It Begins, I Say, At
The Campoodie, And Goes On Toward The Twilight Hills And The
Borders Of Shoshone Land.
It strikes diagonally across the foot of
the hill-slope from the field until it reaches the larkspur level,
and holds south along the front of Oppapago, having the high
ranges to the right and the foothills and the great Bitter Lake
below it on the left.
The mesa holds very level here, cut across
at intervals by the deep washes of dwindling streams, and its
treeless spaces uncramp the soul.
Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback, at the
jigging coyote trot that only western-bred horses learn
successfully. A foot-pace carries one too slowly past the
units in a decorative scheme that is on a scale with the country
round for bigness. It takes days' journeys to give a note of
variety to the country of the social shrubs. These chiefly clothe
the benches and eastern foot-slopes of the Sierras,--great spreads
of artemisia, coleogyne, and spinosa, suffering no other
woody stemmed thing in their purlieus; this by election apparently,
with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each their clientele
of flowering herbs. It would be worth knowing how much the
devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants to
the shelter of the prickle-bushes. It might have begun earlier, in
the time Seyavi of the campoodie tells of, when antelope ran on the
mesa like sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears
itself except from the midst of some stout twigged shrub; larkspur
in the coleogyne, and for every spinosa the purpling coils
of phacelia. In the shrub shelter, in the season, flock the little
stemless things whose blossom time is as short as a marriage song.
The larkspurs make the best showing, being tall and sweet, swaying
a little above the shrubbery, scattering pollen dust which Navajo
brides gather to fill their marriage baskets. This were an easier
task than to find two of them of a shade. Larkspurs in the botany
are blue, but if you were to slip rein to the stub of some black
sage and set about proving it you would be still at it by the hour
when the white gilias set their pale disks to the westering
sun. This is the gilia the children call "evening snow," and it is
no use trying to improve on children's names for wild flowers.
From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a
shifty yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then
as soon as ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the
sidelong ranges, come little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the
edge of the sand. By dusk there are tiny drifts in the lee of
every strong shrub, rosy-tipped corollas as riotous in the sliding
mesa wind as if they were real flakes shaken out of a cloud, not
sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch stems. They keep awake
all night, and all the air is heavy and musky sweet because of
them.
Farther south on the trail there will be poppies meeting ankle
deep, and singly, peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus blown out
at the tops of tall stems. But before the season is in tune for
the gayer blossoms the best display of color is in the lupin wash.
There is always a lupin wash somewhere on the mesa trail,--a broad,
shallow, cobble-paved sink of vanished waters, where the hummocks
of Lupinus ornatus run a delicate gamut from silvery green
of spring to silvery white of winter foliage. They look in fullest
leaf, except for color, most like the huddled huts of the
campoodie, and the largest of them might be a man's length in
diameter. In their season, which is after the gilias are at
their best, and before the larkspurs are ripe for pollen gathering,
every terminal whorl of the lupin sends up its blossom stalk, not
holding any constant blue, but paling and purpling to guide the
friendly bee to virginal honey sips, or away from the perfected and
depleted flower. The length of the blossom stalk conforms to the
rounded contour of the plant, and of these there will be a million
moving indescribably in the airy current that flows down the swale
of the wash.
There is always a little wind on the mesa, a sliding current
of cooler air going down the face of the mountain of its own
momentum, but not to disturb the silence of great space. Passing
the wide mouths of canons, one gets the effect of whatever is doing
in them, openly or behind a screen of cloud,--thunder of falls,
wind in the pine leaves, or rush and roar of rain. The rumor of
tumult grows and dies in passing, as from open doors gaping on a
village street, but does not impinge on the effect of solitariness.
In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for stillness, but the
night silence breaks into certain mellow or poignant notes. Late
afternoons the burrowing owls may be seen blinking at the doors of
their hummocks with perhaps four or five elfish nestlings arow, and
by twilight begin a soft whoo-oo-ing, rounder, sweeter, more
incessant in mating time. It is not possible to disassociate the
call of the burrowing owl from the late slant light of the
mesa. If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of
spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that
mellow double note breaking along the blossom-tops. While the glow
holds one sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings after prey,
and on into the dark hears their soft pus-ssh! clearing out
of the trail ahead. Maybe the pinpoint shriek of field mouse or
kangaroo rat that pricks the wakeful pauses of the night is
extorted by these mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just as
like to be the work of the red fox on his twenty-mile
constitutional.
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