Part 6

It was between four and five in the afternoon when we left Tinah’alta, and though the moon did not rise until late, the stars were bright and the trail was clear. The desert we were riding through was covered with mesquite and creosote and innumerable choya cactus; there were also two kinds of prickly-pear cactus, and ocatillas were plentiful. The last are curious plants; they are formed somewhat on the principle of an umbrella, with a very short central stem from which sometimes as many as twenty spokes radiate umbrella-wise. These spokes are generally about six feet long and are covered with thorns which are partially concealed by tiny leaves. The flower of the ocatilla is scarlet, and although most of them had stopped flowering by August, there were a few still in bloom. After about six hours’ silent riding we reached Tule. The word means a marsh, but, needless to say, all that we found was a rock-basin with a fair supply of water and a very generous supply of tadpoles and water-lice.

Next morning when we came to get breakfast ready we found we had lost, through a hole in a pack-sack, all of our eating utensils except a knife and two spoons; but we were thankful at having got off so easily. By three in the afternoon we were ready for what was to be our hardest march. We wished to get into the Pinacate country; and our next water was to be the Papago tank, which Casares said was about forty-five miles south of us. He said that in this tank we were always sure to find water.

For the first fifteen miles our route lay over the Camino del Diablo, a trail running through the Tule desert--and it has proved indeed a “road of the devil” for many an unfortunate. Then we left the trail, the sun sank, twilight passed, and in spite of the brilliancy of the stars, the going became difficult. In many places where the ground was free from boulders the kangaroo-rats had made a network of tunnels, and into these our animals fell, often sinking shoulder-deep. Casares was leading, riding a hardy little white mule. While he rode he rolled cigarette after cigarette, and as he bent forward in his saddle to light them, for a moment his face would be brought into relief by the burning match and a trail of sparks would light up the succeeding darkness. Once his mule shied violently, and we heard the angry rattling of a side-winder, a sound which once heard is never forgotten.

At about eight o’clock, what with rocks and kangaroo-rat burrows, the going became so bad that we decided to offsaddle and wait till the moon should rise. We stretched out with our heads on our saddles and dozed until about midnight, when it was time to start on again. Soon the desert changed and we were free of the hills among which we had been travelling, and were riding over endless rolling dunes of white sand. As dawn broke, the twin peaks of Pinacate appeared ahead of us, and the sand gave place to a waste of red and black lava, broken by steep arroyos. We had been hearing coyotes during the night, and now a couple jumped up from some rocks, a hundred yards away, and made off amongst the lava.

By eight o’clock the sun was fiercely hot, but we were in among the foot-hills of Pinacate. I asked Casares where the tanks were, and he seemed rather vague, but said they were beyond the next hills. They were not; but several times more he felt sure they were “just around the next hill.” I realized that we were lost and resolved to give him one more try, and then if I found that he was totally at sea as to the whereabouts of the tank, I intended to find some shelter for the heat of the day, and, when it got cooler, to throw the packs off our animals and strike back to Tule. It is difficult to realize how quickly that fierce sun dries up man and beast. I doubt if in that country a really good walker could have covered ten miles in the noonday heat without water and without stopping. We could have made Tule all right, but the return trip would have been a very unpleasant one, and we would probably have lost some of our animals.

However, just before we reached Casares’s last location of the Papago tanks, we came upon an unknown water-hole, in the bed of an arroyo. The rains there are very local, and although the rest of the country was as dry as tinder, some fairly recent downpour had filled up this little rocky basin. There were two trees near it, a mesquite and a palo verde, and though neither would fit exactly into the category of shade-trees, we were most grateful to them for being there at all. The palo verde is very deceptive. When seen from a distance, its greenness gives it a false air of being a lovely, restful screen from the sun, but when one tries to avail oneself of its shade, the fallacy is soon evident. It is only when there is some parasitical mistletoe growing on it that the palo verde offers any real shade. The horses were very thirsty, and it was a revelation to see how they lowered the water in the pool.

Dominguez was only about thirty years old, but he seemed jaded and tired, whereas Casares, who was white-haired, and must have been at least sixty, was as fresh as ever. Two days later, when I was off hunting on the mountains, Casares succeeded in finding the Papago tanks; they were about fifteen miles to our northwest, and were as dry as a bone! I later learned that a Mexican had come through this country some three weeks before we were in there. He had a number of pack-animals. When he found the Papago dry, he struck on for the next water, and succeeded in making it only after abandoning his packs and losing most of his horses.

