The Land Of Little Rain - Mary Hunter Austin
You could never get into any proper relation to Jimville unless you
could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard does
his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver assured
me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady barkeeper. The
phrase tickled all my after-dinner-coffee sense of humor into an
anticipation of Poker Flat. The stage-driver proved himself really
right, though you are not to suppose from this that Jimville had no
conventions and no caste. They work out these things in the personal
equation largely. Almost every latitude of behavior is allowed a good
fellow, one no liar, a free spender, and a backer of his friends'
quarrels. You are respected in as much ground as you can shoot over, in
as many pretensions as you can make good.
That probably explains Mr. Fanshawe, the gentlemanly faro dealer of
those parts, built for the role of Oakhurst, going white-shirted and
frock-coated in a community of overalls; and persuading you that
whatever shifts and tricks of the game were laid to his deal, he could
not practice them on a person of your penetration. But he does. By his
own account and the evidence of his manners he had been bred for a
clergyman, and he certainly has gifts for the part. You find him always
in possession of your point of view, and with an evident though not
obtrusive desire to stand well with you. For an account of his killings,
for his way with women and the way of women with him, I refer you to
Brown of Calaveras and some others of that stripe. His improprieties had
a certain sanction of long standing not accorded to the gay ladies who
wore Mr. Fanshawe's favors. There were perhaps too many of them. On the
whole, the point of the moral distinctions of Jimville appears to be a
point of honor, with an absence of humorous appreciation that strangers
mistake for dullness. At Jimville they see behavior as history and judge
it by facts, untroubled by invention and the dramatic sense. You glimpse
a crude equity in their dealings with Wilkins, who had shot a man at
Lone Tree, fairly, in an open quarrel. Rumor of it reached Jimville
before Wilkins rested there in flight. I saw Wilkins, all Jimville saw
him; in fact, he came into the Silver Dollar when we were holding a
church fair and bought a pink silk pincushion. I have often wondered
what became of it. Some of us shook hands with him, not because we did
not know, but because we had not been officially notified, and there
were those present who knew how it was themselves. When the sheriff
arrived Wilkins had moved on, and Jimville organized a posse and brought
him back, because the sheriff was a Jimville man and we had to stand by
him.
I said we had the church fair at the Silver Dollar. We had most things
there, dances, town meetings, and the kinetoscope exhibition of the
Passion Play. The Silver Dollar had been built when the borders of
Jimville spread from Minton to the red hill the Defiance twisted
through. "Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor for us and moved the bar
to the back room. The fair was designed for the support of the circuit
rider who preached to the few that would hear, and buried us all in
turn. He was the symbol of Jimville's respectability, although he was of
a sect that held dancing among the cardinal sins. The management took no
chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him the
receipts of the evening in the chairman's hat, as a delicate intimation
that the fair was closed. The company filed out of the front door and
around to the back. Then the dance began formally with no feelings hurt.
These were the sort of courtesies, common enough in Jimville, that
brought tears of delicate inner laughter.
There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of Mr. Harte's
demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the soil,--"Alkali
Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono Jim;" fierce, shy,
profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills, who each owned, or had
owned, a mine and was wishful to own one again. They laid up on the worn
benches of the Silver Dollar or the Same Old Luck like beached vessels,
and their talk ran on endlessly of "strike" and "contact" and "mother
lode," and worked around to fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and
the hoodoo of the Minietta, told austerely without imagination.
Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these things
written up from the point of view of people who do not do them every day
would get no savor in their speech.
Says Three Finger, relating the history of the Mariposa, "I took it
off'n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother Bill was shot."
Says Jim Jenkins, "What was the matter of him?"
"Who? Bill? Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around Johnson's wife,
an' Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."
"Why didn't he work it himself?"
"Him? Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to leave the
country pretty quick."
"Huh!" says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.
Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville out into
the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a few rarely
touched water-holes, always, always with the golden hope. They develop
prospects and grow rich, develop others and grow poor but never
embittered. Say the hills, It is all one, there is gold enough, time
enough, and men enough to come after you. And at Jimville they
understand the language of the hills.
Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the earth, it
prefers a "hunch." That is an intimation from the gods that if you go
over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping spring, up Coso way, you
will find what is worth while. I have never heard that the failure of
any particular hunch disproved the principle. Somehow the rawness of the
land favors the sense of personal relation to the supernatural. There is
not much intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you
and the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets in
Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an
explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and drunkenness,
coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a certain indifference,
blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the
pot,--it wants the German to coin a word for that,--no bread-envy, no
brother-fervor. Western writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the
savor of lawlessness too much upon their tongues, but you have these to
witness it is not mean-spiritedness. It is pure Greek in that it
represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond that
it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no
death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts,
so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods.
Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at.
Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct which
includes passion and death in its perquisites. I suppose that the end of
all our hammering and yawping will be something like the point of view
of Jimville. The only difference will be in the decorations.
MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD
It is one of those places God must have meant for a field from all time,
lying very level at the foot of the slope that crowds up against
Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town. North and south it is
fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder strewn and untenable. Eastward
it butts on orchard closes and the village gardens, brimming over into
them by wild brier and creeping grass. The village street, with its
double row of unlike houses, breaks off abruptly at the edge of the
field in a footpath that goes up the streamside, beyond it, to the
source of waters.
The field is not greatly esteemed of the town, not being put to the
plough nor affording firewood, but breeding all manner of wild seeds
that go down in the irrigating ditches to come up as weeds in the
gardens and grass plots. But when I had no more than seen it in the
charm of its spring smiling, I knew I should have no peace until I had
bought ground and built me a house beside it, with a little wicket to go
in and out at all hours, as afterward came about.
Edswick, Roeder, Connor, and Ruffin owned the field before it fell to my
neighbor. But before that the Paiutes, mesne lords of the soil, made a
campoodie by the rill of Pine Creek; and after, contesting the soil with
them, cattle-men, who found its foodful pastures greatly to their
advantage; and bands of blethering flocks shepherded by wild, hairy men
of little speech, who attested their rights to the feeding ground with
their long staves upon each other's skulls. Edswick homesteaded the
field about the time the wild tide of mining life was roaring and
rioting up Kearsarge, and where the village now stands built a stone
hut, with loopholes to make good his claim against cattle-men or
Indians. But Edswick died and Roeder became master of the field. Roeder
owned cattle on a thousand hills, and made it a recruiting ground for
his bellowing herds before beginning the long drive to market across a
shifty desert. He kept the field fifteen years, and afterward falling
into difficulties, put it out as security against certain sums. Connor,
who held the securities, was cleverer than Roeder and not so busy. The
money fell due the winter of the Big Snow, when all the trails were
forty feet under drifts, and Roeder was away in San Francisco selling
his cattle. At the set time Connor took the law by the forelock and was
adjudged possession of the field. Eighteen days later Roeder arrived on
snowshoes, both feet frozen, and the money in his pack. In the long suit
at law ensuing, the field fell to Ruffin, that clever one-armed lawyer
with the tongue to wile a bird out of the bush, Connor's counsel, and
was sold by him to my neighbor, whom from envying his possession I call
Naboth.
Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left no mark
on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking sheep. Round its
corners children pick up chipped arrow points of obsidian, scattered
through it are kitchen middens and pits of old sweat-houses. By the
south corner, where the campoodie stood, is a single shrub of "hoopee"
(_Lycium Andersonii_), maintaining itself hardly among alien shrubs, and
near by, three low rakish trees of hackberry, so far from home that no
prying of mine has been able to find another in any canon east or west.
But the berries of both were food for the Paiutes, eagerly sought and
traded for as far south as Shoshone Land. By the fork of the creek where
the shepherds camp is a single clump of mesquite of the variety called
"screw bean." The seed must have shaken there from some sheep's coat,
for this is not the habitat of mesquite, and except for other single
shrubs at sheep camps, none grows freely for a hundred and fifty miles
south or east.
Naboth has put a fence about the best of the field, but neither the
Indians nor the shepherds can quite forego it. They make camp and build
their wattled huts about the borders of it, and no doubt they have some
sense of home in its familiar aspect.
