UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
AT LOS ANGELES
THE FLOCK
8 5
DON JOSI'-.'S DKIVK
' All llirniieh the dark tlicj' steereil a cmirse by the stars '
THE FLOCK
BY
MARY AUSTIN
Author of ^^The Land of Little Rain,^^ ''LiJro,^
^^TAe Basket fVoman," etc.
Illustrated by E. Boyd Smith
. ii^dlS
.^^-f
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Cftc flitcrsibc press, Cambribijc
1906
\ G5 \ ^
COPYRIGHT 1906 DY MARY AUSTIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October iqob
/ C
p
DEDICATED TO
THE FRIENDLY FOLK IN INYO
AND
THE PEOPLE OF THE BOOK
CONTENTS
I. The Coming of the PYocks .... 3
II. The Sun in Aries 17
III. A Shearing 33
IV. The Hireling Shepherd .... 51
V. The Long Trail 71
VI. The Open Range 91
VII. The Flock ........ 109
VIII. The Go-Betweens 135
IX. The Strife of the Herdsmen . . .155
X. Liers-in-Wait 175
XI. The Sheep and the Reserves . . .191
XII. Ranchos Tejon 215
XIII. The Shade of the Arrows .... 253
THE COMING OF THE
FLOCKS — HOW RIVERA Y MON-
CADA BROUGHT THE FIRST OF
THEM TO ALTA CALIFORNIA, AND
A PREFACE WHICH IS NOT ON
ANY ACCOUNT TO BE OMITTED.
CHAPTER I
, i Si S
THE COMING OF THE FLOCKS
A GREAT many interesting things happened
about the time Rivera y Moncada brought up
the first of the flocks from Velicata. That same
year Daniel Boone, lacking bread and salt and
friends, heard with prophetic rapture the sway-
ing of young rivers in the Dark and Bloody
Ground ; that year British soldiers shot down
men in the streets of Boston for be^'innino^ to
be proud to call themselves Americans and
think accordingly; that year Junipero Serra
lifted the cross by a full creek in the Port of
4 THE FLOCK
Monterey ; — coughing of guns by the eastern
sea, by the sea in the west the tinkle of altar
bells and soft blether of the flocks.
All the years since Onate saw its purple
hills low like a cloud in the west, since Cabrillo
drifted past the tranquil reaches of its coast,
the land lay unspoiled, inviolate. Then God
stirred up His Majesty of Spain to attempt the
dominion of Alta California by the hand of the
Franciscans. This sally of the grey brothers
was like the return of Ezra to upbuild Jeru-
salem ; " they strengthened their hands with
vessels of silver," with bells, with vestments and
altar cloths, with seed corn and beasts col-
lected from the missions of Baja California.
This was done under authority by Rivera y
Moncada. "And," says the Padre in his jour-
nal, " although it was with a somewhat heavy
hand, it was undergone for God and the King."
Four expeditions, two by land and two by
sea, set out from Old Mexico. Seiior San Jose
being much in the public mind at that time,
on account of having just delivered San Jose
del Cabo from a plague of locusts, was chosen
patron of the adventure, and Serra, at the re-
THE COMING OF THE FLOCKS 5
quest of his majesty, sang the Mass of SuppHca-
tion. The four expeditions drew together again
at San Diego, having suffered much, the ships'
crews from scurvy and the land parties from
thirst and desertion. It was now July, and back a
mile from the weltering bay the bloom of cacti
pricked the hot, close air like points of flame.
Seiior San Jose, it appeared, had done enough
for that turn, for though Serra, without waiting
for the formal founding of Mission San Diego
de Alcala, dispatched Crespi and Portola north-
ward, their eyes were holden, and they found
nothing to their minds resembling the much
desired Port of Monterey, and the Mission
prospered so indifferently that their return was
to meet the question of abandonment. The
good Junipero, having reached the end of his
own devisins^, determined to leave somethincj
to God's occasions, and instituted a novena.
For nine days Saint Joseph was entreated by
prayers, by incense, and candle smoke ; and
on the last hour of the last day, which was
March 19, 1770, there appeared in the far blue
ring of the horizon the white flick of a sail
bringing succor. Upon this Serra went on the
THE FLOCK
second and successful expedition to Monterey,
and meantime Don Fernando de Rivera y
Moncada had gone south with twenty soldiers
to bring up the flocks from Velicata.
Over the mesa from the town, color of pop-
pies ran like creeping fire in the chamisal, all
the air was reeking sweet with violets, yellow and
paling at the edges like the bleached, fair hair
of children who play much about the beaches.
Don Fernando left Velicata in May — O, the
good land that holds the record of all he saw !
— the tall, white, odorous Candles - of - Our
Lord, the long, plumed
reaches of the chami-
sal, the tangle of the
meghariza, the yellow-
starred plats of the cki/i-
cojote, reddening berries
of rhus from which the
Padres were yet to gather wax that God's altars
might not lack candles, the steep barrancas
clothed with deer-weed and toyon, blue hills that
swam at noon in waters of mirage. There was
little enough water of any sort on that journey,
none too niuch of sapless feed. Dry camp sue-
THE COMING OF THE FLOCKS 7
ceeded to dry camp. Hills neared them with
the hope of springs and passed bone-dry, in-
hospitably stiff with cactus and rattle weed.
The expedition drifted steadily northward and
smelled the freshness of the sea ; then they
heard the night-singing mocking bird, wildly
sweet in the waxberry bush, and, still two days
from San Diego, met the messengers of Gov-
ernor Portola going south with news of the
founding of Monterey. This was in June of
1770. No doubt they at San Diego were glad
when they heard the roll of the bells and the
blether of the fiock.
Under the Padres' careful shepherding the
sheep increased until, at the time of the secu-
larization, three hundred and twenty thousand
fed in the Mission purlieus. Blankets were
woven, scrapes, and a coarse kind of cloth
called yVr^rt-, but the wool was poor and thin;
probably the home government wished not to
encourage a rival to the exports of Spain. After
secularization in 1833, the numbers of sheep
fell off in California, until, to supply the demand
for their coarse-flavored mutton, flocks were
driven in from Mexico. These " mustang sheep "
8 THE FLOCK
were little and lean and mostly black, sheared
but two and one half pounds of wool, and were
so wild that they must be herded on horseback.
About this time rams were imported from
China without materially improving the breed.
Then the rush westward in the eager fifties
brought men whose trade had been about sheep.
Those who had wintered flocks on New Eng-
land hill pastures began to see possibilities in
the belly-deep grasses of the coast ranges.
In '53, William W. Hollister brought three
hundred ewes over the emigrant trail and
laid the foundation of a fortune. But think of
the fatigues of it, the rivers to swim, the passes
to attempt, the watch fires, the far divided
water holes, the interminable lapsing of days
and nights, — and a sheep's day's journey is
THE COMING OF Till-: FLOCKS 9
seven miles! No doubt they had some pressing,
and comfortable waits in fat pastures, but it
stands on the mere evidence of the fact, that
Hollister was a man of large patience. During
the nextyearSolomon J ewett, the elder, shipped
a flock by way of Panama, and the improve-
ment of the breeds began. The business throve
from the first ; there are men yet to tell you
they have paid as high as twelve dollars for a
well-fatted mutton.
The best days of shepherding in California
were before the Frenchmen began to appear
on the mesas. Owners then had, by occupancy,
the rights to certain range, rights respected by
their neighbors. Then suddenly the land was
overrun by little dark men who fed where feed
was, kept to their own kind, turned money
quickly, and went back to France to spend it.
At evening the solitary homesteader saw with
dread their dust blurs on his horizon, and at
morning looked with rage on the cropped lands
that else should have nourished his own neces-
sary stock ; smoke of the burning forests wit-
nessed to heaven against them. Of this you
shall hear further with some particularity.
lO THE FLOCK
Those who can suck no other comfort from
the tariff revision of the early eighties may
write to its account that it saved us unmea-
sured acreage of wild grass and trees.
What more it did is set down in the proper
place, but certainly the drop in prices drove
out of the wool industry those who could best
be spared from it. Now it could be followed
profitably by none but the foreseeing and con-
sidering shepherd, and to such a one dawned
the necessity of conserving the feed, though
he had not arrived altruistically at wanting it
conserved for anybody else.. So by the time
sheep-herding had recovered its status as a
business, the warrings and evasions began
again over the withdrawal of the forest reserves
from public pasturing. Here in fact it rests,
for though there be sheep-owners who under-
stand the value of tree-covered water-sheds,
there are others to whom the unfair discrimi-
nation between flocks and horned cattle is an
excuse for violation ; and just as a few Cots-
wolds can demoralize a bunch of tractable
merinos, so the unthinking herder brings the
business to discsteem.
THE COMING OF THE FLOCKS ii
What I have to do here is to set down with-
out prejudice, but not without sympathy, as
much as I have been able to understand of
the whole matter kindled by the journey up
from Velicata in the unregarded spring of
1770, and now laid to the successors of Don
Fernando de Rivera y Moncada.
I suppose of all the people who are con-
cerned with the making of a true book, the
one who puts it to the pen has the least to do
with it. This is the book of Jimmy Rosemeyre
and Jose Jesus Lopez, of Little Pete, who is
not to be confounded with the Petit Pete who
loved an antelope in the Ceriso, — the book
of Noriega, of Sanger and the Manxman and
Narcisse Duplin, and many others who, wit-
tingly or unwittingly, have contributed to the
performances set down in it. Very little, not
even the virtue of being uniformly grateful to
the little gods who have constrained me to be
of the audience, can be put to the writer's credit.
All of the book that is mine is the temper of
mind which makes it impossible that there
should be any play not worth the candle.
12 THE FLOCK
By two years of homesteading on the bor-
ders of Tejon, by fifteen beside the Long
Trail where it spindles out through Inyo, by
all the errands of necessity and desire that
made me to know its moods and the calendar
of its shrubs and skies, by the chances of Si-
erra holidays where there were always bells
jangling behind us in the pines or flocks
bletherina^ before us in the meadows, bv the
riot of shearings, by the faint winy smell in
the streets of certain of the towns of the San
Joaquin that apprises of the yearly inturning
of the wandering shepherds, I grew aware of
all that you read here and of much beside.
For if I have not told all of the story of Nar-
cisse Duplin and what happened to the Indian
who worked for Joe Espelier, it is because it
concerned them merely as men and would as
likely have befallen them in any other business.
Something also- I had from the Walking
Woman, when that most wise and insane crea-
ture used to come through by Temblor, and
a little from j)retty Edie Julien interpreting
shyly in her father's house, but not much, I
being occupied in acquiring a distaste for my
THE COMING OF THE FLOCKS 13
own language hearing her rippling French
snag upon such words as " spud " and " bunch "
and "grub." In time I grew to know the owner
of flocks bearing the brand of the Three Legs
of Man, and as I sat by his fire, touching his
tempered spirit as one half draws and drops a
sword in its scabbard for pleasure of its fine-
ness, becoming flock-wise I understood why
the French herders hereabout give him the
name of the Best Shepherd. I met and talked
with the elder Beale after he had come to the
time of life when talking seems a sufflcient
occupation, and while yet there was color and
slow as of the heart wood breakinsf in the
white ash of remembrance. But, in fact, the
best way of knowing about shepherding is to
know sheep, and for this there was never an
occasion lackinor. In this land of such indolent
lapping of the nights and days that neither
the clock nor the calendar has any pertinence
to time, I call on the eye of my mind, as it
were, for relief, looking out across the long
moon-colored sands, and sa)^ : —
" Do you see anything coming. Sister Anne ? "
" I see the dust of a flock on the highway."
14
THE FLOCK
Well, then, if from the clutch of great Te-
dium (of whom more than his beard is blue)
there is no rescue but such as comes by way
of the flock, let us at least miss no point of the
entertainment.
II
THE SUN IX ARIES — WHICH
RELATES HOW THE FLOCKS COME
TO THE HOME PASTURES, AND
THE PROPER MANAGEMENT OF
LAMBS.
CHAPTER II
THE SUN IN ARIES
About the time there begin to be cloud
shadows moving on the unfurrowed wild pas-
tures of the San Joaquin there begin to be
windless clouds of dust coasting the foothills
under the Sierras, drifting in from the blue
barriers of the seaward ranges, or emerging
mysteriously from unguessed quarters of the
shut horizon. They drop into the valley from
Tehachapi, from Kings River and Kern, as
far driven as from the meadows of Mono and
1 8 THE FLOCK
Yosemite, and for the time of their coming:
acknowledge no calendar but the unheralded
Beoinnino; of Rains. Let there be but the
faintest flush of green on the pastures they
left bare in the spring, and by some wireless
prescience all the defiles of Little Lake and
Red Rock are choked with the returning
flocks. Let one of the pallid fogs of early win-
ter obscure the hollow of the valley for a night
and a day, and at its clearing, mark the un-
patented lands all freckled with dust-colored
bands. Drenched mornings one counts a
dozen pale blurs of moving dust low along the
foothills, and evenings on the red track of the
sun sees the same number of shepherd fires
blossom through the dusk. The count of them
diminishes yearly, but since as long ago as the
early sixties, the southern end of the San Joa-
quin Valley has been the favorite lambing
place of flocks ranging north and east as many
miles as a flock can cover in the nine or ten
months' interval between the end and besin-
ning of winter feed. The equable weather, the
great acreage of unclaimed pasture, and the
nearness of the trains tliat pound through the
THE SUN IN ARIES 19
valley like some great, laboring, arterial beat
of the outer world, draw the wandering flocks
to a focus once in the year about the time the
sun enters Aries. As I say, they acknowledge
no calendar but the rains, and the earlier these
come the better, so that the flocks get into the
home pastures before the ewes are too heavy
for traveling. Before all, at lambing time the
shepherd seeks quiet and good pasture, and if
he owns no land at all he must at least have
a leasehold on suitable places to put up his
corrals.
Since as long ago as men referred their af-
fairs to the stars February has been the month
for lambing, and that, you understand, is as long
ago as the sun was actually in Aries, before the
precession of the Equinoxes pulled it back
along the starry way. At Los Alisos the mid-
dle of January sees the ewes all gathered to the
home ranch, and here and there from deep
coves of the hills, yellowing films of dust rising
steadily mark where the wethers still feed, fat-
tening for the market. At this time of the year
the land is quiescent and the sky clearer than
it will be until this time again, halting midway
20 THE FLOCK
between the early rains and late. All the sum-
mer's haze lies folded in a band a little above the
foothills and below the snows of the Sierras, so
that the flame-white crests appear supernatu-
rally suspended in clearness, the very front and
battlements of heaven. In the fields above the
little green tumuli of alfalfa, great cotton woods
click a withered leaf or two, and the tops of
the long row of close, ascending poplars, run-
ninor down from the ranch house, are absorbed
in an infinite extension of light. Now besides
the weirs one finds a heron's feather, and mal-
lards squatter in the crescent pools below the
drops. The foothills show greenness deepen-
ing in the gullies ; nights have a touch of chill-
iness with frequent heavy dews.
