Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback, at the jigging7 coyote trot8 that only western-bred horses learn successfully. A foot-pace carries one too slowly past the units in a decorative10 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 apparently11, with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each their clientele of flowering herbs. It would be worth knowing how much the devastating12 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 antelope13 ran on the mesa like sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears itself except from the midst of some stout14 twigged16 shrub2; 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, scattering17 pollen18 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 rein19 to the stub of some black sage20 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 swell21 out from the sidelong ranges, come little flakes22 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 riotous23 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 tune24 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 hummocks25 of Lupinus ornatus run a delicate gamut26 from silvery green of spring to silvery white of winter foliage27. They look in fullest leaf, except for color, most like the huddled28 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 gathering29, 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 sips30, or away from the perfected and depleted31 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 momentum32, 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 rumor33 of tumult34 grows and dies in passing, as from open doors gaping35 on a village street, but does not impinge on the effect of solitariness36.
In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for stillness, but the night silence breaks into certain mellow37 or poignant38 notes. Late afternoons the burrowing39 owls40 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 incessant41 in mating time. It is not possible to disassociate the call of the burrowing owl9 from the late slant42 light of the mesa. If the fine vibrations43 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 prey44, and on into the dark hears their soft pus-ssh! clearing out of the trail ahead. Maybe the pinpoint45 shriek46 of field mouse or kangaroo rat that pricks47 the wakeful pauses of the night is extorted48 by these mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just as like to be the work of the red fox on his twenty-mile constitutional.
Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours, and both killers49 for the pure love of slaughter50. The fox is no great talker, but the coyote goes garrulously51 through the dark in twenty keys at once, gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light treaders, the split-feet, so that the solitary52 camper sees their eyes about him in the dark sometimes, and hears the soft intake53 of breath when no leaf has stirred and no twig15 snapped underfoot. The coyote is your real lord of the mesa, and so he makes sure you are armed with no long black instrument to spit your teeth into his vitals at a thousand yards, is both bold and curious. Not so bold, however, as the badger54 and not so much of a curmudgeon55. This short-legged meat-eater loves half lights and lowering days, has no friends, no enemies, and disowns his offspring. Very likely if he knew how hawk
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