The Indian
Never Concerns Himself, As The Botanist And The Poet, With The
Plant's Appearances And Relations, But With What It Can Do For Him.
It can do much, but how do you suppose he finds it out; what
instincts or accidents guide him?
How does a cat know when to eat
catnip? Why do western bred cattle avoid loco weed, and strangers
eat it and go mad? One might suppose that in a time of famine the
Paiutes digged wild parsnip in meadow corners and died from eating
it, and so learned to produce death swiftly and at will. But how
did they learn, repenting in the last agony, that animal fat is the
best antidote for its virulence; and who taught them that the
essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis), which looks to
have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in stomachic
disorders. But they so understand and so use. One believes it to
be a sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a complexer
civilization. I remember very well when I came first upon a wet
meadow of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or use. It
looked potent; the cool, shiny leaves, the succulent, pink
stems and fruity bloom. A little touch, a hint, a word, and I
should have known what use to put them to. So I felt, unwilling to
leave it until we had come to an understanding. So a musician
might have felt in the presence of an instrument known to
be within his province, but beyond his power. It was with the
relieved sense of having shaped a long surmise that I watched the
Senora Romero make a poultice of it for my burned hand.
On, down from the lower lakes to the village weirs, the brown
and golden disks of helenum have beauty as a sufficient
excuse for being. The plants anchor out on tiny capes, or
mid-stream islets, with the nearly sessile radicle leaves
submerged. The flowers keep up a constant trepidation in time with
the hasty water beating at their stems, a quivering, instinct with
life, that seems always at the point of breaking into flight; just
as the babble of the watercourses always approaches articulation
but never quite achieves it. Although of wide range the helenum
never makes itself common through profusion, and may be looked for
in the same places from year to year. Another lake dweller that
comes down to the ploughed lands is the red columbine. (
C.truncata). It requires no encouragement other than shade, but
grows too rank in the summer heats and loses its wildwood grace.
A common enough orchid in these parts is the false lady's slipper
(Epipactis gigantea), one that springs up by any water where
there is sufficient growth of other sorts to give it countenance.
It seems to thrive best in an atmosphere of suffocation.
The middle Sierras fall off abruptly eastward toward
the high valleys. Peaks of the fourteen thousand class, belted
with sombre swathes of pine, rise almost directly from the bench
lands with no foothill approaches.
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