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" target="_blank" title="a.屏息的">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