We sat under our two trees during the heat of the day; but shortly after four I took my rifle and my canteen and went off to look for sheep, leaving the two Mexicans in camp. Although I saw no rams, I found plenty of sign and got a good idea of the lay of the land.

The next four or five days I spent hunting from this camp. I was very anxious to get some antelope, and I spent three or four days in a fruitless search for them. It was, I believe, unusually dry, even for that country, and the antelope had migrated to better feeding-grounds. Aside from a herd of nine, which I saw from a long way off but failed to come up with, not only did I not see any antelope, but I did not even find any fresh tracks. There were many very old tracks, and I have no doubt that, at certain times of the year, there are great numbers of antelope in the country over which I was hunting.

The long rides, however, were full of interest. I took the Mexicans on alternate days, and we always left camp before daylight. As the hours wore on, the sun would grow hotter and hotter. In the middle of the day there was generally a breeze blowing across the lava-beds, and that breeze was like the blast from a furnace. There are few whom the desert, at sunset and sunrise, fails to fascinate; but only those who have the love of the wastes born in them feel the magic of their appeal under the scorching noonday sun. Reptile life was abundant; lizards scuttled away in every direction; there were some rather large ones that held their tails up at an oblique angle above the ground as they ran, which gave them a ludicrous appearance. A species of toad whose back was speckled with red was rather common. Jack-rabbits and cottontails were fairly numerous, and among the birds Gambel’s quail and the whitewings, or sonora pigeons, were most in evidence. I came upon one of these later on her nest in a palo-verde-tree; the eggs were about the size of a robin’s and were white, and the nest was made chiefly of galleta-grass. The whitewings are very fond of the fruit of the saguaro; this fruit is of a reddish-orange color when ripe, and the birds peck a hole in it and eat the scarlet pulp within. It is delicious, and the Indians collect it and dry it; the season was over when I was in the country, but there was some late fruit on a few of the trees. When I was back in camp at sunset it was pleasant to hear the pigeons trilling as they flew down to the pool to drink.

One day we returned to the camp at about two. I was rather hot and tired, so I made a cup of tea and sat under the trees and smoked my pipe until almost four. Then I picked up my rifle and went out by myself to look for sheep. I climbed to the top of a great crater hill and sat down to look around with my field-glasses. Hearing a stone move behind, I turned very slowly around. About a hundred and fifty yards off, on the rim of the crater, stood six sheep, two of them fine rams. Very slowly I put down the field-glasses and raised my rifle, and I killed the finer of the rams. It was getting dark, so, without bestowing more than a passing look upon him, I struck off for camp at a round pace. Now the Mexicans, although good enough in the saddle, were no walkers, and so Dominguez saddled a horse, put a pack-saddle on a mule, and followed me back to where the sheep lay. We left the animals at the foot of the hill, and although it was not a particularly hard climb up to the sheep, the Mexican was blown and weary by the time we reached it. The ram was a good one. His horns measured sixteen and three-fourths inches around the base and were thirty-five inches long, so they were larger in circumference though shorter than my first specimen. He was very thin, however, and his hair was falling out, so that one could pull it out in handfuls. All the sheep that I saw in this country seemed thin and in poor shape, while those near Tinah’alta were in very fair condition. The extreme dryness and scarcity of grass doubtless in part accounted for this, although the country in which I got my first two sheep was in no sense green. Making our way back to camp through the lava-fields and across the numerous gullies was a difficult task. The horses got along much better than I should have supposed; indeed, they didn’t seem to find as much difficulty as I did. Dominguez muttered that if the road past Tule was the Camino del Diablo, this certainly was the Camino del Infierno! When we reached camp my clothes were as wet as if I had been in swimming. I set right to work on the headskin, but it was eleven o’clock before I had finished it; that meant but four hours’ sleep for me, and I felt somewhat melancholy about it. Indeed, on this trip, the thing that I chiefly felt was the need of sleep, for it was always necessary to make a very early start, and it was generally after sunset before I got back to camp.

The Mexicans spoke about as much English as I spoke Spanish, which was very little, and as they showed no signs of learning, I set to work to learn some Spanish. At first our conversation was very limited, but I soon got so that I could understand them pretty well. We occasionally tried to tell each other stories but became so confused that we would have to call it off. Dominguez had one English expression which he would pronounce with great pride and emphasis on all appropriate or inappropriate occasions; it was “You betcher!” Once he and I had some discussion as to what day it was and I appealed to Casares. “Ah, quien sabe, quien sabe?” (who knows, who knows?) was his reply; he said that he never knew what day it was and got on very comfortably without knowing--a point of view which gave one quite a restful feeling. They christened our water-hole Tinaja del Bévora, which means the tank of the rattlesnake. They so named it because of the advent in camp one night of a rattler. It escaped and got in a small lava-cave, from out of which the men tried long and unsuccessfully to smoke it.

