I Like To See Hawks Sitting
Daunted In Shallow Holes, Not Daring To Spread A Feather,
And Doves In A Row By The Prickle-Bushes, And Shut-Eyed Cattle,
Turned Tail To The Wind In A Patient Doze.
I like the smother of
sand among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in open
places, but I never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep.
The wind robs them of what wit they had, and they seem never to
have learned the self-induced hypnotic stupor with which most wild
things endure weather stress. I have never heard that the desert
winds brought harm to any other than the wandering shepherds and
their flocks. Once below Pastaria Little Pete showed me bones
sticking out of the sand where a flock of two hundred had been
smothered in a bygone wind. In many places the four-foot posts of
a cattle fence had been buried by the wind-blown dunes.
It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch
the cloud currents and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge,
say, you look over Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on
the level desert air; south of you hurries a white troop late to
some gathering of their kind at the back of Oppapago; nosing the
foot of Waban, a woolly mist creeps south. In the clean, smooth
paths of the middle sky and highest up in air, drift, unshepherded,
small flocks ranging contrarily.
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