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+Project Gutenberg Etext, The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin
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+The Land of Little Rain
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+by Mary Austin
+
+November, 1995  [Etext #365]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext, The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin
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+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Land of
+Little Rain
+by
+MARY AUSTIN
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TO EVE
+"The Comfortress of Unsuccess"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Preface
+The Land of Little Rain
+Water Trails of the Ceriso
+The Scavengers
+The Pocket Hunter
+Shoshone Land
+Jimville--A Bret Harte Town
+My Neighbor's Field
+The Mesa Trail
+The Basket Maker
+The Streets of the Mountains
+Water Borders
+Other Water Borders
+Nurslings of the Sky
+The Little Town of the Grape Vines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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, canons, 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. 
+
+
+
+THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
+
+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.
+
+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 snowline.  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 Canon, 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 edge-wise 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. 
+Canons 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.
+
+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 timberline, 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!
+
+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 preempted 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 snowline, mapped
+out abruptly by the sun, one finds spreading growth of pinon,
+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 mid-day 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.
+
+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 cattlemen, 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 head-board, 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO
+
+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
+fanwise 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 be 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.
+
+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 canon 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 long 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.
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 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 reading thus: "In this direction three [units of
+measurement unknown] is a spring of sweet water; look for it."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE SCAVENGERS
+
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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 Armogosa
+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.
+
+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
+canons, 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.
+
+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.
+
+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 man-handled.
+
+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.
+
+High as the camp may be, so it is not above timberline, 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
+
+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 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.
+
+
+
+
+
+SHOSHONE LAND
+
+It is true I have been in Shoshone Land, but before that, long
+before, I had seen it through the eyes of Winnenap' in a rosy mist
+of reminiscence, and must always see it with a sense of intimacy in
+the light that never was.  Sitting on the golden slope at the
+campoodie, looking across the Bitter Lake to the purple tops of
+Mutarango, the medicine-man drew up its happy places one by one,
+like little blessed islands in a sea of talk.  For he was born a
+Shoshone, was Winnenap'; and though his name, his wife, his
+children, and his tribal relations were of the Paiutes, his
+thoughts turned homesickly toward Shoshone Land.  Once a Shoshone
+always a Shoshone.  Winnenap' lived gingerly among the Paiutes and
+in his heart despised them.  But he could speak a tolerable English
+when he would, and he always would if it were of Shoshone Land.
+
+He had come into the keeping of the Paiutes as a hostage for
+the long peace which the authority of the whites made
+interminable, and, though there was now no order in the tribe, nor
+any power that could have lawfully restrained him, kept on in the
+old usage, to save his honor and the word of his vanished kin.  He
+had seen his children's children in the borders of the Paiutes, but
+loved best his own miles of sand and rainbow-painted hills. 
+Professedly he had not seen them since the beginning of his
+hostage; but every year about the end of the rains and before the
+strength of the sun had come upon us from the south, the
+medicine-man went apart on the mountains to gather herbs, and when
+he came again I knew by the new fortitude of his countenance and
+the new color of his reminiscences that he had been alone and
+unspied upon in Shoshone Land.
+
+To reach that country from the campoodie, one goes south and
+south, within hearing of the lip-lip-lapping of the great tideless
+lake, and south by east over a high rolling district, miles and
+miles of sage and nothing else.  So one comes to the country of the
+painted hills,--old red cones of craters, wasteful beds of mineral
+earths, hot, acrid springs, and steam jets issuing from a leprous
+soil.  After the hills the black rock, after the craters the spewed
+lava, ash strewn, of incredible thickness, and full of sharp,
+winding rifts.  There are picture writings carved deep in the face
+of the cliffs to mark the way for those who do not know it.  On the
+very edge of the black rock the earth falls away in a wide
+sweeping hollow, which is Shoshone Land.
+
+South the land rises in very blue hills, blue because thickly
+wooded with ceanothus and manzanita, the haunt of deer and the
+border of the Shoshones.  Eastward the land goes very far by broken
+ranges, narrow valleys of pure desertness, and huge mesas uplifted
+to the sky-line, east and east, and no man knows the end of it.
+
+It is the country of the bighorn, the wapiti, and the wolf,
+nesting place of buzzards, land of cloud-nourished trees and wild
+things that live without drink.  Above all, it is the land of the
+creosote and the mesquite.  The mesquite is God's best thought in
+all this desertness.  It grows in the open, is thorny, stocky,
+close grown, and iron-rooted.  Long winds move in the draughty
+valleys, blown sand fills and fills about the lower branches,
+piling pyramidal dunes, from the top of which the mesquite twigs
+flourish greenly.  Fifteen or twenty feet under the drift, where it
+seems no rain could penetrate, the main trunk grows, attaining
+often a yard's thickness, resistant as oak.  In Shoshone Land one
+digs for large timber; that is in the southerly, sandy exposures. 
+Higher on the table-topped ranges low trees of juniper and pinon
+stand each apart, rounded and spreading heaps of greenness. 
+Between them, but each to itself in smooth clear spaces, tufts of
+tall feathered grass.
+
+This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is
+room enough and time enough.  Trees grow to consummate domes; every
+plant has its perfect work.  Noxious weeds such as come up thickly
+in crowded fields do not flourish in the free spaces.  Live long
+enough with an Indian, and he or the wild things will show you a
+use for everything that grows in these borders.
+
+The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and
+the land will not be lived in except in its own fashion.  The
+Shoshones live like their trees, with great spaces between, and in
+pairs and in family groups they set up wattled huts by the
+infrequent springs.  More wickiups than two make a very great
+number.  Their shelters are lightly built, for they travel much and
+far, following where deer feed and seeds ripen, but they are not
+more lonely than other creatures that inhabit there.
+
+The year's round is somewhat in this fashion.  After the pinon
+harvest the clans foregather on a warm southward slope for the
+annual adjustment of tribal difficulties and the medicine dance,
+for marriage and mourning and vengeance, and the exchange of
+serviceable information; if, for example, the deer have shifted
+their feeding ground, if the wild sheep have come back to Waban, or
+certain springs run full or dry.  Here the Shoshones winter
+flockwise, weaving baskets and hunting big game driven down from
+the country of the deep snow.  And this brief intercourse is all
+the use they have of their kind, for now there are no wars,
+and many of their ancient crafts have fallen into disuse.  The
+solitariness of the life breeds in the men, as in the plants, a
+certain well-roundedness and sufficiency to its own ends.  Any
+Shoshone family has in itself the man-seed, power to multiply and
+replenish, potentialities for food and clothing and shelter, for
+healing and beautifying.
+
+When the rain is over and gone they are stirred by the
+instinct of those that journeyed eastward from Eden, and go up each
+with his mate and young brood, like birds to old nesting places. 
+The beginning of spring in Shoshone Land--oh the soft wonder of
+it!--is a mistiness as of incense smoke, a veil of greenness over
+the whitish stubby shrubs, a web of color on the silver sanded
+soil.  No counting covers the multitude of rayed blossoms that
+break suddenly underfoot in the brief season of the winter rains,
+with silky furred or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage at all. 
+They are morning and evening bloomers chiefly, and strong seeders. 
+Years of scant rains they lie shut and safe in the winnowed sands,
+so that some species appear to be extinct.  Years of long storms
+they break so thickly into bloom that no horse treads without
+crushing them.  These years the gullies of the hills are rank with
+fern and a great tangle of climbing vines.
+
+Just as the mesa twilights have their vocal note in the
+love call of the burrowing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by
+the mourning doves.  Welcome and sweet they sound in the smoky
+mornings before breeding time, and where they frequent in any great
+numbers water is confidently looked for.  Still by the springs one
+finds the cunning brush shelters from which the Shoshones shot
+arrows at them when the doves came to drink.
+
+Now as to these same Shoshones there are some who claim that
+they have no right to the name, which belongs to a more northerly
+tribe; but that is the word they will be called by, and there is no
+greater offense than to call an Indian out of his name.  According
+to their traditions and all proper evidence, they were a great
+people occupying far north and east of their present bounds, driven
+thence by the Paiutes.  Between the two tribes is the residuum of
+old hostilities.
+
+Winnenap', whose memory ran to the time when the boundary of
+the Paiute country was a dead-line to Shoshones, told me once how
+himself and another lad, in an unforgotten spring, discovered a
+nesting place of buzzards a bit of a way beyond the borders.  And
+they two burned to rob those nests.  Oh, for no purpose at all
+except as boys rob nests immemorially, for the fun of it, to have
+and handle and show to other lads as an exceeding treasure, and
+afterwards discard.  So, not quite meaning to, but breathless with
+daring, they crept up a gully, across a sage brush flat and
+through a waste of boulders, to the rugged pines where their sharp
+eyes had made out the buzzards settling.
+
+The medicine-man told me, always with a quaking relish at this
+point, that while they, grown bold by success, were still in the
+tree, they sighted a Paiute hunting party crossing between them and
+their own land.  That was mid-morning, and all day on into the dark
+the boys crept and crawled and slid, from boulder to bush, and bush
+to boulder, in cactus scrub and on naked sand, always in a sweat of
+fear, until the dust caked in the nostrils and the breath sobbed in
+the body, around and away many a mile until they came to their own
+land again.  And all the time Winnenap' carried those buzzard's
+eggs in the slack of his single buckskin garment! Young Shoshones
+are like young quail, knowing without teaching about feeding and
+hiding, and learning what civilized children never learn, to be
+still and to keep on being still, at the first hint of danger or
+strangeness.
+
+As for food, that appears to be chiefly a matter of being
+willing.  Desert Indians all eat chuckwallas, big black and white
+lizards that have delicate white flesh savored like chicken.  Both
+the Shoshones and the coyotes are fond of the flesh of Gopherus
+agassizii, the turtle that by feeding on buds, going without
+drink, and burrowing in the sand through the winter, contrives to
+live a known period of twenty-five years.  It seems that
+most seeds are foodful in the arid regions, most berries edible,
+and many shrubs good for firewood with the sap in them.  The
+mesquite bean, whether the screw or straight pod, pounded to a
+meal, boiled to a kind of mush, and dried in cakes, sulphur-colored
+and needing an axe to cut it, is an excellent food for long
+journeys.  Fermented in water with wild honey and the honeycomb, it
+makes a pleasant, mildly intoxicating drink.
+
+Next to spring, the best time to visit Shoshone Land is when
+the deer-star hangs low and white like a torch over the morning
+hills.  Go up past Winnedumah and down Saline and up again to the
+rim of Mesquite Valley.  Take no tent, but if you will, have an
+Indian build you a wickiup, willows planted in a circle, drawn over
+to an arch, and bound cunningly with withes, all the leaves on, and
+chinks to count the stars through.  But there was never any but
+Winnenap' who could tell and make it worth telling about Shoshone
+Land.
+
+And Winnenap' will not any more.  He died, as do most
+medicine-men of the Paiutes.
+
+Where the lot falls when the campoodie chooses a medicine-man
+there it rests.  It is an honor a man seldom seeks but must wear,
+an honor with a condition.  When three patients die under his
+ministrations, the medicine-man must yield his life and his office.
+
+Wounds do not count; broken bones and bullet holes the Indian can
+understand, but measles, pneumonia, and smallpox are
+witchcraft.  Winnenap' was medicine-man for fifteen years.  Besides
+considerable skill in healing herbs, he used his prerogatives
+cunningly.  It is permitted the medicine-man to decline the case
+when the patient has had treatment from any other, say the white
+doctor, whom many of the younger generation consult.  Or, if before
+having seen the patient, he can definitely refer his disorder to
+some supernatural cause wholly out of the medicine-man's
+jurisdiction, say to the spite of an evil spirit going about in the
+form of a coyote, and states the case convincingly, he may avoid
+the penalty.  But this must not be pushed too far.  All else
+failing, he can hide.  Winnenap' did this the time of the measles
+epidemic.  Returning from his yearly herb gathering, he heard of it
+at Black Rock, and turning aside, he was not to be found, nor did
+he return to his own place until the disease had spent itself, and
+half the children of the campoodie were in their shallow graves
+with beads sprinkled over them.