At the place where we were camped our arroyo had tunnelled its way along the side of a hill; so that, from its bed, one bank was about ten feet high and the other nearer fifty. In the rocky wall of this latter side there were many caves. One, in particular, would have furnished good sleeping quarters for wet weather. It was about twenty-five feet long and fifteen feet deep, and it varied in height from four to six feet. The signs showed that for generations it had been a favorite abode of sheep; coyotes had also lived in it, and in the back there was a big pack-rat’s nest. Pieces of the bisnaga cactus, with long, cruel spikes, formed a prominent part of the nest.

After I had hunted for antelope in every direction from camp, and within as large a radius as I could manage, I was forced to admit the hopelessness of the task. The water-supply was getting low, but I determined to put in another good long day with the sheep before turning back. Accordingly, early one morning, I left the two Mexicans in camp to rest and set off for the mountains on foot. I headed for the main peak of Pinacate. It was not long before I got in among the foot-hills. I kept down along the ravines, for it was very early, and as a rule the sheep didn’t begin to go up the hills from their night’s feeding until nine or ten o’clock; at this place, also, they almost always spent the noon hours in caves. There were many little chipmunks running along with their tails arched forward over their backs, which gave them rather a comical look. At length I saw a sheep; he was well up the side of a large hill, an old crater, as were many of these mountains. I made off after him and found there were steep ravines to be reckoned with before I even reached the base of the hill. The sides of the crater were covered with choyas, and the footing on the loose lava was so uncertain that I said to myself, “I wonder how long it will be before you fall into one of these choyas,” and only a few minutes later I was gingerly picking choya burrs off my arms, which had come off worst in the fall. The points of the spikes are barbed and are by no means easy to pull out. I stopped many times to wait for my courage to rise sufficiently to start to work again, and by the time I had got myself free I was so angry that I felt like devoting the rest of my day to waging a war of retaliation upon the cactus. The pain from the places from which I had pulled out the spikes lasted for about half an hour after I was free of them, and later, at Yuma, I had to have some of the spines that I had broken off in my flesh cut out.

An hour or so later I came across a very fine bisnaga, or “niggerhead,” cactus. I was feeling very thirsty, and, wishing to save my canteen as long as possible, I decided to cut the bisnaga open and eat some of its pulp, for this cactus always contains a good supply of sweetish water. As I was busy trying to remove the long spikes, I heard a rock fall, and looking round saw a sheep walking along the opposite side of the gully, and not more than four hundred yards away. He was travelling slowly and had not seen me, so I hastily made for a little ridge toward which he was heading. I reached some rocks near the top of the ridge in safety and crouched behind them. I soon saw that he was only a two-year-old, and when he was two hundred yards off I stood up to have a good look at him. When he saw me, instead of immediately making off, he stood and gazed at me. I slowly sat down and his curiosity quite overcame him. He proceeded to stalk me in a most scientific manner, taking due advantage of choyas and rocks; and cautiously poking his head out from behind them to stare at me. He finally got to within fifty feet of me, but suddenly, and for no apparent reason, he took fright and made off. He did not go far, and, from a distance of perhaps five hundred yards, watched me as I resumed operations on the cactus.

Not long after this, as I was standing on the top of a hill, I made out two sheep, half hidden in a draw. There was a great difference in the size of their horns, and, in the hasty glance I got of them, one seemed to me to be big enough to warrant shooting. I did not discover my mistake until I had brought down my game. He was but a two-year-old, and, although I should have been glad of a good specimen for the museum, his hide was in such poor condition that it was quite useless. However, I took his head and some meat and headed back for camp. My camera, water-bottle, and field-glasses were already slung over my shoulder, and the three hours’ tramp back to camp, in the very hottest part of the day, was tiring; and I didn’t feel safe in finishing my canteen until I could see camp.

