more breath than noise. It is
seldom one finds a buzzard's nest, seldom that grown-ups find a nest of
any sort; it is only children to whom these things happen by right. But
by making a business of it one may come upon them in wide, quiet canons,
or on the lookouts of lonely, table-topped mountains, three or four
together, in the tops of stubby trees or on rotten cliffs well open to
the sky.

It is probable that the buzzard is gregarious, but it seems unlikely
from the small number of young noted at any time that every female
incubates each year. The young birds are easily distinguished by their
size when feeding, and high up in air by the worn primaries of the older
birds. It is when the young go out of the nest on their first foraging
that the parents, full of a crass and simple pride, make their
indescribable chucklings of gobbling, gluttonous delight. The little
ones would be amusing as they tug and tussle, if one could forget what
it is they feed upon.

One never comes any nearer to the vulture's nest or nestlings than
hearsay. They keep to the southerly Sierras, and are bold enough, it
seems, to do killing on their own account when no carrion is at hand.
They dog the shepherd from camp to camp, the hunter home from the hill,
and will even carry away offal from under his hand.

The vulture merits respect for his bigness and for his bandit airs, but
he is a sombre bird, with none of the buzzard's frank satisfaction in
his offensiveness.

The least objectionable of the inland scavengers is the raven,
frequenter of the desert ranges, the same called locally "carrion crow."
He is handsomer and has such an air. He is nice in his habits and is
said to have likable traits. A tame one in a Shoshone camp was the butt
of much sport and enjoyed it. He could all but talk and was another with
the children, but an arrant thief. The raven will eat most things that
come his way,--eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, seeds even,
lizards and grasshoppers, which he catches cleverly; and whatever he
is about, let a coyote trot never so softly by, the raven flaps up and
after; for whatever the coyote can pull down or nose out is meat also
for the carrion crow.

And never a coyote comes out of his lair for killing, in the country
of the carrion crows, but looks up first to see where they may be
gathering. It is a sufficient occupation for a windy morning, on
the lineless, level mesa, to watch the pair of them eying each other
furtively, with a tolerable assumption of unconcern, but no doubt with
a certain amount of good understanding about it. Once at Red Rock, in
a year of green pasture, which is a bad time for the scavengers, we saw
two buzzards, five ravens, and a coyote feeding on the same carrion, and
only the coyote seemed ashamed of the company.

Probably we never fully credit the interdependence of wild creatures,
and their cognizance of the affairs of their own kind. When the five
coyotes that range the Tejon from Pasteria to Tunawai planned a relay
race to bring down an antelope strayed from the band, beside myself to
watch, an eagle swung down from Mt. Pinos, buzzards materialized out
of invisible ether, and hawks came trooping like small boys to a street
fight. Rabbits sat up in the chaparral and cocked their ears, feeling
themselves quite safe for the once as the hunt swung near them. Nothing
happens in the deep wood that the blue jays are not all agog to tell.
The hawk follows the badger, the coyote the carrion crow, and from
their aerial stations the buzzards watch each other. What would be worth
knowing is how much of their neighbor's affairs the new generations
learn for themselves, and how much they are taught of their elders.

So wide is the range of the scavengers that it is never safe to say,
eyewitness to the contrary, that there are few or many in such a place.
Where the carrion is, there will the buzzards be gathered together, and
in three days' journey you will not sight another one. The way up from
Mojave to Red Butte is all desertness, affording no pasture and scarcely
a rill of water. In a year of little rain in the south, flocks and herds
were driven to the number of thousands along this road to the perennial
pastures of the high ranges. It is a long, slow trail, ankle deep in
bitter dust that gets up in the slow wind and moves along the backs of
the crawling cattle. In the worst of times one in three will pine and
fall out by the way. In the defiles of Red Rock, the sheep piled up a
stinking lane; it was the sun smiting by day. To these shambles came
buzzards, vultures, and coyotes from all the country round, so that on
the Tejon, the Ceriso, and the Little Antelope there were not scavengers
enough to keep the country clean. All that summer the dead mummified in
the open or dropped slowly back to earth in the quagmires of the bitter
springs. Meanwhile from Red Rock to Coyote Holes, and from Coyote Holes
to Haiwai the scavengers gorged and gorged.

The coyote is not a scavenger by choice, preferring his own kill,
but being on the whole a lazy dog, is apt to fall into carrion eating
because it is easier. The red fox and bobcat, a little pressed by
hunger, will eat of any other animal's kill, but will not ordinarily
touch what dies of itself, and are exceedingly shy of food that has been
man-handled.

Very clean and handsome, quite belying his relationship in appearance,
is Clark's crow, that scavenger and plunderer of mountain camps. It is
permissible to call him by his common name, "Camp Robber:" he has earned
it. Not content with refuse, he pecks open meal sacks, filches whole
potatoes, is a gormand for bacon, drills holes in packing cases, and is
daunted by nothing short of tin. All the while he does not neglect to
vituperate the chipmunks and sparrows that whisk off crumbs of comfort
from under the camper's feet. The Camp Robber's gray coat, black and
white barred wings, and slender bill, with certain tricks of perching,
accuse him of attempts to pass himself off among woodpeckers; but his
behavior is all crow. He frequents the higher pine belts, and has a
noisy strident call like a jay's, and how clean he and the frisk-tailed
chipmunks keep the camp! No crumb or paring or bit of eggshell goes
amiss.

High as the camp may be, so it is not above timberline, it is not too
high for the coyote, the bobcat, or the wolf. It is the complaint of the
ordinary camper that the woods are too still, depleted of wild life. But
what dead body of wild thing, or neglected game untouched by its kind,
do you find? And put out offal away from camp over night, and look next
day at the foot tracks where it lay.

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other
except the bear makes so much noise. Being so well warned beforehand,
it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely
hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in turn, and what he leaves of his
kill is meat for some other. That is the economy of nature, but with it
all there is not sufficient account taken of the works of man. There
is no scavenger that eats tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like
disfigurement on the forest floor.




THE POCKET HUNTER

I remember very well when I first met him. Walking in the evening glow
to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I sniffed the unmistakable
odor of burning sage. It is a smell that carries far and indicates
usually the nearness of a campoodie, but on the level mesa nothing
taller showed than Diana's sage. Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk
under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at
the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the
friendly scrub. He sat tailor-wise in the sand, with his coffee-pot on
the coals, his supper ready to hand in the frying-pan, and himself in
a mood for talk. His pack burros in hobbles strayed off to hunt for a
wetter mouthful than the sage afforded, and gave him no concern.

We came upon him often after that, threading the windy passes, or by
water-holes in the desert hills, and got to know much of his way of
life. He was a small, bowed man, with a face and manner and speech of
no character at all, as if he had that faculty of small hunted things of
taking on the protective color of his surroundings. His clothes were of
no fashion that I could remember, except that they bore liberal markings
of pot black, and he had a curious fashion of going about with his
mouth open, which gave him a vacant look until you came near enough to
perceive him busy about an endless hummed, wordless tune. He traveled
far and took a long time to it, but the simplicity of his kitchen
arrangements was elemental. A pot for beans, a coffee-pot, a frying-pan,
a tin to mix bread in--he fed the burros in this when there was
need--with these he had been half round our western world and back. He
explained to me very early in our acquaintance what was good to take to
the hills for food: nothing sticky, for that "dirtied the pots;" nothing
with "juice" to it, for that would not pack to advantage; and nothing
likely to ferment. He used no gun, but he would set snares by the
water-holes for quail and doves, and in the trout country he carried a
line. Burros he kept, one or two according to his pack, for this chief
excellence, that they would eat potato parings and firewood. He had
owned a horse in the foothill country, but when he came to the desert
with no forage but mesquite, he found himself under the necessity of
picking the beans from the briers, a labor that drove him to the use of
pack animals to whom thorns were a relish.

I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention. He must be
born with the faculty, and along comes the occasion, like the tap on
the test tube that induces crystallization. My friend had been several
things of no moment until he struck a thousand-dollar pocket in the Lee
District and came into his vocation. A pocket, you must know, is a small
body of rich ore occurring by itself, or in a vein of poorer stuff.
Nearly every mineral ledge contains such, if only one has the luck to
hit upon them without too much labor. The sensible thing for a man to
do who has found a good pocket is to buy himself into business and keep
away from the hills. The logical thing is to set out looking for another
one. My friend the Pocket Hunter had been looking twenty years. His
working outfit was a shovel, a pick, a gold pan which he kept cleaner
than his plate, and a pocket magnifier. When he came to a watercourse
he would pan out the gravel of its bed for "colors," and under the glass
determine if they had come from far or near, and so spying he would work
up the stream until he found where the drift of the gold-bearing outcrop
fanned out into the creek; then up the side of the canon till he came
to the proper vein. I think he said the best indication of small pockets
was an iron stain, but I could never get the run of miner's talk enough
to feel instructed for pocket hunting. He had another method in the
waterless hills, where he would work in and out of blind gullies and all
windings of the manifold strata that appeared not to have cooled since
they had been heaved up. His itinerary began with the east slope of the
Sierras of the Snows, where that range swings across to meet the coast
hills, and all up that slope to the Truckee River country, where the
long cold forbade his progress north. Then he worked back down one or
another of the nearly parallel ranges that lie out desertward, and
so down to the sink of the Mojave River, burrowing to oblivion in the
sand,--a big mysterious land, a lonely, inhospitable land, beautiful,
terrible. But he came to no harm in it; the land tolerated him as it
might a gopher or a badger. Of all its inhabitants it has the least
concern for man.

There are many strange sorts of humans bred in a mining country, each
sort despising the queernesses of the other, but of them all I found the
Pocket Hunter most acceptable for his clean, companionable talk. There
was more color to his reminiscences than the faded sandy old miners
"kyoteing," that is, tunneling like a coyote (kyote in the vernacular)
in the core of a lonesome hill. Such a one has found, perhaps, a body of
tolerable ore in a poor lead,--remember that I can never be depended on
to get the terms right,--and followed it into the heart of country rock
to no profit, hoping, burrowing, and hoping. These men go harmlessly mad
in time, believing themselves just behind the wall of fortune--most
likable and simple men, for whom it is well to do any kindly thing that
occurs to you except lend them money. I have known "grub stakers" too,
those persuasive sinners to whom you make allowances of flour and pork
and coffee in consideration of the ledges they are about to find; but
none of these proved so much worth while as the Pocket Hunter. He wanted
nothing of you and maintained a cheerful preference for his own way of
life. It was an excellent way if you had the constitution for it. The
Pocket Hunter had gotten to that point where he knew no bad weather, and
all places were equally happy so long as they were out of doors. I do
not know just how long it takes to become saturated with the elements so
that one takes no account of them. Myself can never get past the glow
and exhilaration of a storm, the wrestle of long dust-heavy winds, the
play of live thunder on the rocks, nor past the keen fret of fatigue
when the storm outlasts physical endurance. But prospectors and Indians
get a kind of a weather shell that remains on the body until death.

The Pocket Hunter had seen destruction by the violence of nature and
the violence of men, and felt himself in the grip of an All-wisdom that
killed men or spared them as seemed for their good; but of death by
sickness he knew nothing except that he believed he should never suffer
it. He had been in Grape-vine Canon the year of storms that changed the
whole front of the mountain. All day he had come down under the wing
of the storm, hoping to win past it, but finding it traveling with him
until night. It kept on after that, he supposed, a steady downpour,
but could not with certainty say, being securely deep in sleep. But the
weather instinct does not sleep. In the night the heavens behind the
hill dissolved in rain, and the roar of the storm was borne in and mixed
with his dreaming, so that it moved him, still asleep, to get up and out
of the path of it. What finally woke him was the crash of pine logs as
they went down before the unbridled flood, and the swirl of foam that
lashed him where he clung in the tangle of scrub while the wall of
water went by. It went on against the cabin of Bill Gerry and laid Bill
stripped and broken on a sand bar at the mouth of the Grape-vine, seven
miles away. There, when the sun was up and the wrath of the rain spent,
the Pocket Hunter found and buried him; but he never laid his own escape
at any door but the unintelligible favor of the Powers.

The journeyings of the Pocket Hunter led him often into that mysterious
country beyond Hot Creek where a hidden force works mischief, mole-like,
under the crust of the earth. Whatever agency is at work in that
neighborhood, and it is popularly supposed to be the devil, it changes
means and direction without time or season. It creeps up whole hillsides
with insidious heat, unguessed until one notes the pine woods dying at
the top, and having scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam
and spout in caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up
sometimes blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, or make
a sucking, scalding quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks had the
kind of morbid interest for the Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavory
reputation has in a respectable neighborhood, but I always found the
accounts he brought me more interesting than his explanations, which
were compounded of fag ends of miner's talk and superstition. He was a
perfect gossip of the woods, this Pocket Hunter, and when I could get
him away from "leads" and "strikes" and "contacts," full of fascinating
small talk about the ebb and flood of creeks, the pinon crop on Black
Mountain, and the wolves of Mesquite Valley. I suppose he never knew how
much he depended for the necessary sense of home and companionship
on the beasts and trees, meeting and finding them in their wonted
places,--the bear that used to come down Pine Creek in the spring,
pawing out trout from the shelters of sod banks, the juniper at Lone
Tree Spring, and the quail at Paddy Jack's.

There is a place on Waban, south of White Mountain, where flat,
wind-tilted cedars make low tents and coves of shade and shelter, where
the wild sheep winter in the snow. Woodcutters and prospectors had
brought me word of that, but the Pocket Hunter was accessory to the
fact. About the opening of winter, when one looks for sudden big storms,
he had attempted a crossing by the nearest path, beginning the ascent at
noon. It grew cold, the snow came on thick and blinding, and wiped
out the trail in a white smudge; the storm drift blew in and cut off
landmarks, the early dark obscured the rising drifts. According to the
Pocket Hunter's account, he knew where he was, but couldn't exactly say.
Three days before he had been in the west arm of Death Valley on a short
water allowance, ankle-deep in shifty sand; now he was on the rise
of Waban, knee-deep in sodden snow, and in both cases he did the
only allowable thing--he walked on. That is the only thing to do in a
snowstorm in any case. It might have been the creature instinct, which
in his way of life had room to grow, that led him to the cedar shelter;
at any rate he found it about four hours after dark, and heard the
heavy breathing of the flock. He said that if he thought at all at this
juncture he must have thought that he had stumbled on a storm-belated
shepherd with his silly sheep; but in fact he took no note of anything
but the warmth of packed fleeces, and snuggled in between them dead with
sleep. If the flock stirred in the night he stirred drowsily to keep
close and let the storm go by. That was all until morning woke him
shining on a white world. Then the very soul of him shook to see the
wild sheep of God stand up about him, nodding their great horns beneath
the cedar roof, looking out on the wonder of the snow. They had moved a
little away from him with the coming of the light, but paid him no more
heed. The light broadened and the white pavilions of the snow swam in
the heavenly blueness of the sea from which they rose. The cloud drift
scattered and broke billowing in the canons. The leader stamped lightly
on the litter to put the flock in motion, suddenly they took the drifts
in those long light leaps that are nearest to flight, down and away on
the slopes of Waban. Think of that to happen to a Pocket Hunter! But
though he had fallen on many a wished-for hap, he was curiously inapt at
getting the truth about beasts in general. He believed in the venom of
toads, and charms for snake bites, and--for this I could never forgive
him--had all the miner's prejudices against my friend the coyote. Thief,
sneak, and son of a thief were the friendliest words he had for this
little gray dog of the wilderness.

