I have never known a city more orderly seeming, more evidently peaceful
and law-abiding than Tucson. Nowhere have I felt safer in wandering
about by myself in all sorts of places, whether within the city proper
or in the surrounding country. Here is a town, I have said to myself,
where the citizen has small need of the policeman. And yet I know a
man, most discreet and inoffensive (not to be shame-faced about it, let
me admit that I speak of the bird-gazer himself), who a few days ago,
for no assignable reason, was violently set upon, or, to speak plainly,
mobbed, just outside the city limits.
Tucson, it should be premised, is a thriving, rapidly growing, modern
city--though it has an antiquity to boast of, as well--in the midst of
a desert. Its own site was originally part of the desert. The nearest
large city is Los Angeles, California, five hundred miles distant; the
nearest village, from what I hear, must be fifty or sixty miles away.
Many roads run out of the town, but only to ranches scattered here and
there along the two watercourses, or to mining camps farther off in
the mountains. How a city ever came to grow up in a place so isolated,
so seemingly destitute of anything like local advantages, is a riddle
beyond my reading; but here it is, a city in the desert. North, south,
east, or west, you may start where you will and go in what direction
you please, and in fifteen minutes you will be out among the creosote
bushes and the cacti, with nothing but a world of creosote and
cactus--with perhaps a windmill and a roof rising above them somewhere
in the distance--between you and the mountain range that bounds the
horizon.
Well, this was exactly what I myself did one fine morning a week ago. I
walked up the main street of the city, turned to the right, passed the
territorial university buildings, and, taking a course northward toward
the Santa Catalinas, sauntered carelessly forward, field-glass in hand,
to see what might be stirring in the chaparral.
There would not be much, I knew. By daylight, at least, and in the
winter season, the desert is not a stirring place. In the tracts where
the creosote occupies the ground alone there proved, as usual, to be
nothing; but presently I came to a place where two or three kinds of
cactus were sprinkled among the creosote bushes, and newly sprung
bluish-green grass (I call it grass, provisionally, although, like
almost everything else hereabout, it has an unaccustomed look) carpeted
or half-carpeted the ground. Here were the almost inevitable two cactus
wrens (how overjoyed I was at the unexpected sight of my first one,
at San Antonio, only three weeks ago, and how soon they have become
an old story!) perched, one here, one there, at the top of branching
cactus trees five or six feet high, calling antiphonally, as their
habit is, in a coarse, unmusical, wearisome voice--the same churlish
phase over and over and over. Nothing but the lonesomeness of the
desert, surely, could ever make that grating, repetitive monotony a
pleasure-giving sound. What the birds will do in the way of song when
their musical season arrives, if it ever does,[14] is more than I know;
but, belonging to be so musical a family, they ought to be capable of
something better than this, for music, of all gifts, is a thing that
runs in the blood. It would be a strange wren that could not express
his happiness in some really lyrical manner.
In the same neighborhood, as has happened on several occasions, were
a group of five or six sage thrashers. It was in this very place,
indeed, that I first formed their acquaintance; and a sorely puzzled
novelty-seeker I was on that eventful afternoon. The whole desert had
seemed to be devoid of animal existence, I remember, when of a sudden
there stood those strange birds on the ground before me. At the first
instant they gave me an impression of overgrown titlarks. Then, when I
watched them running at full speed over the grass, all at once pulling
themselves up and standing erect with a snap of the tail, I said: “Why,
they must be thrushes of some sort.” In attitude and action they were
almost exactly like so many robins. The only striking characteristic of
their plumage was the peculiarly dense streaking of the under-parts.
The mystery was heightened for me by the fact that they maintained an
absolute silence. Indeed, although I have seen them many times since
then, I have yet to hear them utter the first syllable. For aught I can
positively affirm, they may every one be mutes. I chased them about for
half an hour, scrutinizing the least detail of their dress, all the
while wondering what on earth to call them, till finally it came over
me, I could never tell how, that they must be sage thrashers.
“Yes,” I said, “_Oroscoptes!_ I remember that that bird is described as
having a short bill.”
It was a true guess; and in a strange country a man makes so many poor
guesses that he may reasonably boast a little over every good one. To
this day, I am bound to add, the birds, with their short bills, their
extraordinary quickness upon their feet, and their upright carriage,
have to my eye very little the appearance of thrashers. Perhaps when I
hear them sing, my feeling may alter.
There is at least one real thrasher in the desert, however, and usually
in the same places that Oroscoptes affects, places such as I have
mentioned, where cacti are mingled with the omnipresent creosote.
This is Palmer’s thrasher, so called, a grayish-brown bird, with
the characteristic thrasher make-up--long bill, long body, and long
tail. He is one of the common birds about Tucson, both in the river
valley and on the desert, and one of the few that are already in song.