Leberge, the head shepherd of Los Alisos, is
a careful man. The ewes from which lambs are
first expected have the fattest pastures ; corrals
to accommodate a hundred of them are set off
with movable fencing; the number of herders
is multiplied and provided with tar and tur-
pentine and such remedial simples. But for
the most part nature has a full measure of
trust. In the north where sheep run on fenced
THE SUN IN ARIES 21
pastures, the mothers have leave to seek shel-
ters of rock and scrub and clear little formless
hollows to bed their young. There shepherd-
ing has not wholly superseded the weather
wisdom of the brute, and in years of little pro-
mise the untended ewes will not lick their
^ lambs. But here among the hobo herds of the
Long Trail, artificial considerations, such as
the relative price of wool and mutton and the
probable management of forest reserves, deter-
mine whether the ewe shall be allowed to rear
the twin lambs that nature allots her. Years of
curtailed pastures she cannot suckle both and
grow wool, and neither youngster will be strong
enough to endure the stress of a dry season :
the mother becomes enfeebled, and the too
grasping shepherd may end by losing all
three. Much depends on the promptness with
which the weaker of twins is discarded or
suckled to some unfortunate mother of still-
born lambs. Once a ewe has smelled the smell
of her offspring the herder must take a leaf
out of the book of the Supplanter in the man-
agement of forced adoptions. The skin of the
dead lamb is sewed about the body of the
22 THE FLOCK
foundling, limp little legs dangling about its
legs, a stiff little tail above a wagging one, —
all of no moment so long as the ewe finds
some rag-tag smell of her own young among
the commingling smells of the stranger and the
dry and decaying hide.
Here and there will
be young ewes in their
first season refusing
their lambs. Trust the
French herders for finding devices against
such a reversion of nature. About the corners
of the field will be pits where by enforced
companionship the one smell of all smells a
sheep must remember, with no root in expe-
rience or memory, gropes to the seat of her
dull consciousness, and the ewe gives down
her milk. A commoner device is to tie the
recalcitrant dam near a dog, and the silly
sheep, trembling and afraid, too long a mere
fraction of a flock to have any faculty for
sustaining dread, makes friends with her un-
welcome lamb as against their common enemy,
the collie. Remedial measures such as these
must be immediate, otherwise in chill nights of
THE SUN IN ARIES 23
frost or weeping fog, the unlicked, unsuckled
lambs will die. So it is that here and there,
but not invariably, one sees a shepherd mak-
ing rounds with a lantern through the night,
and in a flock of three to five hundred ewes
finding much to do.
Nights such as this the bunch grass cowers
to the wind that lies too low along the pasture
to stir the tops of trees. The Dipper swings
low from the Pole, and changeful Algol is a
beacon in the clear space between the ranges
above which the white planets blink and peer.
The quavering mu-uh-uh, mu-uh-uh-uh of the
mothering ewes keeps on softly all night. The
red eye of the herder's fire winks in the ash ;
the dogs get up from before it, courting an in-
vitation to their accustomed work. Whining
throatily, they nose at the master's heels and
are bidden down again lest they scare the ewe
from her unlicked lamb. Great Orion slopes
from his meridian, and Ris^el calls Aldebaran
up the sky. The lantern swings through the
dark sweep of pasture, cool and dewy and pal-
pitant with the sense of this earliest, elemental
stress of parturition.
24 THE FLOCK
Every now and then some unconsidered
protest arises against the clipped and muti-
lated speech by which a human mother ex-
presses her sense of satisfaction in her young.
But let the protestant go to Los Alisos when
the sun is far gone in its course in Aries, and
understand, if he can, the breaking of the
sheep's accustomed bleat to the soft mutter
of the ewes, and what over-sense prompts the
wethers to futile adoptions of lambs coaxed
from the dam by the same soft, shuddering
cry. Such a sheep is by herders called a
" grannie," and by simply saying it is so, passed
by, but at this hour when the darkness is im-
pregnate with the dawn and the sense responds
to the roll of the world eastward, the return of
these unsexed brutes to the instinct of parental
use takes on the proportions of immeasurable
law. But nourishing is in fact the greater part
of mothering, and lest it should come amiss
the herder marks the careless or unwilling ewe
and the lamb each with a black daub on the
head or shoulder, ]:)air and pair alike, and con-
spicuously, so that he sees at a glance at nurs-
ing time that each young goes to its own dam.
THE SUN IN ARIES 25
Young lambs are principally legs, the con-
necting body being merely a contrivance for
converting milk into more leg, so you under-
stand how it is that they will follow in two
days and are able to take the trail in a fort-
night, traveling four and five miles a day, fall-
ing asleep on their feet, and tottering forward in
the way. By this time it has become necessary
to move out from the home fold to fresher
pastures, but keeping as close as the feed
allows. Not until after shearing do they take
to the mountain pastures and the Long Trail.
Now there will be bird's-eye gilias, sun-cups,
and miles of pepper grass on the mesas ; coast-
ward great clots and splashes of gold, glowing
and dimming as the sun wakes the dormidera
or the mist of cloud folds it up. Wethers and
yearlings will be ranging all abroad, but ewes
with lambs, five or six hundred in a bunch,
will be kept as much as possible in fenced pas-
tures. At a month old the fiock instinct begins
to stir; lambs will run together and choose a
bedding place sunward of a fence or the wind-
break of young willows along an irrigating
ditch. Here they leap and play and between
26
THE FLOCK
whiles doze. Here the ewes seek them with
dripping and distended udders. It is a ques-
tion during the first week if the lamb knows
its mother at all and she it by smell only, and
smells indiscriminately at black lambs or white,
but at the end of eight days they come calling
each to each. Let three or four hundred lambs
lie adoze in the sun of a late afternoon ; comes
a ewe across the pastures, craving relief for
her overflowing dugs. Yards away the lamb
answers her out of sleep and goes teetering
forward on its rickety legs, her own lamb, mind
you, capering up with perhaps the tattered
skin askew on its back, that first deceived her
into permitting its hungry mouth ; and not
one of the four hundred others has more than
flicked an ear or drawn a deeper breath. But
suppose her to have tvvins, these will have
THE SUN IX ARIES 27
been tied together by the herder so that the
stronger may not get first to the fountain but
drags his weaker brother up. In time the con-
\iction of two mouths at the udder becomes
rooted, and one will not be permitted without
the other. Then the amount of urgency to
come on and be fed which the spraddle-kneed
first comer can put into the waggings of his
tail, hardly bears out the observation that the
twins do not know each other very well except
by smell.
The Valley of the San Joaquin is wide
enough to give the whole effect of unmeasured
plain, and the sky at the end of the lambing
season shallow, and hemmed by tenuous
cloud. Close-shut days the flocks drift about
its undulations, sandy, shelterless stretches,
dull rivers defiled by far-off rains, one day east
under black, broad-heading oaks, another west
in foolish, oozy intricacies of sloughs where
rustling tules lean a thousand ways. Blossoms
come up and the lambs nibble them; filaree
uncurls for the sheep to crop. The herder
walks at the head of the flock, and if he is
28 THE FLOCK
near enough, watches the hilltops breaking
the thin woof of cloud to note how the feed
advances in their deepening green; and always
he prays for rain. At intervals the head shep-
herd bears down upon him by some of the
whity-brown roads that run every way in the
valley and by endless crisscrossing and rami-
fications lead to all the places where you do
not particularly wish to go. Now and then a
buyer reaches him by the same roads to over-
look the yearlings or estimate the chances of
wool. Rains may come as late as the last of
April with great blessedness; without thunder
01" threatening, miles and miles of slant grey
curtains drop between him and the outer
world. Whether to lie out in it unfended and
fireless is more or less distressful, is a matter
of the point of view. A sheepman's fortune
may depend on the number of days between
lambing and shearing when the dormidera is
too wet to unfold. It is a comfort in the heart
of a hundred-mile spread of storm to sit under
a canvas and notch these days as an augury
on your staff.
Normally the parting of the flocks begins
THE SUN IN ARIKS 29
immediately after shearing, but if possible the
herders keep on in the valley until the lambs
are weaned. This may occur at the end of
about a hundred days and is best accomplished
by a system of cross weaning, the lambs of one
flock turned to the ewes of the next. But by
whatever means, it is important to have older
sheep with the young, so they become flock-
wise and accustomed to the doos. Not until
all this has taken place are the flocks properly
ready for the Long Trail, but before that the
poppy gold which begins on the coastward
fringes of the valley will have been cast well
up on the slope of the Sierras, and about the
centres of shepherd life begins to drift the
first indubitable sign of a shearing, the smell
of the Mexican cigarette.
Ill
A SHEARING — the crew, the
CAMP, THE SHEARING BAILE,
AND THE PARTING OF THE
FLOCKS.
CHAPTER III
A SHEARING
To find a shearing, turn out from the towns
of the southern San Joaquin at the time of
the year when the hilltops begin to fray out
in the multitudinous keen spears of the wild
hyacinth, and look in the crumbling flakes of
the foothill road for the tracks of the wool
wagon. Here the roll of the valley up from
the place of its lagoons is by long mesas break-
ing into summits and shoulders ; successive
crests of them reared up by slow, ample heav-
34 THE FLOCK
ings, settling into folds, with long, valleyward
slopes, and blunt mountain-facing heads, flung
up at last in the sharp tumult of the Sierras.
Thereward the trail of the wool w^agon bears
evenly and white. Over it, preceded by the
smell of cigarettes, go the shearing crews of
swarthy men with good manners and the air
of opera pirates.
When Solomon Jewett held the ranch above
the ford by the river which was Rio Bravo, and
is now Kern, shearings w^ent forward in a man-
ner suited to the large leisure of the time. That
was in the early sixties, when there were no
laborers but Indians. These drove the flocks
out in the shoulder-high grasses; "for in those
days," said Jewett, " we never thought feed any
good, less than eighteen inches high," and at
the week end rounded them up at headquarters
for the small allowance of whiskey that alone
held them to the six days' job. It was a con-
dition of the weekly dole that all knives and
weapons should be first surrendered, but as you
can imagine, whiskey being hard to come by at
that time, much water went to each man's flask ;
the nearer the bottom of the cask the more water.
A SHEARING 35
" No wcrito, Don Solomon, no wci'-ito''' com-
plained the herders as they saw the liquor
paling in the flasks, but it was still worth such
service as they rendered.
The ration at Rio Bravo was chiefly atole
or " tole " of flour and water, coffee made thick
with sugar, and raw mutton which every man
cut off and toasted for himself ; and a shearing
then was a very jewel of the comfortable issue of
labor. Of the day's allotment each man chose
^y'^o shear what pleased him, and withdrawing,
slept in the shade and the dust of the chaparral
while his women struggled, with laughter and no
bitterness of spirit, with the stubborn and over-
wrinkled sheep. But even Indians, it seems,
are amenable to the time, and I have it on
the authority of Little Pete and the Manxman
that Indians to-da)' make the best shearers,
being crafty hand-workers and possessed of
the communal instinct, likino^ to work and to
loaf in company. Under the social stimulus
they turn out an astonishing number of well-
clipped muttons. Round the half moon of the
lower San Joaquin the Mexicans are almost
the only shearers to be had, and even the men
36 THE FLOCK
who employ them credit them with the greatest
fertility in excuses for quitting work.
All the lost weathers of romance collect
between the ranges of the San Joaquin, like
old galleons adrift in purple, open spaces of
Sargasso, Shearing weather is a derelict from
the time of Admetus; gladness comes out of
the earth and exhales light. It has its note,
too, in pipings of the Dauphinoises, seated on
the ground with gilias coming up between
their knees while the flutes remember France.
Under the low, false firmament of cloud, pools
of luminosity collect in interlacing shallows of
the hills. /Here in one of those gentle swales
where sheep were always meant to be, a ewe
covers her belated lamb, or has stolen out from
the wardship of the dogs to linger until the
decaying clot of bones and hide, which was
once her young, dissolves into its essences. The
flock from which she strayed feeds toward the
flutter of a white rag on the hilltop that sig-
nals a shearing going on in the clear space of
a canon below. Plain on the skyline with his
sharp-eared dogs the herder leans upon his
staff.
A SHEARING ^i
>
/ As many owners will combine for a shear-
ing as can feed their flocks in the contiguous
pastures. At Noriega's this year there were
twenty-eight thousand head. Noriega's camp
and corrals lie in the canon of Poso Creek
where there is a well of one burro power, for
at this season the rains have not unlocked the
sources of the stream. Hills march around it,
shrubless, treeless ; scarps of the Sierras stand
up behind. Tents there are for stores, but all
the operations of the camp are carried on out
of doors. Confessedly or not, the several sorts
of men who have to do with sheep mutually
despise one another. Therefore the shearing
crew has its own outfit, distinct from the camp
of the hired herders.
Expect the best cooking and the worst
smells at the camp of the French shepherds.
It smells of mutton and old cheese, of onions
and claret and garlic and tobacco, sustained
and pervaded by the smell of sheep. This is
the acceptable holiday smell, for when the far-
called flocks come in to the shearing then is
the only playtime the herder knows. Then
if ever he gets a blink at a pretty girl, ciaret.
38 THE FLOCK
and bocie at Vivian's, or a game of hand-ball
at Noriega's, played with the great shovel-
shaped gloves that
are stamped with
the name of Pam-
plona to remind
him of home. But
by the smell chiefly
you should know
something of the
man whose camp you have come on unawares.
When you can detect cheese at a dozen yards
presume a Frenchman, but a leather wine bot-
tle proves him a Basque, garlic and onions
without cheese, a Mexican, and the absence of
all these one of the variable types that calls
itself American.
The shearing sheds face one side of the
corrals and runways by which the sheep are
passed through a chute to the shearers. The
sheds, of which there may be a dozen, accom-
modate five or six shearers, and are, according
to the notion of the owner, roofed and hung
with canvas or lightly built of brush and
blanket rairs. Outside runs a slielf where the
A SHEARING 39
packe rs tie the wool. One of them stands at
every shed with his tie-box and a hank of tie-
cord wound about his body. This tie-box is
merely a wooden frame of tlie capacity of one
fleece, notched to hold the cord, which, once
adjusted, can be tightened with a jerk and a
hitch or two, making the fleece into a neat,
square bundle weighing six to ten pounds as
the clip runs light or heavy. Besides these,
there must go to a full shearing crew two
men to handle the wool sacks and one to sit
on the packed fleeces and keep tally as the
shearer cries his own number and the number
of his sheep, betraying his country by his
tongue.
" Nutnero iieuf^ onze ! " sings the shearer.
'■'' Numero neiif, onze !'' drones the marker.
" Cinco ; vicnte ! "
" Numero cinco ; viente ! tally."
I have heard Little Pete keep tally in three
languages at once.
The day's work begins stiffly, little laughter,
and the leisurely whet of shears. The pulse
of work rises with the warmth, the crisp bite
of the blades, the rustle and scamper of sheep
40
THE FLOCK
in the corral beat into rhythm with the bent
backs rising and stooping to the incessant
cry, '' Ntiniei^o diez, triente ! " " Number ten,
tally ! " closing full at noon with the clink of
canteens. Afternoon sees the sweat dripping
and a freer accompaniment of talk, drowned
again in the rising fever of work at the turn of
the day, after which the smell of cooking be-
gins to climb above the smells of the cor-
rals. A man wipes his
shears on his overalls
and hangs them up
when he has clipped
the forty or fifty sheep
that his wage, neces-
sity, or his reputation
demands of him.