Of course with so much seeking he came occasionally upon pockets of more
or less value, otherwise he could not have kept up his way of life; but
he had as much luck in missing great ledges as in finding small ones.
He had been all over the Tonopah country, and brought away float without
happening upon anything that gave promise of what that district was
to become in a few years. He claimed to have chipped bits off the very
outcrop of the California Rand, without finding it worth while to bring
away, but none of these things put him out of countenance.

It was once in roving weather, when we found him shifting pack on a
steep trail, that I observed certain of his belongings done up in green
canvas bags, the veritable "green bag" of English novels. It seemed
so incongruous a reminder in this untenanted West that I dropped down
beside the trail overlooking the vast dim valley, to hear about the
green canvas. He had gotten it, he said, in London years before, and
that was the first I had known of his having been abroad. It was after
one of his "big strikes" that he had made the Grand Tour, and had
brought nothing away from it but the green canvas bags, which he
conceived would fit his needs, and an ambition. This last was nothing
less than to strike it rich and set himself up among the eminently
bourgeois of London. It seemed that the situation of the wealthy
English middle class, with just enough gentility above to aspire to,
and sufficient smaller fry to bully and patronize, appealed to his
imagination, though of course he did not put it so crudely as that.

It was no news to me then, two or three years after, to learn that he
had taken ten thousand dollars from an abandoned claim, just the sort
of luck to have pleased him, and gone to London to spend it. The land
seemed not to miss him any more than it had minded him, but I missed
him and could not forget the trick of expecting him in least likely
situations. Therefore it was with a pricking sense of the familiar that
I followed a twilight trail of smoke, a year or two later, to the swale
of a dripping spring, and came upon a man by the fire with a coffee-pot
and frying-pan. I was not surprised to find it was the Pocket Hunter. No
man can be stronger than his destiny.




SHOSHONE LAND

It is true I have been in Shoshone Land, but before that, long before,
I had seen it through the eyes of Winnenap' in a rosy mist of
reminiscence, and must always see it with a sense of intimacy in the
light that never was. Sitting on the golden slope at the campoodie,
looking across the Bitter Lake to the purple tops of Mutarango, the
medicine-man drew up its happy places one by one, like little blessed
islands in a sea of talk. For he was born a Shoshone, was Winnenap'; and
though his name, his wife, his children, and his tribal relations were
of the Paiutes, his thoughts turned homesickly toward Shoshone Land.
Once a Shoshone always a Shoshone. Winnenap' lived gingerly among the
Paiutes and in his heart despised them. But he could speak a tolerable
English when he would, and he always would if it were of Shoshone Land.

He had come into the keeping of the Paiutes as a hostage for the long
peace which the authority of the whites made interminable, and, though
there was now no order in the tribe, nor any power that could have
lawfully restrained him, kept on in the old usage, to save his honor and
the word of his vanished kin. He had seen his children's children in
the borders of the Paiutes, but loved best his own miles of sand and
rainbow-painted hills. Professedly he had not seen them since the
beginning of his hostage; but every year about the end of the rains
and before the strength of the sun had come upon us from the south, the
medicine-man went apart on the mountains to gather herbs, and when he
came again I knew by the new fortitude of his countenance and the new
color of his reminiscences that he had been alone and unspied upon in
Shoshone Land.

To reach that country from the campoodie, one goes south and south,
within hearing of the lip-lip-lapping of the great tideless lake, and
south by east over a high rolling district, miles and miles of sage and
nothing else. So one comes to the country of the painted hills,--old red
cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral earths, hot, acrid springs,
and steam jets issuing from a leprous soil. After the hills the black
rock, after the craters the spewed lava, ash strewn, of incredible
thickness, and full of sharp, winding rifts. There are picture writings
carved deep in the face of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do
not know it. On the very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in
a wide sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone Land.

South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly wooded
with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the border of the
Shoshones. Eastward the land goes very far by broken ranges, narrow
valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted to the sky-line,
east and east, and no man knows the end of it.

It is the country of the bighorn, the wapiti, and the wolf, nesting
place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild things that
live without drink. Above all, it is the land of the creosote and the
mesquite. The mesquite is God's best thought in all this desertness. It
grows in the open, is thorny, stocky, close grown, and iron-rooted. Long
winds move in the draughty valleys, blown sand fills and fills about
the lower branches, piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the
mesquite twigs flourish greenly. Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift,
where it seems no rain could penetrate, the main trunk grows, attaining
often a yard's thickness, resistant as oak. In Shoshone Land one digs
for large timber; that is in the southerly, sandy exposures. Higher on
the table-topped ranges low trees of juniper and pinon stand each apart,
rounded and spreading heaps of greenness. Between them, but each to
itself in smooth clear spaces, tufts of tall feathered grass.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and
time enough. Trees grow to consummate domes; every plant has its perfect
work. Noxious weeds such as come up thickly in crowded fields do not
flourish in the free spaces. Live long enough with an Indian, and he or
the wild things will show you a use for everything that grows in these
borders.

The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land
will not be lived in except in its own fashion. The Shoshones live
like their trees, with great spaces between, and in pairs and in family
groups they set up wattled huts by the infrequent springs. More wickiups
than two make a very great number. Their shelters are lightly built, for
they travel much and far, following where deer feed and seeds ripen, but
they are not more lonely than other creatures that inhabit there.

The year's round is somewhat in this fashion. After the pinon harvest
the clans foregather on a warm southward slope for the annual adjustment
of tribal difficulties and the medicine dance, for marriage and mourning
and vengeance, and the exchange of serviceable information; if, for
example, the deer have shifted their feeding ground, if the wild sheep
have come back to Waban, or certain springs run full or dry. Here the
Shoshones winter flockwise, weaving baskets and hunting big game driven
down from the country of the deep snow. And this brief intercourse is
all the use they have of their kind, for now there are no wars, and many
of their ancient crafts have fallen into disuse. The solitariness of the
life breeds in the men, as in the plants, a certain well-roundedness
and sufficiency to its own ends. Any Shoshone family has in itself the
man-seed, power to multiply and replenish, potentialities for food and
clothing and shelter, for healing and beautifying.

When the rain is over and gone they are stirred by the instinct of those
that journeyed eastward from Eden, and go up each with his mate and
young brood, like birds to old nesting places. The beginning of spring
in Shoshone Land--oh the soft wonder of it!--is a mistiness as of
incense smoke, a veil of greenness over the whitish stubby shrubs, a web
of color on the silver sanded soil. No counting covers the multitude of
rayed blossoms that break suddenly underfoot in the brief season of the
winter rains, with silky furred or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage
at all. They are morning and evening bloomers chiefly, and strong
seeders. Years of scant rains they lie shut and safe in the winnowed
sands, so that some species appear to be extinct. Years of long storms
they break so thickly into bloom that no horse treads without crushing
them. These years the gullies of the hills are rank with fern and a
great tangle of climbing vines.

Just as the mesa twilights have their vocal note in the love call of
the burrowing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by the mourning doves.
Welcome and sweet they sound in the smoky mornings before breeding time,
and where they frequent in any great numbers water is confidently looked
for. Still by the springs one finds the cunning brush shelters from
which the Shoshones shot arrows at them when the doves came to drink.

Now as to these same Shoshones there are some who claim that they have
no right to the name, which belongs to a more northerly tribe; but that
is the word they will be called by, and there is no greater offense than
to call an Indian out of his name. According to their traditions and all
proper evidence, they were a great people occupying far north and east
of their present bounds, driven thence by the Paiutes. Between the two
tribes is the residuum of old hostilities.

Winnenap', whose memory ran to the time when the boundary of the Paiute
country was a dead-line to Shoshones, told me once how himself and
another lad, in an unforgotten spring, discovered a nesting place of
buzzards a bit of a way beyond the borders. And they two burned to
rob those nests. Oh, for no purpose at all except as boys rob nests
immemorially, for the fun of it, to have and handle and show to other
lads as an exceeding treasure, and afterwards discard. So, not quite
meaning to, but breathless with daring, they crept up a gully, across
a sage brush flat and through a waste of boulders, to the rugged pines
where their sharp eyes had made out the buzzards settling.

The medicine-man told me, always with a quaking relish at this point,
that while they, grown bold by success, were still in the tree, they
sighted a Paiute hunting party crossing between them and their own land.
That was mid-morning, and all day on into the dark the boys crept and
crawled and slid, from boulder to bush, and bush to boulder, in cactus
scrub and on naked sand, always in a sweat of fear, until the dust caked
in the nostrils and the breath sobbed in the body, around and away
many a mile until they came to their own land again. And all the time
Winnenap' carried those buzzard's eggs in the slack of his single
buckskin garment! Young Shoshones are like young quail, knowing without
teaching about feeding and hiding, and learning what civilized children
never learn, to be still and to keep on being still, at the first hint
of danger or strangeness.

As for food, that appears to be chiefly a matter of being willing.
Desert Indians all eat chuckwallas, big black and white lizards that
have delicate white flesh savored like chicken. Both the Shoshones and
the coyotes are fond of the flesh of Gopherus agassizii, the turtle
that by feeding on buds, going without drink, and burrowing in the sand
through the winter, contrives to live a known period of twenty-five
years. It seems that most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most
berries edible, and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them.
The mesquite bean, whether the screw or straight pod, pounded to a
meal, boiled to a kind of mush, and dried in cakes, sulphur-colored
and needing an axe to cut it, is an excellent food for long journeys.
Fermented in water with wild honey and the honeycomb, it makes a
pleasant, mildly intoxicating drink.

Next to spring, the best time to visit Shoshone Land is when the
deer-star hangs low and white like a torch over the morning hills. Go
up past Winnedumah and down Saline and up again to the rim of Mesquite
Valley. Take no tent, but if you will, have an Indian build you a
wickiup, willows planted in a circle, drawn over to an arch, and bound
cunningly with withes, all the leaves on, and chinks to count the stars
through. But there was never any but Winnenap' who could tell and make
it worth telling about Shoshone Land.

And Winnenap' will not any more. He died, as do most medicine-men of the
Paiutes.

Where the lot falls when the campoodie chooses a medicine-man there it
rests. It is an honor a man seldom seeks but must wear, an honor with
a condition. When three patients die under his ministrations, the
medicine-man must yield his life and his office.

Wounds do not count; broken bones and bullet holes the Indian can
understand, but measles, pneumonia, and smallpox are witchcraft.
Winnenap' was medicine-man for fifteen years. Besides considerable skill
in healing herbs, he used his prerogatives cunningly. It is permitted
the medicine-man to decline the case when the patient has had treatment
from any other, say the white doctor, whom many of the younger
generation consult. Or, if before having seen the patient, he can
definitely refer his disorder to some supernatural cause wholly out
of the medicine-man's jurisdiction, say to the spite of an evil spirit
going about in the form of a coyote, and states the case convincingly,
he may avoid the penalty. But this must not be pushed too far. All
else failing, he can hide. Winnenap' did this the time of the measles
epidemic. Returning from his yearly herb gathering, he heard of it at
Black Rock, and turning aside, he was not to be found, nor did he
return to his own place until the disease had spent itself, and half
the children of the campoodie were in their shallow graves with beads
sprinkled over them.

It is possible the tale of Winnenap's patients had not been strictly
kept. There had not been a medicine-man killed in the valley for twelve
years, and for that the perpetrators had been severely punished by the
whites. The winter of the Big Snow an epidemic of pneumonia carried off
the Indians with scarcely a warning; from the lake northward to the
lava flats they died in the sweathouses, and under the hands of the
medicine-men. Even the drugs of the white physician had no power.

After two weeks of this plague the Paiutes drew to council to consider
the remissness of their medicine-men. They were sore with grief
and afraid for themselves; as a result of the council, one in every
campoodie was sentenced to the ancient penalty. But schooling and native
shrewdness had raised up in the younger men an unfaith in old usages,
so judgment halted between sentence and execution. At Three Pines the
government teacher brought out influential whites to threaten and cajole
the stubborn tribes. At Tunawai the conservatives sent into Nevada for
that pacific old humbug, Johnson Sides, most notable of Paiute orators,
to harangue his people. Citizens of the towns turned out with food and
comforts, and so after a season the trouble passed.

But here at Maverick there was no school, no oratory, and no
alleviation. One third of the campoodie died, and the rest killed the
medicine-men. Winnenap' expected it, and for days walked and sat a
little apart from his family that he might meet it as became a Shoshone,
no doubt suffering the agony of dread deferred. When finally three men
came and sat at his fire without greeting he knew his time. He turned a
little from them, dropped his chin upon his knees, and looked out over
Shoshone Land, breathing evenly. The women went into the wickiup and
covered their heads with their blankets.

So much has the Indian lost of savageness by merely desisting from
killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work
by drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness. In the end a sharp
hatchet-stroke discharged the duty of the campoodie. Afterward his women
buried him, and a warm wind coming out of the south, the force of the
disease was broken, and even they acquiesced in the wisdom of the tribe.
That summer they told me all except the names of the Three.

Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall
have a hand in the heaven of hereafter; and I know what Winnenap's will
be like: worth going to if one has leave to live in it according to
his liking. It will be tawny gold underfoot, walled up with jacinth and
jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet no hymnbook heaven, but the free
air and free spaces of Shoshone Land.




JIMVILLE

A BRET HARTE TOWN

When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his particular
local color fading from the West, he did what he considered the only
safe thing, and carried his young impression away to be worked out
untroubled by any newer fact. He should have gone to Jimville. There he
would have found cast up on the ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of
more tales, and better ones.

You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a survival, like
the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes cheerfully about
those borders some thousands of years beyond his proper epoch. Not that
Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere favorable to the type of a
half century back, if not "forty-niners," of that breed. It is said
of Jimville that getting away from it is such a piece of work that it
encourages permanence in the population; the fact is that most have been
drawn there by some real likeness or liking. Not however that I would
deny the difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of reminder, I
who have made the journey so many times at great pains of a poor body.
Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from anywhere in
particular. North or south, after the railroad there is a stage journey
of such interminable monotony as induces forgetfulness of all previous
states of existence.