+
+It is possible the tale of Winnenap''s patients had not been
+strictly kept.  There had not been a medicine-man killed in the
+valley for twelve years, and for that the perpetrators had been
+severely punished by the whites.  The winter of the Big Snow an
+epidemic of pneumonia carried off the Indians with scarcely a
+warning; from the lake northward to the lava flats they died in the
+sweathouses, and under the hands of the medicine-men.  Even
+the drugs of the white physician had no power.
+
+After two weeks of this plague the Paiutes drew to council to
+consider the remissness of their medicine-men.  They were sore with
+grief and afraid for themselves; as a result of the council, one in
+every campoodie was sentenced to the ancient penalty.  But
+schooling and native shrewdness had raised up in the younger men an
+unfaith in old usages, so judgment halted between sentence and
+execution.  At Three Pines the government teacher brought out
+influential whites to threaten and cajole the stubborn tribes.  At
+Tunawai the conservatives sent into Nevada for that pacific old
+humbug, Johnson Sides, most notable of Paiute orators, to harangue
+his people.  Citizens of the towns turned out with food and
+comforts, and so after a season the trouble passed.
+
+But here at Maverick there was no school, no oratory, and no
+alleviation.  One third of the campoodie died, and the rest killed
+the medicine-men.  Winnenap' expected it, and for days walked and
+sat a little apart from his family that he might meet it as became
+a Shoshone, no doubt suffering the agony of dread deferred.  When
+finally three men came and sat at his fire without greeting he knew
+his time.  He turned a little from them, dropped his chin upon his
+knees, and looked out over Shoshone Land, breathing evenly.  The
+women went into the wickiup and covered their heads with
+their blankets.
+
+So much has the Indian lost of savageness by merely desisting
+from killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work
+by drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness.  In the end a sharp
+hatchet-stroke discharged the duty of the campoodie.  Afterward his
+women buried him, and a warm wind coming out of the south, the
+force of the disease was broken, and even they acquiesced in the
+wisdom of the tribe.  That summer they told me all except the names
+of the Three.
+
+Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we
+shall have a hand in the heaven of hereafter; and I know what
+Winnenap''s will be like: worth going to if one has leave to live
+in it according to his liking.  It will be tawny gold underfoot,
+walled up with jacinth and jasper, ribbed with chalcedony, and yet
+no hymnbook heaven, but the free air and free spaces of Shoshone
+Land.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JIMVILLE
+
+A BRET HARTE TOWN
+
+When Mr. Harte found himself with a fresh palette and his
+particular local color fading from the West, he did what he
+considered the only safe thing, and carried his young impression
+away to be worked out untroubled by any newer fact.  He should have
+gone to Jimville.  There he would have found cast up on the
+ore-ribbed hills the bleached timbers of more tales, and better
+ones.
+
+You could not think of Jimville as anything more than a
+survival, like the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes
+cheerfully about those borders some thousands of years beyond his
+proper epoch.  Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere
+favorable to the type of a half century back, if not
+"forty-niners," of that breed.  It is said of Jimville that getting
+away from it is such a piece of work that it encourages permanence
+in the population; the fact is that most have been drawn there by
+some real likeness or liking.  Not however that I would deny the
+difficulty of getting into or out of that cove of reminder,
+I who have made the journey so many times at great pains of a poor
+body.  Any way you go at it, Jimville is about three days from
+anywhere in particular.  North or south, after the railroad there
+is a stage journey of such interminable monotony as induces
+forgetfulness of all previous states of existence.
+
+The road to Jimville is the happy hunting ground of old
+stage-coaches bought up from superseded routes the West over,
+rocking, lumbering, wide vehicles far gone in the odor of romance,
+coaches that Vasquez has held up, from whose high seats express
+messengers have shot or been shot as their luck held.  This is to
+comfort you when the driver stops to rummage for wire to mend a
+failing bolt.  There is enough of this sort of thing to quite
+prepare you to believe what the driver insists, namely, that all
+that country and Jimville are held together by wire.
+
+First on the way to Jimville you cross a lonely open land,
+with a hint in the sky of things going on under the horizon, a
+palpitant, white, hot land where the wheels gird at the sand and
+the midday heaven shuts it in breathlessly like a tent.  So in
+still weather; and when the wind blows there is occupation enough
+for the passengers, shifting seats to hold down the windward side
+of the wagging coach.  This is a mere trifle.  The Jimville stage
+is built for five passengers, but when you have seven, with
+four trunks, several parcels, three sacks of grain, the mail and
+express, you begin to understand that proverb about the road which
+has been reported to you.  In time you learn to engage the high
+seat beside the driver, where you get good air and the best
+company.  Beyond the desert rise the lava flats, scoriae strewn;
+sharp-cutting walls of narrow canons; league-wide, frozen puddles
+of black rock, intolerable and forbidding.  Beyond the lava the
+mouths that spewed it out, ragged-lipped, ruined craters
+shouldering to the cloud-line, mostly of red earth, as red as a red
+heifer.  These have some comforting of shrubs and grass.  You get
+the very spirit of the meaning of that country when you see Little
+Pete feeding his sheep in the red, choked maw of an old vent,--a
+kind of silly pastoral gentleness that glozes over an elemental
+violence.  Beyond the craters rise worn, auriferous hills of a
+quiet sort, tumbled together; a valley full of mists; whitish green
+scrub; and bright, small, panting lizards; then Jimville.
+
+The town looks to have spilled out of Squaw Gulch, and that,
+in fact, is the sequence of its growth.  It began around the Bully
+Boy and Theresa group of mines midway up Squaw Gulch, spreading
+down to the smelter at the mouth of the ravine.  The freight wagons
+dumped their loads as near to the mill as the slope allowed, and
+Jimville grew in between.  Above the Gulch begins a pine
+wood with sparsely grown thickets of lilac, azalea, and odorous
+blossoming shrubs.
+
+Squaw Gulch is a very sharp, steep, ragged-walled ravine, and
+that part of Jimville which is built in it has only one street,--in
+summer paved with bone-white cobbles, in the wet months a frothy
+yellow flood.  All between the ore dumps and solitary small cabins,
+pieced out with tin cans and packing cases, run footpaths drawing
+down to the Silver Dollar saloon.  When Jimville was having the
+time of its life the Silver Dollar had those same coins let into
+the bar top for a border, but the proprietor pried them out when
+the glory departed.  There are three hundred inhabitants in
+Jimville and four bars, though you are not to argue anything from
+that.
+
+Hear now how Jimville came by its name.  Jim Calkins
+discovered the Bully Boy, Jim Baker located the Theresa.  When Jim
+Jenkins opened an eating-house in his tent he chalked up on the
+flap, "Best meals in Jimville, $1.00," and the name stuck.
+
+There was more human interest in the origin of Squaw Gulch,
+though it tickled no humor.  It was Dimmick's squaw from Aurora
+way.  If Dimmick had been anything except New Englander he would
+have called her a mahala, but that would not have bettered his
+behavior.  Dimmick made a strike, went East, and the squaw who had
+been to him as his wife took to drink.  That was the bald
+way of stating it in the Aurora country.  The milk of human
+kindness, like some wine, must not be uncorked too much in speech
+lest it lose savor.  This is what they did.  The woman would have
+returned to her own people, being far gone with child, but the
+drink worked her bane.  By the river of this ravine her pains
+overtook her.  There Jim Calkins, prospecting, found her dying with
+a three days' babe nozzling at her breast.  Jim heartened her for
+the end, buried her, and walked back to Poso, eighteen miles, the
+child poking in the folds of his denim shirt with small mewing
+noises, and won support for it from the rough-handed folks of that
+place.  Then he came back to Squaw Gulch, so named from that day,
+and discovered the Bully Boy.  Jim humbly regarded this piece of
+luck as interposed for his reward, and I for one believed him.  If
+it had been in mediaeval times you would have had a legend or a
+ballad.  Bret Harte would have given you a tale.  You see in me a
+mere recorder, for I know what is best for you; you shall blow out
+this bubble from your own breath.
+
+You could never get into any proper relation to Jimville
+unless you could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as
+a lizard does his skin.  Once wanting some womanly attentions, the
+stage-driver assured me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House
+from the lady barkeeper.  The phrase tickled all my
+after-dinner-coffee sense of humor into an anticipation of Poker
+Flat.  The stage-driver proved himself really right, though
+you are not to suppose from this that Jimville had no conventions
+and no caste.  They work out these things in the personal equation
+largely.  Almost every latitude of behavior is allowed a good
+fellow, one no liar, a free spender, and a backer of his friends'
+quarrels.  You are respected in as much ground as you can shoot
+over, in as many pretensions as you can make good.
+
+That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe, the gentlemanly faro
+dealer of those parts, built for the role of Oakhurst, going
+white-shirted and frock-coated in a community of overalls; and
+persuading you that whatever shifts and tricks of the game were
+laid to his deal, he could not practice them on a person of your
+penetration.  But he does.  By his own account and the evidence of
+his manners he had been bred for a clergyman, and he certainly has
+gifts for the part.  You find him always in possession of your
+point of view, and with an evident though not obtrusive desire to
+stand well with you.  For an account of his killings, for his way
+with women and the way of women with him, I refer you to Brown of
+Calaveras and some others of that stripe.  His improprieties had a
+certain sanction of long standing not accorded to the gay ladies
+who wore Mr. Fanshawe's favors.  There were perhaps too many of
+them.  On the whole, the point of the moral distinctions of
+Jimville appears to be a point of honor, with an absence of
+humorous appreciation that strangers mistake for dullness.  At
+Jimville they see behavior as history and judge it by facts,
+untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense.  You glimpse a
+crude equity in their dealings with Wilkins, who had shot a man at
+Lone Tree, fairly, in an open quarrel.  Rumor of it reached
+Jimville before Wilkins rested there in flight.  I saw Wilkins, all
+Jimville saw him; in fact, he came into the Silver Dollar when we
+were holding a church fair and bought a pink silk pincushion.  I
+have often wondered what became of it.  Some of us shook hands with
+him, not because we did not know, but because we had not been
+officially notified, and there were those present who knew how it
+was themselves.  When the sheriff arrived Wilkins had moved on, and
+Jimville organized a posse and brought him back, because the
+sheriff was a Jimville man and we had to stand by him.
+
+I said we had the church fair at the Silver Dollar.  We had
+most things there, dances, town meetings, and the kinetoscope
+exhibition of the Passion Play.  The Silver Dollar had been built
+when the borders of Jimville spread from Minton to the red hill the
+Defiance twisted through.  "Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor
+for us and moved the bar to the back room.  The fair was designed
+for the support of the circuit rider who preached to the few that
+would hear, and buried us all in turn.  He was the symbol of
+Jimville's respectability, although he was of a sect that
+held dancing among the cardinal sins.  The management took no
+chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him the
+receipts of the evening in the chairman's hat, as a delicate
+intimation that the fair was closed.  The company filed out of the
+front door and around to the back.  Then the dance began formally
+with no feelings hurt.  These were the sort of courtesies, common
+enough in Jimville, that brought tears of delicate inner laughter.
+
+There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of
+Mr. Harte's demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the
+soil,--"Alkali Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono
+Jim;" fierce, shy, profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills,
+who each owned, or had owned, a mine and was wishful to own one
+again.  They laid up on the worn benches of the Silver Dollar or
+the Same Old Luck like beached vessels, and their talk ran on
+endlessly of "strike" and "contact" and "mother lode," and worked
+around to fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and the hoodoo of
+the Minietta, told austerely without imagination.
+
+Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these
+things written up from the point of view of people who do not do
+them every day would get no savor in their speech.
+
+Says Three Finger, relating the history of the
+Mariposa, "I took it off'n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother
+Bill was shot."