[ Two men can sack
the wool of a thousand
sheep in a day, though
their contrivances are
the simplest, — a frame
tall enough to be taller than a wool sack, which
is once and a half as tall as Little Pete, an
iron ring over which the wetted mouth of the
A SHEARING 41
sack is turned and so held fast to the top of
the frame, a pole to support the weight of the
sack while the packer sews it up. Once the
sack is adjusted, with ears tied in the bottom
corners over a handful of wool, the bundled
fleeces are tossed up into it and trampled close
by the packer as the sack fills and fills. The
pole works under the frame like an ancient
wellsweep, hoisting the three hundred pound
weight of wool while the packer closes the
top.
For the reason why wool shears are ground
dull at the point, and for knowing about the
yolk of the wool, I commend you to Noriega
or Little Pete ; this much of a shearing is their
business ; the rest of it is romance and my
province.
The far-called flocks come in ; Raymundo
has climbed to the top of the wool sack tower
and spies for the dust of their coming ; dust
in the east against the roan-colored hills; dust
in the misty, blue ring of the west; high dust
under Breckenrido^e floatino: across the banked
poppy fires; flocks moving on the cactus-grown
mesa. Now they wheel, and the sun shows them
42 THE FLOCK
white and newly shorn ; there passes the band
of Jean Moynier, shorn yesterday. Northward
the sagebrush melts and stirs in a stream of
moving shadow.
" That," sa3^s Raymundo, " should be
Etienne Picquard; when he goes, he goes fast;
when he rests, he rests altogether. Now he
shall pay me for that crook he had of me last
year."
" Look over against the spotted hill, there
by the white scar," says a little red man who
has just come in. " See you anything } "
" Buzzards flying over," says Raymundo
from the sacking frame.
" By noon, then, you should see a flock
coming; it should be White Mountain Joe. I
passed him Tuesday. He has a cougar's skin,
the largest ever. Four nights it came, and
on the fourth it stayed."
So announced and forerun by word of their
adventures the herders of the Long Trail
come in. At night, like kinsmen met in hos-
telries, they talk between spread pallets by the
dying fires.
" You, Octavieu, you think you are the only
A SHEARING 43
one who has the ill fortune, you and your
poisoned meadows ! When I came by Oak
Creek I lost twoscore of my lambs to the forest
ranger. Twoscore fat and well grown. We
fed along the line of the Reserve, and the flock
scattered. Ah, how should I know, there being
no monuments at that place ! They went but
a flock length over, that I swear to you, and
the ranger came riding on us from the oaks
and charged the sheep ; he was a new man
and a fool not to know that a broken flock
travels up. The more he ran after them the
farther they went in the Reserve. Twoscore
lambs were lost in the steep rocks, or died from
the running, and of the ewes that lost their
lambs seven broke back in the night, and I
could not 0-0 in to the Reserve to hunt them.
And how is that for ill fortune ? You with
your halfscore of scabby wethers ! "
Trouble with forest rangers is a fruitful
topic, and brings a stream of invective that falls
away as does all talk out of doors to a note
of humorous large content. Jules upbraids his
collie tenderly : —
"So you would run away to the town, eh.
44 THE FLOCK
and get a beating for your pains; you are well
served, you misbegotten son of a thief ! Know
you not there is none but old Jules can abide
the sight of you ? "
Echenique by the fire is beginning a bear
story : —
"It was four of the sun when he came upon
me where I camped by the Red Hill north-
ward from Agua Hedidnda and would have
taken my best wether, Duroc, that I have
raised by my own hand. I, being a fool, had left
my gun at Tres Pinos on account of the ran-
gers. Eh, I would not have cared for a sheep
more or less, but Duroc! — when I think of
that I go at him with my staff, for I am seven
times a fool, and the bear he leaves the sheep to
come after me. Well I know the ways of bears,
that they can run faster than a man up a hill
or down; but around and around, that is where
the o^reat wei2:ht of Monsieur le Bear has him
at fault. So long as you run with the side of
the hill the bear comes out below you. Now
this Red Hill where I am camped is small, that
a man might run around it in half an hour.
So I run and the bear runs; when I come out
A SHEARING 45
again by my sheep I speak to the dogs that
they keep them close. Then I run around and
around, and this second time — Sacre ! "
He gets upon his feet as there rises a sud-
den scurry from the flock, turned out that
evening from the shearing pens and bedded
on the mesa's edge, yearning toward the fresh
feed. Echenique Hfts up his staff and whistles
to his dogs ; like enough the flock will move
out in the night to feed and the herder with
him. Not until they meet again by chance, in
. the summer meadows, will each and several
hear the end of the bear story. So they re-
count the year's work by the shearing fires,
and if they be hirelings of different owners,
lie to each other about the feed. Dogs snug-
gle to their masters ; for my part I believe they
would take part in the conversation if they
fcould, and suffer in the deprivation.
>"|<o^;>^At— shearings flocks are reorganized for
the Long Trail. Wethers and non-productive
ewes are cut out for market, vearlino-s chano;e
hands, lambs are marked, herders outfitted.
The shearing crew which has begun in the
extreme southern end of the valley passes
46 THE FLOCK
north on the trail of vanishing snows even as
far as Montana, and picks up the fall shearings,
rounding toward home. This is a recent pro-
cedure. Once there was time enough for a
fiesta lasting two or three days, or at the least
a shearing bailc. I remember very well when
at Adobe, before the wind had cleared the lit-
ter of fleeces, they would be riding at the ring
and clinking the shearing wage over cockfights
and monte. Toward nightfall from somewhere
in the blue-and-white desertness, music of gui-
tars floated in the prettiest girls in the com-
pany of limber vaqueros, clinking their spurs
and shaking from their hair the shining crease
where the heavy sombrero had rested. Middle-
aged senoras wound their fat arms in their
rebosas and sat against the wall ; blue smoke
of cigarettes began to sway with the strum of
the plucked guitar; cascarones w^ould fly about,
breaking in bright tinsel showers. O, the sound
of the mandolin, and the rose in the senorita's
hair ! What is it in the Castilian strain that
makes it possible for a girl to stick a rose be-
hind her ear and cause you to forget the smell
of garlic and the reck of unwashed walls ?
A SHEARING 47
Along about the middle hours, heaves up,
heralded by soft clinkings and girding of broad
tires, the freighter's twenty-eight-mule team.
The teamsters, who have pushed their fagged
animals miles beyond their daily stunt to this
end, drop the reins to the swamper and whirl
with undaunted freshness to the dance. As
late as seven o'clock in the morning you could
still see their ruddy or freckled faces glowing
above the soft, dark heads. Though if }'ou had
sheep in charge you could hardly have stayed
so long. Outside so far that the light that
rays from the crevices of the bursting doors of
Adobe is no brighter than his dying fire, the
herder lies with his sheep, and by the time the
bleached hollows of the sands collect shadows
tenuous and blue, has begun to move his flock
toward the much desired Sierra pastures.
IV
p
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD —
WITH SOME ACCOUNT OF HOW HE
J\
HAS BECOME AX A P.OMl NATION, AND
f
OF THE :\IEN WHO HIRE HIM
CHAPTER IV
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD
" And now," says the interlocutor, " tell me
what led you first to this business of sheep ? "
That was at Little Pete's shearing at Big
Pine, a mile below the town ; a wide open day
of May, dahlia coming into bloom and blue
gilias quavering in the tight shadows under the
saore. Pete had been showintj me the use of a
shepherd's crook, not nearly so interesting as
it sounds. He hooked it under the hind leg
of a wether and drew him into the shearing
52 THE FLOCK
pen ; now he leaned upon its long handle as
on a staff.
"In Aries where I was born, by the Rhone,"
said Pete, " my father kept sheep,"
" And you were put to the minding of
them ? "
" As a boy. We drove them to the Alps in
summer, I remember ver)^ well. We went be-
tween the fenced pastures, feeding every other
day and driving at night. In the dark we
heard the bells ahead and slept upon our feet.
Myself and another herd boy, we tied our-
selves together not to wander from the road.
We slept upon our feet but kept moving to the
bells. This is truth that I tell you. Whenever
shepherds from the Rhone are met about
camps in the Sierras they will be talking of
how they slept upon their feet and followed
after the bells."
There was a clump of crimson mallow at
the corner of the shearing corral. I remem-
bered what the Indians had told me in this
sandy waste, that where the mallow grew they
digged and found, if no more, at least a hand-
ful of plastic clay for making pots. That was
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD 53
like any statement of Pete's ; if you looked for
it, there was always a good lump of romance
about its roots.
"All that country about the Rhone," he
said, " is of fields and pastures, and the Alps
hang above them like clouds. Meadows of the
Sierras are green, but not so green as the little
fields of France when we went between them
with the flocks. We fed for three months in
the high pastures, and for idleness wove gar-
ters in curious patterns of woolen thread, red
and green and blue. Yes ; for our sweethearts,
they wore them on holidays. But here it seems
a garter is not to be mentioned."
" And you came to America ? "
" Yes ; there were changes, and I had heard
that there was free pasture, and money — Eh,
yes, it passes freely about, but there is not
much that sticks to the fins^ers." Pete shunted
the dodge-gate in the pens and searched the
horizon for the dust of his flocks.
"And you, Enscaldunac .<* "
The Basco lifted his shoulders and folded
his arms above his staff.
" In the Pyrenees my father keep sheep,
54 THE FLOCK
his father keep sheep, his father " — He threw
out his hands inimitably across the shifting
shoulders of the flock ; it was as if he had di-
rected the imagination over a backward stretch
of time, that showed to its far diminishing end
generations of small, hairy men, keeping
sheep.
" It is soon told," said Sanger, his voice
halting over some forgotten burr of speech,
"how I began to be interested in sheep.
" It was in Germany when I was a boy.
Everyman has two or three head in his stable,
and there will be one herd boy to the village ;
he leads them out to feed, and home at night.
Every sheep knows its ow-n fold. They are
like dogs returning to the doorstep when they
come in at night, and in the morning they
bleat at the voice of the herd boy. But here
we run two and three thousand to the flock."
The Manxman, when the question was put
to him, laid the tios of his thin fino-ers tosfether
deliberatively, between his knees.
" Well, I be<ran workina^ a shearinsf crew,
my brother and I, but, you see, in the Isle o'
Man " — What more would you have ? Once
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD 55
a man has been put to the care of sheep he
reverts to it in any turn of his affairs Hke
mavericks to old water holes. And if he would
keep out of the business, he must keep strictly
away from the smell of the dust they beat up
on the trail and the familiar blether of the
flock. Narcisse Duplin, who used regularly to
damn the business in October and sell out, and
as regularly buy again in February, told me
this, and told at the same time of a certain
banker in an inland town who had made his
money in sheep and was now ashamed of it,
who kept a cosset ewe in his back yard. There
used to be at Tres Pinos a man who had sold
two thousand wethers and a thousand ewes, to
buy a little shop where he could sell lentils
and claret and copper-riveted overalls to the
herders going by on the Long Trail. But he
never came to any good in it, for the reason
that when trade should be busiest at the semi-
annual passage of the flocks, he would be out
walking after the sheep in the smell and the
bitter dust.
That most sheep-herders are foreigners ac-
counts largely for the abomination in which
56 THE FLOCK
they are held and the prejudice that attaches
to the term. American owners prefer to be
called wool growers, but it is well to be exactly
informed. The Frenchmen call themselves
dcrgers, the Mexicans boregeros, the Basques
artzainas, of all which shepherd is the exact
equivalent. Sheep-herder is a pure colloquial-
ism of the man outside and should not be made
to stand for more than it includes. The best
terms of a trade are to be found among the
men who live by it, and these are their proper
distinctions : The owner or wool grower sits at
home, and seldom seeing his flocks sends them
out under a head shepherd or major-domo ; a
shepherd is an owner who travels with the
flock, with or without herders, overseeing and
directing; the sheep-herder is merely a hire-
ling who works the flock in its year-long pas-
sage from shearing to shearing.
This is the first estate of most sheepmen.
The herder runs a flock for a year or two for
a daily wage of tobacco and food and a dol-
lar, and if he has no family, fifty dollars is as
much as he finds occasion to spend upon him-
self. Then he takes pay in a bunch of ewes
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD 57
and runs them with his master's flock. With
the year's increase he unites with some other
small owner, and puts his knowledge of pas-
tures to the proof. After this his affairs are in
the hands of the Little Gods of Rain. Three or
four successive dry years return him " broke "
to the estate of herding ; the same number of
years of abundant wetness make him a wool
grower.
Notable owners, such as Watterson, Olcese,
Sanger, and Harry Quinn of Rag Gulch, think
themselves not much occupied with romance.
They improve the breeds, conserve the natural
range, multiply contrivances. At Rag Gulch
there is a cemented vat for dipping sheep, and
at Button Willow they have set up wool-clip-
ping machines, — but as for me, the dust of
the shuffling hoofs is in my eyes. As it rises
on the trail one perceives through its pale
luminosity the social order struggling into
shape.
Sanger, when he drove his sheep to Mon-
tana in '70, went up like a patriarch with his
family in wagons, his dogs and his herders,
his milch cows, his saddle horses, and his sheep
58
THE FLOCK
in bands. When they came by Hving springs,
there they pitched the camp ; when they found
fresh pastures, there they halted. But on the
Long Trail the herders go out with a little
burro to pack, with a lump of salt pork and
a bag of lentils, a
bunch of garlic,
a frying pan, and
a pot, with two or
three dogs and a
cat to ride on top of
the cayaques and
clear the camp of
mice. After them comes the head shepherd in
a stout-built wagon. Met on the county roads,
he is to be distinguished from the farmers by
the sharp noses of the dogs thrust out between
his feet, and by the appearance of having on
too many clothes and the clothes not belong-
ing to him. Nothing sets so ill on the man
from outdoors as the ready-made suit. On the
range in a blouse loose at the throat, belted
with a wisp of sheepskin or a bright handker-
chief, these shepherd folk show to be admi-
rably built, the bodies columnar, the chests
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD 59
brawny, the reach of the arms extraordinary,
the hands not calloused but broadened at the
knuckles by the constant grip of the staff.
Of the other sorts of men having to do with
sheep there are not many who merit much at-
tention. These are the buyers who seek out
the flocks on the range, and fortified by a
secret knowledge of the market fluctuations,
bargain for the mutton and the fleeces. Having
paid to the shepherd, as earnest of their inten-
tion, the cost of driving the flock at a given
time to the point of transportation, they melt
away by the main traveled roads, and the herder
knows them no more. The real focus of the
sheep business in any district is to be found in
some such friendly concern as the house of
Olcese and Ardizzi, who make good in the
terms of modernity the very old rule that one
Frenchman is always worth being trusted by
another. Hardly any who go up across my
country but have been lifted by them through
their bad years by credits and supplies, and the
inestimable advantao^e that comes to a man in
knowing: his word is esteemed 2;ood.
