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 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.

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 cañon 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 "kyote-ing," 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 Cañon 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 piñon 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 cañons. 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.