+
+Says Jim Jenkins, "What was the matter of him?"
+
+"Who?  Bill?  Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around
+Johnson's wife, an' Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."
+
+"Why didn't he work it himself?"
+
+"Him?  Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to
+leave the country pretty quick."
+
+"Huh!" says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.
+
+Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville
+out into the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a
+few rarely touched water-holes, always, always with the golden
+hope.  They develop prospects and grow rich, develop others and
+grow poor but never embittered.  Say the hills, It is all one,
+there is gold enough, time enough, and men enough to come after
+you.  And at Jimville they understand the language of the hills.
+
+Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the
+earth, it prefers a "hunch." That is an intimation from the gods
+that if you go over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping
+spring, up Coso way, you will find what is worth while.  I have
+never heard that the failure of any particular hunch disproved the
+principle.  Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of
+personal relation to the supernatural.  There is not much
+intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you and
+the organizing forces to cut off communication.  All this begets in
+Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an
+explanation that passes belief.  Along with killing and
+drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a
+certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all
+vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,--it wants the German to coin
+a word for that,--no bread-envy, no brother-fervor.  Western
+writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the savor of lawlessness
+too much upon their tongues, but you have these to witness it is
+not mean-spiritedness.  It is pure Greek in that it represents the
+courage to sheer off what is not worth while.  Beyond that it
+endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no
+death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do
+beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day
+did gods.  Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to
+gape and wonder at.
+
+Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct
+which includes passion and death in its perquisites.  I suppose
+that the end of all our hammering and yawping will be something
+like the point of view of Jimville.  The only difference will be in
+the decorations.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD
+
+It is one of those places God must have meant for a field from all
+time, lying very level at the foot of the slope that crowds up
+against Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town.  North and
+south it is fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder strewn and
+untenable.  Eastward it butts on orchard closes and the village
+gardens, brimming over into them by wild brier and creeping grass. 
+The village street, with its double row of unlike houses, breaks
+off abruptly at the edge of the field in a footpath that goes up
+the streamside, beyond it, to the source of waters.
+
+The field is not greatly esteemed of the town, not being put
+to the plough nor affording firewood, but breeding all manner of
+wild seeds that go down in the irrigating ditches to come up as
+weeds in the gardens and grass plots.  But when I had no more than
+seen it in the charm of its spring smiling, I knew I should have no
+peace until I had bought ground and built me a house beside
+it, with a little wicket to go in and out at all hours, as
+afterward came about.
+
+Edswick, Roeder, Connor, and Ruffin owned the field before it
+fell to my neighbor.  But before that the Paiutes, mesne lords of
+the soil, made a campoodie by the rill of Pine Creek; and after,
+contesting the soil with them, cattle-men, who found its foodful
+pastures greatly to their advantage; and bands of blethering flocks
+shepherded by wild, hairy men of little speech, who attested their
+rights to the feeding ground with their long staves upon each
+other's skulls.  Edswick homesteaded the field about the time the
+wild tide of mining life was roaring and rioting up Kearsarge, and
+where the village now stands built a stone hut, with loopholes to
+make good his claim against cattlemen or Indians.  But Edswick died
+and Roeder became master of the field.  Roeder owned cattle on a
+thousand hills, and made it a recruiting ground for his bellowing
+herds before beginning the long drive to market across a shifty
+desert.  He kept the field fifteen years, and afterward falling
+into difficulties, put it out as security against certain sums. 
+Connor, who held the securities, was cleverer than Roeder and not
+so busy.  The money fell due the winter of the Big Snow, when all
+the trails were forty feet under drifts, and Roeder was away in San
+Francisco selling his cattle.  At the set time Connor took the law
+by the forelock and was adjudged possession of the field.  Eighteen
+days later Roeder arrived on snowshoes, both feet frozen,
+and the money in his pack.  In the long suit at law ensuing, the
+field fell to Ruffin, that clever one-armed lawyer with the tongue
+to wile a bird out of the bush, Connor's counsel, and was sold by
+him to my neighbor, whom from envying his possession I call Naboth.
+
+Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left
+no mark on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking
+sheep.  Round its corners children pick up chipped arrow points of
+obsidian, scattered through it are kitchen middens and pits of old
+sweat-houses.  By the south corner, where the campoodie stood, is
+a single shrub of "hoopee" (Lycium andersonii), maintaining
+itself hardly among alien shrubs, and near by, three low rakish
+trees of hackberry, so far from home that no prying of mine has
+been able to find another in any canon east or west.  But the
+berries of both were food for the Paiutes, eagerly sought and
+traded for as far south as Shoshone Land.  By the fork of the creek
+where the shepherds camp is a single clump of mesquite of the
+variety called "screw bean." The seed must have shaken there from
+some sheep's coat, for this is not the habitat of mesquite, and
+except for other single shrubs at sheep camps, none grows freely
+for a hundred and fifty miles south or east.
+
+Naboth has put a fence about the best of the field, but
+neither the Indians nor the shepherds can quite forego it. 
+They make camp and build their wattled huts about the borders of
+it, and no doubt they have some sense of home in its familiar
+aspect.
+
+As I have said, it is a low-lying field, between the mesa and
+the town, with no hillocks in it, but a gentle swale where the
+waste water of the creek goes down to certain farms, and the
+hackberry-trees, of which the tallest might be three times the
+height of a man, are the tallest things in it.  A mile up from the
+water gate that turns the creek into supply pipes for the town,
+begins a row of long-leaved pines, threading the watercourse to the
+foot of Kearsarge.  These are the pines that puzzle the local
+botanist, not easily determined, and unrelated to other conifers of
+the Sierra slope; the same pines of which the Indians relate a
+legend mixed of brotherliness and the retribution of God.  Once the
+pines possessed the field, as the worn stumps of them along the
+streamside show, and it would seem their secret purpose to regain
+their old footing.  Now and then some seedling escapes the
+devastating sheep a rod or two down-stream.  Since I came to live
+by the field one of these has tiptoed above the gully of the creek,
+beckoning the procession from the hills, as if in fact they would
+make back toward that skyward-pointing finger of granite on the
+opposite range, from which, according to the legend, when they were
+bad Indians and it a great chief, they ran away.  This year
+the summer floods brought the round, brown, fruitful cones to my
+very door, and I look, if I live long enough, to see them come up
+greenly in my neighbor's field.
+
+It is interesting to watch this retaking of old ground by the
+wild plants, banished by human use.  Since Naboth drew his fence
+about the field and restricted it to a few wild-eyed steers,
+halting between the hills and the shambles, many old habitues of
+the field have come back to their haunts.  The willow and brown
+birch, long ago cut off by the Indians for wattles, have come back
+to the streamside, slender and virginal in their spring greenness,
+and leaving long stretches of the brown water open to the sky.  In
+stony places where no grass grows, wild olives sprawl;
+close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more translucent
+greenish gold in spring than any aureole.  Along with willow and
+birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders,
+slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the
+village street.  Convinced after three years that it would come no
+nearer, we spent time fruitlessly pulling up roots to plant in the
+garden.  All this while, when no coaxing or care prevailed upon any
+transplanted slip to grow, one was coming up silently outside the
+fence near the wicket, coiling so secretly in the rabbit-brush that
+its presence was never suspected until it flowered delicately along
+its twining length.  The horehound comes through the fence
+and under it, shouldering the pickets off the railings; the brier
+rose mines under the horehound; and no care, though I own I am not
+a close weeder, keeps the small pale moons of the primrose from
+rising to the night moth under my apple-trees.  The first summer in
+the new place, a clump of cypripediums came up by the irrigating
+ditch at the bottom of the lawn.  But the clematis will not come
+inside, nor the wild almond.
+
+I have forgotten to find out, though I meant to, whether the
+wild almond grew in that country where Moses kept the flocks of his
+father-in-law, but if so one can account for the burning bush.  It
+comes upon one with a flame-burst as of revelation; little hard red
+buds on leafless twigs, swelling unnoticeably, then one, two, or
+three strong suns, and from tip to tip one soft fiery glow,
+whispering with bees as a singing flame.  A twig of finger size
+will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by pink five-petaled
+bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees find their way
+in it.  In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of fruit too
+often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny,
+tap-rooted shrubs are resistant to most plant evils.
+
+It is not easy always to be attentive to the maturing of wild
+fruit.  Plants are so unobtrusive in their material processes, and
+always at the significant moment some other bloom has reached its
+perfect hour.  One can never fix the precise moment when the
+rosy tint the field has from the wild almond passes into the
+inspiring blue of lupines.  One notices here and there a spike of
+bloom, and a day later the whole field royal and ruffling lightly
+to the wind.  Part of the charm of the lupine is the continual stir
+of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere.  Go and stand by
+any crown of bloom and the tall stalks do but rock a little as for
+drowsiness, but look off across the field, and on the stillest days
+there is always a trepidation in the purple patches.
+
+From midsummer until frost the prevailing note of the field is
+clear gold, passing into the rusty tone of bigelovia going into a
+decline, a succession of color schemes more admirably managed than
+the transformation scene at the theatre.  Under my window a colony
+of cleome made a soft web of bloom that drew me every morning for
+a long still time; and one day I discovered that I was looking into
+a rare fretwork of fawn and straw colored twigs from which both
+bloom and leaf had gone, and I could not say if it had been for a
+matter of weeks or days.  The time to plant cucumbers and set out
+cabbages may be set down in the almanac, but never seed-time nor
+blossom in Naboth's field.
+
+Certain winged and mailed denizens of the field seem to reach
+their heyday along with the plants they most affect.  In June the
+leaning towers of the white milkweed are jeweled over with
+red and gold beetles, climbing dizzily.  This is that milkweed from
+whose stems the Indians flayed fibre to make snares for small game,
+but what use the beetles put it to except for a displaying ground
+for their gay coats, I could never discover.  The white butterfly
+crop comes on with the bigelovia bloom, and on warm mornings makes
+an airy twinkling all across the field.  In September young linnets
+grow out of the rabbit-brush in the night.  All the nests
+discoverable in the neighboring orchards will not account for the
+numbers of them.  Somewhere, by the same secret process by which
+the field matures a million more seeds than it needs, it is
+maturing red-hooded linnets for their devouring.  All the purlieus
+of bigelovia and artemisia are noisy with them for a month. 
+Suddenly as they come as suddenly go the fly-by-nights, that pitch
+and toss on dusky barred wings above the field of summer twilights.
+
+Never one of these nighthawks will you see after linnet time,
+though the hurtle of their wings makes a pleasant sound across the
+dusk in their season.
+
+For two summers a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field
+every afternoon between three and four o'clock, swooping and
+soaring with the airs of a gentleman adventurer.  What he finds
+there is chiefly conjectured, so secretive are the little people of
+Naboth's field.  Only when leaves fall and the light is low and
+slant, one sees the long clean flanks of the jackrabbits,
+leaping like small deer, and of late afternoons little cotton-tails
+scamper in the runways.  But the most one sees of the burrowers,
+gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of their newly opened
+doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird hangs on spiny
+shrubs.
+
+It is a still field, this of my neighbor's, though so busy,
+and admirably compounded for variety and pleasantness,--a little
+sand, a little loam, a grassy plot, a stony rise or two, a full
+brown stream, a little touch of humanness, a footpath trodden out
+by moccasins.  Naboth expects to make town lots of it and his
+fortune in one and the same day; but when I take the trail to talk
+with old Seyavi at the campoodie, it occurs to me that though the
+field may serve a good turn in those days it will hardly be
+happier.  No, certainly not happier.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MESA TRAIL
+
+The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth's
+field, though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the
+canon, or from any of the cattle paths that go up along the
+streamside; a clean, pale, smooth-trodden way between spiny shrubs,
+comfortably wide for a horse or an Indian.  It begins, I say, at
+the campoodie, and goes on toward the twilight hills and the
+borders of Shoshone Land.  It strikes diagonally across the foot of
+the hill-slope from the field until it reaches the larkspur level,
+and holds south along the front of Oppapago, having the high
+ranges to the right and the foothills and the great Bitter Lake
+below it on the left.  The mesa holds very level here, cut across
+at intervals by the deep washes of dwindling streams, and its
+treeless spaces uncramp the soul.