Once for all the French herders in America
6o THE FLOCK
shall have in me a faithful recorder. You may
call a Frenchman a Gascon, which is to say a
liar, and escape punishment ; but you really
must not confound him with a Basque. Un-
derstand that all the Pyreneeans of my ac-
quaintance are straight folk and likable, but
if you lay all the evils of shepherding at the
doors of those I do not know, you will have
some notion of how they are esteemed of the
French.
When on the mesa or about the edges of
a gentian-spattered meadow you come upon a
still camp with " Consuelo," the " Fables of La
Fontaine," or Michelet's " Histoire de France"
lying about among the cooking pots, it is well
to wait until the herder comes home. In seven-
teen years I have found nobody better w^orth
than Little Pete to discuss French literature.
This is that Pierre Geraud who has the
meadow of Coyote Valley and the ranch at
Tinnemaha; a man who gives the impression
that he has made himself a little less than
large for convenience in getting about, of such
abundant vitality and elasticity that he gives
back largely to the lightest touch. He knows
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD 6i
how to put information in its most pregnant
shape, though I am not sure it is because he
is a Frenchman or because he is a shepherd.
Once you get speech with them, of all out-
door folk the minders of flocks arc the most
fruitful talkers ; better at it than cowboys, next
best after forest rangers. The constant flux
from the estate of owner to hirelins: makes
them philosophers ; all outdoors contrives to
nourish the imagination, and they have in full
what we oftenest barely brush wings with, ele-
mental human experiences.
Once in the Temblors, a wild bulk of hills
westward from San Emigdio, I knew a herder
who had called a woman from one of the wat-
tled huts sprawled in a brown caiion ; she an-
swering freely to the call as the quail to the
piping of its mate. She was slim and brown,
and points of amber flame swam in her quiet
eyes. They went up unweariedly by faint old
trails and felt the earth-pulse under them.
They shook the unregarded rain from their
eyes, and sat together in a wordless sweet com-
panionship through endless idle noons. After-
ward when she grew heavy he set her Madonna-
62
THE FLOCK
wise on a burro, he holding the leading strap
and she smiling at him in a large content.
Well — but what is marriage exactly ?
Understand that the actual manas^ement of
a flock on the range is never a " white man's
job." Those so describing themselves who
maybe hired to
it are the im-
possibles, men
who work a lit-
tle in order to
drink a great
deal, returning
to the flock in
such a condition
of disrepair that
their own dogs
do not know
them.
Of the twoscore shepherds who pass and
repass between Naboth's field and the foot
of Kearsarge, most are French, then Basque,
Mexican^ and a Portuguese or two. Once I
found a Scotchman sitting on a fallen plinth
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD 63
of the Black Rock below Little Lake ; I knew
he was Scotch because he was knitting and
he would not talk. There was an Indian who
worked for Joe Espelier, — but in general the
Indian loves society too much to make a nota-
ble herder, and the Mexican has a difificulty in
remembering that the claims of his employer
are superior to the obligations of hospitality.
Gervaise told me that when he ran thirty thou-
sand merinos in New Mexico he used to deal
out supplies in day's rations, otherwise he
would be feeding all his herders' relations and
relations-in-law.
It is said of the Devil that he spent seven
years in learning the Basque language and
acquired but three words of it, and offered in
corroboration that the people of the Pyrenees
called themselves Enscaldunac, " the people
with a speech." I believe myself these Bascos
are a little proud of the foolish gaspings and
gutterings by which they prevent an under-
standing, and contribute to the unfounded as-
sumption that most sheep-herders are a little
insane. This sort of opprobrium is always cast
upon unfamiliar manners by the sorts of peo-
64 THE FLOCK
pie who meet oftenest with shepherd folk, —
cowboys, homesteaders, provincials with little
imagination and no social experience. When-
ever it is possible to bridge the prejudice which
isolates the herder from the servants of other
affairs, what first appears is that the grazing
ground is the prize of a little war that requires
for its successful issue as much foresightedness
and knowledge of technique as goes propor-
tionately to other business, so that a man
might much more easily go insane under its
perplexities than for the want of employment
that is oftenest imputed. Nor does shepherd-
ing lack a sustaining morale in the occasions
it affords for devotion to the interests of the
employer. And this presents itself in any
knowledgeable report of their relations that,
in a business carried on so far from the own-
er's eye, nothing could be possible without an
extraordinary degree of dependableness in the
hireling.
Not that the leash of reason does not occa-
sionally slip in the big wilderness ; there was
Jean Lambert, who in a succession of dry years
found himself so harassed by settlers and cattle-
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD 65
men occupying his accustomed ground and
defending them with guns and strategies, that
he conceived the ver)'- earth and sky in league
against him, and was found at last roaring about
a dry meadow, holding close his starved flock
and defying the Powers of the Air. Once there
was a Portuguese herder misled by false monu-
ments in the Coso country, without water for
three days, discovered witless and happy, bath-
ing nakedly in the waters of mirage. But there
were also miners in that county and teamsters
whom the land made mad ; indeed, what occupa-
tion fends us from thirst and desertness ? I hand
you up these things as they w^ere told to me, for
such as these always occur in some other place,
like Arizona or New Mexico where almost any-
r thing might happen. With all my seeking into
^ desert places there are three things that of my
own knowledge I have not seen, — a man who
has rediscovered a lost mine, the heirs of one
who died of the bite of a sidewinder, and a
shepherd who is insane.
The loneliness imputed by the town-bred is
not so in fact. Almost invariably two men are
put to a flock, and these are seldom three days
66 THE FLOCK
together out of touch with the owner or head
shepherd who, travehng with supphes, directs
several bands at once, baking bread, replenishing
the outfit, spying ahead for fresh pastures, and
purveying news. This necessity for renewing
contact at given places and occasions points the
labor of the herder and supplies a companiona-
ble touch. Herders of different owners meet on
the rano^e and exchangee misinformation about
the feed ; lately also they defame the forest
rangers. Returning in the fall, before under-
taking the desert drive, they turn into the alfalfa
fields about Oak Creek and below Williamson
and Lone Pine. Here while the flock fattens
they make camps of ten or a dozen ; here in
long twilights they sing and romp boyishly
with the dogs, and here the wineskin goes about.
These goatskin bottles with the hair inside
come from Basqueland and are held by the
possessors to give an unrivaled flavor to the
weak claret drunk in camp. When a company
of Basque herders are met about the fire,
in the whole of a lono; eveninc: the wineskin
does not touch the ground. Each man receives
it from his neighbor, holds it a foot away from
THE HIRELING SHEPHERD dj
his face, deftly wets his throat with a thin, pink
stream squirted through the horn tip, hands it
about and about, singing.
After sundown in the stilhiess of high valleys
the sound of an accordion carries far. When
it croons wheezily over a love song of the sev-
enteenth century, it is worth following to its
point of issue beside the low flare of the brush-
wood fire with the shepherds seated round it
on the ground. There you will hear roundels
and old ballades, perhaps a new one begin-
ning, —
"A shepherd there was of Gascony,
A glutton, a drunkard, a liar was he,
A rascal, a thief, and a Blasphemer,
The worst in the whole round world I aver ;
Who, seeing the master had left him alone,
He gave the coyotes the lambs for their own,
He left the poor dogs to watch over the sheep
And down by the wine cask he laid him asleep."
It goes much more swingingly than that in
the original, which, if you wish, you can get
from Little Pete, who made it.
V
THE LONG TRAIL —
HOW IT WAS DEFINED,
WHAT GOES ON IN IT,
AND HOW THE DAV's
WORK. IS ACCOMPLISHED.
CHAPTER V
THE LONG TRAIL
Toward the end of spring in the wide Cahfor-
nia valleys, night begins close along the ground,
as if it laired by day in the shadows of the
rabbit-brush or suspired sleepily from thick,
secret sloughs. At that hour when the earth
turns as if from the red eye of the sun, all the
effort of nature seems to withdraw attention
from its adumbration to direct it toward the
ineffably pure vault of blueness on which the
clear obscurity that shores the rim of the world
encroaches late or not at all. In the San Joa-
72 THE FLOCK
quin there will be nights of early summer when
the live color of heaven is to be seen at all
hours beyond the earth's penumbra, darkling
between the orderly perspectives of the stars.
At such seasons there will be winking in the
pellucid gloom, in the vicinity of shearing sta-
tions, a hundred camp fires of men who have
not lost the sense of the earth being good to lie
down upon. They have moved out from Fa-
moso, from Delano, Poso, and Caliente, bound
as the mind of the head shepherd runs for
summer pastures as far north as may be con-
veniently accomplished between shearing and
lambing ; and all the ways of their going and
coming make that most notable of sheepwalks,
the Long Trail.
The great trunk of the trail lies along the east
slope of the Sierra Nevadas, looping through
them by way of the passes around Yosemite,
or even as far north as Tahoe, shaped and de-
fined by the occasions that in little record the
progress from nomadism to the commonwealth.
Conceive the cimeter blade of the Sierra curv-
ing to the slow oval of the valley, dividing the
rains, clouds herding about its summits and
THE LONG TRAIL 73
flocks along its flanks, their approaches ordered
by the extension and recession of its snows.
The common necessities of the sheep business
beat it into a kind of rhythm as early even as
the time when every foot of this country was
open range. Recurrently as the hills clothed
themselves with white wonder the shepherds
turned south for lambing, and as surely as
bent heather recovers from the drifts, they
sought the summer pastures.
The down plunge of the Sierras to the San
Joaquin is prolonged by round-backed droves
of hills, and the westerly trail is as wide as a
week of flock journeys ; but here on the east
you have the long, sharp scar where Padahoon,
the little hawk who made it, tore the range
from its foundations when he stole that terri-
tory from the little duck who brought up the
stuff for its building from the bottom of the
primordial sea. Here the trail hugs the foot
of the orreat Sierra fault for a hundred miles
O
through the knife-cut valleys, trending no far-
ther desertvvard than the scant fling of winter
rains, and even here it began soon enough to
be man-crowded.
74 THE FLOCK
Wherever the waters of cloud-dividing ridges
issue from the caiions, steadying their swaying
to the level lands, there were homesteads es-
tablished that in thirty years expanded into the
irrio^ated belt that limits and defines the rans^e
of sheep. Not without a struggle though. Be-
tween the herders and the ranchers the impalpa-
ble fence of the law had first to externalize itself
in miles upon miles of barbed wire to accom-
plish for the patented lands what the hair rope
is supposed to do for the teamster's bed, for in
the early eighties there was no vermin so pes-
tiferous to the isolated rancher as the sheep.
Finally the trail was mapped by the viewless
line of the Forest Reserve, drawn about the best
of the w^atershed and so narrowed that where it
passes between Kearsarge and Naboth's field,
where my house is, it is no more than a three-
mile strip of close-grazed, social shrubs.
The trail begins properly at the Place of the
Year Long Wind, otherwise Mojave. Flocks
pour into it by way of Tehachapi, and in very
dry years from as far south as San Gabriel and
San Bernardino, crowded up with limping, stark-
ribbed cattle. In the spring of '94 they were
THE LONC; TRAIL
driven north in such numbers that the stajje
road between Mojave and Red Rock was trod-
den indistinguishably into the dust. The place
where it had been was mapped in the u})per air
by the wide, tilted wings of scavengers and the
crawling dustheaps below them on the sand,
formless blurs for the sheep and long snaking
lines of steers ; for horned cattle have come
so much nearer the man-mind that thev love
a beaten path. Weeks
on end the black gui-
dons flapped and halt-
ed in the high currents
of the furnace-heated
air.
Rolling northward
on the Mojave stage,
from the high seat be-
side the driver, I saw
the sick hearts of cat-
tlemen and herders
watch through swollen
eyelids the third and then the half of their
possessions wasting from them as sand slips
through the fingers. By the dry wash where
76 THE FLOCK
they buried the Chinaman who tried to walk
in from Borax Marsh without water, we saw
Baptiste the Portuguese, sitting with his eyes
upon the ground, all his flock cast up along the
bank, and his hopes with them like the waste
of rotting leaves among the bleached boul-
ders of a vanished stream, dying upon their
feet.
All trails run together through Red Rock,
the gorge by which the stage road climbs to the
mesa. There is a water hole halfway of its
wind-sculptured walls ; often had I seen it
glimmering palely like a dead eye between
lashless, ruined lids. Crowded into the defile
at noon, for at that time we made the first
stage of the journey by day, a band of black
faces added the rank smell of their fleeces to
the choked atmosphere. The light above the
smitten sands shuddered everywhere with heat.
The sheep had come from Antelope Valley
with insufificient feed and no water since
Mojave, and had waited four hours in the
breathless gully for the watering of a band of
cattle at the flat, turgid well. The stage pushed
into the caiion as having the right of way, for
THE LONG TRAIL j-j
besides passengers we carried the mail ; the
herder spoke to the dogs that they open the
flock to let us pass. They and the sheep an-
swered heavily, being greatly spent; dumbly
they shuffled from the road and closed huddling
behind, as clods. For an interval we halted in
the middle of the band until one of the horses
snorted back upon his haunches and occasioned
one of those incidents that, whether among
sheep or men, turn us sickeningly from the
social use of the flock-mind. The band becjan
to turn upon itself ; those scrambling from the
horses piled up upon their fellows as viewless
shapes of thirst and fear herded them inward
to the suffocating heap that sunk and shud-
dered and piled again. My eyes were shut, but
I heard the driver swear whispering and help-
lessly for the brief interval that we could not
hear the gride of the moving wheels upon the
sand. Afterward when I came to my own place
I watched the trail long for the passing of that
herder and that band, to inquire how they had
come through, — but they iievei^ passed !
Nothing, absolutely nothing, say the herders,
of interest or profit can happen to a flock be-
78 THE FLOCK
tween Antelope Valley and Haiwai in a dry year.
It is the breeding place of little dust devils that
choose the moment when your pot lid is off, or
you cool your broth with your breath, to whisk
up surprisingly out of stillness with rubbish
and bitter dust to disorder the camp. Foot-
soreness, loco-weed, deadly waters, and starva-
tion establish its borders ; and withal no possi-
bility of imputing malignity. It is not that the
desert would destroy men and flocks, it merely
neglects them. When they fail through its
sheer inattention, because of the preoccupation
of its own beauty, it has not time even to kill
quickly. Plainly the lord of its luminous great
spaces has a more tremendous notion, not to
be disturbed for starveling ewe, not though
the bloomy violet glow of its twilight closes
so many times on the vulture dropped above
it, swinging as from some invisible pendulum
under the sky. Lungren showed me a picture
once, of a man and a horse dead upon the
desert, painted as it would be with the light
breaking upon the distended bodies, nebu-
lously rainbow-hued and tender, which he said
hardly anybody liked. How should they ? It is
THE LONG TRAIL 79
still hard for men to 2:et alonsf with God for
thinking of death not as they do.