The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old stage-coaches
bought up from superseded routes the West over, rocking, lumbering, wide
vehicles far gone in the odor of romance, coaches that Vasquez has held
up, from whose high seats express messengers have shot or been shot as
their luck held. This is to comfort you when the driver stops to rummage
for wire to mend a failing bolt. There is enough of this sort of thing
to quite prepare you to believe what the driver insists, namely, that
all that country and Jimville are held together by wire.

First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land, with a hint
in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a palpitant, white, hot
land where the wheels gird at the sand and the midday heaven shuts it in
breathlessly like a tent. So in still weather; and when the wind blows
there is occupation enough for the passengers, shifting seats to hold
down the windward side of the wagging coach. This is a mere trifle. The
Jimville stage is built for five passengers, but when you have seven,
with four trunks, several parcels, three sacks of grain, the mail and
express, you begin to understand that proverb about the road which has
been reported to you. In time you learn to engage the high seat beside
the driver, where you get good air and the best company. Beyond the
desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn; sharp-cutting walls of
narrow canons; league-wide, frozen puddles of black rock, intolerable
and forbidding. Beyond the lava the mouths that spewed it out,
ragged-lipped, ruined craters shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of
red earth, as red as a red heifer. These have some comforting of shrubs
and grass. You get the very spirit of the meaning of that country when
you see Little Pete feeding his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old
vent,--a kind of silly pastoral gentleness that glozes over an elemental
violence. Beyond the craters rise worn, auriferous hills of a quiet
sort, tumbled together; a valley full of mists; whitish green scrub; and
bright, small, panting lizards; then Jimville.

The town looks to have spilled out of Squaw Gulch, and that, in fact,
is the sequence of its growth. It began around the Bully Boy and Theresa
group of mines midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading down to the smelter at
the mouth of the ravine. The freight wagons dumped their loads as near
to the mill as the slope allowed, and Jimville grew in between. Above
the Gulch begins a pine wood with sparsely grown thickets of lilac,
azalea, and odorous blossoming shrubs.

Squaw Gulch is a very sharp, steep, ragged-walled ravine, and that part
of Jimville which is built in it has only one street,--in summer paved
with bone-white cobbles, in the wet months a frothy yellow flood. All
between the ore dumps and solitary small cabins, pieced out with tin
cans and packing cases, run footpaths drawing down to the Silver Dollar
saloon. When Jimville was having the time of its life the Silver
Dollar had those same coins let into the bar top for a border, but
the proprietor pried them out when the glory departed. There are three
hundred inhabitants in Jimville and four bars, though you are not to
argue anything from that.

Hear now how Jimville came by its name. Jim Calkins discovered the
Bully Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa. When Jim Jenkins opened an
eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the flap, "Best meals in
Jimville, $1.00," and the name stuck.

There was more human interest in the origin of Squaw Gulch, though it
tickled no humor. It was Dimmick's squaw from Aurora way. If Dimmick had
been anything except New Englander he would have called her a mahala,
but that would not have bettered his behavior. Dimmick made a strike,
went East, and the squaw who had been to him as his wife took to drink.
That was the bald way of stating it in the Aurora country. The milk of
human kindness, like some wine, must not be uncorked too much in speech
lest it lose savor. This is what they did. The woman would have returned
to her own people, being far gone with child, but the drink worked her
bane. By the river of this ravine her pains overtook her. There Jim
Calkins, prospecting, found her dying with a three days' babe nozzling
at her breast. Jim heartened her for the end, buried her, and walked
back to Poso, eighteen miles, the child poking in the folds of his
denim shirt with small mewing noises, and won support for it from the
rough-handed folks of that place. Then he came back to Squaw Gulch, so
named from that day, and discovered the Bully Boy. Jim humbly regarded
this piece of luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed
him. If it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or
a ballad. Bret Harte would have given you a tale. You see in me a mere
recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out this
bubble from your own breath.

You could never get into any proper relation to Jimville unless you
could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard does
his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver assured
me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady barkeeper.
The phrase tickled all my after-dinner-coffee sense of humor into an
anticipation of Poker Flat. The stage-driver proved himself really
right, though you are not to suppose from this that Jimville had no
conventions and no caste. They work out these things in the personal
equation largely. Almost every latitude of behavior is allowed a good
fellow, one no liar, a free spender, and a backer of his friends'
quarrels. You are respected in as much ground as you can shoot over, in
as many pretensions as you can make good.

That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe, the gentlemanly faro dealer of
those parts, built for the role of Oakhurst, going white-shirted
and frock-coated in a community of overalls; and persuading you that
whatever shifts and tricks of the game were laid to his deal, he could
not practice them on a person of your penetration. But he does. By
his own account and the evidence of his manners he had been bred for a
clergyman, and he certainly has gifts for the part. You find him always
in possession of your point of view, and with an evident though not
obtrusive desire to stand well with you. For an account of his killings,
for his way with women and the way of women with him, I refer you to
Brown of Calaveras and some others of that stripe. His improprieties had
a certain sanction of long standing not accorded to the gay ladies who
wore Mr. Fanshawe's favors. There were perhaps too many of them. On the
whole, the point of the moral distinctions of Jimville appears to be a
point of honor, with an absence of humorous appreciation that strangers
mistake for dullness. At Jimville they see behavior as history and judge
it by facts, untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense. You glimpse
a crude equity in their dealings with Wilkins, who had shot a man at
Lone Tree, fairly, in an open quarrel. Rumor of it reached Jimville
before Wilkins rested there in flight. I saw Wilkins, all Jimville saw
him; in fact, he came into the Silver Dollar when we were holding a
church fair and bought a pink silk pincushion. I have often wondered
what became of it. Some of us shook hands with him, not because we did
not know, but because we had not been officially notified, and there
were those present who knew how it was themselves. When the sheriff
arrived Wilkins had moved on, and Jimville organized a posse and brought
him back, because the sheriff was a Jimville man and we had to stand by
him.

I said we had the church fair at the Silver Dollar. We had most things
there, dances, town meetings, and the kinetoscope exhibition of the
Passion Play. The Silver Dollar had been built when the borders of
Jimville spread from Minton to the red hill the Defiance twisted
through. "Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor for us and moved the bar
to the back room. The fair was designed for the support of the circuit
rider who preached to the few that would hear, and buried us all in
turn. He was the symbol of Jimville's respectability, although he was of
a sect that held dancing among the cardinal sins. The management took
no chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him the
receipts of the evening in the chairman's hat, as a delicate intimation
that the fair was closed. The company filed out of the front door and
around to the back. Then the dance began formally with no feelings
hurt. These were the sort of courtesies, common enough in Jimville, that
brought tears of delicate inner laughter.

There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of Mr. Harte's
demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the soil,--"Alkali
Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono Jim;" fierce, shy,
profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills, who each owned, or had
owned, a mine and was wishful to own one again. They laid up on the worn
benches of the Silver Dollar or the Same Old Luck like beached vessels,
and their talk ran on endlessly of "strike" and "contact" and "mother
lode," and worked around to fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and
the hoodoo of the Minietta, told austerely without imagination.

Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these things
written up from the point of view of people who do not do them every day
would get no savor in their speech.

Says Three Finger, relating the history of the Mariposa, "I took it
off'n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother Bill was shot."

Says Jim Jenkins, "What was the matter of him?"

"Who? Bill? Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around Johnson's wife,
an' Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."

"Why didn't he work it himself?"

"Him? Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to leave the
country pretty quick."

"Huh!" says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.

Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville out into
the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a few rarely
touched water-holes, always, always with the golden hope. They develop
prospects and grow rich, develop others and grow poor but never
embittered. Say the hills, It is all one, there is gold enough,
time enough, and men enough to come after you. And at Jimville they
understand the language of the hills.

Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the earth, it
prefers a "hunch." That is an intimation from the gods that if you go
over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping spring, up Coso way, you
will find what is worth while. I have never heard that the failure of
any particular hunch disproved the principle. Somehow the rawness of the
land favors the sense of personal relation to the supernatural. There is
not much intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you
and the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets
in Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an
explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and drunkenness,
coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a certain indifference,
blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the
pot,--it wants the German to coin a word for that,--no bread-envy, no
brother-fervor. Western writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the
savor of lawlessness too much upon their tongues, but you have these
to witness it is not mean-spiritedness. It is pure Greek in that it
represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond
that it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no
death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts,
so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods.
Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at.

Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct which
includes passion and death in its perquisites. I suppose that the end of
all our hammering and yawping will be something like the point of view
of Jimville. The only difference will be in the decorations.




MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD

It is one of those places God must have meant for a field from all
time, lying very level at the foot of the slope that crowds up against
Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town. North and south it is
fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder strewn and untenable. Eastward
it butts on orchard closes and the village gardens, brimming over into
them by wild brier and creeping grass. The village street, with its
double row of unlike houses, breaks off abruptly at the edge of the
field in a footpath that goes up the streamside, beyond it, to the
source of waters.

The field is not greatly esteemed of the town, not being put to the
plough nor affording firewood, but breeding all manner of wild seeds
that go down in the irrigating ditches to come up as weeds in the
gardens and grass plots. But when I had no more than seen it in the
charm of its spring smiling, I knew I should have no peace until I had
bought ground and built me a house beside it, with a little wicket to go
in and out at all hours, as afterward came about.

Edswick, Roeder, Connor, and Ruffin owned the field before it fell to my
neighbor. But before that the Paiutes, mesne lords of the soil, made a
campoodie by the rill of Pine Creek; and after, contesting the soil
with them, cattle-men, who found its foodful pastures greatly to their
advantage; and bands of blethering flocks shepherded by wild, hairy men
of little speech, who attested their rights to the feeding ground with
their long staves upon each other's skulls. Edswick homesteaded the
field about the time the wild tide of mining life was roaring and
rioting up Kearsarge, and where the village now stands built a stone
hut, with loopholes to make good his claim against cattlemen or Indians.
But Edswick died and Roeder became master of the field. Roeder owned
cattle on a thousand hills, and made it a recruiting ground for his
bellowing herds before beginning the long drive to market across a
shifty desert. He kept the field fifteen years, and afterward falling
into difficulties, put it out as security against certain sums. Connor,
who held the securities, was cleverer than Roeder and not so busy. The
money fell due the winter of the Big Snow, when all the trails were
forty feet under drifts, and Roeder was away in San Francisco selling
his cattle. At the set time Connor took the law by the forelock and was
adjudged possession of the field. Eighteen days later Roeder arrived on
snowshoes, both feet frozen, and the money in his pack. In the long suit
at law ensuing, the field fell to Ruffin, that clever one-armed lawyer
with the tongue to wile a bird out of the bush, Connor's counsel, and
was sold by him to my neighbor, whom from envying his possession I call
Naboth.

Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left no mark
on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking sheep. Round its
corners children pick up chipped arrow points of obsidian, scattered
through it are kitchen middens and pits of old sweat-houses. By the
south corner, where the campoodie stood, is a single shrub of "hoopee"
(Lycium andersonii), maintaining itself hardly among alien shrubs, and
near by, three low rakish trees of hackberry, so far from home that no
prying of mine has been able to find another in any canon east or west.
But the berries of both were food for the Paiutes, eagerly sought and
traded for as far south as Shoshone Land. By the fork of the creek where
the shepherds camp is a single clump of mesquite of the variety called
"screw bean." The seed must have shaken there from some sheep's coat,
for this is not the habitat of mesquite, and except for other single
shrubs at sheep camps, none grows freely for a hundred and fifty miles
south or east.

Naboth has put a fence about the best of the field, but neither the
Indians nor the shepherds can quite forego it. They make camp and build
their wattled huts about the borders of it, and no doubt they have some
sense of home in its familiar aspect.

As I have said, it is a low-lying field, between the mesa and the town,
with no hillocks in it, but a gentle swale where the waste water of the
creek goes down to certain farms, and the hackberry-trees, of which the
tallest might be three times the height of a man, are the tallest things
in it. A mile up from the water gate that turns the creek into supply
pipes for the town, begins a row of long-leaved pines, threading the
watercourse to the foot of Kearsarge. These are the pines that puzzle
the local botanist, not easily determined, and unrelated to other
conifers of the Sierra slope; the same pines of which the Indians relate
a legend mixed of brotherliness and the retribution of God. Once
the pines possessed the field, as the worn stumps of them along the
streamside show, and it would seem their secret purpose to regain their
old footing. Now and then some seedling escapes the devastating sheep a
rod or two down-stream. Since I came to live by the field one of these
has tiptoed above the gully of the creek, beckoning the procession
from the hills, as if in fact they would make back toward that
skyward-pointing finger of granite on the opposite range, from which,
according to the legend, when they were bad Indians and it a great
chief, they ran away. This year the summer floods brought the round,
brown, fruitful cones to my very door, and I look, if I live long
enough, to see them come up greenly in my neighbor's field.

It is interesting to watch this retaking of old ground by the wild
plants, banished by human use. Since Naboth drew his fence about the
field and restricted it to a few wild-eyed steers, halting between the
hills and the shambles, many old habitues of the field have come back
to their haunts. The willow and brown birch, long ago cut off by the
Indians for wattles, have come back to the streamside, slender and
virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the
brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows,
wild olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more
translucent greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow
and birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders,
slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the village
street. Convinced after three years that it would come no nearer, we
spent time fruitlessly pulling up roots to plant in the garden. All this
while, when no coaxing or care prevailed upon any transplanted slip
to grow, one was coming up silently outside the fence near the wicket,
coiling so secretly in the rabbit-brush that its presence was never
suspected until it flowered delicately along its twining length. The
horehound comes through the fence and under it, shouldering the pickets
off the railings; the brier rose mines under the horehound; and no care,
though I own I am not a close weeder, keeps the small pale moons of the
primrose from rising to the night moth under my apple-trees. The
first summer in the new place, a clump of cypripediums came up by the
irrigating ditch at the bottom of the lawn. But the clematis will not
come inside, nor the wild almond.

I have forgotten to find out, though I meant to, whether the wild almond
grew in that country where Moses kept the flocks of his father-in-law,
but if so one can account for the burning bush. It comes upon one with
a flame-burst as of revelation; little hard red buds on leafless twigs,
swelling unnoticeably, then one, two, or three strong suns, and from tip
to tip one soft fiery glow, whispering with bees as a singing flame. A
twig of finger size will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by
pink five-petaled bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees
find their way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of
fruit too often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny,
tap-rooted shrubs are resistant to most plant evils.

It is not easy always to be attentive to the maturing of wild fruit.
Plants are so unobtrusive in their material processes, and always at the
significant moment some other bloom has reached its perfect hour. One
can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has from
the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines. One notices
here and there a spike of bloom, and a day later the whole field royal
and ruffling lightly to the wind. Part of the charm of the lupine is the
continual stir of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere. Go and
stand by any crown of bloom and the tall stalks do but rock a little as
for drowsiness, but look off across the field, and on the stillest days
there is always a trepidation in the purple patches.

