The primrose from
rising to the night moth under my apple-trees. The first summer in
the new place, a clump of cypripediums came up by the irrigating
ditch at the bottom of the lawn. But the clematis will not come
inside, nor the wild almond.
I have forgotten to find out, though I meant to, whether the
wild almond grew in that country where Moses kept the flocks of his
father-in-law, but if so one can account for the burning bush. It
comes upon one with a flame-burst as of revelation; little hard red
buds on leafless twigs, swelling unnoticeably, then one, two, or
three strong suns, and from tip to tip one soft fiery glow,
whispering with bees as a singing flame. A twig of finger size
will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by pink five-petaled
bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees find their way
in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of fruit too
often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny,
tap-rooted shrubs are resistant to most plant evils.
It is not easy always to be attentive to the maturing of wild
fruit. Plants are so unobtrusive in their material processes, and
always at the significant moment some other bloom has reached its
perfect hour. One can never fix the precise moment when the
rosy tint the field has from the wild almond passes into the
inspiring blue of lupines. One notices here and there a spike of
bloom, and a day later the whole field royal and ruffling lightly
to the wind. Part of the charm of the lupine is the continual stir
of its plumes to airs not suspected otherwhere. Go and stand by
any crown of bloom and the tall stalks do but rock a little as for
drowsiness, but look off across the field, and on the stillest days
there is always a trepidation in the purple patches.
From midsummer until frost the prevailing note of the field is
clear gold, passing into the rusty tone of bigelovia going into a
decline, a succession of color schemes more admirably managed than
the transformation scene at the theatre. Under my window a colony
of cleome made a soft web of bloom that drew me every morning for
a long still time; and one day I discovered that I was looking into
a rare fretwork of fawn and straw colored twigs from which both
bloom and leaf had gone, and I could not say if it had been for a
matter of weeks or days. The time to plant cucumbers and set out
cabbages may be set down in the almanac, but never seed-time nor
blossom in Naboth's field.
Certain winged and mailed denizens of the field seem to reach
their heyday along with the plants they most affect. In June the
leaning towers of the white milkweed are jeweled over with
red and gold beetles, climbing dizzily. This is that milkweed from
whose stems the Indians flayed fibre to make snares for small game,
but what use the beetles put it to except for a displaying ground
for their gay coats, I could never discover. The white butterfly
crop comes on with the bigelovia bloom, and on warm mornings makes
an airy twinkling all across the field. In September young linnets
grow out of the rabbit-brush in the night. All the nests
discoverable in the neighboring orchards will not account for the
numbers of them. Somewhere, by the same secret process by which
the field matures a million more seeds than it needs, it is
maturing red-hooded linnets for their devouring. All the purlieus
of bigelovia and artemisia are noisy with them for a month.
Suddenly as they come as suddenly go the fly-by-nights, that pitch
and toss on dusky barred wings above the field of summer twilights.
Never one of these nighthawks will you see after linnet time,
though the hurtle of their wings makes a pleasant sound across the
dusk in their season.
For two summers a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field
every afternoon between three and four o'clock, swooping and
soaring with the airs of a gentleman adventurer. What he finds
there is chiefly conjectured, so secretive are the little people of
Naboth's field. Only when leaves fall and the light is low and
slant, one sees the long clean flanks of the jackrabbits,
leaping like small deer, and of late afternoons little cotton-tails
scamper in the runways. But the most one sees of the burrowers,
gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of their newly opened
doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird hangs on spiny
shrubs.
It is a still field, this of my neighbor's, though so busy,
and admirably compounded for variety and pleasantness,--a little
sand, a little loam, a grassy plot, a stony rise or two, a full
brown stream, a little touch of humanness, a footpath trodden out
by moccasins. Naboth expects to make town lots of it and his
fortune in one and the same day; but when I take the trail to talk
with old Seyavi at the campoodie, it occurs to me that though the
field may serve a good turn in those days it will hardly be
happier. No, certainly not happier.
THE MESA TRAIL
The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth's
field, though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the
canon, or from any of the cattle paths that go up along the
streamside; a clean, pale, smooth-trodden way between spiny shrubs,
comfortably wide for a horse or an Indian.