As I have said, it is a low-lying field, between the mesa and the town,
with no hillocks in it, but a gentle swale where the waste water of the
creek goes down to certain farms, and the hackberry-trees, of which the
tallest might be three times the height of a man, are the tallest things
in it. A mile up from the water gate that turns the creek into supply
pipes for the town, begins a row of long-leaved pines, threading the
watercourse to the foot of Kearsarge. These are the pines that puzzle
the local botanist, not easily determined, and unrelated to other
conifers of the Sierra slope; the same pines of which the Indians relate
a legend mixed of brotherliness and the retribution of God. Once the
pines possessed the field, as the worn stumps of them along the
streamside show, and it would seem their secret purpose to regain their
old footing. Now and then some seedling escapes the devastating sheep a
rod or two down-stream. Since I came to live by the field one of these
has tiptoed above the gully of the creek, beckoning the procession from
the hills, as if in fact they would make back toward that
skyward-pointing finger of granite on the opposite range, from which,
according to the legend, when they were bad Indians and it a great
chief, they ran away. This year the summer floods brought the round,
brown, fruitful cones to my very door, and I look, if I live long
enough, to see them come up greenly in my neighbor's field.
It is interesting to watch this retaking of old ground by the wild
plants, banished by human use. Since Naboth drew his fence about the
field and restricted it to a few wild-eyed steers, halting between the
hills and the shambles, many old habitues of the field have come back to
their haunts. The willow and brown birch, long ago cut off by the
Indians for wattles, have come back to the streamside, slender and
virginal in their spring greenness, and leaving long stretches of the
brown water open to the sky. In stony places where no grass grows, wild
olives sprawl; close-twigged, blue-gray patches in winter, more
translucent greenish gold in spring than any aureole. Along with willow
and birch and brier, the clematis, that shyest plant of water borders,
slips down season by season to within a hundred yards of the village
street. Convinced after three years that it would come no nearer, we
spent time fruitlessly pulling up roots to plant in the garden. All this
while, when no coaxing or care prevailed upon any transplanted slip to
grow, one was coming up silently outside the fence near the wicket,
coiling so secretly in the rabbit-brush that its presence was never
suspected until it flowered delicately along its twining length. The
horehound comes through the fence and under it, shouldering the pickets
off the railings; the brier rose mines under the horehound; and no care,
though I own I am not a close weeder, keeps the small pale moons of the
primrose from rising to the night moth under my apple-trees. The first
summer in the new place, a clump of cypripediums came up by the
irrigating ditch at the bottom of the lawn. But the clematis will not
come inside, nor the wild almond.
I have forgotten to find out, though I meant to, whether the wild almond
grew in that country where Moses kept the flocks of his father-in-law,
but if so one can account for the burning bush. It comes upon one with a
flame-burst as of revelation; little hard red buds on leafless twigs,
swelling unnoticeably, then one, two, or three strong suns, and from tip
to tip one soft fiery glow, whispering with bees as a singing flame. A
twig of finger size will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by
pink five-petaled bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees
find their way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of
fruit too often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny,
tap-rooted shrubs are resistant to most plant evils.
It is not easy always to be attentive to the maturing of wild fruit.
Plants are so unobtrusive in their material processes, and always at the
significant moment some other bloom has reached its perfect hour. One
can never fix the precise moment when the rosy tint the field has from
the wild almond passes into the inspiring blue of lupines. One notices
here and there a spike of bloom, and a day later the whole field royal
and ruffling lightly to the wind. Part of the charm of the lupine is the
continual stir of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere. Go and
stand by any crown of bloom and the tall stalks do but rock a little as
for drowsiness, but look off across the field, and on the stillest days
there is always a trepidation in the purple patches.
