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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 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 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.


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