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 runnels
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 bighorns 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.
[Illustration]
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 pot-hole, 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 timber-line 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 runnels 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 cañons.
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 Cañon alone, and if that does not include them all it is
because they were already collected otherwhere.
[Illustration]
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. Year 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
cañon, 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 cañon
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
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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 Montaña, 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 cañon 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.
[Illustration]
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 Señora 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 cañons, 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.
[Illustration]
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 far-flown 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
[Illustration]
[Illustration]