But if ever spring comes to the Mojave, and
the passage of spring beyond the Sierra wall
is a matter of place and occasion rather than
season, there is no more tolerable land for a
flock to be abroad in. This year it came and
stayed along three hundred miles, and the sheep
grew fat and improved their fleeces. But for
the insufificience of watering places a hundred
thousand mio^ht have thriven on the o-reat
variety of grazing, — atriplexes, dahlia, tender
young lupines, and " marrow-fat " weed.
As many shepherds as think the grudging
permission to cross the Forest Reserve not too
dearly paid for by the vexations of it, bring
their sheep up by way of Havilah and Green-
horn through Walker's Pass. As many as
think it worth while feed out toward Panamint
and Coso, where once in seven years there is a
chance of abundant grazing; but about Owen's
Lake they are drawn together by the narrowing
of the trail and the tax collector. If ever you
come along the south shore of that dwindling,
tideless water about the place where Manuel
8o THE FLOCK
de Borba killed Mariana, his master, and sold
the flock to his own profit, look across it to the
wall-sided hulks of the Sierras ; best if you can
see them in the pure, shadowless light of early
evening when the lake shines in the wet grey
color of Irish eyes. For then and from this
point it seems the Indians named them " Too-
rape',' the Ball Players. They line up as braves
for the ancient play, immortally young, shining
nakedly above, girt with pines, their strong
cliffs leaning to the noble poises of the game.
" It is evident," Narcisse Duplin used to say
when he came to this point, " that God and a
poor shepherd may admire the same things."
Always in October or April one sees about
the little towns of Inyo, in some corner of the
fields, two to six heavy wagons of the head shep-
herds, with the season's outfit stowed under
canvas ; and at Eibeshutz's or Meysan's hap-
pen upon nearly unintelligible herders buying
the best imported olive oil and the heaviest
American cowhide boots. Hereabouts they
refresh the trail-weary flocks in the hired pas-
tures and outfit them for the Sierra meadows.
Here also they pay the license for the open
THE LONG TRAIL 8i
range, two to five cents a head, payable by
actual count in every county going or return-
ing. As the annual passage is often twice
across three or four counties, the license be-
comes, in the minds of some herders, a thing
worth avoiding. Narcisse Duplin, red Narcisse,
who went over this trail once too often, told
me how, in a certain county where the land
permitted it, he would hide away the half of
his flock in the hills, then go boldly with the
remnant to pay his assessment, smuggling forth
the others at night out of the collector's range.
But here where the trail spindles out past
Kearsarge there is no convenience and, I may
add, hardly any intention of avoiding it.
A flock on the trail moves out by earliest
light to feed. For an hour it may be safely
left to the dogs while the herder starts the fire
under his coffee pot and prepares his bowl of
goat's milk and large lumps of bread. The
flock spreads fanwise, feeding from the sun.
Good herding must not be close ; where the
sheep are held in too narrow a compass the
middlers and tailers crop only stubble, and
82 THE FLOCK
coming empty to the bedding ground, break
in the night and stray in search of pasture.
An anxious herder makes a lean flock. Prop-
erly the band comes to rest about mid-morning,
drinking when there is water to be had, but if
no water, ruminating contentedly on the open
fronts of hills while the herder cooks a meal.
Myself, I like the dinner that comes out of
the herder's black pot, mixing its savory smells
with the acrid smoke of burning sage. You
sit on the ground under a little pent of brush
and are served in a tin basin with mutton, len-
tils, and garlic cooked together wuth potatoes
and peppers (" red pottage of lentils "), with
thick wedges of sour-dough bread to sop up
the gravy, good coffee in a tin cup ; and after
the plate is cleared, a helping of wild honey
or tinned sweet stuff. Occasionally there will
be wild salad, miner's lettuce, pepper grass or
cress from springy meadows. If the herder has
been much about Indians, you may have little
green pods of milkweed cooked like string
beans, summers in westward-fronting caiions,
thimbleberries which the herder gathers in his
hat. Trout there are in a trout country, but
THE LONG TRAIL 83
seldom game, for a gun does not go easily in a
cayaca.
When in the fall the Basques forgather at
a place on Oak Creek called by the Indians
" Sagahaj'awife, Place - of-the - Mush - that - was -
Afraid," you get the greatest delicacy of a
sheep camp, a haunch of mutton stuck full of
garlic corns and roasted in a Dutch oven under
ground. Even buried a foot in red-hot coals
the smell of this delectation is so persuasive
that Julien told me once on Kern River, when
he had left his mutton a moment to look after
the sheep, a bear came out of the hills and car-
ried off the roast in the pot. There is no doubt
whatever of the truth of this incident.
Bxead for the camp is baked by the head
shepherd, and when it is ready for the pans he
-'''^#.v£^_^^3^.^'
c' ■
.-^-4&Mi
,-
^ /
84 THE FLOCK
pulls off a lump and drops it back in the flour
sack. There it ferments until it is used to start
the next baking,
" How long," said I to the herder from whom
I first learned the management of the loaves,
"how long might you go on raising bread from
one ' starter ' ? "
He considered as he rubbed the dough from
his hands.
" When first I come to this country in '96 I
have a fresh piece, from the head shepherd
of Louis Olcese. Yes, when I am come from
France. Madame-who-writes-the-book could
not have supposed that I brought it with me.
Ah, uon ! "
A sack of flour goes to six of the round,
brown loaves, and one is a four days' ration,
excellent enough when it comes up out of the
baking trench, rather falling off after three
days in the pack with garlic and burro sweat,
and old cheese. The acceptable vegetables are
lentils and onions, and the test of a good em-
ployer is the quantity of onions that can be
gotten out of him after the price goes higher
than a dollar and a quarter a sack.
THE LONG TRAIL 85
The mess which the herder puts over the
fire every day at mid-morning is packed in the
pot in the cayaca when the flock moves out in
the afternoon, and warmed at his twihght-cheer-
ing fire, serves as supper for liimself and the
dogs ahke, and not infrequently in the same
dish.
I have said you should hear what the tariff
revision accomplished for the sheep. Just this :
before that, men raised sheep for wool or mut-
ton expressly, but chiefly for wool. Then as
the scale of prices hung wavering, doubtful if
wool or mutton was to run highest, they began
to cross the wool and mutton breeds to produce
a sheep that matures rapidly and shears nine or
ten pounds of wool, directing the management
of the flock always towards the turn of the
highest prices. Every sheepman will have his
preferences among Merinos, Shropshires, and
Cotswolds; but in general the Merinos are most
tractable, and blackfaces the best for fenced
pastures, for though they are marketable early
they scatter too much, not liking to feed in the
middle of the band, grow footsore too easily.
86 THE FLOCK
and despise the herder. It is the ultimate dis-
position of the flocks, whether for mutton or
wool, that determines the distribution of them
along the upper countr}- contiguous to the
trail, as the various sorts of forage, in the es-
timation of the shepherd, favor one or another
end. He is a poor shepherd whose mind can-
not outrun the flock by a season's length when
by eight and nine mile journeyings they pass
northward in the spring. Little Pete drops
out at Coyote Valley where by owning the best
meadow he controls the neighboring feed. Joe
Eyraud, White Mountain Joe, turns off toward
the upswelling of his name peak to the peren-
nial pastures of its snows. One goes by Deep
Springs and Lida to the far-between grazing-
grounds of Nevada, another to the burnt desert
of Mono. Time was before the Forest Reserve
cut them off from the high Sierras, the shep-
herds worked clean through them, returning to
the lambing stations by way of North Fork,
Kaweah, and the Four Creek country, and such
as came up the west slope went back through
Mono and Inyo. But now they return as they
went, complaining greatly of depleted pastures.
THE LONC; TRAIL 87
The flocks, I say, drift northward where the
turgid creeks discharge on the long mesas.
Passage toward tlie high valleys is deterred by
late meltino^of the snows and urs^ed forward bv
the consideration that along the most traveled
stages of the way there will be no new feed
between the flowering of wild almonds and the
time of Bigelovia bloom. Close spring feeding
makes a bitter passage of the fall returning. In
bad years the flocks turn in to the barley stub-
ble, they take the last crop of alfalfa standing ;
in a vineyard country they are put to stripping
the leaves from the vines.
What the shepherd prays for when in the
fall the tall dust columns begin to rise from the
Black Rock is a promise of rain in the dun
clouds stretched across the valley, low and
fleecy soft, touching the mountains on either
side ; grey air moving on the dusky mesas,
wide fans of light cutting through the canons
to illume the clear blue above the Passes ;
soft thunder treading tiptoe above the floor of
cloud, movino- about this business of the rain.
VI
THE OPEN RANGE — THE
COUNTRY WHERE THERE IS
NO WEATHER, AND THE
SIERRA MEADOWS
CHAPTER VI
THE OPEN RANGE
Beyond that portion of the great California
sheepwalk which is every man's, the desert-
fenced portion between Mojave and Sherwin
Hill, lies a big, wild country full of laughing
waters, with pines marching up alongside them
circling the glassy colored lakes, full of noble
windy slopes and high grassy valleys barred by
the sharp, straight shadows of new mountains.
All the cliffs of that country have fresh edges,
and the lioht that cuts between them from the
92 THE FLOCK
westering sun lies yellowly along the sod. All
the winds of its open places smell of sage,
and all its young rivers are swift. They begin
thin and crystalline from under the forty-foot
drifts, grow thick and brown in the hot leaps
of early summer, run clear with full throaty
laughter in midseason, froth and cloud to quick,
far-off rains, fall off to low and golden-mottled
rills before the first of the snows. By their
changes the herder camped a hundred miles
from his summer pastures knows what goes
forward in them.
Let me tell you this, — every sort of life has
its own zest for those who are bred to it. No
more delighted sense of competency and power
goes to the man who from his wire web con-
trols the movement of money and wheat, than to
the shepherd who by the passage of birds, by the
stream tones, by the drift of pine pollen on the
eddies of slack water, keeps tally of the pas-
tures. Do you read the notes of mountain color
as they draw into dusk.f^ There is a color of
blue, deeply pure as a trumpet tone low in the
scale, that announces rain ; there is a hot blue
mist suffusing into gold as it climbs against the
THE OPEN RANGE 93
horizon, that promises wind. There is a sense
that wakes in the night with a warning to keej)
the flock close, and another sense of the short-
est direction. The smell of the sheep is to the
herder as the smack and savor of any man's
work. Also it is possible to felicitate one's self
on roundino- a feedino- flock and brin2:ino^ it to
a standstill within a flock-lenq;th.
The whole of that great country northward
is so open and well-ordered that it affords the
freest exercise of shepherd craft, every man
going about to seek the preferred pastures for
which use has bred a liking. Miles and miles
of that district are dusky white w'ith sage, fall-
ing off to cienagas, — grassy hollows of seeping
springs, — cooled by the windy flood that sets
from the mountain about an hour before noon.
The voice of that country is an open whisper,
pointed at intervals by the deep whir-r-r-r of
the sage hens rising from some place of hidden
waters. Times when there is moonlight, watery
and cold, a long thin howl detaches itself from
any throat and welters on the wind. Here the
lift of the sky through the palpitant, pale noons
exalts the sense, and the rui^e of the sage
94 THE FLOCK
under it turning silverly to the wind stirs at
the heart as the slow smile of one well -loved
of whom you are yet a little afraid. Such
hours, merely at finding in the bent tops of
the brush the wattling by which the herder
keeps his head from the sun, passes the fiash
and color of the time when the man-seed was
young and the Power moved toward the Par-
thenon from a plat of interlacing twigs.
The sagebrush grows up to an elevation of
eight or nine thousand feet and the wind has
not quite lapped up the long-backed drifts from
its hollows when the sheep come in. A month
later there will begin to be excellent browse
along the lower pine borders, meadow sweet,
buckthorns, and sulphur flower. The yellow
pines, beaten by the wind, or at the mere stir of
pine warblers and grosbeaks in their branches,
give out clouds of pollen dust.
The suffusion of light over the Sierra high-
lands is singular. Broad bands of atmosphere
infiltrating the minareted crests seem not to
be penetrated by it, but the sage, the rounded
backs of the sheep, the clicking needles of the
pines give it back in luminous particles in-
THi: OPEN RANGE 95
finitely divided. Airy floods of it pour about
the plats of white and purple heather and
deepen vaporously blue at the bases of the
headlands. Long shafts of it at evening fall
so obliquely as to strike far under the ragged
bellies of the sheep. Wind approaches from
the high places; even at the highest it drops
down from unimagined steeps of air. Wlien it
moves in a caiion, before ever the near torches
of the castilleia are stirred by it, far up you hear
the crescendo tone of the fretted waters, first
as it were the foam of sound blown toward you,
and under it the pounding of the falls. Then
it runs with a patter in the quaking asp ; now it
takes a fir and wrestles with it ; it wakes the
brushwood with a whistle ; in the soft dark of
night it tugs at the corners of the bed.
Weather warnings in a hill country are
short but unmistakable; it is not well any-
where about the Sierras to leave the camp
uncovered if one must move out of reach of it.
And if the herder tires of precautions let him
go eastward of the granite ranges where there
is no weather. Let him go by the Hot Creek
country, by Dead Man's Gulch and the Suck-
96 THE FXOCK
ing Sands, by the lava Flats and the pink and
roan-colored hills where the lost mines are, by
the black hills of pellucid glass where the sage
gives place to the bitter brush, the wheno-iiabe,
where the carrion crows catch grasshoppers
and the coyotes eat juniper berries, where,
during the months man finds it possible to
stay in them, there is no weather. Let him
go, if he can stand it, where the land is naked
and not ashamed, where it is always shut
night or wide-open day with no interval but
the pinkish violet hour of the alpen glow.
There is forage enough in good years and
water if you know where to look for it. Indians
resorted there once to gather winter stores
from the grey nut-pines that head out roundly
on the eight thousand foot levels each in its
clear wide space. The sand between them is
strewn evenly with charred flakes of roasted
cones and the stone circles about the pits are
powdered still with ashes, for, as I have said,
there is no weather there.
There are some pleasant places in this
district, nice and trivial as the childhood re-
miniscences of senility, but the great laps and
I
THE OPEN RANGE 97
folds of the canons are like the corrugations
in the faces of the indecently aged. There is
a look about men who come from sojourning
in that country as if the sheer nakedness of
the land had somehow driven the soul back
on its elemental impulses. You can imagine
that one type of man exposed to it would
become a mystic and another incredibly
brutalized.
The devotion of the herder to the necessi-
ties of the flock is become a proverb. In a
matter of urgent grazing these hairy little Bas-
cos would feed their flocks to the rim of the
world and a little over it, but I think thev like
best to stay where the days and nights are not
all of one piece, where after the flare of the
storm-trumpeting sunsets, they can snuggle
to the blankets and hear the rain begin to
drum on the canvas covers, and mornings see
the shudder of the flock under the lift of the
cloud-mist like the yellowing droves of breakers
in a fog backing away from the ferries in the
bay. Pleasant it is also in the high valleys
where the pines begin, to happen on friendly
camps of Indians come up in clans and fami-
98 THE FLOCK
lies to gather larva? of pine borers, cJiia,
ground cherries, and sunflower seed. One
could well leave the flock with the dogs for
an hour to see the firelight redden on care-
free faces and hear the soft laughter of the
women, bubbling as hidden water in the dark.