+
+Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback, at the
+jigging coyote trot that only western-bred horses learn
+successfully.  A foot-pace carries one too slowly past the
+units in a decorative scheme that is on a scale with the country
+round for bigness.  It takes days' journeys to give a note of
+variety to the country of the social shrubs.  These chiefly clothe
+the benches and eastern foot-slopes of the Sierras,--great spreads
+of artemisia, coleogyne, and spinosa, suffering no other
+woody stemmed thing in their purlieus; this by election apparently,
+with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each their clientele
+of flowering herbs.  It would be worth knowing how much the
+devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants to
+the shelter of the prickle-bushes.  It might have begun earlier, in
+the time Seyavi of the campoodie tells of, when antelope ran on the
+mesa like sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears
+itself except from the midst of some stout twigged shrub; larkspur
+in the coleogyne, and for every spinosa the purpling coils
+of phacelia.  In the shrub shelter, in the season, flock the little
+stemless things whose blossom time is as short as a marriage song. 
+The larkspurs make the best showing, being tall and sweet, swaying
+a little above the shrubbery, scattering pollen dust which Navajo
+brides gather to fill their marriage baskets.  This were an easier
+task than to find two of them of a shade.  Larkspurs in the botany
+are blue, but if you were to slip rein to the stub of some black
+sage and set about proving it you would be still at it by the hour
+when the white gilias set their pale disks to the westering
+sun.  This is the gilia the children call "evening snow," and it is
+no use trying to improve on children's names for wild flowers.
+
+From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a
+shifty yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor.  Then
+as soon as ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the
+sidelong ranges, come little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the
+edge of the sand.  By dusk there are tiny drifts in the lee of
+every strong shrub, rosy-tipped corollas as riotous in the sliding
+mesa wind as if they were real flakes shaken out of a cloud, not
+sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch stems.  They keep awake
+all night, and all the air is heavy and musky sweet because of
+them.
+
+Farther south on the trail there will be poppies meeting ankle
+deep, and singly, peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus blown out
+at the tops of tall stems.  But before the season is in tune for
+the gayer blossoms the best display of color is in the lupin wash. 
+There is always a lupin wash somewhere on the mesa trail,--a broad,
+shallow, cobble-paved sink of vanished waters, where the hummocks
+of Lupinus ornatus run a delicate gamut from silvery green
+of spring to silvery white of winter foliage.  They look in fullest
+leaf, except for color, most like the huddled huts of the
+campoodie, and the largest of them might be a man's length in
+diameter.  In their season, which is after the gilias are at
+their best, and before the larkspurs are ripe for pollen gathering,
+every terminal whorl of the lupin sends up its blossom stalk, not
+holding any constant blue, but paling and purpling to guide the
+friendly bee to virginal honey sips, or away from the perfected and
+depleted flower.  The length of the blossom stalk conforms to the
+rounded contour of the plant, and of these there will be a million
+moving indescribably in the airy current that flows down the swale
+of the wash.
+
+There is always a little wind on the mesa, a sliding current
+of cooler air going down the face of the mountain of its own
+momentum, but not to disturb the silence of great space.  Passing
+the wide mouths of canons, one gets the effect of whatever is doing
+in them, openly or behind a screen of cloud,--thunder of falls,
+wind in the pine leaves, or rush and roar of rain.  The rumor of
+tumult grows and dies in passing, as from open doors gaping on a
+village street, but does not impinge on the effect of solitariness.
+
+In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for stillness, but the
+night silence breaks into certain mellow or poignant notes.  Late
+afternoons the burrowing owls may be seen blinking at the doors of
+their hummocks with perhaps four or five elfish nestlings arow, and
+by twilight begin a soft whoo-oo-ing, rounder, sweeter, more
+incessant in mating time.  It is not possible to disassociate the
+call of the burrowing owl from the late slant light of the
+mesa.  If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of
+spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that
+mellow double note breaking along the blossom-tops.  While the glow
+holds one sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings after prey,
+and on into the dark hears their soft pus-ssh! clearing out
+of the trail ahead.  Maybe the pinpoint shriek of field mouse or
+kangaroo rat that pricks the wakeful pauses of the night is
+extorted by these mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just as
+like to be the work of the red fox on his twenty-mile
+constitutional.
+
+Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours,
+and both killers for the pure love of slaughter.  The fox is no
+great talker, but the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in
+twenty keys at once, gossip, warning, and abuse.  They are light
+treaders, the split-feet, so that the solitary camper sees their
+eyes about him in the dark sometimes, and hears the soft intake of
+breath when no leaf has stirred and no twig snapped underfoot.  The
+coyote is your real lord of the mesa, and so he makes sure you are
+armed with no long black instrument to spit your teeth into his
+vitals at a thousand yards, is both bold and curious.  Not so bold,
+however, as the badger and not so much of a curmudgeon.  This
+short-legged meat-eater loves half lights and lowering days, has
+no friends, no enemies, and disowns his offspring.  Very
+likely if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would
+resent it.  But the badger is not very well contrived for looking
+up or far to either side.  Dull afternoons he may be met nosing a
+trail hot-foot to the home of ground rat or squirrel, and is with
+difficulty persuaded to give the right of way.  The badger is a
+pot-hunter and no sportsman.  Once at the hill, he dives for the
+central chamber, his sharp-clawed, splayey feet splashing up the
+sand like a bather in the surf.  He is a swift trailer, but not so
+swift or secretive but some small sailing hawk or lazy crow,
+perhaps one or two of each, has spied upon him and come drifting
+down the wind to the killing.
+
+No burrower is so unwise as not to have several exits from his
+dwelling under protecting shrubs.  When the badger goes down, as
+many of the furry people as are not caught napping come up by the
+back doors, and the hawks make short work of them.  I suspect that
+the crows get nothing but the gratification of curiosity and the
+pickings of some secret store of seeds unearthed by the badger. 
+Once the excavation begins they walk about expectantly, but the
+little gray hawks beat slow circles about the doors of exit, and
+are wiser in their generation, though they do not look it.
+
+There are always solitary hawks sailing above the mesa, and
+where some blue tower of silence lifts out of the neighboring
+range, an eagle hanging dizzily, and always buzzards high up in the
+thin, translucent air making a merry-go-round.  Between the
+coyote and the birds of carrion the mesa is kept clear of miserable
+dead.
+
+The wind, too, is a besom over the treeless spaces, whisking
+new sand over the litter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little
+doorways of the burrowers are as trim as city fronts.  It takes man
+to leave unsightly scars on the face of the earth.  Here on the
+mesa the abandoned campoodies of the Paiutes are spots of
+desolation long after the wattles of the huts have warped in the
+brush heaps.  The campoodies are near the watercourses, but never
+in the swale of the stream.  The Paiute seeks rising ground,
+depending on air and sun for purification of his dwelling, and when
+it becomes wholly untenable, moves.
+
+A campoodie at noontime, when there is no smoke rising and no
+stir of life, resembles nothing so much as a collection of
+prodigious wasps' nests.  The huts are squat and brown and
+chimneyless, facing east, and the inhabitants have the faculty of
+quail for making themselves scarce in the underbrush at the
+approach of strangers.  But they are really not often at home
+during midday, only the blind and incompetent left to keep the
+camp.  These are working hours, and all across the mesa one sees
+the women whisking seeds of chia into their spoon-shaped
+baskets, these emptied again into the huge conical carriers,
+supported on the shoulders by a leather band about the forehead.
+
+Mornings and late afternoons one meets the men singly and
+afoot on unguessable errands, or riding shaggy, browbeaten ponies,
+with game slung across the saddle-bows.  This might be deer or even
+antelope, rabbits, or, very far south towards Shoshone Land,
+lizards.
+
+There are myriads of lizards on the mesa, little gray darts,
+or larger salmon-sided ones that may be found swallowing their
+skins in the safety of a prickle-bush in early spring.  Now and
+then a palm's breadth of the trail gathers itself together and  
+scurries off with a little rustle under the brush, to resolve
+itself into sand again.  This is pure witchcraft.  If you succeed
+in catching it in transit, it loses its power and becomes a flat,
+horned, toad-like creature, horrid-looking and harmless, of the
+color of the soil; and the curio dealer will give you two bits for
+it, to stuff.
+   Men have their season on the mesa as much as plants and
+four-footed things, and one is not like to meet them out of their
+time.  For example, at the time of rodeos, which is perhaps
+April, one meets free riding vaqueros who need no trails and can
+find cattle where to the layman no cattle exist.  As early as
+February bands of sheep work up from the south to the high Sierra
+pastures.  It appears that shepherds have not changed more than
+sheep in the process of time.  The shy hairy men who herd the
+tractile flocks might be, except for some added clothing, the very
+brethren of David.  Of necessity they are hardy, simple
+livers, superstitious, fearful, given to seeing visions, and almost
+without speech.  It needs the bustle of shearings and copious
+libations of sour, weak wine to restore the human faculty.  Petite
+Pete, who works a circuit up from the Ceriso to Red Butte and
+around by way of Salt Flats, passes year by year on the mesa trail,
+his thick hairy chest thrown open to all weathers, twirling his
+long staff, and dealing brotherly with his dogs, who are possibly
+as intelligent, certainly handsomer.
+
+A flock's journey is seven miles, ten if pasture fails, in a
+windless blur of dust, feeding as it goes, and resting at noons. 
+Such hours Pete weaves a little screen of twigs between his head
+and the sun--the rest of him is as impervious as one of his own
+sheep--and sleeps while his dogs have the flocks upon their
+consciences.  At night, wherever he may be, there Pete camps, and
+fortunate the trail-weary traveler who falls in with him.  When
+the fire kindles and savory meat seethes in the pot, when there is
+a drowsy blether from the flock, and far down the mesa the twilight
+twinkle of shepherd fires, when there is a hint of blossom
+underfoot and a heavenly whiteness on the hills, one harks back
+without effort to Judaea and the Nativity.  But one feels by day
+anything but good will to note the shorn shrubs and cropped
+blossom-tops.  So many seasons' effort, so many suns and rains to
+make a pound of wool!  And then there is the loss of
+ground-inhabiting birds that must fail from the mesa when few herbs
+ripen seed.
+
+Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills,
+there is more sky than any place in the world.  It does not sit
+flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space
+in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean
+winey winds.  There are some odors, too, that get into the blood. 
+There is the spring smell of sage that is the warning that sap is
+beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices
+of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what
+a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that
+is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant's best, and
+leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop.  There is the smell
+of sage at sundown, burning sage from campoodies and sheep camps,
+that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell
+that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon
+long acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it
+indubitably.  There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that
+comes up from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and
+the smell of rain from the wide-mouthed canons.  And last the smell
+of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of other things
+that are the end of the mesa trail.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BASKET MAKER
+
+"A man," says Seyavi of the campoodie, "must have a woman, but a
+woman who has a child will do very well."
+
+That was perhaps why, when she lost her mate in the dying
+struggle of his race, she never took another, but set her wit to
+fend for herself and her young son.  No doubt she was often put to
+it in the beginning to find food for them both.  The Paiutes had
+made their last stand at the border of the Bitter Lake;
+battle-driven they died in its waters, and the land filled with
+cattle-men and adventurers for gold: this while Seyavi and the boy
+lay up in the caverns of the Black Rock and ate tule roots and
+fresh-water clams that they dug out of the slough bottoms with
+their toes.  In the interim, while the tribes swallowed their
+defeat, and before the rumor of war died out, they must have come
+very near to the bare core of things.  That was the time Seyavi
+learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more
+easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.
