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.
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