[Illustration: (cover)]
THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
[Illustration: PETITE PETE (Page 157)]
THE LAND
OF
LITTLE RAIN
BY
MARY AUSTIN
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1903
[Illustration]
COPYRIGHT 1903 BY MARY AUSTIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published October 1903_
TO EVE
“THE COMFORTRESS OF UNSUCCESS”
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, cañons, 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.
NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
The Publishers feel that they have been peculiarly fortunate in
securing Mr. E. Boyd Smith as the illustrator and interpreter of
Mrs. Austin’s charming sketches of the “Land of Little Rain.” His
familiarity with the region and his rare artistic skill have enabled
him to give the very atmosphere of the desert, and graphically to
portray its life, animal and human. This will be felt not only in
the full-page compositions, but in the delightful marginal sketches,
which are not less illustrative, although, from their nature, it is
impracticable to enumerate them in a formal list.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN 1
WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO 23
THE SCAVENGERS 45
THE POCKET HUNTER 61
SHOSHONE LAND 81
JIMVILLE--A BRET HARTE TOWN 103
MY NEIGHBOR’S FIELD 123
THE MESA TRAIL 141
THE BASKET MAKER 161
THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS 181
WATER BORDERS 203
OTHER WATER BORDERS 223
NURSLINGS OF THE SKY 243
THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES 263
THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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 snow-line. 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 Cañon, 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 edgewise 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. Cañons 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.
[Illustration]
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 timber-line, 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!
[Illustration]
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 preëmpted 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 snow-line, mapped out
abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of piñon, 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 midday 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.
[Illustration]
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 cattle-men, 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 headboard,
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.
[Illustration]
WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO
[Illustration]
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 fan wise
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.
[Illustration]
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 cañon 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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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 lone 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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration: Fig. 1.]
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 (Fig. 1), 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
(Fig. 2) reading thus: “In this direction three [units of measurement
unknown] is a spring of sweet water; look for it.”
[Illustration: Fig. 2.]
THE SCAVENGERS
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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 Armogossa 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.
[Illustration: LOST FOR THREE DAYS IN THE DESERT]
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 cañons, 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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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 manhandled.
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.
[Illustration]
High as the camp may be, so it is not above timber-line, 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
[Illustration]
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 tailorwise 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.
[Illustration]
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.