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
luminousradiance 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
heightdark 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
shallowforms 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
unseencoyote 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.