From midsummer until frost the prevailing note of the field is clear
gold, passing into the rusty tone of bigelovia going into a decline,
a succession of color schemes more admirably managed than the
transformation scene at the theatre. Under my window a colony of cleome
made a soft web of bloom that drew me every morning for a long still
time; and one day I discovered that I was looking into a rare fretwork
of fawn and straw colored twigs from which both bloom and leaf had gone,
and I could not say if it had been for a matter of weeks or days. The
time to plant cucumbers and set out cabbages may be set down in the
almanac, but never seed-time nor blossom in Naboth's field.

Certain winged and mailed denizens of the field seem to reach their
heyday along with the plants they most affect. In June the leaning
towers of the white milkweed are jeweled over with red and gold beetles,
climbing dizzily. This is that milkweed from whose stems the Indians
flayed fibre to make snares for small game, but what use the beetles put
it to except for a displaying ground for their gay coats, I could never
discover. The white butterfly crop comes on with the bigelovia bloom,
and on warm mornings makes an airy twinkling all across the field. In
September young linnets grow out of the rabbit-brush in the night. All
the nests discoverable in the neighboring orchards will not account for
the numbers of them. Somewhere, by the same secret process by which
the field matures a million more seeds than it needs, it is maturing
red-hooded linnets for their devouring. All the purlieus of bigelovia
and artemisia are noisy with them for a month. Suddenly as they come as
suddenly go the fly-by-nights, that pitch and toss on dusky barred wings
above the field of summer twilights.

Never one of these nighthawks will you see after linnet time, though the
hurtle of their wings makes a pleasant sound across the dusk in their
season.

For two summers a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field every
afternoon between three and four o'clock, swooping and soaring with
the airs of a gentleman adventurer. What he finds there is chiefly
conjectured, so secretive are the little people of Naboth's field. Only
when leaves fall and the light is low and slant, one sees the long
clean flanks of the jackrabbits, leaping like small deer, and of late
afternoons little cotton-tails scamper in the runways. But the most one
sees of the burrowers, gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of their
newly opened doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird hangs
on spiny shrubs.

It is a still field, this of my neighbor's, though so busy, and
admirably compounded for variety and pleasantness,--a little sand, a
little loam, a grassy plot, a stony rise or two, a full brown stream, a
little touch of humanness, a footpath trodden out by moccasins. Naboth
expects to make town lots of it and his fortune in one and the same day;
but when I take the trail to talk with old Seyavi at the campoodie, it
occurs to me that though the field may serve a good turn in those days
it will hardly be happier. No, certainly not happier.




THE MESA TRAIL

The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth's field,
though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the canon, or from
any of the cattle paths that go up along the streamside; a clean, pale,
smooth-trodden way between spiny shrubs, comfortably wide for a horse
or an Indian. It begins, I say, at the campoodie, and goes on toward the
twilight hills and the borders of Shoshone Land. It strikes diagonally
across the foot of the hill-slope from the field until it reaches the
larkspur level, and holds south along the front of Oppapago, having the
high ranges to the right and the foothills and the great Bitter Lake
below it on the left. The mesa holds very level here, cut across at
intervals by the deep washes of dwindling streams, and its treeless
spaces uncramp the soul.

Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback, at the jigging
coyote trot that only western-bred horses learn successfully. A
foot-pace carries one too slowly past the units in a decorative scheme
that is on a scale with the country round for bigness. It takes days'
journeys to give a note of variety to the country of the social
shrubs. These chiefly clothe the benches and eastern foot-slopes of the
Sierras,--great spreads of artemisia, coleogyne, and spinosa, suffering
no other woody stemmed thing in their purlieus; this by election
apparently, with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each their
clientele of flowering herbs. It would be worth knowing how much the
devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants to the
shelter of the prickle-bushes. It might have begun earlier, in the time
Seyavi of the campoodie tells of, when antelope ran on the mesa like
sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears itself except
from the midst of some stout twigged shrub; larkspur in the coleogyne,
and for every spinosa the purpling coils of phacelia. In the shrub
shelter, in the season, flock the little stemless things whose blossom
time is as short as a marriage song. The larkspurs make the best
showing, being tall and sweet, swaying a little above the shrubbery,
scattering pollen dust which Navajo brides gather to fill their marriage
baskets. This were an easier task than to find two of them of a shade.
Larkspurs in the botany are blue, but if you were to slip rein to the
stub of some black sage and set about proving it you would be still
at it by the hour when the white gilias set their pale disks to the
westering sun. This is the gilia the children call "evening snow," and
it is no use trying to improve on children's names for wild flowers.

From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a shifty
yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then as soon as
ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the sidelong ranges, come
little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the edge of the sand. By dusk
there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped
corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa wind as if they were real flakes
shaken out of a cloud, not sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch
stems. They keep awake all night, and all the air is heavy and musky
sweet because of them.

Farther south on the trail there will be poppies meeting ankle deep, and
singly, peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus blown out at the tops of
tall stems. But before the season is in tune for the gayer blossoms the
best display of color is in the lupin wash. There is always a lupin wash
somewhere on the mesa trail,--a broad, shallow, cobble-paved sink of
vanished waters, where the hummocks of Lupinus ornatus run a delicate
gamut from silvery green of spring to silvery white of winter foliage.
They look in fullest leaf, except for color, most like the huddled huts
of the campoodie, and the largest of them might be a man's length in
diameter. In their season, which is after the gilias are at their best,
and before the larkspurs are ripe for pollen gathering, every terminal
whorl of the lupin sends up its blossom stalk, not holding any constant
blue, but paling and purpling to guide the friendly bee to virginal
honey sips, or away from the perfected and depleted flower. The length
of the blossom stalk conforms to the rounded contour of the plant,
and of these there will be a million moving indescribably in the airy
current that flows down the swale of the wash.

There is always a little wind on the mesa, a sliding current of cooler
air going down the face of the mountain of its own momentum, but not to
disturb the silence of great space. Passing the wide mouths of canons,
one gets the effect of whatever is doing in them, openly or behind a
screen of cloud,--thunder of falls, wind in the pine leaves, or rush
and roar of rain. The rumor of tumult grows and dies in passing, as
from open doors gaping on a village street, but does not impinge on the
effect of solitariness.

In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for stillness, but the night
silence breaks into certain mellow or poignant notes. Late afternoons
the burrowing owls may be seen blinking at the doors of their hummocks
with perhaps four or five elfish nestlings arow, and by twilight begin a
soft whoo-oo-ing, rounder, sweeter, more incessant in mating time. It is
not possible to disassociate the call of the burrowing owl from the
late slant light of the mesa. If the fine vibrations which are the
golden-violet glow of spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it
would be just that mellow double note breaking along the blossom-tops.
While the glow holds one sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings
after prey, and on into the dark hears their soft pus-ssh! clearing out
of the trail ahead. Maybe the pinpoint shriek of field mouse or kangaroo
rat that pricks the wakeful pauses of the night is extorted by these
mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just as like to be the work of
the red fox on his twenty-mile constitutional.

Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours, and both
killers for the pure love of slaughter. The fox is no great talker, but
the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once,
gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light treaders, the split-feet,
so that the solitary camper sees their eyes about him in the dark
sometimes, and hears the soft intake of breath when no leaf has stirred
and no twig snapped underfoot. The coyote is your real lord of the mesa,
and so he makes sure you are armed with no long black instrument to
spit your teeth into his vitals at a thousand yards, is both bold
and curious. Not so bold, however, as the badger and not so much of a
curmudgeon. This short-legged meat-eater loves half lights and lowering
days, has no friends, no enemies, and disowns his offspring. Very likely
if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would resent it.
But the badger is not very well contrived for looking up or far to
either side. Dull afternoons he may be met nosing a trail hot-foot to
the home of ground rat or squirrel, and is with difficulty persuaded to
give the right of way. The badger is a pot-hunter and no sportsman. Once
at the hill, he dives for the central chamber, his sharp-clawed, splayey
feet splashing up the sand like a bather in the surf. He is a swift
trailer, but not so swift or secretive but some small sailing hawk
or lazy crow, perhaps one or two of each, has spied upon him and come
drifting down the wind to the killing.

No burrower is so unwise as not to have several exits from his dwelling
under protecting shrubs. When the badger goes down, as many of the furry
people as are not caught napping come up by the back doors, and the
hawks make short work of them. I suspect that the crows get nothing but
the gratification of curiosity and the pickings of some secret store
of seeds unearthed by the badger. Once the excavation begins they walk
about expectantly, but the little gray hawks beat slow circles about
the doors of exit, and are wiser in their generation, though they do not
look it.

There are always solitary hawks sailing above the mesa, and where some
blue tower of silence lifts out of the neighboring range, an eagle
hanging dizzily, and always buzzards high up in the thin, translucent
air making a merry-go-round. Between the coyote and the birds of carrion
the mesa is kept clear of miserable dead.

The wind, too, is a besom over the treeless spaces, whisking new sand
over the litter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little doorways
of the burrowers are as trim as city fronts. It takes man to leave
unsightly scars on the face of the earth. Here on the mesa the abandoned
campoodies of the Paiutes are spots of desolation long after the wattles
of the huts have warped in the brush heaps. The campoodies are near the
watercourses, but never in the swale of the stream. The Paiute seeks
rising ground, depending on air and sun for purification of his
dwelling, and when it becomes wholly untenable, moves.

A campoodie at noontime, when there is no smoke rising and no stir of
life, resembles nothing so much as a collection of prodigious wasps'
nests. The huts are squat and brown and chimneyless, facing east, and
the inhabitants have the faculty of quail for making themselves scarce
in the underbrush at the approach of strangers. But they are really not
often at home during midday, only the blind and incompetent left to keep
the camp. These are working hours, and all across the mesa one sees
the women whisking seeds of chia into their spoon-shaped baskets, these
emptied again into the huge conical carriers, supported on the shoulders
by a leather band about the forehead.

Mornings and late afternoons one meets the men singly and afoot on
unguessable errands, or riding shaggy, browbeaten ponies, with game
slung across the saddle-bows. This might be deer or even antelope,
rabbits, or, very far south towards Shoshone Land, lizards.

There are myriads of lizards on the mesa, little gray darts, or larger
salmon-sided ones that may be found swallowing their skins in the safety
of a prickle-bush in early spring. Now and then a palm's breadth of
the trail gathers itself together and scurries off with a little
rustle under the brush, to resolve itself into sand again. This is pure
witchcraft. If you succeed in catching it in transit, it loses its
power and becomes a flat, horned, toad-like creature, horrid-looking and
harmless, of the color of the soil; and the curio dealer will give you
two bits for it, to stuff. Men have their season on the mesa as much as
plants and four-footed things, and one is not like to meet them out of
their time. For example, at the time of rodeos, which is perhaps April,
one meets free riding vaqueros who need no trails and can find cattle
where to the layman no cattle exist. As early as February bands of sheep
work up from the south to the high Sierra pastures. It appears that
shepherds have not changed more than sheep in the process of time. The
shy hairy men who herd the tractile flocks might be, except for some
added clothing, the very brethren of David. Of necessity they are hardy,
simple livers, superstitious, fearful, given to seeing visions, and
almost without speech. It needs the bustle of shearings and copious
libations of sour, weak wine to restore the human faculty. Petite Pete,
who works a circuit up from the Ceriso to Red Butte and around by way of
Salt Flats, passes year by year on the mesa trail, his thick hairy chest
thrown open to all weathers, twirling his long staff, and dealing
brotherly with his dogs, who are possibly as intelligent, certainly
handsomer.

A flock's journey is seven miles, ten if pasture fails, in a windless
blur of dust, feeding as it goes, and resting at noons. Such hours Pete
weaves a little screen of twigs between his head and the sun--the rest
of him is as impervious as one of his own sheep--and sleeps while his
dogs have the flocks upon their consciences. At night, wherever he may
be, there Pete camps, and fortunate the trail-weary traveler who falls
in with him. When the fire kindles and savory meat seethes in the pot,
when there is a drowsy blether from the flock, and far down the mesa
the twilight twinkle of shepherd fires, when there is a hint of blossom
underfoot and a heavenly whiteness on the hills, one harks back without
effort to Judaea and the Nativity. But one feels by day anything but
good will to note the shorn shrubs and cropped blossom-tops. So many
seasons' effort, so many suns and rains to make a pound of wool! And
then there is the loss of ground-inhabiting birds that must fail from
the mesa when few herbs ripen seed.

Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more
sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim
of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is
poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. There are some
odors, too, that get into the blood. There is the spring smell of sage
that is the warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks
to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that
sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here,
the sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the
plant's best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There
is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from campoodies and sheep
camps, that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell
that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon long
acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it indubitably.
There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that comes up from the
alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and the smell of rain from
the wide-mouthed canons. And last the smell of the salt grass country,
which is the beginning of other things that are the end of the mesa
trail.




THE BASKET MAKER

"A man," says Seyavi of the campoodie, "must have a woman, but a woman
who has a child will do very well."

That was perhaps why, when she lost her mate in the dying struggle of
his race, she never took another, but set her wit to fend for herself
and her young son. No doubt she was often put to it in the beginning to
find food for them both. The Paiutes had made their last stand at the
border of the Bitter Lake; battle-driven they died in its waters, and
the land filled with cattle-men and adventurers for gold: this while
Seyavi and the boy lay up in the caverns of the Black Rock and ate tule
roots and fresh-water clams that they dug out of the slough bottoms with
their toes. In the interim, while the tribes swallowed their defeat, and
before the rumor of war died out, they must have come very near to the
bare core of things. That was the time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of
mother wit, and how much more easily one can do without a man than might
at first be supposed.

To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is
lived in and the procession of the year. This valley is a narrow one, a
mere trough between hills, a draught for storms, hardly a crow's flight
from the sharp Sierras of the Snows to the curled, red and ochre,
uncomforted, bare ribs of Waban. Midway of the groove runs a burrowing,
dull river, nearly a hundred miles from where it cuts the lava flats
of the north to its widening in a thick, tideless pool of a lake.
Hereabouts the ranges have no foothills, but rise up steeply from the
bench lands above the river. Down from the Sierras, for the east ranges
have almost no rain, pour glancing white floods toward the lowest land,
and all beside them lie the campoodies, brown wattled brush heaps,
looking east.

In the river are mussels, and reeds that have edible white roots, and in
the soddy meadows tubers of joint grass; all these at their best in the
spring. On the slope the summer growth affords seeds; up the steep the
one-leafed pines, an oily nut. That was really all they could depend
upon, and that only at the mercy of the little gods of frost and rain.
For the rest it was cunning against cunning, caution against skill,
against quacking hordes of wild-fowl in the tulares, against pronghorn
and bighorn and deer. You can guess, however, that all this warring of
rifles and bowstrings, this influx of overlording whites, had made game
wilder and hunters fearful of being hunted. You can surmise also, for it
was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became in turn the
game of the conquerors.