From midsummer until frost the prevailing note of the field is clear
gold, passing into the rusty tone of bigelovia going into a decline, a
succession of color schemes more admirably managed than the
transformation scene at the theatre. Under my window a colony of cleome
made a soft web of bloom that drew me every morning for a long still
time; and one day I discovered that I was looking into a rare fretwork
of fawn and straw colored twigs from which both bloom and leaf had gone,
and I could not say if it had been for a matter of weeks or days. The
time to plant cucumbers and set out cabbages may be set down in the
almanac, but never seed-time nor blossom in Naboth's field.
Certain winged and mailed denizens of the field seem to reach their
heyday along with the plants they most affect. In June the leaning
towers of the white milkweed are jeweled over with red and gold beetles,
climbing dizzily. This is that milkweed from whose stems the Indians
flayed fibre to make snares for small game, but what use the beetles put
it to except for a displaying ground for their gay coats, I could never
discover. The white butterfly crop comes on with the bigelovia bloom,
and on warm mornings makes an airy twinkling all across the field. In
September young linnets grow out of the rabbit-brush in the night. All
the nests discoverable in the neighboring orchards will not account for
the numbers of them. Somewhere, by the same secret process by which the
field matures a million more seeds than it needs, it is maturing
red-hooded linnets for their devouring. All the purlieus of bigelovia
and artemisia are noisy with them for a month. Suddenly as they come as
suddenly go the fly-by-nights, that pitch and toss on dusky barred wings
above the field of summer twilights. Never one of these nighthawks will
you see after linnet time, though the hurtle of their wings makes a
pleasant sound across the dusk in their season.
For two summers a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field every
afternoon between three and four o'clock, swooping and soaring with the
airs of a gentleman adventurer. What he finds there is chiefly
conjectured, so secretive are the little people of Naboth's field. Only
when leaves fall and the light is low and slant, one sees the long clean
flanks of the jackrabbits, leaping like small deer, and of late
afternoons little cotton-tails scamper in the runways. But the most one
sees of the burrowers, gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of their
newly opened doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird hangs
on spiny shrubs.
It is a still field, this of my neighbor's, though so busy, and
admirably compounded for variety and pleasantness,--a little sand, a
little loam, a grassy plot, a stony rise or two, a full brown stream, a
little touch of humanness, a footpath trodden out by moccasins. Naboth
expects to make town lots of it and his fortune in one and the same day;
but when I take the trail to talk with old Seyavi at the campoodie, it
occurs to me that though the field may serve a good turn in those days
it will hardly be happier. No, certainly not happier.
THE MESA TRAIL
The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth's field,
though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the canon, or from
any of the cattle paths that go up along the streamside; a clean, pale,
smooth-trodden way between spiny shrubs, comfortably wide for a horse or
an Indian. It begins, I say, at the campoodie, and goes on toward the
twilight hills and the borders of Shoshone Land. It strikes diagonally
across the foot of the hill-slope from the field until it reaches the
larkspur level, and holds south along the front of Oppapago, having the
high ranges to the right and the foothills and the great Bitter Lake
below it on the left. The mesa holds very level here, cut across at
intervals by the deep washes of dwindling streams, and its treeless
spaces uncramp the soul.
Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback, at the jigging
coyote trot that only western-bred horses learn successfully. A
foot-pace carries one too slowly past the units in a decorative scheme
that is on a scale with the country round for bigness. It takes days'
journeys to give a note of variety to the country of the social shrubs.
These chiefly clothe the benches and eastern foot-slopes of the
Sierras,--great spreads of artemisia, _coleogyne_, and spinosa,
suffering no other woody stemmed thing in their purlieus; this by
election apparently, with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each
their clientele of flowering herbs. It would be worth knowing how much
the devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants to
the shelter of the prickle-bushes. It might have begun earlier, in the
time Seyavi of the campoodie tells of, when antelope ran on the mesa
like sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears itself
except from the midst of some stout twigged shrub; larkspur in the
_coleogyne_, and for every spinosa the purpling coils of phacelia. In
the shrub shelter, in the season, flock the little stemless things whose
blossom time is as short as a marriage song. The larkspurs make the best
showing, being tall and sweet, swaying a little above the shrubbery,
scattering pollen dust which Navajo brides gather to fill their marriage
baskets. This were an easier task than to find two of them of a shade.