It was not until most of the things I have
been writing to you about had happened ;
after Narcisse Duplin had died because of
Suzon Moynier, and Suzon had died; after
the two Lausannes had found each other and
Finot had won a fortune in a lottery and gone
back to France to spend it ; but not long after
the wavering of the tariff and its final adjust-
ment had brought the sheep business to its
present status, that the flocks began to be
tabooed of the natural forest lands.
One must think of the coniferous belt of the
Sierra Nevadas as it appears from the top of
the tremendous uplift about the head of Kern
and Kings rivers, as a dark mantle laid over
the range, rent sharply by the dove-grey sierra,
conforming to the large contours of the moun-
tains and fraying raggedly along the caiions;
THE OPEN RANGE 99
a sombre cloak to the mysteries by which the
drainage of this watershed is made into Hve
rivers.
Above the pines rears a choppy and disor-
dered surf of stone, lakes in its hollows of the
clear jade that welters below the shoreward
lift of waves. From the troughs of the upfiung
peaks the shining drifts sag back. By the time
they have shortened so much that the honey
flutes of the wild columbine call the bees to the
upper limit of trees, the flocks have melted into
the wood. They feed on the chaparral up
from the stream borders and in the hanging
meadows that are freed first from the flood of
snow-water; the raking hoofs sink deeply in
the damp, loosened soil. As the waste of the
drifts gathers into runnels they follow it into
filled lake basins and cut off the hope of a
thousand blossomy things. Then they begin to
seek out the hidden meadows, deep wells of
pleasantness that the pines avoid because of
wetness, soddy and good and laced by bright
waters, Manache meadows girdling the red hills,
Kearsarw meadows above the white-barked
O
pines. Big meadows where the creek goes
lOO THE FLOCK
smoothly on the glacier slips, Short-Hair mead-
ows, Tehippeti meadows under the dome where
the haunted water has a sound of bells, mead-
ows of the Twin Lakes and Middle-Fork,
meadows of Yosemite, of Stinking Water, and
Angustora.
Chains of meadows there are that lie along
creek borders, new meadows at the foot of steep
snow-shedding cliffs, shut pastures fiock-jour-
neys apart, where no streams run out and no
trails lead in, and between them over the con-
necting moraines, over the dividing knife-blade
ridges, go the pines in open order with the
young hope of the forest coming up under
them. No doubt meadow grasses, all plants
that renew from the root, were meant for for-
age, and forgetting at them wild grazing beasts
were made fleet. But nothing other than fear
puts speed in man-herded flocks. Seed-renew-
ing plants come up between the tree boles,
tufty grass, fireweed, shinleaf, and pipsisiwa ;
these the slow-moving flocks must crop, and
unavoidably along with them the seedling pines;
then as by successive croppings, forest floors are
cleared, they nip the tender ends of young sap-
THE OPEN RANGE loi
lings, for the business of the flock is to feed and
to keep on feeding. Where the forest intervals
afforded no more grazing, good shepherds set
them alight and looked for new pastures to
spring up in the burned districts. Who knew
how far the fire crept in the brown litter or
heard it shrieking as it ran up the tall masts of
pines, or saw the wild supplications of its pitchy
smoke ? As for the shepherd, he fed forward
with the flocks over the shrubby moraines.
When the thick chaparral made difficult pass-
age, when it tore the wool, the good shepherd
set the fire to rip out a path, and the next
year found tender, sappy browze springing
from the undying roots. The flock came to the
meadows ; they fed close ; then the foreplan-
nino: herder turned the creek from its course
to water it anew and the rainbow trout died
gasping on the sod.
I say the good shepherd — the man who
makes good the destiny of flocks to bear wool
and produce mutton. For what else fares he
forth with his staff and his dogs? A shepherd
is not a forester, nor is he the only sort of man
ignorant and scornful of the advantage of cov-
I02 THE FLOCK
ered watersheds. When he first vv-ent about the
business of putting the mountain to account,
the orreatest number to whom water for irrisra-
tion is the greatest good had not arrived. If
in the seventies and eighties here and there a
sheepman had arisen to declare for the Forest
Reserve, who of the Powers would have heard
him, which of the New Englanders who are
now orange-growers would have understood
his speech ? In fact many did so deliver them-
selves. The unrestricted devotion of the pine
belt to the sheep has done us damage; but let
us say no more about it lest we be made
ashamed.
The meadow pastures make long camps and
light labors. The sheep feed out to the hill
slopes in the morning and return to the stream-
side to drink. The herder lies upon the grass,
the springy grass of the willow-skirted mead-
ows, by the white violets of alpine meadows
where the racing waters are. Then he begins
to be busy about those curious handcrafts as
old as shepherding. He makes chain orna-
ments of horsehair, black and white, and pipe
THE OPEN RANGE
103
bowls of ruddy, curled roots of manzanita. He
sits with his knife and his staff of willow and
covers it with interlacing patterns of carved
work. There was a herder whose round was by
way of Antelope Valley and Agua Hedidndo
who had carved his staff from the bottom, be-
ginning with scaly fish-tailed things through all
the beasts that are and some that are not, climb-
ing up to man. Vivian who keeps the wine-
shop at Kern, Vivian the W^ood Carver, had a
chest in his camp with
a lock of several com-
binations, all of hard
wood, the work of his
knife. But chiefly the
French herder loves to
spend himself on the
curious keys of horn
that stay the bell-leath-
ers in the yoke, for to
the shepherd born there is no more tunable,
sweet sound than the varied peal of his bells
"each under each," as the flock strays in the
tall chaparral. Now and then in a large flock,
for distinctness, clangs the flat-toned American
I04 THE FLOCK
bell, but the best come from Gap in the Hau-
tain Alps, and come steerage in the herder's
pack, though you can buy the voiceless shell
of the bell from Louis Olcese at Kern. The
metal is thin and shines like the gold of Ma-
zourka, and though it is dimmed by use like
old bronze, though it colors in time as the skin
of Indians, and the edge of it wears sharp as
a knife-blade where it rubs along the sand, the
tone of it is deep and sweet. The clapper of a
French bell is a hard tip of ram's horn, or the
ankle bone of a burro, hung on a soft buckskin
thong, a fashion old as Araby. Shepherds from
the Rhone love to stay the bells on great oak
bows as broad as a man's hand, flaring at the
ends; and where the bell-leathers pass through
they are held by curious keys of horn. Some
I have from Vivian Wright of the hard tips of
bighorn, softened and shaped with infinite long
care, matched perfectly for curve and color.
There is a sort of fascination in the naive and
unrelated whittlings and plaitings that proceed
from men who have a musing way of life, as if
when the mind is a little from itself some fig-
ment of the Original Impulse begins to fumble
THE OPEN RANGE
105
through the teachable strong fingers toward
creation. Such hints do glimmer on the sense
when with his knife the herder beguiles the
still noons of summer meadows.
It was there, too, I first heard the fiute of
the Dauphinoisa.
I had come up an hour of stiff climbing on
a glacier slip, by the long shin-
ing granite bosses, treading
the narrow footholds of the
saxifrage, by the great plats of
winy, red penstemon, odorous
and hot, hugging perilously
around grey, sloping, stony
fronts, scarred purple by the
shallow-creviced epilobium ; by
white-belled beds of cassiope,
where a spring issued whisper-
ingly on the stones; by glassy
hollows of snow-water, with cool vagrant airs
blowing blithely on the heather; then warm,
weathered surfaces of stone with flocks of white
columbine adrift about their cleavages ; and
above all the springy, prostrate trunks of the
white-barked pine, depressed on the polished
io6 THE FLOCK
frontage of the hill. Here I heard at intervals
the flute, sweet single notes as if the lucid air
had dripped in sound. Awhile I heard it, and
between, the slumberous roll of bells and the
whistling whisper of the pines, the long note
of the pines like falling water and water falling
like the windy tones of pines; then the warble
of the flute out of the flock-murmur as I came
over the back of the slip where it hollowed to
let in a little meadow fresh and flowered.
The herder sat with his back to a boulder
and gave forth with his breath small notes of
sweet completeness, threading the shape of a
tune as the drip of snow-water threads among
the stones, and the tune an old one such as
suits very well with a comfortable mind and a
rosy meadow. The flute was a reed, a common
reed out of Inyo, from the muddy water where
it sprawls between the marshes, and the herder
had shaped it with his knife ; but it could say
as well as another that though grieving was no
doubt wholesome when grief was seasonable,
since the hour was set for gladness it was well
to be glad most completely.
VII
m^:.^
THE FLOCK.
CHAPTER VII
THE FLOCK
The earliest important achievement of ovine
intelligence is to know whether its own notion
or another's is most worth while, and if the
other's, which one. Individual sheep have cer-
tain qualities, instincts, competencies, but in
the man-herded flocks these are superseded
by something which I shall call the l^ock-mind,
though I cannot say very well what it is, ex-
cept that it is less than the sum of all their in-
telligences. This is why there have never been
no THE FLOCK
any notable changes in the management of
flocks since the first herder girt himself with
a wallet of sheepskin and went out of his cave
dwelling to the pastures.
Understand that a flock is not the same
thing as a number of sheep. On the stark
wild headlands of the White Mountains, as
many as thirty Bighorn are known to run in
loose, fluctuating hordes ; in fenced pastures,
two to three hundred; close -herded on the
range, two to three thousand ; but however
artificially augmented, the flock is always a
conscious adjustment. As it is made up in the
beginning of the season, the band is chiefly of
one sort, wethers or ewes or weanling lambs
(for the rams do not run with the flock except
for a brief season in August) ; with a few flock-
wise ones, trained goats, the cabestres of the
Mexican herders, trusted bell-wethers or ex-
perienced old ewes mixed and intermeddled by
the herder and the dogs, becoming invariably
and finally coordinate. There are always
Leaders, Middlers, and Tailers, each insisting on
its own place in the order of going. Should the
flock be rounded up suddenly in alarm it mills
THE FLOCK in
within itself until these have come to their
own places.
If you would know something of the temper
and politics of the shepherd you meet, inquire
of him for the names of his leaders. They
should be named for his sweethearts, for the
little towns of France, for the generals of the
great Napoleon, for the presidents of Repub-
lics, — though for that matter they are all ar-
dent republicans, — for the popular heroes of
the hour. Good shepherds take the greatest
pains with their leaders, not passing them with
the first flock to slaughter, but saving them to
make wise the next.
There is much debate between herders as to
the advantage of goats over sheep as leaders.
In any case there are always a few goats in a
flock, and most American owners prefer them ;
but the Frenchmen choose bell-wethers. Goats
lead naturally by reason of a quicker instinct,
forage more freely, and can find water on their
own account. But wethers, if trained with care,
learn what goats abhor, to take broken ground
sedately, to walk through the water rather than
set the whole flock leaping and scrambling ;
112 THE FLOCK
but never to give voice to alarm as goats will,
and call the herder. Wethers are more bidable
once they are broken to it, but a goat is the
better for a good beating. Echenique has told
me that the more a goat complains under his
cudgelings the surer he is of the brute's need of
discipline. Goats afford another service in fur-
nishing milk for the shepherd, and, their udders
being most public, will suckle a sick lamb, a
pup, or a young burro at need.
It appears that leaders understand their
office, and goats particularly exhibit a jealousy
of their rights to be first over the stepping-
stones or to walk the teetering log-bridges at
the roaring creeks. By this facile reference of
the initiative to the wisest one, the shepherd
is served most. The dogs learn to which of the
flock to communicate orders, at which heels a
bark or a bite soonest sets the flock in motion.
But the flock-mind obsesses equally the best
trained, flashes as instantly from the Meanest
of the Flock.
Suppose the sheep to scatter widely on a
heather-planted headland, the leader feeding-
far to windward. Comes a cougar sneaking up
THE FLOCK 113
the trail between the rooted boulders toward
the Meanest of the Flock. The smell of him,
the play of light on his sleek flanks startles the
unslumbering fear in the Meanest; it runs
widening in the liock-mind, exploding instantly
in the impulse of flight.
Danger ! flashes the flock-mind, and in dan-
ger the indispensable thing is to run, not to
wait until the leader sniffs the tainted wind
and signals it ; not for each and singly to put
the occasion to the proof ; but to run — of this
the flock-mind apprises — and to keep on run-
ning until the impulse dies faintly as water-
rings on the surface of a mantling pond. In
the wild pastures flight is the only succor,
and since to cry out is to interfere with that
business and draw on the calamity, a flock in
extremity never cries out.
Consider, then, the inadequacy of the flock-
mind. A hand-fed leader may learn to call the
herder vociferously, a cosset lamb in trouble
come blatting to his heels, but -the flock has
no voice other than the deep-mouthed peal-
ino-s hungr about the leader's neck. In all that
darkling lapse of time since herders began to
114 THE FLOCK
sleep by the sheep with their weapons, afford-
ing a protection that the flock-mind never
learns to invite, they have found no better
trick than to be still and run foolishly. For
the flock-mind moves only in the direction
of the Original Intention. When at shearings
or markings they run the yearlings through a
gate for counting, the rate of going accelerates
until the sheep pass too rapidly for number-
ing. Then the shepherd thrusts his staff across
the opening, forcing the next sheep to jump,
and the next, and the next, until. Jump ! says
the flock-mind. Then he withdraws the staff,
and the sheep go on jumping until the impulse
dies as the dying peal of the bells.
By very little the herder may turn the flock-
mind to his advantage, but chiefly it works
against him. Suppose on the open range the
impulse to forward movement overtakes them,
set in motion by some eager leaders that re-
member enough of what lies ahead to make
them oblivious to what they pass. They press
ahead. The flock draws on. The momentum
of travel grows. The bells clang soft and hur-
riedly ; the sheep forget to feed ; they neglect
THE FLOCK 115
the tender pastures ; they will not stay to drink.
Under an unwise or indolent herder the sheep
soins: on an accustomed trail will over-travel
and under-feed, until in the midst of good pas-
ture they starve upon their feet. So it is on the
Long Trail you so often see the herder walking
with his dogs ahead of his sheep to hold them
back to feed. But if it should be new ground
he must go after and press them skillfully, for
the flock-mind balks chiefly at the unknown.
If a Hock could be stopped as suddenly as
it is set in motion, Sanger would never have
lost to a single bear the five hundred sheep he
told me of. They were bedded on a mesa
breaking off in a precipice two hundred feet
above the valley, and the bear came up behind
them in the moonless watch of night. A\"ith
no sound but the scurry of feet and the star-
tled clamor of the bells, the flock broke straight
ahead. The brute instinct had warned ihem
asleep but it could not save them awake. All
that the flock-mind could do was to stir them
instantly to running, and they fled straight away
over the headland, piling up, five hundred of
them, in the gulch below.
ii6 THE FLOCK
In sudden attacks from several quarters, or
inexplicable man-thwarting of their instincts,
the flock-mind teaches them to turn a solid
front, revolving about in the smallest compass
with the lambs in the midst, narrowing and in-
drawing until they perish by suffocation. So
they did in the intricate defiles of Red Rock,
where Carrier lost two hundred and fifty in
'74, and at Poison Springs, as Narcisse Duplin
told me, where he had to choose between leav-
ing them to the deadly waters, or, prevented
from the spring, made witless by thirst, to mill
about until they piled up and killed threescore
in their midst. By no urgency of the dogs
could they be moved forward or scattered until
night fell with coolness and returning sanity.
