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.
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