+
+To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land
+it is lived in and the procession of the year.  This valley is a
+narrow one, a mere trough between hills, a draught for storms,
+hardly a crow's flight from the sharp Sierras of the Snows to the
+curled, red and ochre, uncomforted, bare ribs of Waban.  Midway of
+the groove runs a burrowing, dull river, nearly a hundred miles
+from where it cuts the lava flats of the north to its widening in
+a thick, tideless pool of a lake.  Hereabouts the ranges have no
+foothills, but rise up steeply from the bench lands above the
+river.  Down from the Sierras, for the east ranges have almost no
+rain, pour glancing white floods toward the lowest land, and all
+beside them lie the campoodies, brown wattled brush heaps, looking
+east.
+
+In the river are mussels, and reeds that have edible white
+roots, and in the soddy meadows tubers of joint grass; all these at
+their best in the spring.  On the slope the summer growth affords
+seeds; up the steep the one-leafed pines, an oily nut.  That was
+really all they could depend upon, and that only at the mercy of
+the little gods of frost and rain.  For the rest it was cunning
+against cunning, caution against skill, against quacking hordes of
+wild-fowl in the tulares, against pronghorn and bighorn and deer. 
+You can guess, however, that all this warring of rifles and
+bowstrings, this influx of overlording whites, had made game
+wilder and hunters fearful of being hunted.  You can surmise also,
+for it was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became
+in turn the game of the conquerors.
+
+There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or
+outcast, that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and
+foraged for them, slinking savage and afraid, remembering and
+mistrusting humankind, wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.
+
+I have thought Seyavi might have had days like that, and have had
+perfect leave to think, since she will not talk of it.  Paiutes
+have the art of reducing life to its lowest ebb and yet saving it
+alive on grasshoppers, lizards, and strange herbs; and that time
+must have left no shift untried.  It lasted long enough for Seyavi
+to have evolved the philosophy of life which I have set down at the
+beginning.  She had gone beyond learning to do for her son, and
+learned to believe it worth while.
+
+In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the
+fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of
+her experience.  If she goes on crimping and uncrimping with the
+changing mode, it is safe to suppose she has never come up against
+anything too big for her.  The Indian woman gets nearly the same
+personal note in the pattern of her baskets.  Not that she does not
+make all kinds, carriers, water-bottles, and cradles,--these
+are kitchen ware,--but her works of art are all of the same piece. 
+Seyavi made flaring, flat-bottomed bowls, cooking pots really, when
+cooking was done by dropping hot stones into water-tight food
+baskets, and for decoration a design in colored bark of the
+procession of plumed crests of the valley quail.  In this pattern
+she had made cooking pots in the golden spring of her wedding year,
+when the quail went up two and two to their resting places about
+the foot of Oppapago.  In this fashion she made them when, after
+pillage, it was possible to reinstate the housewifely crafts. 
+Quail ran then in the Black Rock by hundreds,--so you will still
+find them in fortunate years,--and in the famine time the women cut
+their long hair to make snares when the flocks came morning and
+evening to the springs.
+
+Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money, in a
+generation that preferred iron pots for utility.  Every Indian
+woman is an artist,--sees, feels, creates, but does not
+philosophize about her processes.  Seyavi's bowls are wonders of
+technical precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with
+them, but the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of
+humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl.
+
+There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck
+trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate
+the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket
+without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you
+might own one a year without thinking how it was done;
+but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness.  The weaver and
+the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same
+elements.  Twice a year, in the time of white butterflies and again
+when young quail ran neck and neck in the chaparral, Seyavi cut
+willows for basketry by the creek where it wound toward the river
+against the sun and sucking winds.  It never quite reached the
+river except in far-between times of summer flood, but it always
+tried, and the willows encouraged it as much as they could.  You
+nearly always found them a little farther down than the trickle of
+eager water.  The Paiute fashion of counting time appeals to me
+more than any other calendar.  They have no stamp of heathen gods
+nor great ones, nor any succession of moons as have red men of the
+East and North, but count forward and back by the progress of the
+season; the time of taboose, before the trout begin to leap, the
+end of the pinon harvest, about the beginning of deep snows.  So
+they get nearer the sense of the season, which runs early or late
+according as the rains are forward or delayed.  But whenever Seyavi
+cut willows for baskets was always a golden time, and the soul of
+the weather went into the wood.  If you had ever owned one of
+Seyavi's golden russet cooking bowls with the pattern of plumed
+quail, you would understand all this without saying anything.
+
+Before Seyavi made baskets for the satisfaction of
+desire,--for that is a house-bred theory of art that makes anything
+more of it,--she danced and dressed her hair.  In those days, when
+the spring was at flood and the blood pricked to the mating fever,
+the maids chose their flowers, wreathed themselves, and danced in
+the twilights, young desire crying out to young desire.  They sang
+what the heart prompted, what the flower expressed, what boded in
+the mating weather.
+
+"And what flower did you wear, Seyavi?"
+
+"I, ah,--the white flower of twining (clematis), on my body
+and my hair, and so I sang:--
+
+
+"I am the white flower of twining,
+Little white flower by the river,
+Oh, flower that twines close by the river;
+Oh, trembling flower!
+So trembles the maiden heart."
+
+So sang Seyavi of the campoodie before she made baskets, and in her
+later days laid her arms upon her knees and laughed in them at the
+recollection.  But it was not often she would say so much, never
+understanding the keen hunger I had for bits of lore and the "fool
+talk" of her people.  She had fed her young son with meadowlarks'
+tongues, to make him quick of speech; but in late years was
+loath to admit it, though she had come through the period of
+unfaith in the lore of the clan with a fine appreciation of its
+beauty and significance.
+
+"What good will your dead get, Seyavi, of the baskets you
+burn?" said I, coveting them for my own collection.
+
+Thus Seyavi, "As much good as yours of the flowers you strew."
+
+Oppapago looks on Waban, and Waban on Coso and the Bitter
+Lake, and the campoodie looks on these three; and more, it sees the
+beginning of winds along the foot of Coso, the gathering of clouds
+behind the high ridges, the spring flush, the soft spread of wild
+almond bloom on the mesa.  These first, you understand, are the
+Paiute's walls, the other his furnishings.  Not the wattled hut is
+his home, but the land, the winds, the hill front, the stream. 
+These he cannot duplicate at any furbisher's shop as you who live
+within doors, who, if your purse allows, may have the same home at
+Sitka and Samarcand.  So you see how it is that the homesickness of
+an Indian is often unto death, since he gets no relief from it;
+neither wind nor weed nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the hills of
+a strange land sufficiently like his own.  So it was when the
+government reached out for the Paiutes, they gathered into the
+Northern Reservation only such poor tribes as could devise no other
+end of their affairs.  Here, all along the river, and south to
+Shoshone Land, live the clans who owned the earth, fallen
+into the deplorable condition of hangers-on.  Yet you hear them
+laughing at the hour when they draw in to the campoodie after
+labor, when there is a smell of meat and the steam of the cooking
+pots goes up against the sun.  Then the children lie with their
+toes in the ashes to hear tales; then they are merry, and have the
+joys of repletion and the nearness of their kind.  They have their
+hills, and though jostled are sufficiently free to get some
+fortitude for what will come.  For now you shall hear of the end of
+the basket maker.
+
+In her best days Seyavi was most like Deborah, deep bosomed,
+broad in the hips, quick in counsel, slow of speech, esteemed of
+her people.  This was that Seyavi who reared a man by her own hand,
+her own wit, and none other.  When the townspeople began to take
+note of her--and it was some years after the war before there began
+to be any towns--she was then in the quick maturity of primitive
+women; but when I knew her she seemed already old.  Indian women do
+not often live to great age, though they look incredibly steeped in
+years.  They have the wit to win sustenance from the raw material
+of life without intervention, but they have not the sleek look of
+the women whom the social organization conspires to nourish. 
+Seyavi had somehow squeezed out of her daily round a spiritual
+ichor that kept the skill in her knotted fingers along after the
+accustomed time, but that also failed.  By all counts she would
+have been about sixty years old when it came her turn to sit in the
+dust on the sunny side of the wickiup, with little strength left
+for anything but looking.  And in time she paid the toll of the
+smoky huts and became blind.  This is a thing so long expected by
+the Paiutes that when it comes they find it neither bitter nor
+sweet, but tolerable because common.  There were three other blind
+women in the campoodie, withered fruit on a bough, but they had
+memory and speech.  By noon of the sun there were never any left in
+the campoodie but these or some mother of weanlings, and they sat
+to keep the ashes warm upon the hearth.  If it were cold, they
+burrowed in the blankets of the hut; if it were warm, they followed
+the shadow of the wickiup around.  Stir much out of their places
+they hardly dared, since one might not help another; but they
+called, in high, old cracked voices, gossip and reminder across the
+ash heaps.
+
+Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour
+to spare, there are things to be learned of life not set down in
+any books, folk tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and
+desire, but no whimpering.  Now and then one or another of the
+blind keepers of the camp will come across to where you sit
+gossiping, tapping her way among the kitchen middens, guided by
+your voice that carries far in the clearness and stillness
+of mesa afternoons.  But suppose you find Seyavi retired into the
+privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day.  There
+is no other privacy possible in a campoodie.  All the processes of
+life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven
+walls of the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for
+behavior.  Very early the Indian learns to possess his countenance
+in impassivity, to cover his head with his blanket.  Something to
+wrap around him is as necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet
+to pray in.
+
+So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the
+unlit hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her
+spirit against the time of the spirit's need, for she knows in fact
+quite as much of these matters as you who have a larger hope,
+though she has none but the certainty that having borne herself
+courageously to this end she will not be reborn a coyote.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS
+
+All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow
+they go up to the core of the hills.  Any trail that goes
+otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances.  Rifts of
+the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide
+enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this
+distinction in mind,--valleys are the sunken places of the earth,
+canons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God.  They have a
+better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of
+pleasantness; they call them parks.  Here and there in the hill
+country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony
+barriers.  These head also for the heart of the mountains; their
+distinction is that they never get anywhere.
+
+All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep
+grooves where a stream might run.  You would do well to avoid that
+range uncomforted by singing floods.  You will find it forsaken of
+most things but beauty and madness and death and God.  Many
+such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the
+imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the
+ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable
+thirst.
+
+The river canons of the Sierras of the Snows are better worth
+while than most Broadways, though the choice of them is like the
+choice of streets, not very well determined by their names.  There
+is always an amount of local history to be read in the names of
+mountain highways where one touches the successive waves of
+occupation or discovery, as in the old villages where the
+neighborhoods are not built but grow.  Here you have the Spanish
+Californian in Cero Gordo and pinon; Symmes and Shepherd,
+pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek, Kearsarge,
+--easy to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute that;
+Mist Canon and Paddy Jack's.  The streets of the west Sierras
+sloping toward the San Joaquin are long and winding, but from the
+east, my country, a day's ride carries one to the lake regions. 
+The next day reaches the passes of the high divide, but whether one
+gets passage depends a little on how many have gone that road
+before, and much on one's own powers.  The passes are steep and
+windy ridges, though not the highest.  By two and three thousand
+feet the snow-caps overtop them.  It is even possible to wind
+through the Sierras without having passed above timber-line,
+but one misses a great exhilaration.
+
+The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out
+into long shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other
+thunder-splintered sierras.  You get the saw-tooth effect from a
+distance, but the near-by granite bulk glitters with the terrible
+keen polish of old glacial ages.  I say terrible; so it seems. 
+When those glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain,
+you conceive how long and imperturbable are the purposes of God.
+
+Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best
+time to go up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the
+merely idle or sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and
+understanding, the best time is when you have the longest leave to
+stay.  And here is a hint if you would attempt the stateliest
+approaches; travel light, and as much as possible live off the
+land.  Mulligatawny soup and tinned lobster will not bring you the
+favor of the woodlanders.