There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or outcast,
that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and foraged for
them, slinking savage and afraid, remembering and mistrusting humankind,
wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.

I have thought Seyavi might have had days like that, and have had
perfect leave to think, since she will not talk of it. Paiutes have
the art of reducing life to its lowest ebb and yet saving it alive on
grasshoppers, lizards, and strange herbs; and that time must have left
no shift untried. It lasted long enough for Seyavi to have evolved the
philosophy of life which I have set down at the beginning. She had
gone beyond learning to do for her son, and learned to believe it worth
while.

In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her
hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience. If she
goes on crimping and uncrimping with the changing mode, it is safe to
suppose she has never come up against anything too big for her. The
Indian woman gets nearly the same personal note in the pattern of her
baskets. Not that she does not make all kinds, carriers, water-bottles,
and cradles,--these are kitchen ware,--but her works of art are all of
the same piece. Seyavi made flaring, flat-bottomed bowls, cooking pots
really, when cooking was done by dropping hot stones into water-tight
food baskets, and for decoration a design in colored bark of the
procession of plumed crests of the valley quail. In this pattern she
had made cooking pots in the golden spring of her wedding year, when
the quail went up two and two to their resting places about the foot
of Oppapago. In this fashion she made them when, after pillage, it was
possible to reinstate the housewifely crafts. Quail ran then in the
Black Rock by hundreds,--so you will still find them in fortunate
years,--and in the famine time the women cut their long hair to make
snares when the flocks came morning and evening to the springs.

Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money, in a generation
that preferred iron pots for utility. Every Indian woman is an
artist,--sees, feels, creates, but does not philosophize about her
processes. Seyavi's bowls are wonders of technical precision, inside and
out, the palm finds no fault with them, but the subtlest appeal is in
the sense that warns us of humanness in the way the design spreads into
the flare of the bowl.

There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck trinket
baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate the design
to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket without sensible
disproportion, and so cleverly that you might own one a year without
thinking how it was done; but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond
cleverness. The weaver and the warp lived next to the earth and were
saturated with the same elements. Twice a year, in the time of white
butterflies and again when young quail ran neck and neck in the
chaparral, Seyavi cut willows for basketry by the creek where it wound
toward the river against the sun and sucking winds. It never quite
reached the river except in far-between times of summer flood, but it
always tried, and the willows encouraged it as much as they could. You
nearly always found them a little farther down than the trickle of eager
water. The Paiute fashion of counting time appeals to me more than any
other calendar. They have no stamp of heathen gods nor great ones, nor
any succession of moons as have red men of the East and North, but count
forward and back by the progress of the season; the time of taboose,
before the trout begin to leap, the end of the pinon harvest, about the
beginning of deep snows. So they get nearer the sense of the season,
which runs early or late according as the rains are forward or delayed.
But whenever Seyavi cut willows for baskets was always a golden time,
and the soul of the weather went into the wood. If you had ever owned
one of Seyavi's golden russet cooking bowls with the pattern of plumed
quail, you would understand all this without saying anything.

Before Seyavi made baskets for the satisfaction of desire,--for that is
a house-bred theory of art that makes anything more of it,--she danced
and dressed her hair. In those days, when the spring was at flood and
the blood pricked to the mating fever, the maids chose their flowers,
wreathed themselves, and danced in the twilights, young desire crying
out to young desire. They sang what the heart prompted, what the flower
expressed, what boded in the mating weather.

"And what flower did you wear, Seyavi?"

"I, ah,--the white flower of twining (clematis), on my body and my hair,
and so I sang:--

     "I am the white flower of twining,
     Little white flower by the river,
     Oh, flower that twines close by the river;
     Oh, trembling flower!
     So trembles the maiden heart."

So sang Seyavi of the campoodie before she made baskets, and in her
later days laid her arms upon her knees and laughed in them at the
recollection. But it was not often she would say so much, never
understanding the keen hunger I had for bits of lore and the "fool talk"
of her people. She had fed her young son with meadowlarks' tongues,
to make him quick of speech; but in late years was loath to admit it,
though she had come through the period of unfaith in the lore of the
clan with a fine appreciation of its beauty and significance.

"What good will your dead get, Seyavi, of the baskets you burn?" said I,
coveting them for my own collection.

Thus Seyavi, "As much good as yours of the flowers you strew."

Oppapago looks on Waban, and Waban on Coso and the Bitter Lake, and the
campoodie looks on these three; and more, it sees the beginning of winds
along the foot of Coso, the gathering of clouds behind the high ridges,
the spring flush, the soft spread of wild almond bloom on the mesa.
These first, you understand, are the Paiute's walls, the other his
furnishings. Not the wattled hut is his home, but the land, the winds,
the hill front, the stream. These he cannot duplicate at any furbisher's
shop as you who live within doors, who, if your purse allows, may have
the same home at Sitka and Samarcand. So you see how it is that the
homesickness of an Indian is often unto death, since he gets no relief
from it; neither wind nor weed nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the
hills of a strange land sufficiently like his own. So it was when the
government reached out for the Paiutes, they gathered into the Northern
Reservation only such poor tribes as could devise no other end of their
affairs. Here, all along the river, and south to Shoshone Land, live
the clans who owned the earth, fallen into the deplorable condition of
hangers-on. Yet you hear them laughing at the hour when they draw in to
the campoodie after labor, when there is a smell of meat and the steam
of the cooking pots goes up against the sun. Then the children lie with
their toes in the ashes to hear tales; then they are merry, and have the
joys of repletion and the nearness of their kind. They have their hills,
and though jostled are sufficiently free to get some fortitude for what
will come. For now you shall hear of the end of the basket maker.

In her best days Seyavi was most like Deborah, deep bosomed, broad in
the hips, quick in counsel, slow of speech, esteemed of her people. This
was that Seyavi who reared a man by her own hand, her own wit, and none
other. When the townspeople began to take note of her--and it was some
years after the war before there began to be any towns--she was then in
the quick maturity of primitive women; but when I knew her she seemed
already old. Indian women do not often live to great age, though they
look incredibly steeped in years. They have the wit to win sustenance
from the raw material of life without intervention, but they have not
the sleek look of the women whom the social organization conspires to
nourish. Seyavi had somehow squeezed out of her daily round a spiritual
ichor that kept the skill in her knotted fingers along after the
accustomed time, but that also failed. By all counts she would have been
about sixty years old when it came her turn to sit in the dust on the
sunny side of the wickiup, with little strength left for anything but
looking. And in time she paid the toll of the smoky huts and became
blind. This is a thing so long expected by the Paiutes that when it
comes they find it neither bitter nor sweet, but tolerable because
common. There were three other blind women in the campoodie, withered
fruit on a bough, but they had memory and speech. By noon of the sun
there were never any left in the campoodie but these or some mother of
weanlings, and they sat to keep the ashes warm upon the hearth. If it
were cold, they burrowed in the blankets of the hut; if it were warm,
they followed the shadow of the wickiup around. Stir much out of their
places they hardly dared, since one might not help another; but they
called, in high, old cracked voices, gossip and reminder across the ash
heaps.

Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour to spare,
there are things to be learned of life not set down in any books,
folk tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and desire, but no
whimpering. Now and then one or another of the blind keepers of the camp
will come across to where you sit gossiping, tapping her way among the
kitchen middens, guided by your voice that carries far in the clearness
and stillness of mesa afternoons. But suppose you find Seyavi retired
into the privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day.
There is no other privacy possible in a campoodie. All the processes of
life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven walls
of the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for behavior. Very
early the Indian learns to possess his countenance in impassivity, to
cover his head with his blanket. Something to wrap around him is as
necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet to pray in.

So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the unlit
hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her spirit against
the time of the spirit's need, for she knows in fact quite as much of
these matters as you who have a larger hope, though she has none but the
certainty that having borne herself courageously to this end she will
not be reborn a coyote.




THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow they go
up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and
cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each other,
and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by
courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind,--valleys are the
sunken places of the earth, canons are scored out by the glacier ploughs
of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced
open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and there in
the hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony
barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their
distinction is that they never get anywhere.

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where
a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by
singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and
madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from the
mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not
revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an
intolerable thirst.

The river canons of the Sierras of the Snows are better worth while than
most Broadways, though the choice of them is like the choice of streets,
not very well determined by their names. There is always an amount of
local history to be read in the names of mountain highways where one
touches the successive waves of occupation or discovery, as in the old
villages where the neighborhoods are not built but grow. Here you have
the Spanish Californian in Cero Gordo and pinon; Symmes and Shepherd,
pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek, Kearsarge,--easy
to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute that; Mist Canon
and Paddy Jack's. The streets of the west Sierras sloping toward the
San Joaquin are long and winding, but from the east, my country, a day's
ride carries one to the lake regions. The next day reaches the passes
of the high divide, but whether one gets passage depends a little on
how many have gone that road before, and much on one's own powers. The
passes are steep and windy ridges, though not the highest. By two and
three thousand feet the snow-caps overtop them. It is even possible to
wind through the Sierras without having passed above timber-line, but
one misses a great exhilaration.

The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out into
long shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other
thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a
distance, but the near-by granite bulk glitters with the terrible keen
polish of old glacial ages. I say terrible; so it seems. When those
glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain, you conceive how
long and imperturbable are the purposes of God.

Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best time to go
up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the merely idle or
sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and understanding, the best
time is when you have the longest leave to stay. And here is a hint if
you would attempt the stateliest approaches; travel light, and as much
as possible live off the land. Mulligatawny soup and tinned lobster will
not bring you the favor of the woodlanders.

Every canon commends itself for some particular pleasantness; this
for pines, another for trout, one for pure bleak beauty of granite
buttresses, one for its far-flung irised falls; and as I say, though
some are easier going, leads each to the cloud shouldering citadel.
First, near the canon mouth you get the low-heading full-branched,
one-leaf pines. That is the sort of tree to know at sight, for the
globose, resin-dripping cones have palatable, nourishing kernels, the
main harvest of the Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing
accommodatingly below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the
valley-ward slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts
with the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon the
wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here begins the
manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the sharp waste of
boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek, ruddy,
chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished laurel, and the
million unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pentstemon. Wild life is
likely to be busiest about the lower pine borders. One looks in hollow
trees and hiving rocks for wild honey. The drone of bees, the chatter of
jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous
and hot. The roar of the stream fills up the morning and evening
intervals, and at night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets. It is
worth watching the year round in the purlieus of the long-leafed pines.
One month or another you set sight or trail of most roving mountain
dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows, and more bloom
than you can properly appreciate.

Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains, water has
the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the shortest passage.
Where the rifts are narrow, and some of the Sierra canons are not a
stone's throw from wall to wall, the best trail for foot or horse winds
considerably above the watercourses; but in a country of cone-bearers
there is usually a good strip of swardy sod along the canon floor. Pine
woods, the short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high Sierras, are
sombre, rooted in the litter of a thousand years, hushed, and corrective
to the spirit. The trail passes insensibly into them from the black
pines and a thin belt of firs. You look back as you rise, and strain for
glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter Lake, and tender
cloud films on the farther ranges. For such pictures the pine
branches make a noble frame. Presently they close in wholly; they
draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks, giving up the trail
indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You get a kind of impatience
with their locked ranks, until you come out lastly on some high, windy
dome and see what they are about. They troop thickly up the open ways,
river banks, and brook borders; up open swales of dribbling springs;
swarm over old moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about
clean still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented, bowed, persisting
to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to pray for rain. The
spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than frankincense, and
trail it out over high altars, staining the snow.

No doubt they understand this work better than we; in fact they know no
other. "Come," say the churches of the valleys, after a season of dry
years, "let us pray for rain." They would do better to plant more trees.

It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die out.
Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing wood, the soul
is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They have no voice but the
wind, and no sound of them rises up to the high places. But the waters,
the evidences of their power, that go down the steep and stony ways, the
outlets of ice-bordered pools, the young rivers swaying with the force
of their running, they sing and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the
noise of it far outreaches the forest spires. You see from these conning
towers how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how
they fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them
countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad by
them.

Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a sense of
pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any, are home
dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They
grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent
curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines,
where they have borne the weight of sagging drifts.

Well up from the valley, at the confluence of canons, are delectable
summer meadows. Fireweed flames about them against the gray boulders;
streams are open, go smoothly about the glacier slips and make deep
bluish pools for trout. Pines raise statelier shafts and give themselves
room to grow,--gentians, shinleaf, and little grass of Parnassus in
their golden checkered shadows; the meadow is white with violets and all
outdoors keeps the clock. For example, when the ripples at the ford of
the creek raise a clear half tone,--sign that the snow water has come
down from the heated high ridges,--it is time to light the evening fire.
When it drops off a note--but you will not know it except the Douglas
squirrel tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial
gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint of the
nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it flashes from
Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it to the westering
peaks. The high rills wake and run, the birds begin. But down three
thousand feet in the canon, where you stir the fire under the cooking
pot, it will not be day for an hour. It goes on, the play of light
across the high places, rosy, purpling, tender, glint and glow, thunder
and windy flood, like the grave, exulting talk of elders above a merry
game.

Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the streets
of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the
silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine. Around the
amphitheatres of the lake regions and above them to the limit of
perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in splintered rock wastes. The
crowds of them, the airy spread of sepals, the pale purity of the petal
spurs, the quivering swing of bloom, obsesses the sense. One must learn
to spare a little of the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all
one's purse in one shop. There is always another year, and another.

Lingering on in the alpine regions until the first full snow, which
is often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good company.
First snows are soft and clogging and make laborious paths. Then it is
the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of the wood, below the
limit of early storms. Early winter and early spring one may have sight
or track of deer and bear and bighorn, cougar and bobcat, about the
thickets of buckthorn on open slopes between the black pines. But when
the ice crust is firm above the twenty foot drifts, they range far and
forage where they will. Often in midwinter will come, now and then, a
long fall of soft snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust,
and work a real hardship for the dwellers of these streets. When such a
storm portends the weather-wise blacktail will go down across the valley
and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than suffices
to nourish the sparsely growing pines. But the bighorn, the wild sheep,
able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress, cannot cope
with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over the mountains
that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly deep among the
lower rifts. I have a pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that were
borne as late as a year ago by a very monarch of the flock whom death
overtook at the mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow. He met it
as a king should, with no vain effort or trembling, and it was wholly
kind to take him so with four of his following rather than that the
night prowlers should find him.

