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The Land of Little Rain-Part5_Mary Hunter Austin(1868-1934)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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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 incrediblethickness, 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.






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