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. At the lower edge of the bench
or mesa the land falls away, often by a fault, to the river
hollows, and along the drop one looks for springs or intermittent
swampy swales. Here the plant world resembles a little the lake
gardens, modified by altitude and the use the town folk put it to
for pasture. Here are cress, blue violets, potentilla, and, in the
damp of the willow fence-rows, white false asphodels. I am sure we
make too free use of this word FALSE in naming plants--false
mallow, false lupine, and the like. The asphodel is at least no
falsifier, but a true lily by all the heaven-set marks, though
small of flower and run mostly to leaves, and should have a name
that gives it credit for growing up in such celestial semblance.
Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres
wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy
fluttering as of azure wings. Single flowers are too thin and
sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full fields
have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand, and
quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal. A very
poet's flower, I thought; not fit for gathering up, and proving a
nuisance in the pastures, therefore needing to be the more loved.
And one day I caught Winnenap' drawing out from mid leaf a
fine strong fibre for making snares. The borders of the iris
fields are pure gold, nearly sessile buttercups and a
creeping-stemmed composite of a redder hue. I am convinced that
English-speaking children will always have buttercups. If they do
not light upon the original companion of little frogs they will
take the next best and cherish it accordingly. I find five
unrelated species loved by that name, and as many more and as
inappropriately called cowslips.
By every mesa spring one may expect to find a single shrub of
the buckthorn, called of old time Cascara sagrada--the
sacred bark. Up in the canons, within the limit of the rains, it
seeks rather a stony slope, but in the dry valleys is not found
away from water borders.
In all the valleys and along the desert edges of the west are
considerable areas of soil sickly with alkali-collecting pools,
black and evil-smelling like old blood. Very little grows
hereabout but thick-leaved pickle weed. Curiously enough, in
this stiff mud, along roadways where there is frequently a little
leakage from canals, grows the only western representative of the
true heliotropes (Heliotropium curassavicum). It has
flowers of faded white, foliage of faded green, resembling the
"live-for-ever" of old gardens and graveyards, but even less
attractive. After so much schooling in the virtues of
water-seeking plants, one is not surprised to learn that
its mucilaginous sap has healing powers.
Last and inevitable resort of overflow waters is the tulares,
great wastes of reeds (Juncus) in sickly, slow streams. The
reeds, called tules, are ghostly pale in winter, in summer deep
poisonous-looking green, the waters thick and brown; the reed beds
breaking into dingy pools, clumps of rotting willows, narrow
winding water lanes and sinking paths.
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