There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one looks to
find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather. Light feet of
hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a wondrously plain
track in the snow. We used to look and look at the beginning of winter
for the birds to come down from the pine lands; looked in the orchard
and stubble; looked north and south on the mesa for their migratory
passing, and wondered that they never came. Busy little grosbeaks picked
about the kitchen doors, and woodpeckers tapped the eaves of the farm
buildings, but we saw hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer
canons. After a while when we grew bold to tempt the snow borders we
found them in the street of the mountains. In the thick pine woods where
the overlapping boughs hung with snow-wreaths make wind-proof shelter
tents, in a very community of dwelling, winter the bird-folk who get
their living from the persisting cones and the larvae harboring bark.
Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow chambers of the chaparral.
Consider how it must be in a hill-slope overgrown with stout-twigged,
partly evergreen shrubs, more than man high, and as thick as a hedge.
Not all the canon's sifting of snow can fill the intricate spaces of
the hill tangles. Here and there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch
of buckthorn, makes an opening to communicating rooms and runways deep
under the snow.

The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and ghostly,
but serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and the
wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that live plants,
especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off heat; the snow
wall melts earliest from within and hollows to thinnness before there is
a hint of spring in the air. But you think of these things afterward.
Up in the street it has the effect of being done consciously; the
buckthorns lean to each other and the drift to them, the little birds
run in and out of their appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness.
They give almost no tokens of distress, and even if the winter tries
them too much you are not to pity them. You of the house habit can
hardly understand the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor of being
comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an exaggerated
pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it or not they
adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease. The
business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous,
world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children crying
small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct its
affairs. Summer is their holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the
street, "I have need of a great work and no more playing."

But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness. They
are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the nobler plan which
they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned.




WATER BORDERS

I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and find
it pertinent to my subject,--Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits eastward and
solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and above a range of
little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave aspect as of some woman
you might have known, looking out across the grassy barrows of her dead.
From twin gray lakes under its noble brow stream down incessant white
and tumbling waters. "Mahala all time cry," said Winnenap', drawing
furrows in his rugged, wrinkled cheeks.

The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to
the understanding but mysterious to the sense. They are always at it,
but one so seldom catches them in the act. Here in the valley there is
no cessation of waters even in the season when the niggard frost gives
them scant leave to run. They make the most of their midday hour, and
tinkle all night thinly under the ice. An ear laid to the snow catches a
muffled hint of their eternal busyness fifteen or twenty feet under the
canon drifts, and long before any appreciable spring thaw, the sagging
edges of the snow bridges mark out the place of their running. One
who ventures to look for it finds the immediate source of the spring
freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed with the reek of melting drifts,
all the gravelly flats in a swirl of waters. But later, in June or July,
when the camping season begins, there runs the stream away full and
singing, with no visible reinforcement other than an icy trickle from
some high, belated dot of snow. Oftenest the stream drops bodily from
the bleak bowl of some alpine lake; sometimes breaks out of a hillside
as a spring where the ear can trace it under the rubble of loose stones
to the neighborhood of some blind pool. But that leaves the lakes to be
accounted for.

The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking, also
unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brows is guessed
at. It is always a favorite local tradition that one or another of the
blind lakes is bottomless. Often they lie in such deep cairns of broken
boulders that one never gets quite to them, or gets away unhurt. One
such drops below the plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds over,
perilously, nearing the pass. It lies still and wickedly green in its
sharp-lipped cap, and the guides of that region love to tell of the
packs and pack animals it has swallowed up.

But the lakes of Oppapago are perhaps not so deep, less green than gray,
and better befriended. The ousel haunts them, while still hang about
their coasts the thin undercut drifts that never quite leave the high
altitudes. In and out of the bluish ice caves he flits and sings, and
his singing heard from above is sweet and uncanny like the Nixie's
chord. One finds butterflies, too, about these high, sharp regions which
might be called desolate, but will not by me who love them. This is
above timber-line but not too high for comforting by succulent small
herbs and golden tufted grass. A granite mountain does not crumble with
alacrity, but once resolved to soil makes the best of it. Every handful
of loose gravel not wholly water leached affords a plant footing, and
even in such unpromising surroundings there is a choice of locations.
There is never going to be any communism of mountain herbage, their
affinities are too sure. Full in the tunnels of snow water on gravelly,
open spaces in the shadow of a drift, one looks to find buttercups,
frozen knee-deep by night, and owning no desire but to ripen their fruit
above the icy bath. Soppy little plants of the portulaca and small,
fine ferns shiver under the drip of falls and in dribbling crevices.
The bleaker the situation, so it is near a stream border, the better
the cassiope loves it. Yet I have not found it on the polished glacier
slips, but where the country rock cleaves and splinters in the high
windy headlands that the wild sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the
white bells swing over matted, mossy foliage. On Oppapago, which is also
called Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the beds of cassiope the
ice-worn, stony hollows where the big-horns cradle their young.

These are above the wolf's quest and the eagle's wont, and though the
heather beds are softer, they are neither so dry nor so warm, and here
only the stars go by. No other animal of any pretensions makes a habitat
of the alpine regions. Now and then one gets a hint of some small, brown
creature, rat or mouse kind, that slips secretly among the rocks; no
others adapt themselves to desertness of aridity or altitude so readily
as these ground inhabiting, graminivorous species. If there is an open
stream the trout go up the lake as far as the water breeds food for
them, but the ousel goes farthest, for pure love of it.

Since no lake can be at the highest point, it is possible to find plant
life higher than the water borders; grasses perhaps the highest, gilias,
royal blue trusses of polymonium, rosy plats of Sierra primroses. What
one has to get used to in flowers at high altitudes is the bleaching
of the sun. Hardly do they hold their virgin color for a day, and this
early fading before their function is performed gives them a pitiful
appearance not according with their hardihood. The color scheme runs
along the high ridges from blue to rosy purple, carmine and coral red;
along the water borders it is chiefly white and yellow where the mimulus
makes a vivid note, running into red when the two schemes meet and mix
about the borders of the meadows, at the upper limit of the columbine.

Here is the fashion in which a mountain stream gets down from the
perennial pastures of the snow to its proper level and identity as an
irrigating ditch. It slips stilly by the glacier scoured rim of an ice
bordered pool, drops over sheer, broken ledges to another pool, gathers
itself, plunges headlong on a rocky ripple slope, finds a lake again,
reinforced, roars downward to a pothole, foams and bridles, glides a
tranquil reach in some still meadow, tumbles into a sharp groove between
hill flanks, curdles under the stream tangles, and so arrives at the
open country and steadier going. Meadows, little strips of alpine
freshness, begin before the timberline is reached. Here one treads on
a carpet of dwarf willows, downy catkins of creditable size and the
greatest economy of foliage and stems. No other plant of high altitudes
knows its business so well. It hugs the ground, grows roots from stem
joints where no roots should be, grows a slender leaf or two and twice
as many erect full catkins that rarely, even in that short growing
season, fail of fruit. Dipping over banks in the inlets of the creeks,
the fortunate find the rosy apples of the miniature manzanita, barely,
but always quite sufficiently, borne above the spongy sod. It does not
do to be anything but humble in the alpine regions, but not fearful. I
have pawed about for hours in the chill sward of meadows where one might
properly expect to get one's death, and got no harm from it, except it
might be Oliver Twist's complaint. One comes soon after this to shrubby
willows, and where willows are trout may be confidently looked for in
most Sierra streams. There is no accounting for their distribution;
though provident anglers have assisted nature of late, one still comes
upon roaring brown waters where trout might very well be, but are not.

The highest limit of conifers--in the middle Sierras, the white bark
pine--is not along the water border. They come to it about the level of
the heather, but they have no such affinity for dampness as the tamarack
pines. Scarcely any bird-note breaks the stillness of the timber-line,
but chipmunks inhabit here, as may be guessed by the gnawed ruddy cones
of the pines, and lowering hours the woodchucks come down to the water.
On a little spit of land running into Windy Lake we found one summer the
evidence of a tragedy; a pair of sheep's horns not fully grown caught in
the crotch of a pine where the living sheep must have lodged them.
The trunk of the tree had quite closed over them, and the skull bones
crumbled away from the weathered horn cases. We hoped it was not too
far out of the running of night prowlers to have put a speedy end to the
long agony, but we could not be sure. I never liked the spit of Windy
Lake again.

It seems that all snow nourished plants count nothing so excellent in
their kind as to be forehanded with their bloom, working secretly to
that end under the high piled winters. The heathers begin by the lake
borders, while little sodden drifts still shelter under their branches.
I have seen the tiniest of them (Kalmia glauca) blooming, and with
well-formed fruit, a foot away from a snowbank from which it could
hardly have emerged within a week. Somehow the soul of the heather
has entered into the blood of the English-speaking. "And oh! is that
heather?" they say; and the most indifferent ends by picking a sprig of
it in a hushed, wondering way. One must suppose that the root of their
respective races issued from the glacial borders at about the same
epoch, and remember their origin.

Among the pines where the slope of the land allows it, the streams run
into smooth, brown, trout-abounding rills across open flats that are
in reality filled lake basins. These are the displaying grounds of the
gentians--blue--blue--eye-blue, perhaps, virtuous and likable flowers.
One is not surprised to learn that they have tonic properties. But if
your meadow should be outside the forest reserve, and the sheep have
been there, you will find little but the shorter, paler G. newberryii,
and in the matted sods of the little tongues of greenness that lick
up among the pines along the watercourses, white, scentless, nearly
stemless, alpine violets.

At about the nine thousand foot level and in the summer there will be
hosts of rosy-winged dodecatheon, called shooting-stars, outlining the
crystal tunnels in the sod. Single flowers have often a two-inch
spread of petal, and the full, twelve blossomed heads above the slender
pedicels have the airy effect of wings.

It is about this level one looks to find the largest lakes with thick
ranks of pines bearing down on them, often swamped in the summer floods
and paying the inevitable penalty for such encroachment. Here in wet
coves of the hills harbors that crowd of bloom that makes the wonder of
the Sierra canons.

They drift under the alternate flicker and gloom of the windy rooms
of pines, in gray rock shelters, and by the ooze of blind springs, and
their juxtapositions are the best imaginable. Lilies come up out of fern
beds, columbine swings over meadowsweet, white rein-orchids quake in the
leaning grass. Open swales, where in wet years may be running water, are
plantations of false hellebore (Veratrum californicum), tall, branched
candelabra of greenish bloom above the sessile, sheathing, boat-shaped
leaves, semi-translucent in the sun. A stately plant of the lily family,
but why "false?" It is frankly offensive in its character, and its young
juices deadly as any hellebore that ever grew.

Like most mountain herbs, it has an uncanny haste to bloom. One hears
by night, when all the wood is still, the crepitatious rustle of the
unfolding leaves and the pushing flower-stalk within, that has open
blossoms before it has fairly uncramped from the sheath. It commends
itself by a certain exclusiveness of growth, taking enough room and
never elbowing; for if the flora of the lake region has a fault it is
that there is too much of it. We have more than three hundred species
from Kearsarge Canon alone, and if that does not include them all it is
because they were already collected otherwhere.

One expects to find lakes down to about nine thousand feet, leading into
each other by comparatively open ripple slopes and white cascades. Below
the lakes are filled basins that are still spongy swamps, or substantial
meadows, as they get down and down.

Here begin the stream tangles. On the east slopes of the middle Sierras
the pines, all but an occasional yellow variety, desert the stream
borders about the level of the lowest lakes, and the birches and
tree-willows begin. The firs hold on almost to the mesa levels,--there
are no foothills on this eastern slope,--and whoever has firs misses
nothing else. It goes without saying that a tree that can afford to take
fifty years to its first fruiting will repay acquaintance. It keeps,
too, all that half century, a virginal grace of outline, but having once
flowered, begins quietly to put away the things of its youth. Years by
year the lower rounds of boughs are shed, leaving no scar; year by year
the star-branched minarets approach the sky. A fir-tree loves a water
border, loves a long wind in a draughty canon, loves to spend itself
secretly on the inner finishings of its burnished, shapely cones. Broken
open in mid-season the petal-shaped scales show a crimson satin surface,
perfect as a rose.

The birch--the brown-bark western birch characteristic of lower stream
tangles--is a spoil sport. It grows thickly to choke the stream that
feeds it; grudges it the sky and space for angler's rod and fly. The
willows do better; painted-cup, cypripedium, and the hollow stalks
of span-broad white umbels, find a footing among their stems. But in
general the steep plunges, the white swirls, green and tawny pools, the
gliding hush of waters between the meadows and the mesas afford little
fishing and few flowers.

One looks for these to begin again when once free of the rifted canon
walls; the high note of babble and laughter falls off to the steadier
mellow tone of a stream that knows its purpose and reflects the sky.




OTHER WATER BORDERS

It is the proper destiny of every considerable stream in the west to
become an irrigating ditch. It would seem the streams are willing. They
go as far as they can, or dare, toward the tillable lands in their own
boulder fenced gullies--but how much farther in the man-made waterways.
It is difficult to come into intimate relations with appropriated
waters; like very busy people they have no time to reveal themselves.
One needs to have known an irrigating ditch when it was a brook, and to
have lived by it, to mark the morning and evening tone of its crooning,
rising and falling to the excess of snow water; to have watched far
across the valley, south to the Eclipse and north to the Twisted Dyke,
the shining wall of the village water gate; to see still blue herons
stalking the little glinting weirs across the field.

Perhaps to get into the mood of the waterways one needs to have seen
old Amos Judson asquat on the headgate with his gun, guarding his
water-right toward the end of a dry summer. Amos owned the half of Tule
Creek and the other half pertained to the neighboring Greenfields ranch.
Years of a "short water crop," that is, when too little snow fell on the
high pine ridges, or, falling, melted too early, Amos held that it took
all the water that came down to make his half, and maintained it with
a Winchester and a deadly aim. Jesus Montana, first proprietor
of Greenfields,--you can see at once that Judson had the racial
advantage,--contesting the right with him, walked into five of Judson's
bullets and his eternal possessions on the same occasion. That was the
Homeric age of settlement and passed into tradition. Twelve years later
one of the Clarks, holding Greenfields, not so very green by now, shot
one of the Judsons. Perhaps he hoped that also might become classic, but
the jury found for manslaughter. It had the effect of discouraging the
Greenfields claim, but Amos used to sit on the headgate just the same,
as quaint and lone a figure as the sandhill crane watching for water
toads below the Tule drop.

Every subsequent owner of Greenfields bought it with Amos in full view.
The last of these was Diedrick. Along in August of that year came a week
of low water. Judson's ditch failed and he went out with his rifle to
learn why. There on the headgate sat Diedrick's frau with a long-handled
shovel across her lap and all the water turned into Diedrick's ditch;
there she sat knitting through the long sun, and the children brought
out her dinner. It was all up with Amos; he was too much of a gentleman
to fight a lady--that was the way he expressed it. She was a very large
lady, and a long-handled shovel is no mean weapon. The next year Judson
and Diedrick put in a modern water gauge and took the summer ebb in
equal inches. Some of the water-right difficulties are more squalid than
this, some more tragic; but unless you have known them you cannot very
well know what the water thinks as it slips past the gardens and in the
long slow sweeps of the canal. You get that sense of brooding from the
confined and sober floods, not all at once but by degrees, as one might
become aware of a middle-aged and serious neighbor who has had that in
his life to make him so. It is the repose of the completely accepted
instinct.