+
+Every canon commends itself for some particular pleasantness;
+this for pines, another for trout, one for pure bleak beauty of
+granite buttresses, one for its far-flung irised falls; and as I
+say, though some are easier going, leads each to the cloud
+shouldering citadel.  First, near the canon mouth you get the
+low-heading full-branched, one-leaf pines.  That is the sort of
+tree to know at sight, for the globose, resin-dripping cones
+have palatable, nourishing kernels, the main harvest of the
+Paiutes.  That perhaps accounts for their growing accommodatingly
+below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on the valleyward
+slopes.  The real procession of the pines begins in the rifts with
+the long-leafed Pinus jeffreyi, sighing its soul away upon
+the wind.  And it ought not to sigh in such good company.  Here
+begins the manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the
+sharp waste of boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to
+the sleek, ruddy, chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet,
+burnished laurel, and the million unregarded trumpets of the coral-
+red pentstemon.  Wild life is likely to be busiest about the lower
+pine borders.  One looks in hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild
+honey.  The drone of bees, the chatter of jays, the hurry and stir
+of squirrels, is incessant; the air is odorous and hot.  The roar
+of the stream fills up the morning and evening intervals, and at
+night the deer feed in the buckthorn thickets.  It is worth
+watching the year round in the purlieus of the long-leafed pines. 
+One month or another you set sight or trail of most roving mountain
+dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows, and more
+bloom than you can properly appreciate.
+
+Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains,
+water has the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the
+shortest passage.  Where the rifts are narrow, and some of
+the Sierra canons are not a stone's throw from wall to wall, the
+best trail for foot or horse winds considerably above the
+watercourses; but in a country of cone-bearers there is usually a
+good strip of swardy sod along the canon floor.  Pine woods, the
+short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the high Sierras, are sombre,
+rooted in the litter of a thousand years, hushed, and corrective to
+the spirit.  The trail passes insensibly into them from the black
+pines and a thin belt of firs.  You look back as you rise, and
+strain for glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the Bitter
+Lake, and tender cloud films on the farther ranges.  For such
+pictures the pine branches make a noble frame.  Presently they
+close in wholly; they draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks,
+giving up the trail indifferently, or with a secret grudge.  You
+get a kind of impatience with their locked ranks, until you come
+out lastly on some high, windy dome and see what they are about. 
+They troop thickly up the open ways, river banks, and brook
+borders; up open swales of dribbling springs; swarm over old
+moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part and meet about clean
+still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented, bowed, persisting
+to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to pray for rain. 
+The spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than
+frankincense, and trail it out over high altars, staining the snow.
+
+No doubt they understand this work better than we; in fact
+they know no other.  "Come," say the churches of the valleys,
+after a season of dry years, "let us pray for rain."  They would do
+better to plant more trees.
+
+It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die
+out.  Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing
+wood, the soul is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines.  They
+have no voice but the wind, and no sound of them rises up to the
+high places.  But the waters, the evidences of their power, that go
+down the steep and stony ways, the outlets of ice-bordered pools,
+the young rivers swaying with the force of their running, they sing
+and shout and trumpet at the falls, and the noise of it far
+outreaches the forest spires.  You see from these conning towers
+how they call and find each other in the slender gorges; how they
+fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer nearing walls to give them
+countenance and show the way; and how the pine woods are made glad
+by them.
+
+Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a
+sense of pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if they are any,
+are home dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking
+asp.  They grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems
+have a permanent curve toward the down slope, as you may also see
+in hillside pines, where they have borne the weight of sagging
+drifts.
+
+Well up from the valley, at the confluence of canons, are
+delectable summer meadows.  Fireweed flames about them against the
+gray boulders; streams are open, go smoothly about the glacier
+slips and make deep bluish pools for trout.  Pines raise statelier
+shafts and give themselves room to grow,--gentians, shinleaf, and
+little grass of Parnassus in their golden checkered shadows; the
+meadow is white with violets and all outdoors keeps the clock.  For
+example, when the ripples at the ford of the creek raise a clear
+half tone,--sign that the snow water has come down from the heated
+high ridges,--it is time to light the evening fire.  When it drops
+off a note--but you will not know it except the Douglas squirrel
+tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from the pines' aerial
+gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the first far glint
+of the nearing sun.  Whitney cries it from his vantage tower; it
+flashes from Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte speeds it
+to the westering peaks.  The high rills wake and run, the birds
+begin.  But down three thousand feet in the canon, where you stir
+the fire under the cooking pot, it will not be day for an hour.  It
+goes on, the play of light across the high places, rosy, purpling,
+tender, glint and glow, thunder and windy flood, like the grave,
+exulting talk of elders above a merry game.
+
+Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the
+streets of the mountains.  As for me, once set above the
+country of the silver firs, I must go on until I find white
+columbine.  Around the amphitheatres of the lake regions and above
+them to the limit of perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in
+splintered rock wastes.  The crowds of them, the airy spread of
+sepals, the pale purity of the petal spurs, the quivering swing of
+bloom, obsesses the sense.  One must learn to spare a little of the
+pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all one's purse in one
+shop.  There is always another year, and another.
+
+Lingering on in the alpine regions until the first full snow,
+which is often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good
+company.  First snows are soft and clogging and make laborious
+paths.  Then it is the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of
+the wood, below the limit of early storms.  Early winter and early
+spring one may have sight or track of deer and bear and bighorn,
+cougar and bobcat, about the thickets of buckthorn on open slopes
+between the black pines.  But when the ice crust is firm above the
+twenty foot drifts, they range far and forage where they will. 
+Often in midwinter will come, now and then, a long fall of soft
+snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust, and work a real
+hardship for the dwellers of these streets.  When such a storm
+portends the weather-wise blacktail will go down across the valley
+and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than
+suffices to nourish the sparsely growing pines.  But the
+bighorn, the wild sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms with no
+signs of stress, cannot cope with the loose shifty snow.  Never
+such a storm goes over the mountains that the Indians do not
+catch them floundering belly deep among the lower rifts.  I have a
+pair of horns, inconceivably heavy, that were borne as late as a
+year ago by a very monarch of the flock whom death overtook at the
+mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet snow.  He met it as a king
+should, with no vain effort or trembling, and it was wholly kind to
+take him so with four of his following rather than that the night
+prowlers should find him.
+
+There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one
+looks to find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather. 
+Light feet of hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a
+wondrously plain track in the snow.  We used to look and look at
+the beginning of winter for the birds to come down from the pine
+lands; looked in the orchard and stubble; looked north and south
+on the mesa for their migratory passing, and wondered that they
+never came.  Busy little grosbeaks picked about the kitchen doors,
+and woodpeckers tapped the eaves of the farm buildings, but we saw
+hardly any other of the frequenters of the summer canons.  After a
+while when we grew bold to tempt the snow borders we found them in
+the street of the mountains.  In the thick pine woods where
+the overlapping boughs hung with snow-wreaths make wind-proof
+shelter tents, in a very community of dwelling, winter the
+bird-folk who get their living from the persisting cones and the
+larvae harboring bark.  Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow
+chambers of the chaparral.  Consider how it must be in a hill-slope
+overgrown with stout-twigged, partly evergreen shrubs, more than
+man high, and as thick as a hedge.  Not all the canon's sifting of
+snow can fill the intricate spaces of the hill tangles.  Here and
+there an overhanging rock, or a stiff arch of buckthorn, makes an
+opening to communicating rooms and runways deep under the snow.
+
+The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and
+ghostly, but serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries,
+and the wind-built walls are warm against the wind.  It seems that
+live plants, especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off
+heat; the snow wall melts earliest from within and hollows to
+thinnness before there is a hint of spring in the air.  But you
+think of these things afterward.  Up in the street it has the
+effect of being done consciously; the buckthorns lean to each other
+and the drift to them, the little birds run in and out of their
+appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness.  They give almost no
+tokens of distress, and even if the winter tries them too much you
+are not to pity them.  You of the house habit can hardly understand
+the sense of the hills.  No doubt the labor of being
+comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an
+exaggerated pain to be set aside.  Whether the wild things
+understand it or not they adapt themselves to its processes with
+the greater ease.  The business that goes on in the street of the
+mountain is tremendous, world-formative.  Here go birds, squirrels,
+and red deer, children crying small wares and playing in the
+street, but they do not obstruct its affairs.  Summer is their
+holiday; "Come now," says the lord of the street, "I have need of
+a great work and no more playing."
+
+But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure
+kindness.  They are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the
+nobler plan which they accept with a dignity the rest of us have
+not yet learned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WATER BORDERS
+
+I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and
+find it pertinent to my subject,--Oppapago, The Weeper.  It sits
+eastward and solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and
+above a range of little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave
+aspect as of some woman you might have known, looking out across
+the grassy barrows of her dead.  From twin gray lakes under its
+noble brow stream down incessant white and tumbling waters. 
+"Mahala all time cry," said Winnenap', drawing furrows in his
+rugged, wrinkled cheeks.
+
+The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears,
+patent to the understanding but mysterious to the sense.  They are
+always at it, but one so seldom catches them in the act.  Here in
+the valley there is no cessation of waters even in the season when
+the niggard frost gives them scant leave to run.  They make the
+most of their midday hour, and tinkle all night thinly under the
+ice.  An ear laid to the snow catches a muffled hint of their
+eternal busyness fifteen or twenty feet under the canon
+drifts, and long before any appreciable spring thaw, the sagging
+edges of the snow bridges mark out the place of their running.  One
+who ventures to look for it finds the immediate source of the
+spring freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed with the reek of
+melting drifts, all the gravelly flats in a swirl of waters.  But
+later, in June or July, when the camping season begins, there runs
+the stream away full and singing, with no visible reinforcement
+other than an icy trickle from some high, belated dot of snow. 
+Oftenest the stream drops bodily from the bleak bowl of some alpine
+lake; sometimes breaks out of a hillside as a spring where the ear
+can trace it under the rubble of loose stones to the neighborhood
+of some blind pool.  But that leaves the lakes to be accounted for.
+
+The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid,
+unwinking, also unfathomable.  Whatever goes on under the high and
+stony brows is guessed at.  It is always a favorite local tradition
+that one or another of the blind lakes is bottomless.  Often they
+lie in such deep cairns of broken boulders that one never gets
+quite to them, or gets away unhurt.  One such drops below the
+plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds over, perilously,
+nearing the pass.  It lies still and wickedly green in its
+sharp-lipped cap, and the guides of that region love to
+tell of the packs and pack animals it has swallowed up.
+
+But the lakes of Oppapago are perhaps not so deep, less green
+than 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 tunnels 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 big-horns 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.
+
+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 pothole, 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
+timberline 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 tunnels 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 canons.
+
+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 Canon alone, and if
+that does not include them all it is because they were already
+collected otherwhere.
+
+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.  Years 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 canon, 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 canon 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
+
+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.
+
+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 Montana, 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 longhandled 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 canon 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.
+
+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
+Senora 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 canons, 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.
+
+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 farflown 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
+
+Choose a hill country for storms.  There all the business of the
+weather is carried on above your horizon and loses its terror in
+familiarity.  When you come to think about it, the disastrous
+storms are on the levels, sea or sand or plains.  There you get
+only a hint of what is about to happen, the fume of the gods rising
+from their meeting place under the rim of the world; and when it
+breaks upon you there is no stay nor shelter.  The terrible mewings
+and mouthings of a Kansas wind have the added terror of
+viewlessness.  You are lapped in them like uprooted grass; suspect
+them of a personal grudge.  But the storms of hill countries have
+other business.  They scoop watercourses, manure the pines, twist
+them to a finer fibre, fit the firs to be masts and spars, and, if
+you keep reasonably out of the track of their affairs, do you no
+harm.