Larkspurs in the botany are blue, but if you were to slip rein to the
stub of some black sage and set about proving it you would be still at
it by the hour when the white gilias set their pale disks to the
westering sun. This is the gilia the children call "evening snow," and
it is no use trying to improve on children's names for wild flowers.
From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a shifty
yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then as soon as
ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the sidelong ranges, come
little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the edge of the sand. By dusk
there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped
corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa wind as if they were real flakes
shaken out of a cloud, not sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch
stems. They keep awake all night, and all the air is heavy and musky
sweet because of them.
Farther south on the trail there will be poppies meeting ankle deep, and
singly, peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus blown out at the tops of
tall stems. But before the season is in tune for the gayer blossoms the
best display of color is in the lupin wash. There is always a lupin wash
somewhere on a mesa trail,--a broad, shallow, cobble-paved sink of
vanished waters, where the hummocks of _Lupinus ornatus_ run a delicate
gamut from silvery green of spring to silvery white of winter foliage.
They look in fullest leaf, except for color, most like the huddled huts
of the campoodie, and the largest of them might be a man's length in
diameter. In their season, which is after the gilias are at their best,
and before the larkspurs are ripe for pollen gathering, every terminal
whorl of the lupin sends up its blossom stalk, not holding any constant
blue, but paling and purpling to guide the friendly bee to virginal
honey sips, or away from the perfected and depleted flower. The length
of the blossom stalk conforms to the rounded contour of the plant, and
of these there will be a million moving indescribably in the airy
current that flows down the swale of the wash.
There is always a little wind on the mesa, a sliding current of cooler
air going down the face of the mountain of its own momentum, but not to
disturb the silence of great space. Passing the wide mouths of canons,
one gets the effect of whatever is doing in them, openly or behind a
screen of cloud,--thunder of falls, wind in the pine leaves, or rush and
roar of rain. The rumor of tumult grows and dies in passing, as from
open doors gaping on a village street, but does not impinge on the
effect of solitariness. In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for
stillness, but the night silence breaks into certain mellow or poignant
notes. Late afternoons the burrowing owls may be seen blinking at the
doors of their hummocks with perhaps four or five elfish nestlings arow,
and by twilight begin a soft _whoo-oo-ing_, rounder, sweeter, more
incessant in mating time. It is not possible to disassociate the call of
the burrowing owl from the late slant light of the mesa. If the fine
vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of spring twilights were to
tremble into sound, it would be just that mellow double note breaking
along the blossom-tops. While the glow holds one sees the thistle-down
flights and pouncings after prey, and on into the dark hears their soft
_pus-ssh!_ clearing out of the trail ahead. Maybe the pin-point shriek
of field mouse or kangaroo rat that pricks the wakeful pauses of the
night is extorted by these mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just
as like to be the work of the red fox on his twenty-mile constitutional.
Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours, and both
killers for the pure love of slaughter. The fox is no great talker, but
the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once,
gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light treaders, the split-feet, so
that the solitary camper sees their eyes about him in the dark
sometimes, and hears the soft intake of breath when no leaf has stirred
and no twig snapped underfoot. The coyote is your real lord of the mesa,
and so he makes sure you are armed with no long black instrument to spit
your teeth into his vitals at a thousand yards, is both bold and
curious. Not so bold, however, as the badger and not so much of a
curmudgeon. This short-legged meat-eater loves half lights and lowering
days, has no friends, no enemies, and disowns his offspring. Very likely
if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would resent it.
But the badger is not very well contrived for looking up or far to
either side. Dull afternoons he may be met nosing a trail hot-foot to
the home of ground rat or squirrel, and is with difficulty persuaded to
give the right of way. The badger is a pot-hunter and no sportsman. Once
at the hill, he dives for the central chamber, his sharp-clawed, splayey
feet splashing up the sand like a bather in the surf. He is a swift
trailer, but not so swift or secretive but some small sailing hawk or
lazy crow, perhaps one or two of each, has spied upon him and come
drifting down the wind to the killing.