The Land Of Little Rain - Mary Hunter Austin
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 lone 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, 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
Armogossa 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
manhandled.
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 timber-line, 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 "kyote-ing," 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.