+
+They have habits to be learned, appointed paths, seasons, and
+warnings, and they leave you in no doubt about their
+performances.  One who builds his house on a water scar or the
+rubble of a steep slope must take chances.  So they did in Overtown
+who built in the wash of Argus water, and at Kearsarge at the foot
+of a steep, treeless swale.  After twenty years Argus water rose in
+the wash against the frail houses, and the piled snows of Kearsarge
+slid down at a thunder peal over the cabins and the camp, but you
+could conceive that it was the fault of neither the water nor the
+snow.
+
+The first effect of cloud study is a sense of presence and
+intention in storm processes.  Weather does not happen.  It is the
+visible manifestation of the Spirit moving itself in the void.  It
+gathers itself together under the heavens; rains, snows, yearns
+mightily in wind, smiles; and the Weather Bureau, situated
+advantageously for that very business, taps the record on his
+instruments and going out on the streets denies his God, not having
+gathered the sense of what he has seen.  Hardly anybody takes
+account of the fact that John Muir, who knows more of mountain
+storms than any other, is a devout man.
+
+Of the high Sierras choose the neighborhood of the splintered
+peaks about the Kern and King's river divide for storm study, or
+the short, wide-mouthed canons opening eastward on high valleys. 
+Days when the hollows are steeped in a warm, winey flood the clouds
+came walking on the floor of heaven, flat and pearly gray beneath,
+rounded and pearly white above.  They gather flock-wise,
+moving on the level currents that roll about the peaks, lock hands
+and settle with the cooler air, drawing a veil about those places
+where they do their work.  If their meeting or parting takes place
+at sunrise or sunset, as it often does, one gets the splendor of
+the apocalypse.  There will be cloud pillars miles high,
+snow-capped, glorified, and preserving an orderly perspective
+before the unbarred door of the sun, or perhaps mere ghosts of
+clouds that dance to some pied piper of an unfelt wind.  But be it
+day or night, once they have settled to their work, one sees from
+the valley only the blank wall of their tents stretched along the
+ranges.  To get the real effect of a mountain storm you must be
+inside.
+
+One who goes often into a hill country learns not to say: What
+if it should rain?  It always does rain somewhere among the peaks:
+the unusual thing is that one should escape it.  You might suppose
+that if you took any account of plant contrivances to save their
+pollen powder against showers.  Note how many there are
+deep-throated and bell-flowered like the pentstemons, how many
+have nodding pedicels as the columbine, how many grow in copse
+shelters and grow there only.  There is keen delight in the quick
+showers of summer canons, with the added comfort, born of
+experience, of knowing that no harm comes of a wetting at high
+altitudes.  The day is warm; a white cloud spies over the
+canon wall, slips up behind the ridge to cross it by some windy
+pass, obscures your sun.  Next you hear the rain drum on the
+broad-leaved hellebore, and beat down the mimulus beside the brook.
+
+You shelter on the lee of some strong pine with shut-winged
+butterflies and merry, fiddling creatures of the wood.  Runnels of
+rain water from the glacier-slips swirl through the pine needles
+into rivulets; the streams froth and rise in their banks.  The sky
+is white with cloud; the sky is gray with rain; the sky is clear. 
+The summer showers leave no wake.
+
+Such as these follow each other day by day for weeks in August
+weather.  Sometimes they chill suddenly into wet snow that packs
+about the lake gardens clear to the blossom frills, and melts away
+harmlessly.  Sometimes one has the good fortune from a
+heather-grown headland to watch a rain-cloud forming in mid-air. 
+Out over meadow or lake region begins a little darkling of the
+sky,--no cloud, no wind, just a smokiness such as spirits
+materialize from in witch stories.
+
+It rays out and draws to it some floating films from secret
+canons.  Rain begins, "slow dropping veil of thinnest lawn;" a wind
+comes up and drives the formless thing across a meadow, or a dull
+lake pitted by the glancing drops, dissolving as it drives.  Such
+rains relieve like tears.
+
+The same season brings the rains that have work to do,
+ploughing storms that alter the face of things.  These come
+with thunder and the play of live fire along the rocks.  They come
+with great winds that try the pines for their work upon the seas
+and strike out the unfit.  They shake down avalanches of splinters
+from sky-line pinnacles and raise up sudden floods like battle
+fronts in the canons against towns, trees, and boulders.  They
+would be kind if they could, but have more important matters.  Such
+storms, called cloud-bursts by the country folk, are not rain,
+rather the spillings of Thor's cup, jarred by the Thunderer.  After
+such a one the water that comes up in the village hydrants miles
+away is white with forced bubbles from the wind-tormented streams.
+
+All that storms do to the face of the earth you may read in
+the geographies, but not what they do to our contemporaries.  I
+remember one night of thunderous rain made unendurably mournful by
+the houseless cry of a cougar whose lair, and perhaps his family,
+had been buried under a slide of broken boulders on the slope of
+Kearsarge.  We had heard the heavy detonation of the slide about
+the hour of the alpenglow, a pale rosy interval in a darkling air,
+and judged he must have come from hunting to the ruined cliff and
+paced the night out before it, crying a very human woe.  I
+remember, too, in that same season of storms, a lake made milky 
+white for days, and crowded out of its bed by clay washed into it
+by a fury of  rain, with the trout floating in it belly  up, 
+stunned by the shock of the sudden flood.  But there were
+trout enough for what was left of the lake next year and the
+beginning of a meadow about its upper rim.  What taxed me most in
+the wreck of one of my favorite canons by cloud-burst was to see a
+bobcat mother mouthing her drowned kittens in the ruined lair built
+in the wash, far above the limit of accustomed waters, but not far
+enough for the unexpected.  After a time you get the point of view
+of gods about these things to save you from being too pitiful.
+
+The great snows that come at the beginning of winter, before
+there is yet any snow except the perpetual high banks, are best
+worth while to watch.  These come often before the late bloomers
+are gone and while the migratory birds are still in the piney
+woods.  Down in the valley you see little but the flocking of
+blackbirds in the streets, or the low flight of mallards over the
+tulares, and the gathering of clouds behind Williamson.  First
+there is a waiting stillness in the wood; the pine-trees creak
+although there is no wind, the sky glowers, the firs rock by the
+water borders.  The noise of the creek rises insistently and falls
+off a full note like a child abashed by sudden silence in the room.
+
+This changing of the stream-tone following tardily the changes of
+the sun on melting snows is most meaningful of wood notes.  After
+it runs a little trumpeter wind to cry the wild creatures to their
+holes.  Sometimes the warning hangs in the air for days
+with increasing stillness.  Only Clark's crow and the strident jays
+make light of it; only they can afford to.  The cattle get down to
+the foothills and ground-inhabiting creatures make fast their
+doors.  It grows chill, blind clouds fumble in the canons; there
+will be a roll of thunder, perhaps, or a flurry of rain, but mostly
+the snow is born in the air with quietness and the sense of strong
+white pinions softly stirred.  It increases, is wet and clogging,
+and makes a white night of midday.
+
+There is seldom any wind with first snows, more often rain,
+but later, when there is already a smooth foot or two over all the
+slopes, the drifts begin.  The late snows are fine and dry, mere
+ice granules at the wind's will.  Keen mornings after a storm they
+are blown out in wreaths and banners from the high ridges sifting
+into the canons.
+
+Once in a year or so we have a "big snow."  The cloud tents
+are widened out to shut in the valley and an outlying range or two
+and are drawn tight against the sun.  Such a storm begins warm,
+with a dry white mist that fills and fills between the ridges, and
+the air is thick with formless groaning.  Now for days you get no
+hint of the neighboring ranges until the snows begin to lighten and
+some shouldering peak lifts through a rent.  Mornings after the
+heavy snows are steely blue, two-edged with cold, divinely fresh
+and still, and these are times to go up to the pine borders.  There
+you may find floundering in the unstable drifts "tainted wethers"
+of the wild sheep, faint from age and hunger; easy prey. 
+Even the deer make slow going in the thick fresh snow, and once
+we found a wolverine going blind and feebly in the white glare.
+
+No tree takes the snow stress with such ease as the silver
+fir.  The star-whorled, fan-spread branches droop under the soft
+wreaths--droop and press flatly to the trunk; presently the point
+of overloading is reached, there is a soft sough and muffled
+drooping, the boughs recover, and the weighting goes on until the
+drifts have reached the midmost whorls and covered up the branches.
+
+When the snows are particularly wet and heavy they spread over the
+young firs in green-ribbed tents wherein harbor winter loving
+birds.
+
+All storms of desert hills, except wind storms, are impotent. 
+East and east of the Sierras they rise in nearly parallel ranges,
+desertward, and no rain breaks over them, except from some
+far-strayed cloud or roving wind from the California Gulf, and
+these only in winter.  In summer the sky travails with thunderings
+and the flare of sheet lightnings to win a few blistering big
+drops, and once in a lifetime the chance of a torrent.  But you
+have not known what force resides in the mindless things until you
+have known a desert wind.  One expects it at the turn of the two
+seasons, wet and dry, with electrified tense nerves.  Along the
+edge of the mesa where it drops off to the valley, dust
+devils begin to rise white and steady, fanning out at the top like
+the genii out of the Fisherman's bottle.  One supposes the Indians
+might have learned the use of smoke signals from these dust pillars
+as they learn most things direct from the tutelage of the earth. 
+The air begins to move fluently, blowing hot and cold between the
+ranges.  Far south rises a murk of sand against the sky; it grows,
+the wind shakes itself, and has a smell of earth.  The cloud of
+small dust takes on the color of gold and shuts out the
+neighborhood, the push of the wind is unsparing.  Only man of all
+folk is foolish enough to stir abroad in it.  But being in a house
+is really much worse; no relief from the dust, and a great fear of
+the creaking timbers.  There is no looking ahead in such a wind,
+and the bite of the small sharp sand on exposed skin is keener than
+any insect sting.  One might sleep, for the lapping of the wind
+wears one to the point of exhaustion very soon, but there is dread,
+in open sand stretches sometimes justified, of being over blown by
+the drift.  It is hot, dry, fretful work, but by going along the
+ground with the wind behind, one may come upon strange things in
+its tumultuous privacy.  I like these truces of wind and heat that
+the desert makes, otherwise I do not know how I should come by so
+many acquaintances with furtive folk.  I like to see hawks sitting
+daunted in shallow holes, not daring to spread a feather,
+and doves in a row by the prickle-bushes, and shut-eyed cattle,
+turned tail to the wind in a patient doze.  I like the smother of
+sand among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in open
+places, but I never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep. 
+The wind robs them of what wit they had, and they seem never to
+have learned the self-induced hypnotic stupor with which most wild
+things endure weather stress.  I have never heard that the desert
+winds brought harm to any other than the wandering shepherds and
+their flocks.  Once below Pastaria Little Pete showed me bones
+sticking out of the sand where a flock of two hundred had been
+smothered in a bygone wind.  In many places the four-foot posts of
+a cattle fence had been buried by the wind-blown dunes.
+
+It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch
+the cloud currents and the chambers of the sky.  From Kearsarge,
+say, you look over Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on
+the level desert air; south of you hurries a white troop late to
+some gathering of their kind at the back of Oppapago; nosing the
+foot of Waban, a woolly mist creeps south.  In the clean, smooth
+paths of the middle sky and highest up in air, drift, unshepherded,
+small flocks ranging contrarily. You will find the proper names of
+these things in the reports of the Weather Bureau--cirrus, cumulus,
+and the like and charts that will teach by study when to
+sow and take up crops.  It is astonishing the trouble men will be
+at to find out when to plant potatoes, and gloze over the eternal
+meaning of the skies.  You have to beat out for yourself many
+mornings on the windy headlands the sense of the fact that you get
+the same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of
+your garden hose.  And not necessarily then do you live up to it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES
+
+There are still some places in the west where the quails cry
+"cuidado"; where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle;
+where all the dishes have chile in them, and they make more of the
+Sixteenth of September than they do of the Fourth of July.  I mean
+in particular El Pueblo de Las Uvas.  Where it lies, how to come at
+it, you will not get from me; rather would I show you the heron's
+nest in the tulares.  It has a peak behind it, glinting above the
+tamarack pines, above a breaker of ruddy hills that have a long
+slope valley-wards and the shoreward steep of waves toward the
+Sierras.