With the water runs a certain following of thirsty herbs and shrubs. The
willows go as far as the stream goes, and a bit farther on the slightest
provocation. They will strike root in the leak of a flume, or the
dribble of an overfull bank, coaxing the water beyond its appointed
bounds. Given a new waterway in a barren land, and in three years the
willows have fringed all its miles of banks; three years more and they
will touch tops across it. It is perhaps due to the early usurpation
of the willows that so little else finds growing-room along the large
canals. The birch beginning far back in the canon tangles is more
conservative; it is shy of man haunts and needs to have the permanence
of its drink assured. It stops far short of the summer limit of waters,
and I have never known it to take up a position on the banks beyond
the ploughed lands. There is something almost like premeditation in the
avoidance of cultivated tracts by certain plants of water borders. The
clematis, mingling its foliage secretly with its host, comes down with
the stream tangles to the village fences, skips over to corners of
little used pasture lands and the plantations that spring up about
waste water pools; but never ventures a footing in the trail of spade or
plough; will not be persuaded to grow in any garden plot. On the other
hand, the horehound, the common European species imported with the
colonies, hankers after hedgerows and snug little borders. It is more
widely distributed than many native species, and may be always found
along the ditches in the village corners, where it is not appreciated.
The irrigating ditch is an impartial distributer. It gathers all the
alien weeds that come west in garden and grass seeds and affords
them harbor in its banks. There one finds the European mallow (Malva
rotundifolia) spreading out to the streets with the summer overflow, and
every spring a dandelion or two, brought in with the blue grass seed,
uncurls in the swardy soil. Farther than either of these have come the
lilies that the Chinese coolies cultivate in adjacent mud holes for
their foodful bulbs. The seegoo establishes itself very readily in
swampy borders, and the white blossom spikes among the arrow-pointed
leaves are quite as acceptable to the eye as any native species.

In the neighborhood of towns founded by the Spanish Californians,
whether this plant is native to the locality or not, one can always find
aromatic clumps of yerba buena, the "good herb" (Micromeria douglassii).
The virtue of it as a febrifuge was taught to the mission fathers by the
neophytes, and wise old dames of my acquaintance have worked astonishing
cures with it and the succulent yerba mansa. This last is native to wet
meadows and distinguished enough to have a family all to itself.

Where the irrigating ditches are shallow and a little neglected, they
choke quickly with watercress that multiplies about the lowest Sierra
springs. It is characteristic of the frequenters of water borders near
man haunts, that they are chiefly of the sorts that are useful to
man, as if they made their services an excuse for the intrusion. The
joint-grass of soggy pastures produces edible, nut-flavored tubers,
called by the Indians taboose. The common reed of the ultramontane
marshes (here Phragmites vulgaris), a very stately, whispering reed,
light and strong for shafts or arrows, affords sweet sap and pith which
makes a passable sugar.

It seems the secrets of plant powers and influences yield themselves
most readily to primitive peoples, at least one never hears of the
knowledge coming from any other source. The Indian never concerns
himself, as the botanist and the poet, with the plant's appearances and
relations, but with what it can do for him.

It can do much, but how do you suppose he finds it out; what instincts
or accidents guide him? How does a cat know when to eat catnip? Why do
western bred cattle avoid loco weed, and strangers eat it and go mad?
One might suppose that in a time of famine the Paiutes digged wild
parsnip in meadow corners and died from eating it, and so learned to
produce death swiftly and at will. But how did they learn, repenting in
the last agony, that animal fat is the best antidote for its virulence;
and who taught them that the essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis),
which looks to have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in
stomachic disorders. But they so understand and so use. One believes
it to be a sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a complexer
civilization. I remember very well when I came first upon a wet meadow
of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or use. It looked potent; the
cool, shiny leaves, the succulent, pink stems and fruity bloom. A little
touch, a hint, a word, and I should have known what use to put them to.
So I felt, unwilling to leave it until we had come to an understanding.
So a musician might have felt in the presence of an instrument known to
be within his province, but beyond his power. It was with the relieved
sense of having shaped a long surmise that I watched the Senora Romero
make a poultice of it for my burned hand.

On, down from the lower lakes to the village weirs, the brown and golden
disks of helenum have beauty as a sufficient excuse for being. The
plants anchor out on tiny capes, or mid-stream islets, with the nearly
sessile radicle leaves submerged. The flowers keep up a constant
trepidation in time with the hasty water beating at their stems,
a quivering, instinct with life, that seems always at the point of
breaking into flight; just as the babble of the watercourses always
approaches articulation but never quite achieves it. Although of wide
range the helenum never makes itself common through profusion, and may
be looked for in the same places from year to year. Another lake
dweller that comes down to the ploughed lands is the red columbine. (
C.truncata). It requires no encouragement other than shade, but grows
too rank in the summer heats and loses its wildwood grace. A common
enough orchid in these parts is the false lady's slipper (Epipactis
gigantea), one that springs up by any water where there is sufficient
growth of other sorts to give it countenance. It seems to thrive best in
an atmosphere of suffocation.

The middle Sierras fall off abruptly eastward toward the high valleys.
Peaks of the fourteen thousand class, belted with sombre swathes
of pine, rise almost directly from the bench lands with no foothill
approaches. At the lower edge of the bench or mesa the land falls away,
often by a fault, to the river hollows, and along the drop one looks for
springs or intermittent swampy swales. Here the plant world resembles a
little the lake gardens, modified by altitude and the use the town folk
put it to for pasture. Here are cress, blue violets, potentilla, and, in
the damp of the willow fence-rows, white false asphodels. I am sure we
make too free use of this word FALSE in naming plants--false mallow,
false lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at least no falsifier, but
a true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though small of flower and
run mostly to leaves, and should have a name that gives it credit for
growing up in such celestial semblance. Native to the mesa meadows is a
pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full
bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are
too thin and sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full
fields have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand,
and quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal. A very
poet's flower, I thought; not fit for gathering up, and proving a
nuisance in the pastures, therefore needing to be the more loved. And
one day I caught Winnenap' drawing out from mid leaf a fine strong fibre
for making snares. The borders of the iris fields are pure gold, nearly
sessile buttercups and a creeping-stemmed composite of a redder hue. I
am convinced that English-speaking children will always have buttercups.
If they do not light upon the original companion of little frogs
they will take the next best and cherish it accordingly. I find
five unrelated species loved by that name, and as many more and as
inappropriately called cowslips.

By every mesa spring one may expect to find a single shrub of the
buckthorn, called of old time Cascara sagrada--the sacred bark. Up
in the canons, within the limit of the rains, it seeks rather a stony
slope, but in the dry valleys is not found away from water borders.

In all the valleys and along the desert edges of the west are
considerable areas of soil sickly with alkali-collecting pools, black
and evil-smelling like old blood. Very little grows hereabout but
thick-leaved pickle weed. Curiously enough, in this stiff mud, along
roadways where there is frequently a little leakage from canals, grows
the only western representative of the true heliotropes (Heliotropium
curassavicum). It has flowers of faded white, foliage of faded green,
resembling the "live-for-ever" of old gardens and graveyards, but even
less attractive. After so much schooling in the virtues of water-seeking
plants, one is not surprised to learn that its mucilaginous sap has
healing powers.

Last and inevitable resort of overflow waters is the tulares, great
wastes of reeds (Juncus) in sickly, slow streams. The reeds, called
tules, are ghostly pale in winter, in summer deep poisonous-looking
green, the waters thick and brown; the reed beds breaking into dingy
pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow winding water lanes and sinking
paths. The tules grow inconceivably thick in places, standing man-high
above the water; cattle, no, not any fish nor fowl can penetrate them.
Old stalks succumb slowly; the bed soil is quagmire, settling with the
weight as it fills and fills. Too slowly for counting they raise little
islands from the bog and reclaim the land. The waters pushed out cut
deeper channels, gnaw off the edges of the solid earth.

The tulares are full of mystery and malaria. That is why we have meant
to explore them and have never done so. It must be a happy mystery. So
you would think to hear the redwinged blackbirds proclaim it clear March
mornings. Flocks of them, and every flock a myriad, shelter in the dry,
whispering stems. They make little arched runways deep into the heart
of the tule beds. Miles across the valley one hears the clamor of their
high, keen flutings in the mating weather.

Wild fowl, quacking hordes of them, nest in the tulares. Any day's
venture will raise from open shallows the great blue heron on his hollow
wings. Chill evenings the mallard drakes cry continually from the glassy
pools, the bittern's hollow boom rolls along the water paths. Strange
and farflown fowl drop down against the saffron, autumn sky. All day
wings beat above it hazy with speed; long flights of cranes glimmer in
the twilight. By night one wakes to hear the clanging geese go over.
One wishes for, but gets no nearer speech from those the reedy fens have
swallowed up. What they do there, how fare, what find, is the secret of
the tulares.




NURSLINGS OF THE SKY

Choose a hill country for storms. There all the business of the weather
is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in familiarity.
When you come to think about it, the disastrous storms are on the
levels, sea or sand or plains. There you get only a hint of what is
about to happen, the fume of the gods rising from their meeting place
under the rim of the world; and when it breaks upon you there is no stay
nor shelter. The terrible mewings and mouthings of a Kansas wind have
the added terror of viewlessness. You are lapped in them like uprooted
grass; suspect them of a personal grudge. But the storms of hill
countries have other business. They scoop watercourses, manure the
pines, twist them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars,
and, if you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no
harm.

They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and warnings,
and they leave you in no doubt about their performances. One who builds
his house on a water scar or the rubble of a steep slope must take
chances. So they did in Overtown who built in the wash of Argus water,
and at Kearsarge at the foot of a steep, treeless swale. After twenty
years Argus water rose in the wash against the frail houses, and the
piled snows of Kearsarge slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and
the camp, but you could conceive that it was the fault of neither the
water nor the snow.

The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and intention
in storm processes. Weather does not happen. It is the visible
manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void. It gathers itself
together under the heavens; rains, snows, yearns mightily in wind,
smiles; and the Weather Bureau, situated advantageously for that very
business, taps the record on his instruments and going out on the
streets denies his God, not having gathered the sense of what he has
seen. Hardly anybody takes account of the fact that John Muir, who knows
more of mountain storms than any other, is a devout man.

Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered peaks
about the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or the short,
wide-mouthed canons opening eastward on high valleys. Days when the
hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds came walking on
the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath, rounded and pearly
white above. They gather flock-wise, moving on the level currents that
roll about the peaks, lock hands and settle with the cooler air, drawing
a veil about those places where they do their work. If their meeting or
parting takes place at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets
the splendor of the apocalypse. There will be cloud pillars miles high,
snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective before the
unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of clouds that dance
to some pied piper of an unfelt wind. But be it day or night, once they
have settled to their work, one sees from the valley only the blank wall
of their tents stretched along the ranges. To get the real effect of a
mountain storm you must be inside.

One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What if it
should rain? It always does rain somewhere among the peaks: the unusual
thing is that one should escape it. You might suppose that if you took
any account of plant contrivances to save their pollen powder against
showers. Note how many there are deep-throated and bell-flowered like
the pentstemons, how many have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how
many grow in copse shelters and grow there only. There is keen delight
in the quick showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born
of experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
altitudes. The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the canon wall,
slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy pass, obscures your
sun. Next you hear the rain drum on the broad-leaved hellebore, and beat
down the mimulus beside the brook.

You shelter on the lee of some strong pine with shut-winged butterflies
and merry, fiddling creatures of the wood. Runnels of rain water from
the glacier-slips swirl through the pine needles into rivulets; the
streams froth and rise in their banks. The sky is white with cloud; the
sky is gray with rain; the sky is clear. The summer showers leave no
wake.

Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August weather.
Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs about the
lake gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away harmlessly.
Sometimes one has the good fortune from a heather-grown headland to
watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air. Out over meadow or lake region
begins a little darkling of the sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a
smokiness such as spirits materialize from in witch stories.

It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret canons.
Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind comes up and
drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull lake pitted by the
glancing drops, dissolving as it drives. Such rains relieve like tears.

The same season brings the rains that have work to do, ploughing storms
that alter the face of things. These come with thunder and the play of
live fire along the rocks. They come with great winds that try the pines
for their work upon the seas and strike out the unfit. They shake down
avalanches of splinters from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden
floods like battle fronts in the canons against towns, trees, and
boulders. They would be kind if they could, but have more important
matters. Such storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not
rain, rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer. After
such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles away is
white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.

All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in the
geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries. I remember one
night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by the houseless cry
of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family, had been buried under
a slide of broken boulders on the slope of Kearsarge. We had heard the
heavy detonation of the slide about the hour of the alpenglow, a pale
rosy interval in a darkling air, and judged he must have come from
hunting to the ruined cliff and paced the night out before it, crying a
very human woe. I remember, too, in that same season of storms, a lake
made milky white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay washed
into it by a fury of rain, with the trout floating in it belly up,
stunned by the shock of the sudden flood. But there were trout enough
for what was left of the lake next year and the beginning of a meadow
about its upper rim. What taxed me most in the wreck of one of my
favorite canons by cloud-burst was to see a bobcat mother mouthing her
drowned kittens in the ruined lair built in the wash, far above the
limit of accustomed waters, but not far enough for the unexpected. After
a time you get the point of view of gods about these things to save you
from being too pitiful.

The great snows that come at the beginning of winter, before there is
yet any snow except the perpetual high banks, are best worth while to
watch. These come often before the late bloomers are gone and while the
migratory birds are still in the piney woods. Down in the valley you see
little but the flocking of blackbirds in the streets, or the low
flight of mallards over the tulares, and the gathering of clouds
behind Williamson. First there is a waiting stillness in the wood; the
pine-trees creak although there is no wind, the sky glowers, the firs
rock by the water borders. The noise of the creek rises insistently
and falls off a full note like a child abashed by sudden silence in the
room.

This changing of the stream-tone following tardily the changes of the
sun on melting snows is most meaningful of wood notes. After it runs
a little trumpeter wind to cry the wild creatures to their holes.
Sometimes the warning hangs in the air for days with increasing
stillness. Only Clark's crow and the strident jays make light of it;
only they can afford to. The cattle get down to the foothills and
ground-inhabiting creatures make fast their doors. It grows chill, blind
clouds fumble in the canons; there will be a roll of thunder, perhaps,
or a flurry of rain, but mostly the snow is born in the air with
quietness and the sense of strong white pinions softly stirred. It
increases, is wet and clogging, and makes a white night of midday.

There is seldom any wind with first snows, more often rain, but later,
when there is already a smooth foot or two over all the slopes, the
drifts begin. The late snows are fine and dry, mere ice granules at the
wind's will. Keen mornings after a storm they are blown out in wreaths
and banners from the high ridges sifting into the canons.

