In The Long Suit At Law Ensuing, The
Field Fell To Ruffin, That Clever One-Armed Lawyer With The Tongue
To Wile A Bird Out Of The Bush, Connor's Counsel, And Was Sold By
Him To My Neighbor, Whom From Envying His Possession I Call Naboth.
Curiously, all this human occupancy of greed and mischief left
no mark on the field, but the Indians did, and the unthinking
sheep.
Round its corners children pick up chipped arrow points of
obsidian, scattered through it are kitchen middens and pits of old
sweat-houses. By the south corner, where the campoodie stood, is
a single shrub of "hoopee" (Lycium andersonii), maintaining
itself hardly among alien shrubs, and near by, three low rakish
trees of hackberry, so far from home that no prying of mine has
been able to find another in any canon east or west. But the
berries of both were food for the Paiutes, eagerly sought and
traded for as far south as Shoshone Land. By the fork of the creek
where the shepherds camp is a single clump of mesquite of the
variety called "screw bean." The seed must have shaken there from
some sheep's coat, for this is not the habitat of mesquite, and
except for other single shrubs at sheep camps, none grows freely
for a hundred and fifty miles south or east.
Naboth has put a fence about the best of the field, but
neither the Indians nor the shepherds can quite forego it.
They make camp and build their wattled huts about the borders of
it, and no doubt they have some sense of home in its familiar
aspect.
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