Nor does the imperfect gregariousness of man
always save us from ill-considered rushes or
strano^ulous in-turninQ[s of the social mass.
Notwithstanding there are those who would
have us to be flock-minded.
It is probable that the obsession of this
over-sense originates in the extraordinary
quickness with which the sheep makes the
superior intelligence of the leader serve his
THE FLOCK ii7
own end. A very little running in the open
range proves that one in e\ery group of sheep
has sharper vision, quicker hearing, keener
scent; henceforth it is the business of the dull
sheep to watch that favored one. No slightest
sniff or stamp escapes him ; the order for flight
finds him with muscles tense for runninor.
The worth of a leader in close-herded fiocks
is his ability to catch readily the will of the
herder. Times I have seen the sheep feeding
far from the man, not knowing their appointed
bedding-place. The dogs lag at the herder's
heels. Now as the sun is going down the man
thrusts out his arm with a gesture that conveys
to the dogs his wish that they turn the flock
toward a certain open scarp. The dogs trot
out leisurely, circling widely to bring up the
farthest stragglers, but before they round upon
it the flock turns. It moves toward the ap-
pointed quarter and pours smoothl}^ up the hill.
It is possible that the leaders may have learned
the language of that right arm, and in times
of quietude obey it without intervention of the
doo^s. It is also conceivable that in the clear
silences of the untroubled wild the flock-mind
ii8 THE FLOCK
takes its impulse directly from the will of the
herder.
- Almost the only sense left untouched by
man-herding is the weather sense. Scenting a
change, the sheep exhibit a tendency to move to
higher ground ; no herder succeeds in making
his flock feed in the eye of the sun. While rain
falls they will not feed nor travel except in
extreme desperation, but if after long falling it
leaves off suddenly, night or day, the flock
begins to crop. Then if the herder hears not
the bells nor wakes himself by that subtle sense
which in the outdoor life has time to grow, he
has his day's work cut out for him in the round-
ing-up. A season of long rains makes short
fleeces.
Summers in the mountains, sheep love to
lie on the cooling banks and lick the snow, pre-
ferring it to any drink ; but if falling snow over-
takes them they are bewildered by it, find no
food for themselves, and refuse to travel while
it lies on the ground. This is the more singu-
lar, for the American wild sheep, the Bighorn,
makes nothing of a twenty foot fall ; in the
I
THE FLOCK 119
blinding swirl of flakes shifts only to let the
drifts pile under him; ruminates most content-
edly when the world is full of a roaring- white
wind. Most beasts in bad weather drift before
a storm. The faster it moves the farther go
the sheep ; so if there arises one of those blowy
days that announce the turn of the two seasons,
blinding thick with small dust, at the end of a
few hours of it the shepherd sees the tails of
his sheep disappearing down the wind. The
tendency of sheep is to seek lower ground when
disturbed by beasts, and under weather stress
to work up. When any of his flock are strayed
or stampeded, the herder knows by the occa-
sion whether to seek them up hill or down.
Seek them he must if he would have them
again, for estrays have no faculty by sense or
scent to work their way back to the herd. Let
them be separated from it but by the roll of the
land, and by accident headed in another direc-
tion, it is for them as if the ilock had never
been. It is to provide against this incompe-
tency that the shepherd makes himself markers,
a black sheep, or one with a crumpled horn or
an unshorn patch on the rump, easily notice-
I20 THE FLOCK
able in the shuffle of dust-colored backs. It
is the custom to have one marker to one hun-
dred sheep, each known by his chosen place
in the flock which he insists upon, so that if
as many as half a dozen stray out of the band
the relative position of the markers is changed ;
or if one of these conspicuous ones be missing
it will not be singly, because of the tendency
of large flocks to form smaller groups about
the best worth following.
I do not know very well what to make of
that trait of lost sheep to seek rock shelter at
the base of cliffs, for it suits with no character-
istic of his wild brethren. But if an estray in his
persistent journey up toward the high places
arrives at the foot of a tall precipice, there he
stays, seeking not to go around it, feeding out
perhaps and returning to it, but if frightened
by prowlers, huddling there to starve. Could
it be the survival, not of a wild instinct, — it is
too foolish to have been that, — but of the cave-
dwelling time when man protected him in his
stone shelters or in pens built against the base
of a cliff, as we see the herder yet for greater
convenience build rude corrals of piled bould-
THE FLOCK 121
ers at the foot of an overlianging or insur-
mountable rocky wall ? It is yet to be shown
how long man halted in the period of stone
dwelling and the sheep with him ; but if it be as-
sented that we have brought some traces of that
life forward with us, might not also the sheep ?
Where the wild strain most persists is in the
bedding habits of the flock. Still they take for
choice, the brow of a rising hill, turning out-
ward toward the largest view ; and nexer have
I seen the flock all lie down at one time. Al-
ways as if by prearrangement some will stand,
and upon their surrendering the watch others
will rise in their places headed to sniff the
tainted wind and scan the rim of the world.
Like a thing palpable one sees the racial obli-
gation pass through the bedded flock ; as the
tired watcher folds his knees under him and
lies down, it passes like a sigh. By some mys-
terious selection it leaves a hundred ruminat-
ing in quietude and troubles the appointed one.
One sees in the shaking of his sides a hint of
struggle against the hereditary and so unnec-
essary instinct, but sighing he gets upon his
feet. By noon or night the tlock instinct never
122 THE FLOCK
sleeps. Waking and falling asleep, waking and
spying on the flock, no chance discovers the
watchers failing, even though they doze upon
their feet; and by nothing so much is the want
of interrelation of the herder and the flock
betrayed, for watching is the trained accom-
plishment of dogs.
The habit of nocturnal feeding is easily
resumed, the sheep growing restless when
the moon is full, and moving out to feed at the
least encouragement. In hot seasons on the
treeless range the herder takes advantage of
it, making the longer siesta of the burning
noon. But if the habit is to be resumed or
broken off, it is best done by moving to new
grounds, the association of locality being most
stubborn to overcome.
Of the native instincts for finding water and
knowing when food is good for them, herded
goats have retained much, but sheep not a
whit. In the open San Joaquin, said a good
shepherd of that country, when the wind blew
off the broad lake, his sheep, being thirsty,
would break and run as much as a mile or two
in that direction ; but it seems that the alkaline
THE FLOCK 123
dust of the desert range must have diminished
the keenness of smell, for Sanger told me how,
on his long drive, when his sheep had come
forty miles without drink and were then so
near a water-hole that the horses scented it
and pricked up their ears, the flock became
unmanageable from thirst and broke back to
the place where they had last drunk. Great
difficulty is experienced in the desert ranges in
getting the flock to water situated obscurely
in steep ravines ; they panting with water need,
but not even aware of its nearness until they
have been fairly thrust into it. Then if one lifts
up a joyous blat the dogs and the herder must
stand well forward to prevent suffocation by
piling up of the flock. You should have heard
Jose Jesus Lopez tell how, when the ten thou-
sand came to water in the desert after a day or
two of dry travel, when the first of the nearing
band had drunk he lifted up the water call;
how it was taken up and carried back across
the shouldering brutes to the nearest band be-
hind, and by them flatly trumpeted to the next,
and so across the mesa, miles and miles in the
still, slant light.
124 THE FLOCK
When Watterson ran his sheep on the plains
he watered them at a pump, and in the course
of the season all the bands that bore the Three
Legs of Man got to know the smell pertaining
to that brand, drinking at the troughs as they
drew in at sundown from the feeding-ground.
But when for a price strange bands in passing
drank there, he could in no wise prevail upon
his own sheep to drink of the water they had
left. The flocks shuffled in and sniffed at the
tainted drink and went and lay down waterless.
The second band drew alongside and made as
if to refresh themselves at the troughs, but
before they had so much as smelled of it : —
Ba-a-a, Ba-a-a-a ! blatted the first flock, and
the newcomers turned toward them and lay
down. Comes another band and the second
takes up the report, not having proved the
event but accepting it at hearsay from the
first.
Ba-a-a-a-d, Ba-a-a-a-d ! blat the watchers, and
when that has happened two or three times
the shepherd gives over trying to make his
sheep accept the leavings of the troughs, what-
ever the price of water, but turns it out upon
THE FLOCK 125
the sand. Sheep will die rather than drink
water which does not please them, and die
drinking water with which they should not be
pleased. Nor can they discriminate in the mat-
ter of poisonous herbs. In the northerly Sier-
ras they perish yearly, cropping the azaleas ;
Julien lost three or four hundred when wild
tobacco {nicoliana attemcatd) sprang up after
a season of tiood water below Coyote Holes ;
and in places about the high mountains there
are certain isolated meadows wherein some
herb unidentified by sheepmen works disaster
to the ignorant or too confiding herder. Such
places come to be known as Poison Meadows,
and grasses ripen in them uncropped year after
year. Yet it would seem there is a rag-tag of
instinct left, for in the desert regions where
sheep have had a taste of Loco-weed [astra-
galus) which affects
them as cocaine, like
the devotees of that
drug, they return to
seek for it and become
dopy and worthless
through its excess ; and a tiock that has suf
126 THE FLOCK
fered from milkweed poisoning learns at last
to be a little aware of it. Old tales of folk-
lore would have us to understand that this
atrophy of a vital sense is within the reach of
history. Is it not told indeed, in Araby, that
the exhilaration of coffee was discovered by a
goatherd from the behavior of his goats when
they had cropped the berries ?
By much the same cry that apprises the flock
of tainted drink they are made aware of stran-
gers in the band. This is chiefly the business
of yearlings, wise old ewes and seasoned weth-
ers not much regarding it. One of the band
discerns a smell not the smell of his flock, and
bells the others to come on and inquire. They
run blatting to his call and form a ring about
the stranger, vociferating disapproval until the
flock-mind wakes and pricks them to butt the
intruder from the herd ; but he persisting and
hanging on the outskirts of the flock, acquaints
them with his smell and becomes finally incor-
porate in the band. Nothing else but the rat-
tlesnake extracts this note of protest from the
flock. Him also they inclose in the iioisy ring
until the rattler wriggles to his hole, or the
THE FLOCK
127
herder comes with his makila and puts an end
to the commotion.
It is well to keep in mind that ordinarily
when the flock cries there is nothing in par-
ticular the matter with it. The continuous
blether of the evening round-up is merely the
note of domesticity, ewes calling to their lambs,
wethers to their companions as they revolve to
their accustomed places, all a little resentful of
the importunity of the dogs. In sickness and
alarm the sheep are distressfully still, only
milkweed poisoning, of all evils, forcing from
them a kind of breathy moan; but this is merely
a symptom of the disorder and not directed
toward the procurement of relief.
It is doubtful if the herder is anything more
to the flock than an incident of the range.
128 THE FLOCK
except as a giver of salt, for the only cry they
make to him is the salt cry. When the natural
craving is at the point of urgency they circle
about his camp or his cabin, leaving off feed-
ing for that business ; and nothing else offer-
ing, they will continue this headlong circling
about a boulder or any object bulking large
in their immediate neighborhood remotely re-
sembling the appurtenances of man, as if they
had learned nothing since they were free to
find licks for themselves, except that salt comes
by bestowal and in conjunction with the vaguely
indeterminate lumps of matter that associate
with man. As if in fifty centuries of man-herd-
ing they had made but one step out of the ter-
rible isolation of brute species, an isolation
impenetrable except by fear to every other
brute, but now admitting the fact without
knowledge, of the God of the Salt. Accus-
tomed to receiving this miracle on open bould-
ers, when the craving is strong upon them
they seek such as these to run about, vocifer-
ating, as if they said. In such a place our God
has been wont to bless us, come now let us
greatly entreat Him. This one quavering bleat,
THE FLOCK 129
unmistakable to the sheepman even at a dis-
tance, is the only new note in the sheep's vocab-
ulary, and the only one which passes with in-
tention from himself to man. As for the call
of distress which a leader raised by hand may
make to his master, it is not new, is not com-
mon to flock usage, and is swamped utterly in
the obsession of the flock-mind.
But when you hear shepherds from the Pyre-
nees speak of the salt call it is no blether of
the sheep they mean, but that long, rolling,
high and raucous Ru-u-u-u-u-ii by which they
summon the flock to the lick. And this is most
curious that no other word than this is recos;-
nized as exclusive to the sheep, as we under-
stand " scat " to be the peculiar shibboleth of
cats, and " bossy " the only proper appellate of
cows. Ordinarily the herder does not wish to
call the sheep, he prefers to send the dogs, but
if he needs must name them he cries Sheep,
sheep ! or motiton, or boregito, as his tongue is,
or apprises them of the distribution of salt by
beating on a pan. Only the Basco, and such
French as have learned it from him, troubles
his throat with this searching, mutilated cry. If
I30 THE FLOCK
it should be in crossing the Reserve when the
rangers hurry him, or on the range when in
the midst of security, suddenly he discovers the
deadly milkweed growing all abroad, or if above
the timber-line one of the quick, downpouring
storms begins to shape in the pure aerial
glooms, at once you see the herder striding at
the head of his flock drawing them on with the
uplifted, R71-21-U-UUUUU ! and all the sheep
running to it as it were the Pied Piper come
again.
Suppose it were true what we have read, that
there w^as once an Atlantis stationed toward
the west, continuing the empurpled Pyrenees.
Suppose the first of these Pyrenean folk were,
as it is written, just Atlantean shepherds stray-
ing farthest from that happy island, when the
seas engulfed it ; suppose they should have car-
ried forward with the inbred shepherd habit
some roots of speech, likeliest to have been
such as belonged to shepherding — well then,
when above the range of trees, when the wild
scarps lift rosily through the ineffably pure blue
of the twilight earth, suffused with splendor of
the alpen glow, when the flock crops the tufted
THE FLOCK 131
grass scattering widely on the steep, should you
see these little men of long arms leaping among
the rocks and all the flock lift up their heads
to hear the \A\A2i\Aw<^ Ric-iMibru-ii-miu ! would
not all these things leap together in your mind
and seem to mean something? Just suppose!
VIII
THE GO-BETWEENS— A
CHAPTER TO BE OMITTED BV
THE READER WHO HAS NOT
LOVED A DOG.
CHAPTER VIII
THE GO-BETWEENS
What one wishes to know is just what the
dog means to the flock. It might be something
of what the dark means to man, the mould of
fear, the racial memory of the shape in which
Terror first beset them. It is as easy to see
what the flock means to the dog as to under-
stand what it meant before man went about this
business of perverting the Original Intention.
If it is a trick man has played upon the dog to
constitute him the guardian of his natural
prey, he has also been played upon, for even
136 THE FLOCK
as men proved their God on the persons of
the brethren and exterminated tribes to show
how great He was, latterly they afflict them-
selves to offer up the heathen scathless and
comforted.
