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.