And Put Out
Offal Away From Camp Over Night, And Look Next Day At The Foot
Tracks Where It Lay.
Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there
is no other except the bear makes so much noise.
Being so well
warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one,
that cannot keep safely hid. The cunningest hunter is hunted in
turn, and what he leaves of his kill is meat for some other. That
is the economy of nature, but with it all there is not sufficient
account taken of the works of man. There is no scavenger that eats
tin cans, and no wild thing leaves a like disfigurement on the
forest floor.
THE POCKET HUNTER
I remember very well when I first met him. Walking in the evening
glow to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I sniffed the
unmistakable odor of burning sage. It is a smell that carries far
and indicates usually the nearness of a campoodie, but on the level
mesa nothing taller showed than Diana's sage. Over the tops of it,
beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering
ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter
making a dry camp in the friendly scrub. He sat tailorwise in the
sand, with his coffee-pot on the coals, his supper ready to hand in
the frying-pan, and himself in a mood for talk. His pack burros in
hobbles strayed off to hunt for a wetter mouthful than the sage
afforded, and gave him no concern.
We came upon him often after that, threading the windy passes,
or by water-holes in the desert hills, and got to know much of his
way of life. He was a small, bowed man, with a face and manner
and speech of no character at all, as if he had that faculty of
small hunted things of taking on the protective color of his
surroundings. His clothes were of no fashion that I could
remember, except that they bore liberal markings of pot black, and
he had a curious fashion of going about with his mouth open, which
gave him a vacant look until you came near enough to perceive him
busy about an endless hummed, wordless tune. He traveled far and
took a long time to it, but the simplicity of his kitchen
arrangements was elemental. A pot for beans, a coffee-pot, a
frying-pan, a tin to mix bread in--he fed the burros in this when
there was need--with these he had been half round our western world
and back. He explained to me very early in our acquaintance what
was good to take to the hills for food: nothing sticky, for that
"dirtied the pots;" nothing with "juice" to it, for that would not
pack to advantage; and nothing likely to ferment. He used no gun,
but he would set snares by the water-holes for quail and doves, and
in the trout country he carried a line. Burros he kept, one or two
according to his pack, for this chief excellence, that they would
eat potato parings and firewood. He had owned a horse in the
foothill country, but when he came to the desert with no forage but
mesquite, he found himself under the necessity of picking the beans
from the briers, a labor that drove him to the use of pack animals
to whom thorns were a relish.
I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention.
He must be born with the faculty, and along comes the occasion,
like the tap on the test tube that induces crystallization. My
friend had been several things of no moment until he struck a
thousand-dollar pocket in the Lee District and came into his
vocation. A pocket, you must know, is a small body of rich ore
occurring by itself, or in a vein of poorer stuff. Nearly every
mineral ledge contains such, if only one has the luck to hit upon
them without too much labor. The sensible thing for a man to do
who has found a good pocket is to buy himself into business and
keep away from the hills. The logical thing is to set out looking
for another one. My friend the Pocket Hunter had been looking
twenty years. His working outfit was a shovel, a pick, a gold pan
which he kept cleaner than his plate, and a pocket magnifier. When
he came to a watercourse he would pan out the gravel of its bed for
"colors," and under the glass determine if they had come from far
or near, and so spying he would work up the stream until he found
where the drift of the gold-bearing outcrop fanned out into the
creek; then up the side of the canon till he came to the proper
vein. I think he said the best indication of small pockets was an
iron stain, but I could never get the run of miner's talk enough to
feel instructed for pocket hunting. He had another method in the
waterless hills, where he would work in and out of blind
gullies and all windings of the manifold strata that appeared not
to have cooled since they had been heaved up. His itinerary began
with the east slope of the Sierras of the Snows, where that range
swings across to meet the coast hills, and all up that slope to the
Truckee River country, where the long cold forbade his progress
north. Then he worked back down one or another of the nearly
parallel ranges that lie out desertward, and so down to the sink of
the Mojave River, burrowing to oblivion in the sand,--a big
mysterious land, a lonely, inhospitable land, beautiful, terrible.
But he came to no harm in it; the land tolerated him as it might a
gopher or a badger.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 9 of 36
Words from 8072 to 9071
of 35837
