Wheeling To Their Stations In The Sky, They
Make The Poor World-Fret Of No Account.
Of no account you who lie
out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the
scrub from you and howls and howls.
WATER TRAILS OF THE CERISO
By the end of the dry season the water trails of the Ceriso are
worn to a white ribbon in the leaning grass, spread out faint and
fanwise toward the homes of gopher and ground rat and squirrel.
But however faint to man-sight, they are sufficiently plain to the
furred and feathered folk who travel them. Getting down to the eye
level of rat and squirrel kind, one perceives what might easily be
wide and winding roads to us if they occurred in thick plantations
of trees three times the height of a man. It needs but a slender
thread of barrenness to make a mouse trail in the forest of the
sod. To the little people the water trails are as country roads,
with scents as signboards.
It seems that man-height is the least fortunate of all heights
from which to study trails. It is better to go up the front of
some tall hill, say the spur of Black Mountain, looking back and
down across the hollow of the Ceriso. Strange how long the soil
keeps the impression of any continuous treading, even after
grass has overgrown it. Twenty years since, a brief heyday of
mining at Black Mountain made a stage road across the Ceriso, yet
the parallel lines that are the wheel traces show from the height
dark and well defined.
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