Once in a year or so we have a "big snow." The cloud tents are widened
out to shut in the valley and an outlying range or two and are drawn
tight against the sun. Such a storm begins warm, with a dry white mist
that fills and fills between the ridges, and the air is thick with
formless groaning. Now for days you get no hint of the neighboring
ranges until the snows begin to lighten and some shouldering peak
lifts through a rent. Mornings after the heavy snows are steely blue,
two-edged with cold, divinely fresh and still, and these are times to go
up to the pine borders. There you may find floundering in the unstable
drifts "tainted wethers" of the wild sheep, faint from age and hunger;
easy prey. Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and
once we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white glare.

No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver fir. The
star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft wreaths--droop
and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point of overloading is
reached, there is a soft sough and muffled drooping, the boughs recover,
and the weighting goes on until the drifts have reached the midmost
whorls and covered up the branches.

When the snows are particularly wet and heavy they spread over the young
firs in green-ribbed tents wherein harbor winter loving birds.

All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent. East and
east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges, desertward, and
no rain breaks over them, except from some far-strayed cloud or roving
wind from the California Gulf, and these only in winter. In summer the
sky travails with thunderings and the flare of sheet lightnings to win
a few blistering big drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a
torrent. But you have not known what force resides in the mindless
things until you have known a desert wind. One expects it at the turn of
the two seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves. Along the
edge of the mesa where it drops off to the valley, dust devils begin to
rise white and steady, fanning out at the top like the genii out of the
Fisherman's bottle. One supposes the Indians might have learned the
use of smoke signals from these dust pillars as they learn most things
direct from the tutelage of the earth. The air begins to move fluently,
blowing hot and cold between the ranges. Far south rises a murk of sand
against the sky; it grows, the wind shakes itself, and has a smell of
earth. The cloud of small dust takes on the color of gold and shuts out
the neighborhood, the push of the wind is unsparing. Only man of all
folk is foolish enough to stir abroad in it. But being in a house is
really much worse; no relief from the dust, and a great fear of the
creaking timbers. There is no looking ahead in such a wind, and the bite
of the small sharp sand on exposed skin is keener than any insect sting.
One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind wears one to the point
of exhaustion very soon, but there is dread, in open sand stretches
sometimes justified, of being over blown by the drift. It is hot, dry,
fretful work, but by going along the ground with the wind behind, one
may come upon strange things in its tumultuous privacy. I like these
truces of wind and heat that the desert makes, otherwise I do not know
how I should come by so many acquaintances with furtive folk. I like
to see hawks sitting daunted in shallow holes, not daring to spread a
feather, and doves in a row by the prickle-bushes, and shut-eyed cattle,
turned tail to the wind in a patient doze. I like the smother of sand
among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in open places, but I
never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep. The wind robs them of
what wit they had, and they seem never to have learned the self-induced
hypnotic stupor with which most wild things endure weather stress. I
have never heard that the desert winds brought harm to any other than
the wandering shepherds and their flocks. Once below Pastaria Little
Pete showed me bones sticking out of the sand where a flock of two
hundred had been smothered in a bygone wind. In many places the
four-foot posts of a cattle fence had been buried by the wind-blown
dunes.

It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch the cloud
currents and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge, say, you look over
Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on the level desert air;
south of you hurries a white troop late to some gathering of their kind
at the back of Oppapago; nosing the foot of Waban, a woolly mist creeps
south. In the clean, smooth paths of the middle sky and highest up in
air, drift, unshepherded, small flocks ranging contrarily. You will
find the proper names of these things in the reports of the Weather
Bureau--cirrus, cumulus, and the like and charts that will teach by
study when to sow and take up crops. It is astonishing the trouble
men will be at to find out when to plant potatoes, and gloze over the
eternal meaning of the skies. You have to beat out for yourself many
mornings on the windy headlands the sense of the fact that you get the
same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden
hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.




THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

There are still some places in the west where the quails cry "cuidado";
where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle; where all the
dishes have chile in them, and they make more of the Sixteenth of
September than they do of the Fourth of July. I mean in particular El
Pueblo de Las Uvas. Where it lies, how to come at it, you will not get
from me; rather would I show you the heron's nest in the tulares. It has
a peak behind it, glinting above the tamarack pines, above a breaker of
ruddy hills that have a long slope valley-wards and the shoreward steep
of waves toward the Sierras.

Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas for
common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the tulares.
It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of
cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabouts are some
strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the
village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of the arrastra. Wild vines
that begin among the willows lap over to the orchard rows, take the
trellis and roof-tree.

There is another town above Las Uvas that merits some attention, a town
of arches and airy crofts, full of linnets, blackbirds, fruit birds,
small sharp hawks, and mockingbirds that sing by night. They pour out
piercing, unendurably sweet cavatinas above the fragrance of bloom and
musky smell of fruit. Singing is in fact the business of the night
at Las Uvas as sleeping is for midday. When the moon comes over the
mountain wall new-washed from the sea, and the shadows lie like lace
on the stamped floors of the patios, from recess to recess of the vine
tangle runs the thrum of guitars and the voice of singing.

At Las Uvas they keep up all the good customs brought out of Old Mexico
or bred in a lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and look out for
something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten to a family, have
cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes and wait for the sun
to go down. And always they dance; at dusk on the smooth adobe floors,
afternoons under the trellises where the earth is damp and has a fruity
smell. A betrothal, a wedding, or a christening, or the mere proximity
of a guitar is sufficient occasion; and if the occasion lacks, send for
the guitar and dance anyway.

All this requires explanation. Antonio Sevadra, drifting this way from
Old Mexico with the flood that poured into the Tappan district after the
first notable strike, discovered La Golondrina. It was a generous lode
and Tony a good fellow; to work it he brought in all the Sevadras, even
to the twice-removed; all the Castros who were his wife's family,
all the Saises, Romeros, and Eschobars,--the relations of his
relations-in-law. There you have the beginning of a pretty considerable
town. To these accrued much of the Spanish California float swept out
of the southwest by eastern enterprise. They slacked away again when the
price of silver went down, and the ore dwindled in La Golondrina. All
the hot eddy of mining life swept away from that corner of the hills,
but there were always those too idle, too poor to move, or too easily
content with El Pueblo de Las Uvas.

Nobody comes nowadays to the town of the grape vines except, as we say,
"with the breath of crying," but of these enough. All the low sills run
over with small heads. Ah, ah! There is a kind of pride in that if you
did but know it, to have your baby every year or so as the time sets,
and keep a full breast. So great a blessing as marriage is easily come
by. It is told of Ruy Garcia that when he went for his marriage license
he lacked a dollar of the clerk's fee, but borrowed it of the sheriff,
who expected reelection and exhibited thereby a commendable thrift.
Of what account is it to lack meal or meat when you may have it of any
neighbor? Besides, there is sometimes a point of honor in these things.
Jesus Romero, father of ten, had a job sacking ore in the Marionette
which he gave up of his own accord. "Eh, why?" said Jesus, "for my
fam'ly."

"It is so, senora," he said solemnly, "I go to the Marionette, I work,
I eat meat--pie--frijoles--good, ver' good. I come home sad'day nigh'
I see my fam'ly. I play lil' game poker with the boys, have lil' drink
wine, my money all gone. My fam'ly have no money, nothing eat. All time
I work at mine I eat, good, ver' good grub. I think sorry for my fam'ly.
No, no, senora, I no work no more that Marionette, I stay with my
fam'ly." The wonder of it is, I think, that the family had the same
point of view.

Every house in the town of the vines has its garden plot, corn and brown
beans and a row of peppers reddening in the sun; and in damp borders
of the irrigating ditches clumps of yerbasanta, horehound, catnip, and
spikenard, wholesome herbs and curative, but if no peppers then nothing
at all. You will have for a holiday dinner, in Las Uvas, soup with meat
balls and chile in it, chicken with chile, rice with chile, fried beans
with more chile, enchilada, which is corn cake with the sauce of chile
and tomatoes, onion, grated cheese, and olives, and for a relish
chile tepines passed about in a dish, all of which is comfortable and
corrective to the stomach. You will have wine which every man makes for
himself, of good body and inimitable bouquet, and sweets that are not
nearly so nice as they look.

There are two occasions when you may count on that kind of a meal;
always on the Sixteenth of September, and on the two-yearly visits of
Father Shannon. It is absurd, of course, that El Pueblo de Las Uvas
should have an Irish priest, but Black Rock, Minton, Jimville, and all
that country round do not find it so. Father Shannon visits them all,
waits by the Red Butte to confess the shepherds who go through with
their flocks, carries blessing to small and isolated mines, and so in
the course of a year or so works around to Las Uvas to bury and marry
and christen. Then all the little graves in the Campo Santo are brave
with tapers, the brown pine headboards blossom like Aaron's rod with
paper roses and bright cheap prints of Our Lady of Sorrows. Then the
Senora Sevadra, who thinks herself elect of heaven for that office,
gathers up the original sinners, the little Elijias, Lolas, Manuelitas,
Joses, and Felipes, by dint of adjurations and sweets smuggled into
small perspiring palms, to fit them for the Sacrament.

I used to peek in at them, never so softly, in Dona Ina's living-room;
Raphael-eyed little imps, going sidewise on their knees to rest them
from the bare floor, candles lit on the mantel to give a religious air,
and a great sheaf of wild bloom before the Holy Family. Come Sunday they
set out the altar in the schoolhouse, with the fine-drawn altar cloths,
the beaten silver candlesticks, and the wax images, chief glory of Las
Uvas, brought up mule-back from Old Mexico forty years ago. All in white
the communicants go up two and two in a hushed, sweet awe to take the
body of their Lord, and Tomaso, who is priest's boy, tries not to look
unduly puffed up by his office. After that you have dinner and a bottle
of wine that ripened on the sunny slope of Escondito. All the week
Father Shannon has shriven his people, who bring clean conscience to
the betterment of appetite, and the Father sets them an example. Father
Shannon is rather big about the middle to accommodate the large laugh
that lives in him, but a most shrewd searcher of hearts. It is reported
that one derives comfort from his confessional, and I for my part
believe it.

The celebration of the Sixteenth, though it comes every year, takes as
long to prepare for as Holy Communion. The senoritas have each a new
dress apiece, the senoras a new rebosa. The young gentlemen have
new silver trimmings to their sombreros, unspeakable ties, silk
handkerchiefs, and new leathers to their spurs. At this time when the
peppers glow in the gardens and the young quail cry "cuidado," "have a
care!" you can hear the plump, plump of the metate from the alcoves of
the vines where comfortable old dames, whose experience gives them the
touch of art, are pounding out corn for tamales.

School-teachers from abroad have tried before now at Las Uvas to have
school begin on the first of September, but got nothing else to stir
in the heads of the little Castros, Garcias, and Romeros but feasts and
cock-fights until after the Sixteenth. Perhaps you need to be told that
this is the anniversary of the Republic, when liberty awoke and cried
in the provinces of Old Mexico. You are aroused at midnight to hear them
shouting in the streets, "Vive la Libertad!" answered from the houses
and the recesses of the vines, "Vive la Mexico!" At sunrise shots are
fired commemorating the tragedy of unhappy Maximilian, and then music,
the noblest of national hymns, as the great flag of Old Mexico floats up
the flag-pole in the bare little plaza of shabby Las Uvas. The sun
over Pine Mountain greets the eagle of Montezuma before it touches the
vineyards and the town, and the day begins with a great shout. By and
by there will be a reading of the Declaration of Independence and an
address punctured by vives; all the town in its best dress, and some
exhibits of horsemanship that make lathered bits and bloody spurs; also
a cock-fight.

By night there will be dancing, and such music! old Santos to play the
flute, a little lean man with a saintly countenance, young Garcia whose
guitar has a soul, and Carrasco with the violin. They sit on a high
platform above the dancers in the candle flare, backed by the red,
white, and green of Old Mexico, and play fervently such music as you
will not hear otherwhere.

At midnight the flag comes down. Count yourself at a loss if you are
not moved by that performance. Pine Mountain watches whitely overhead,
shepherd fires glow strongly on the glooming hills. The plaza, the bare
glistening pole, the dark folk, the bright dresses, are lit ruddily by
a bonfire. It leaps up to the eagle flag, dies down, the music begins
softly and aside. They play airs of old longing and exile; slowly out
of the dark the flag drops down, bellying and falling with the midnight
draught. Sometimes a hymn is sung, always there are tears. The flag
is down; Tony Sevadra has received it in his arms. The music strikes a
barbaric swelling tune, another flag begins a slow ascent,--it takes
a breath or two to realize that they are both, flag and tune, the Star
Spangled Banner,--a volley is fired, we are back, if you please, in
California of America. Every youth who has the blood of patriots in him
lays ahold on Tony Sevadra's flag, happiest if he can get a corner of
it. The music goes before, the folk fall in two and two, singing. They
sing everything, America, the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French
shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba, and the Chilian national air to
comfort two families of that land. The flag goes to Dona Ina's, with the
candlesticks and the altar cloths, then Las Uvas eats tamales and dances
the sun up the slope of Pine Mountain.

You are not to suppose that they do not keep the Fourth, Washington's
Birthday, and Thanksgiving at the town of the grape vines. These make
excellent occasions for quitting work and dancing, but the Sixteenth is
the holiday of the heart. On Memorial Day the graves have garlands and
new pictures of the saints tacked to the headboards. There is great
virtue in an Ave said in the Camp of the Saints. I like that name which
the Spanish speaking people give to the garden of the dead, Campo Santo,
as if it might be some bed of healing from which blind souls and sinners
rise up whole and praising God. Sometimes the speech of simple folk
hints at truth the understanding does not reach. I am persuaded only a
complex soul can get any good of a plain religion. Your earthborn is a
poet and a symbolist. We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements
a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other
people's way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same roof
that houses their God. Such as these go to church to be edified, but at
Las Uvas they go for pure worship and to entreat their God. The logical
conclusion of the faith that every good gift cometh from God is the open
hand and the finer courtesy. The meal done without buys a candle for the
neighbor's dead child. You do foolishly to suppose that the candle does
no good.

At Las Uvas every house is a piece of earth--thick walled, whitewashed
adobe that keeps the even temperature of a cave; every man is an
accomplished horseman and consequently bowlegged; every family keeps
dogs, flea-bitten mongrels that loll on the earthen floors. They speak
a purer Castilian than obtains in like villages of Mexico, and the way
they count relationship everybody is more or less akin. There is not
much villainy among them. What incentive to thieving or killing
can there be when there is little wealth and that to be had for the
borrowing! If they love too hotly, as we say "take their meat before
grace," so do their betters. Eh, what! shall a man be a saint before he
is dead? And besides, Holy Church takes it out of you one way or another
before all is done. Come away, you who are obsessed with your own
importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not
sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the
even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de
Las Uvas.







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