The next day we collected as much galleta-grass as we could for the horses, and, having watered them well, an operation which practically finished our pool, we set out for Tule at a little after three. As soon as the Mexicans got a little saddle-stiff they would stand up in one stirrup, crooking the other knee over the saddle, and keeping the free heel busy at the horses’ ribs. The result was twofold: the first and most obvious being a sore back for the horses, and the second being that the horses became so accustomed to a continual tattoo to encourage them to improve their pace, that, with a rider unaccustomed to that method, they lagged most annoyingly. The ride back to Tule was as uneventful as it was lovely.

On the next day’s march, from Tule toward Win’s tank, I saw the only Gila monster--the sluggish, poisonous lizard of the southwestern deserts--that I came across throughout the trip. He was crossing the trail in leisurely fashion and darted his tongue out angrily as I stopped to admire him. Utting told me of an interesting encounter he once saw between a Gila monster and a rattlesnake. He put the two in a large box; they were in opposite corners, but presently the Gila monster started slowly and sedately toward the rattler’s side of the box. He paid absolutely no attention to the snake, who coiled himself up and rattled angrily. When the lizard got near enough, the rattler struck out two or three times, each time burying his fangs in the Gila monster’s body; the latter showed not the slightest concern, and, though Utting waited expectantly for him to die, he apparently suffered no ill effects whatever from the encounter. He showed neither anger nor pain; he simply did not worry himself about the rattler at all.

We reached Wellton at about nine in the evening of the second day from Pinacate. We had eaten all our food, and our pack-animals were practically without loads; so we had made ninety miles in about fifty-five hours. Dominguez had suffered from the heat on the way back, and at Win’s tank, which was inaccessible to the horses, I had been obliged myself to pack all the water out to the animals. At Wellton I parted company with the Mexicans, with the regret one always feels at leaving the comrades of a hunting trip that has proved both interesting and successful.

After Moose in New Brunswick

AFTER MOOSE IN NEW BRUNSWICK

It was early in September when the four of us--Clarke, Jamieson, Thompson, and myself--landed at Bathurst, on Chaleur Bay, and took the little railroad which runs twenty miles up the Nepisiquit River to some iron-mines. From that point we expected to pole up the river about forty miles farther and then begin our hunting.

For the four hunters--“sports” was what the guides called us--there were six guides. Three of them bore the name Venneau; there were Bill Grey and his son Willie, and the sixth was Wirre (pronounced Warry) Chamberlain. Among themselves the guides spoke French--or a corruption of French--which was hard to understand and which has come down from generation to generation without ever getting into written form. A fine-looking six they were,--straight,--with the Indian showing in their faces.

At the end of the third day of poling--a lazy time for the “sports,” but three days of marvellously skilful work for the guides--our heavily laden canoes were brought up to the main camp. From here we expected to start our hunting expeditions, each taking a guide, blankets, and food, and striking off for the more isolated cabins in the woods. My purpose was to collect specimens for the National Museum at Washington. I wanted moose, caribou, and beaver--a male and female of each species. Whole skins and leg-bones were to be brought out.

A hard rain woke us, and the prospects were far from cheerful as we packed and prepared to separate. Bill Grey was to be my guide, and the “Popple Cabin,” three miles away, was to be our shelter. Our tramp through the wet woods--pine, hemlock, birch, and poplar--ended at the little double lean-to shelter. After we had started a fire and spread our blankets to dry we set off in search of game.

We climbed out of the valley in which we were camped and up to the top of a hill from which we could get a good view of some small barren stretches that lay around us. It was the blueberry season, and these barrens were covered with bushes, all heavily laden. We moved around from hill to hill in search of game, but saw only three deer. We’d have shot one of them for meat, but didn’t care to run the chance of frightening away any moose or caribou. The last hill we climbed overlooked a small pond which lay beside a pine forest on the edge of a barren strip. Bill intended to spend a good part of each day watching this pond, and it was to a small hill overlooking it that we made our way early next morning.

Before we had been watching many minutes, a cow moose with a calf appeared at the edge of the woods. She hesitated for several minutes, listening intently and watching sharply, and then stepped out across the barren on her way to the pond. Before she had gone far, the path she was following cut the trail we had made on our way to the lookout hill. She stopped immediately and began to sniff at our tracks, the calf following her example; a few seconds were enough to convince her, but for some reason, perhaps to make doubly sure, she turned and for some minutes followed along our trail with her nose close to the ground. Then she swung round and struck off into the woods at a great slashing moose trot.

Not long after she had disappeared, we got a fleeting glimpse of two caribou cows; they lacked the impressive ungainliness of the moose, and in the distance might easily have been mistaken for deer.