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.
No burrower is so unwise as not to have several exits from his
dwelling under protecting shrubs. When the badger goes down, as
many of the furry people as are not caught napping come up by the
back doors, and the hawks make short work of them. I suspect that
the crows get nothing but the gratification of curiosity and the
pickings of some secret store of seeds unearthed by the badger.
Once the excavation begins they walk about expectantly, but the
little gray hawks beat slow circles about the doors of exit, and
are wiser in their generation, though they do not look it.
There are always solitary hawks sailing above the mesa, and
where some blue tower of silence lifts out of the neighboring
range, an eagle hanging dizzily, and always buzzards high up in the
thin, translucent air making a merry-go-round. Between the
coyote and the birds of carrion the mesa is kept clear of miserable
dead.
The wind, too, is a besom over the treeless spaces, whisking
new sand over the litter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little
doorways of the burrowers are as trim as city fronts. It takes man
to leave unsightly scars on the face of the earth. Here on the
mesa the abandoned campoodies of the Paiutes are spots of
desolation long after the wattles of the huts have warped in the
brush heaps. The campoodies are near the watercourses, but never
in the swale of the stream. The Paiute seeks rising ground,
depending on air and sun for purification of his dwelling, and when
it becomes wholly untenable, moves.
A campoodie at noontime, when there is no smoke rising and no
stir of life, resembles nothing so much as a collection of
prodigious wasps' nests. The huts are squat and brown and
chimneyless, facing east, and the inhabitants have the faculty of
quail for making themselves scarce in the underbrush at the
approach of strangers. But they are really not often at home
during midday, only the blind and incompetent left to keep the
camp. These are working hours, and all across the mesa one sees
the women whisking seeds of chia into their spoon-shaped
baskets, these emptied again into the huge conical carriers,
supported on the shoulders by a leather band about the forehead.
Mornings and late afternoons one meets the men singly and
afoot on unguessable errands, or riding shaggy, browbeaten ponies,
with game slung across the saddle-bows. This might be deer or even
antelope, rabbits, or, very far south towards Shoshone Land,
lizards.
There are myriads of lizards on the mesa, little gray darts,
or larger salmon-sided ones that may be found swallowing their
skins in the safety of a prickle-bush in early spring. Now and
then a palm's breadth of the trail gathers itself together and
scurries off with a little rustle under the brush, to resolve
itself into sand again. This is pure witchcraft. If you succeed
in catching it in transit, it loses its power and becomes a flat,
horned, toad-like creature, horrid-looking and harmless, of the
color of the soil; and the curio dealer will give you two bits for
it, to stuff.
Men have their season on the mesa as much as plants and
four-footed things, and one is not like to meet them out of their
time. For example, at the time of rodeos, which is perhaps
April, one meets free riding vaqueros who need no trails and can
find cattle where to the layman no cattle exist. As early as
February bands of sheep work up from the south to the high Sierra
pastures. It appears that shepherds have not changed more than
sheep in the process of time. The shy hairy men who herd the
tractile flocks might be, except for some added clothing, the very
brethren of David. Of necessity they are hardy, simple
livers, superstitious, fearful, given to seeing visions, and almost
without speech. It needs the bustle of shearings and copious
libations of sour, weak wine to restore the human faculty. Petite
Pete, who works a circuit up from the Ceriso to Red Butte and
around by way of Salt Flats, passes year by year on the mesa trail,
his thick hairy chest thrown open to all weathers, twirling his
long staff, and dealing brotherly with his dogs, who are possibly
as intelligent, certainly handsomer.
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