+
+Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Las Uvas
+for common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the
+tulares.  It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a
+dome of cottonwood-trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. 
+Hereabouts are some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up
+the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of
+the arrastra.  Wild vines that begin among the willows lap
+over to the orchard rows, take the trellis and roof-tree.
+
+There is another town above Las Uvas that merits some
+attention, a town of arches and airy crofts, full of linnets,
+blackbirds, fruit birds, small sharp hawks, and mockingbirds that
+sing by night.  They pour out piercing, unendurably sweet cavatinas
+above the fragrance of bloom and musky smell of fruit.  Singing is
+in fact the business of the night at Las Uvas as sleeping is for
+midday.  When the moon comes over the mountain wall new-washed from
+the sea, and the shadows lie like lace on the stamped floors of the
+patios, from recess to recess of the vine tangle runs the thrum of
+guitars and the voice of singing.
+
+At Las Uvas they keep up all the good customs brought out of
+Old Mexico or bred in a lotus-eating land; drink, and are merry and
+look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten
+to a family, have cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes
+and wait for the sun to go down.  And always they dance; at dusk on
+the smooth adobe floors, afternoons under the trellises where the
+earth is damp and has a fruity smell.  A betrothal, a wedding, or
+a christening, or the mere proximity of a guitar is sufficient
+occasion; and if the occasion lacks, send for the guitar and dance
+anyway.
+
+All this requires explanation.  Antonio Sevadra,
+drifting this way from Old Mexico with the flood that poured into
+the Tappan district after the first notable strike, discovered La
+Golondrina.  It was a generous lode and Tony a good fellow; to work
+it he brought in all the Sevadras, even to the twice-removed; all
+the Castros who were his wife's family, all the Saises, Romeros,
+and Eschobars,--the relations of his relations-in-law.  There you
+have the beginning of a pretty considerable town.  To these accrued
+much of the Spanish California float swept out of the southwest by
+eastern enterprise.  They slacked away again when the price of
+silver went down, and the ore dwindled in La Golondrina.  All the
+hot eddy of mining life swept away from that corner of the hills,
+but there were always those too idle, too poor to move, or too
+easily content with El Pueblo de Las Uvas.
+
+Nobody comes nowadays to the town of the grape vines except,
+as we say, "with the breath of crying," but of these enough.  All
+the low sills run over with small heads.  Ah, ah! There is a kind
+of pride in that if you did but know it, to have your baby every
+year or so as the time sets, and keep a full breast.  So great a
+blessing as marriage is easily come by.  It is told of Ruy Garcia
+that when he went for his marriage license he lacked a dollar of
+the clerk's fee, but borrowed it of the sheriff, who expected
+reelection and exhibited thereby a commendable thrift. Of what
+account is it to lack meal or meat when you may have it of
+any neighbor?  Besides, there is sometimes a point of honor in
+these things.  Jesus Romero, father of ten, had a job sacking ore
+in the Marionette which he gave up of his own accord.  "Eh, why?"
+said Jesus, "for my fam'ly."
+
+"It is so, senora," he said solemnly, "I go to the Marionette,
+I work, I eat meat--pie--frijoles--good, ver' good.  I come home
+sad'day nigh' I see my fam'ly.  I play lil' game poker with the
+boys, have lil' drink wine, my money all gone.  My fam'ly have no
+money, nothing eat.  All time I work at mine I eat, good, ver' good
+grub.  I think sorry for my fam'ly.  No, no, senora, I no work no
+more that Marionette, I stay with my fam'ly."  The wonder of it is,
+I think, that the family had the same point of view.
+
+Every house in the town of the vines has its garden plot, corn
+and brown beans and a row of peppers reddening in the sun; and in
+damp borders of the irrigating ditches clumps of 
+yerbasanta, horehound, catnip, and spikenard, wholesome herbs and
+curative, but if no peppers then nothing at all.  You will have for
+a holiday dinner, in Las Uvas, soup with meat balls and chile in
+it, chicken with chile, rice with chile, fried beans with more
+chile, enchilada, which is corn cake with the sauce of chile and
+tomatoes, onion, grated cheese, and olives, and for a relish chile
+tepines passed about in a dish, all of which is comfortable
+and corrective to the stomach.  You will have wine which
+every man makes for himself, of good body and inimitable bouquet,
+and sweets that are not nearly so nice as they look.
+
+There are two occasions when you may count on that kind of a
+meal; always on the Sixteenth of September, and on the two-yearly
+visits of Father Shannon.  It is absurd, of course, that El Pueblo
+de Las Uvas should have an Irish priest, but Black Rock, Minton,
+Jimville, and all that country round do not find it so.  Father
+Shannon visits them all, waits by the Red Butte to confess the
+shepherds who go through with their flocks, carries blessing to
+small and isolated mines, and so in the course of a year or so
+works around to Las Uvas to bury and marry and christen.  Then all
+the little graves in the Campo Santo are brave with tapers,
+the brown pine headboards blossom like Aaron's rod with paper roses
+and bright cheap prints of Our Lady of Sorrows.  Then the Senora
+Sevadra, who thinks herself elect of heaven for that office,
+gathers up the original sinners, the little Elijias, Lolas,
+Manuelitas, Joses, and Felipes, by dint of adjurations and sweets
+smuggled into small perspiring palms, to fit them for the
+Sacrament.
+
+I used to peek in at them, never so softly, in Dona Ina's
+living-room; Raphael-eyed little imps, going sidewise on their
+knees to rest them from the bare floor, candles lit on the mantel
+to give a religious air, and a great sheaf of wild bloom
+before the Holy Family.  Come Sunday they set out the altar in the
+schoolhouse, with the fine-drawn altar cloths, the beaten silver
+candlesticks, and the wax images, chief glory of Las Uvas, brought
+up mule-back from Old Mexico forty years ago.  All in white the
+communicants go up two and two in a hushed, sweet awe to take the
+body of their Lord, and Tomaso, who is priest's boy, tries not to
+look unduly puffed up by his office.  After that you have dinner
+and a bottle of wine that ripened on the sunny slope of Escondito. 
+All the week Father Shannon has shriven his people, who bring clean
+conscience to the betterment of appetite, and the Father sets them
+an example.  Father Shannon is rather big about the middle to
+accommodate the large laugh that lives in him, but a most shrewd
+searcher of hearts.  It is reported that one derives comfort from
+his confessional, and I for my part believe it.
+
+The celebration of the Sixteenth, though it comes every year,
+takes as long to prepare for as Holy Communion.  The senoritas have
+each a new dress apiece, the senoras a new rebosa.  The
+young gentlemen have new silver trimmings to their sombreros,
+unspeakable ties, silk handkerchiefs, and new leathers to their
+spurs.  At this time when the peppers glow in the gardens and the
+young quail cry "cuidado," "have a care!" you can hear the
+plump, plump of the metate from the alcoves of the vines where
+comfortable old dames, whose experience gives them the touch of art,
+are pounding out corn for tamales.
+
+School-teachers from abroad have tried before now at Las Uvas
+to have school begin on the first of September, but got nothing
+else to stir in the heads of the little Castros, Garcias, and
+Romeros but feasts and cock-fights until after the Sixteenth. 
+Perhaps you need to be told that this is the anniversary of the
+Republic, when liberty awoke and cried in the provinces of Old
+Mexico.  You are aroused at midnight to hear them shouting in the
+streets, "Vive la Libertad!" answered from the houses and
+the recesses of the vines, "Vive la Mexico!"  At sunrise
+shots are fired commemorating the tragedy of unhappy Maximilian,
+and then music, the noblest of national hymns, as the great flag of
+Old Mexico floats up the flag-pole in the bare little plaza of
+shabby Las Uvas.  The sun over Pine Mountain greets the eagle of
+Montezuma before it touches the vineyards and the town, and the day
+begins with a great shout.  By and by there will be a reading of
+the Declaration of Independence and an address punctured by
+vives; all the town in its best dress, and some exhibits of
+horsemanship that make lathered bits and bloody spurs; also a
+cock-fight.
+
+By night there will be dancing, and such music! old Santos to
+play the flute, a little lean man with a saintly countenance, young
+Garcia whose guitar has a soul, and Carrasco with the
+violin.  They sit on a high platform above the dancers in the
+candle flare, backed by the red, white, and green of Old Mexico,
+and play fervently such music as you will not hear otherwhere.
+
+At midnight the flag comes down.  Count yourself at a loss if
+you are not moved by that performance.  Pine Mountain watches
+whitely overhead, shepherd fires glow strongly on the glooming
+hills.  The plaza, the bare glistening pole, the dark folk, the
+bright dresses, are lit ruddily by a bonfire.  It leaps up to the
+eagle flag, dies down, the music begins softly and aside.  They
+play airs of old longing and exile; slowly out of the dark the flag
+drops down, bellying and falling with the midnight draught. 
+Sometimes a hymn is sung, always there are tears.  The flag is
+down; Tony Sevadra has received it in his arms.  The music strikes
+a barbaric swelling tune, another flag begins a slow ascent,--it
+takes a breath or two to realize that they are both, flag and tune,
+the Star Spangled Banner,--a volley is fired, we are back, if you
+please, in California of America.  Every youth who has the blood of
+patriots in him lays ahold on Tony Sevadra's flag, happiest if he
+can get a corner of it.  The music goes before, the folk fall in
+two and two, singing.  They sing everything, America, the
+Marseillaise, for the sake of the French shepherds hereabout, the
+hymn of Cuba, and the Chilian national air to comfort two
+families of that land.  The flag goes to Dona Ina's, with the
+candlesticks and the altar cloths, then Las Uvas eats tamales and
+dances the sun up the slope of Pine Mountain.
+
+You are not to suppose that they do not keep the Fourth,
+Washington's Birthday, and Thanksgiving at the town of the grape
+vines.  These make excellent occasions for quitting work and
+dancing, but the Sixteenth is the holiday of the heart.  On
+Memorial Day the graves have garlands and new pictures of the
+saints tacked to the headboards.  There is great virtue in an
+Ave said in the Camp of the Saints.  I like that name which
+the Spanish speaking people give to the garden of the dead,
+Campo Santo, as if it might be some bed of healing from
+which blind souls and sinners rise up whole and praising God. 
+Sometimes the speech of simple folk hints at truth the
+understanding does not reach.  I am persuaded only a complex soul
+can get any good of a plain religion.  Your earthborn is a poet and
+a symbolist.  We breed in an environment of asphalt pavements a
+body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other
+people's way of life, and have kitchens and latrines under the same
+roof that houses their God.  Such as these go to church to be
+edified, but at Las Uvas they go for pure worship and to entreat
+their God.  The logical conclusion of the faith that every good
+gift cometh from God is the open hand and the finer courtesy.  The
+meal done without buys a candle for the neighbor's dead
+child.  You do foolishly to suppose that the candle does no good.
+
+At Las Uvas every house is a piece of earth--thick walled,
+whitewashed adobe that keeps the even temperature of a cave; every
+man is an accomplished horseman and consequently bowlegged; every
+family keeps dogs, flea-bitten mongrels that loll on the earthen
+floors.  They speak a purer Castilian than obtains in like villages
+of Mexico, and the way they count relationship everybody is more or
+less akin.  There is not much villainy among them.  What incentive
+to thieving or killing can there be when there is little wealth and
+that to be had for the borrowing!  If they love too hotly, as we
+say "take their meat before grace," so do their betters.  Eh, what!
+shall a man be a saint before he is dead?  And besides, Holy Church
+takes it out of you one way or another before all is done.  Come
+away, you who are obsessed with your own importance in the scheme
+of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by
+the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills to the even-breathing
+days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Las Uvas.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext, The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin
+
+
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