Even he, I suspect, is not really letting himself go as yet, but he
is in tune daily; not so versatile a performer, seemingly, as our
Eastern reddish-brown bird; with much less range of voice, and more
given to repeating the same phrase half a dozen times in succession,
so that his music has less the air of a strict improvisation; but a
genuine thrasher, nevertheless, with a thrasher’s song. As the season
progresses he will probably grow more ecstatic, though to hear him
now, one would not expect him ever to become so mad a rhapsodist as
the crazy bird that we admire, and sometimes smile at, in the Eastern
country.
Whether the thrasher was seen on the day I am supposed to be
describing, I do not now remember, but in all probability he was,
for I never walk far in the desert without seeing or hearing him. If
he does not sing, he salutes me with volleys of sharp, whip-snapping
whistles in the style of the wood thrush and the robin. Like the wren,
he prefers a perch at the top of a cactus. He prefers it, I say; but in
truth it is almost Hobson’s choice with him, since the topmost spray
of a creosote bush, the only other thing he _could_ perch on, would
hardly support his weight. There he stands, at all events, perfectly at
his ease among the closely set spines, sharp as the sharpest needles,
though how he manages the ticklish feat so adroitly is more than I can
imagine.
I may have seen two or three desert sparrows, also; the black-throated
sparrow, that is, with some slight variations, imperceptible in the
bush, that make him, in the language of science, _Amphispiza bilineata
deserticola_; and possibly, though this is somewhat less to be taken
for granted, his long-tailed relative, the sage sparrow (_Amphispiza
belli nevadensis_), may have teased me by his shyness. Both these birds
are said to be famous enliveners of the desert,--though neither of them
in their present silent state quite lives up to his reputation,--and
will doubtless become prime favorites with me if I remain here long
enough really to know them. Where should simple, hearty melodies find
appreciation, if not in the desert?
I am slow in coming to the point of my story; and with reason. It is
not pleasant to be mobbed; there is nothing to boast of in such an
adventure; nothing to flatter one’s sense of personal importance; one
is not apt to speak of it _con amore_, as we say. Some things are best
slipped over in silence. So I have noticed that men who have served
their country in prison will always contrive by one path or another to
go round the name of that unpopular institution. But I have begun, and
there is nothing for it but to finish.
Well, then, I had walked perhaps a mile and a half beyond the
university buildings, which is the same as to say beyond the limits
of the town, and found myself approaching a lonely ranch, when a
flock of ravens, white-necked ravens, which abound hereabout--“the
multitudinous raven,” I have caught myself saying[15]--rose from the
scrub not far in advance, with the invariable hoarse chorus of _quark_,
_quark_. I thought nothing of it, the sight being so much an every-day
matter, till after a little I began to be aware that the whole flock
seemed to be concentrating its attention upon my unsuspecting,
inoffensive self. There must have been fifty of the big black birds.
Round and round they went in circles, just above my head, moving
forward as I moved, vociferating every one as he came near, “quark,
quark.”
At first I was amused; it was something new and interesting. I recalled
the time when I walked miles on miles over the North Carolina mountains
in hope of seeing one raven, and here were half a hundred almost within
hand’s reach; I chaffed them as they passed, calling them names and
quarking back to them in derision. But before very long the novelty of
the thing wore off; the persecution grew tiresome. Enough is as good
as a feast; and I had had enough. “Quark, quark,” they yelled, all the
while settling nearer,--or so I fancied,--till it seemed as if they
actually meant violence. They were doing precisely what a flock of
crows does to an owl or a hawk: they were mobbing me. “Quark, quark!
Hit him, there! Hit him! Pick his eyes out!”
The commotion lasted for at least half a mile. Then the birds wearied
of it, and went off about their business. All but one of them, I mean
to say. He had no such notion. For ten minutes longer he stayed by. His
persistency was devilish. It became almost unbearable. The single voice
was more exasperating even than the chorus. If the famous albatross
carried on after any such outrageous fashion, I have no stones to throw
at the Ancient Mariner. He acted well within his rights. If I had had
a crossbow, and had been as good a marksman as he was,--with “his
glittering eye,”--there would have been one less raven in Arizona, and
no questions asked. If a dead calm had succeeded, so much the better.
“Quark, quark!” the black villain cried, wagging his impish head, and
swooping low to spit the insult into my ear.
But all things have an end, as leaves have their time to fall, and even
a raven’s perseverance will wear out at last. Perhaps the bird grew
hungry. At all events he gave over the assault, stillness fell upon the
desert, and an innocent foot-passenger went on his way in peace.
And this is how I was mobbed in Arizona. I could never have believed
it.