Now that in the room of the Primal Impulse,
the herder is the god of the sheep dog, the
flock is become an oblation. The ministrant
waits with pricked ears and an expectant eye
the motion of his deity; he invites orders by
eagerness ; he worries the sheep by the zeal-
ousness of care; that not one may escape he
threads ev^ery wandering scent and trails it
back to the flock. In short, when in the best
temper for his work he frequently becomes use-
less from excess of use. But in the half a hun-
dred centuries that have gone to perverting his
native instincts, the sheep have hardly come
so far. They no longer flee the herd dog, but
neither do they run to him. When he rounds
them they turn ; when he speaks they tremble ;
when he snaps they leave off feeding ; but when
they hear his cousin-german, the coyote, pad-
ding about them in the dark, they trust only to
fleeing. For this is the apotheosis of the dog,
THE GO-l^KTWEKXS 137
that he fights his own kind for the flock, but
the liock does not know it.
It is notable that the best sheep dogs are
most like wolves in habit, the erect triangular
ears, the long thin muzzle, the sag of the bushy
tail, the thick mane-like hackles; as if it were
on the particular aptness for knowing the ways
of flocking beasts developed by successful
wolves that the effective collie is moulded. No
particular breed of dogs is favored by the
herders hereabout, though Scotch strains pre-
dominate. Amonor the Frenchmen a small
short-tailed, black-and-white type is seen often-
est, a pinto with white about the eyes. One
may pay as much as five dollars or five hundred
for a six months' pup, but mostly the herders
breed their own stock and exchansre amons^
themselves. Ordinarily the dog goes with the
fiock, is the property of the ov>:ier, for sheep
learn to know their own guardian and suffer
an accession of timidity if a stranger is set over
them.
The herder who brings up a dog by hand
loves it surpassingly. There was one of my
acquaintance had so great an attachment for
138 THE FLOCK
a bitch called Jehane that he worked long for
a hard master and yearly tendered him the full
of his wage if only he might have Jehane and
depart with her to a better employment. He
was not single in his belief that Jehane re-
garded him with a like affection, for the faith a
herder arrows to have in the do"'s understand-
ing is only exceeded by the miracle of com-
munication. To see three or four shepherds
met in a district of good pastures, leaning on
their staves, each with a dog at his knees quick
and attentive to the talk, is to go a long way
toward conviction.
Many years ago, but not so long that he can
recall it without sorrow, Giraud lost a dog on
Kern River. There had come one of the sud-
den storms of that district, white blasts of hail
and a nipping wind ; it was important to get
the sheep speedily to lower ground. The dog
was ailins: and fell behind somewhere in the
white swarm of the snow. When it lay soft and
quiet over all that region and the flock was
bedded far below it in the canon, Giraud re-
turned to the upper river, seeking and calling;
twenty days he quested bootless about the
THE GO-BETWEENS
139
meadows and among the cold camps. More he
could not have done for a brother, for Pierre
Giraud was not then the owner of good acres
and well-fleeced Merinos that he is now, and
twenty days of a shepherd's time is more than
the price of a dog. " And still," Pierre finishes
his story simply, " whenever I go by that coun-
try of Kern River I think of my dog."
Curiously, the obligation of his work — who
shall say it is not that higher form of habit out
of which the sense of duty shapes itself .f* — is
always stronger in the dog than the love of the
herder. Lacking a direct command, in any
severance of their interests, the collie stays by
the sheep. In that same country of young roar-
ing rivers a shepherd died suddenly in his
camp and was not found for two days. The
I40 THE FLOCK
flock was gone on from the meadow where he
lay, straying toward high places as shepherd-
less sheep will, and the dogs with them. They
had returned to lick the dead face of the herder,
no doubt they had mourned above him in their
fashion in the dusk of pines, but though they
could win no authority from him they stayed
by the flock. So they did when the two herds-
men of Barret's were frozen on their feet
while still faithfully rounding the sheep; they
dropped stilly in their places and were over-
blown by the snow. The dogs had scraped the
drifts from their bodies, and the sheep had
trampled mindlessly on the straightened forms,
but at the end of the third day when succor
found them, the dogs had come a flock-journey
from that place and had turned the sheep
toward home. This is as long as can be proved
that the sense of responsibility to the flock
stays with the dog when he feels himself aban-
doned by his over-lord.
A dog might remain indefinitely with the
sheep because he has the habit of association,
but the service of herding is rendered only at
the lidding of the gods. The superintendent
THE GO-BETWEENS 141
of Tejon told me of a dog that could be trusted
to take a bunch of muttons that had been cut
out for use at the ranch house, and from any
point on the range, drive them a whole day's
journey at his order, and bring them safely to
the home corral. Sen or Lopez, I think, re-
lated of another that it was sent out to hunt
estrays, and not returning, was hunted for and
found warding a ewe and twin lambs, licking
his wounds and sniffing, not without the ap-
pearance of satisfaction, at a newly killed coy-
ote. The dog must have found the ewe in
travail, for the lambs were but a few hours old,
and been made aware of it by what absolute
and elemental means who shall say, and stood
guarding the event through the night.
At Los Alisos there was a bitch of such ex-
cellent temper that she was thought of more
value for raising pups than herding ; she was,
therefore, when her litter came, taken from the
flock and given quarters at the ranch house.
But in the morning Flora went out to the sheep.
She sought them in the pastures where they
had been, and kept the accustomed round, re-
turning wearied to her young at noon; she fol-
142 THE FLOCK
lowed after them at evening and covered with
panting sides the distance they had put be-
tween them and her Htter. At the end of the
second day when she came to her bed, half
dead with running, she was tied, but gnawed
the rope, and in twenty-four hours was out on
the cold trail of the flock. One of the vaqueros
found her twenty miles from home, working
faint and frenzied over its vanishing scent. It
was only after this fruitless sally that she was
reconciled to her new estate.
Now consider that we have very many high
and brave phrases for such performances when
they pertain to two-footed beings who grow
hair on their heads only, and are disallowed
the use of them for the four-foots that have
hair all over them. Duty, chivalry, sacrifice,
these are words sacred to the man things. But
how shall one lovino- definiteness consis^n to
the loose limbo of instinct all the qualities
engendered in the intelligence of the dog by
the mind of man.^* For it is incontrovertible
that a good sheep dog is made.
The propensity to herd is fixed in the breed.
Some unaccountably in any litter will have
THE GO-BETWEENS 143
missed the possibility of being good at it, and
a collie that is not good for a herd dog is good
for nothing. The only thing to do with the
born incompetent is to shoot it or give it to
the children ; in the bringing up of a family
almost any dog is better than no dog at all.
What good breeding means in a young collie
is not that he is fit to herd sheep, but that he
is fit to be trained to it. Aptitude he may be
born with, but can in no wise dispense with
the hand of the herder over him. What we
need is a new vocabulary for the larger estate
which a dog takes on when he is tamed by a
man.
Training here is not carried to so fine a
pitch as abroad, most owners not desiring too
dependable a dog. The herder is the more
likely to leave the flock too much to his care,
and whatever a sheep dog may learn, it is never
to discriminate in the matter of pasture. An
excellent collie makes an indolent herder.
Every man who follows after sheep will tell
you how he thinks he trains his pups, and of
all the means variously expounded there are
two that are constant. It is important that the
144 THE FLOCK
dog acquire early the habit of association, and
to this purpose herders will often carry a pup
in the cayaca and suckle it to a goat. Most
important is it that he shall learn to return of
his own motion to the master for deserved
chastisement. To accomplish this the dog is
tied with suf^cient ropeway and punished until
he discovers that the ease of his distress is to
come straightly to the hand that afflicts him.
He is to be tied long to allow him room for
volition and tied securely that he may not
once get clean away from the trainer's hand.
Once a dog, through fear or the sense of anger
incurred, escapes his master for a space of
hours, there is not much to be done by way of
retrievement. It is as if the impalpable bridge
between his mind and the mind of man, being
broken by the act, is never to be built again.
For this in fine is what constitutes a good herd
dog, to be wholly open to the suggestion of
the man-mind, and carry its will to the flock.
His is the service of the Go-Between. Not
that he knows or cares what becomes of the
flock, but merely what the herder intends
toward it.
THE GO-lii:T\Vl{I-:NS 145
I have said the shepherd will tell you how he
thinks he trains his collies, for watching them
I srow certain that more sroes forward than
the herder is rightly aware. Working commu-
nication between them is largely by signs, since
the dog manoeuvres at the distance of a flock-
length, taking orders from the herder's arm.
Every movement of the flock can be so effected,
but if the herder would have barking, he must
say to him, Speak, and he speaks. The teach-
ing methods seem not to be contrived by any
rule, as if everv man fumblino; at the dog's
understanding had hit upon a device which
seemed to accomplish his end, and might or
mio'ht not serve the next adventure. You would
not suppose in any other case that by waving
arms, buffets, pettings, and retrievings, and by
no other means, so much could be communi-
cable in violation to racial instincts, with no
root in experience and only a possible one in
the generational memory ; nor do I for one sup-
pose it. Moreover it sticks in my mind that I
have never seen one herd dog instruct another
even by the implication of behaving in such a
manner as to invite imitation.
146 THE FLOCK
Bobcats I have seen teaching their kittens
to seek prey, young eagles coached at flying,
coyote cubs remanded to the trail with a snarl
when wishful to leave it; but never the sheep
dog teaching her young to round and guard.
In this all the shepherds of the Long Trail
bear me out. Assuredly the least intelligent
dog learns something by imitation ; to be con-
vinced of it one has only to note the assumed
postures, the look as of a very deaf person
who wishes to have you believe that he has
heard, the self-2:ratulation when some tentative
motion proves acceptable, the tolerable assump-
tion when it fails that the sally has been under-
taken merely by way of entertainment. But
with it all no intention of being imitated.
Since all these things are so, how then can
a shepherd say to the Go- Between what the
dog cannot say to another dog? It is not alto-
gether that they lack speech, for, as I say, the
work of herding goes on by signs, and I have
come to an excellent understanding with some
collies that know only Basque and a patois
that is not the P'"rench of the books. Fellow-
ship is helped by conversation, though it is not
THE GO-BETWEENS 147
indispensable, and if the herder has an arm to
wave has not the dog a tail to wag ? If he reads
the face of his master, and who that has been
loved by a dog but believes him amenable to a
smile or a frown, may he not so learn the coun-
tenance of his blood brother? Notwithstand-
ing, the desire of the shepherd which the dog
bears to the sheep remains with respect to other
dogs, like the personal revelation of a deity,
locked, incommunicable. He arises to the man
virtues so long as the man's command, or the
echo of it, lies in his consciousness. But we,
when we have arrived at the pitch of conserv-
ing what was once our study to destroy, con-
ceive that we have done it of ourselves.
What a herd dog has first to learn is to
know every one of two to three hundred sheep,
and to know them both by sight and smell.
This he does thorouo'hlv. When Watterson
was running sheep on the plains he had a
young collie not yet put to the herd but kept
about the pumping plant. As the sheep came
in by hundreds to the troughs, the dog grew
so to know them that when they had picked
148 THE FLOCK
up an estray from another band he discovered it
from afar off, and darting as a hornet, nipping
and yelping, parted it out from the band. At
that time no mere man would have pretended
without the aid of the brand to recognize any
of the thousands that bore it.
How long recollection stays by the dog is
not certain, but at least a twelvemonth, as was
proved to Filon Gerard after he had lost a
third of his band when the Santa Anna came
roaring up by Lone Pine with a cloud of saf-
fron-colored dust on its wings. After shearing
of next year, passing close to another band,
Filon's dogs set themselves unbidden to routing
out of it, and rounding with their own, nearly
twenty head which the herder, being an honest
man, freely admitted he had picked up on the
mesa following after Filon the spring before.
Quick to know the willful and unbidable
members of a flock, the wise collie is not spar-
ins: of bites, and followino- after a stubborn
estray will often throw it, and stand guard until
help arrives, or the sheep shows a better mind.
But the herder who has a dog trained at the
difficult work of herding range sheep through
THE GO-BETWEENS
149
the chutes and runwa3\s into boats and cars for
transportation is the fortunate fellow.
There was Pete's dog, Bourdaloue, that, at
the Stockton landing, with no assistance, put
eight hundred wild sheep from the highlands
on the boat in eight minutes, by running along
the backs of the flock until he had picked out
the stubborn or stupid leaders that caused the
sheep to jam in the runway, and by sharp bites
set them forward, himself treading the backs
of the racing flock, like the premier equestri-
enne of the circus, which all the men of the
shipping cheered to see.
In shaping his work to the land he moves in,
an old wolf-habit
of the sheep dog
comes into play.
From knowing how
to leap up in mid-
run to keep sight
of small quarry, the
collie has learned to
mount on stumps
and boulders to ob-
serve the flock. So he does in the sao;e and
ISO THE FLOCK
chamisal, and of greater necessity years ago in
the coast ranges where the mustard engulfed
the flock until their whereabouts could be
known only by the swaying of its bloom.
Julien, the good shepherd of Lone Pine, had
a little dog, much loved, that would come and
bark to be taken up on his master's shoulder
that he might better judge how his work lay.
The propensity of sheep to fall over one
another into a pit whenever occasion offers
is as well noted by the dog as the owner; so
that there was once a collie of Hittell's of such
flock-wisdom that at a point in a certain drive
where an accident had occurred by the sheep
being gulched, he never failed afterward to
2fo forward and sfuard the bank until the flock
o o
had gone by.
Footsoreness is the worst evil of the Long
Trail ; cactus thorn, foxtail, and sharp, hot
granite sands induce so great distress that to
remedy it the shepherd makes moccasins of deer-
skin for his dogs. Once having experience of
these comforts the collie returns to the herder s
knee and lifts up his paws as a gentle invita-
tion to have them on when the trail begins to
THE GO-BETWEENS 151
wear. On his long drive Sanger had slung a
rawhide under the wagon to carry brushwood
for the fire, but the dogs soon discovered in it
a material easement of their fatigues, and
would lie in it while the team went forward,
each collie rousting out his confrere and insist-
ing on his turn.
When one falls in with a sheep camp it is
always well to inquire concerning the dogs; the
herder who will not talk of anything else will
talk of these. You bend back the springy
sage to sit upon, the shepherd sits on a brown
boulder with his staff between his knees, the
dogs at his feet, ears pointed with attention.
He unfolds his cigarette papers and fumbles
for the sack.
" Eh, my tobacco ? I have left it at the camp ;
go, Pinto, and fetch it."
Away races the collie, pleased as a patted
schoolboy, and comes back with the tobacco
between his jaws.
" I must tell you a story of that misbegotten
devil of a he goat, Noe," says the shepherd,
rolling a cigarette; " you, go and fetch Noe that
Madame-who-writes-the-book may see."
152 THE FLOCK
In a jiffy the dog has nipped Noe by the
ankles and cut him out of the band, but you
will have to ask again before you get your story,
for it is not Noe the shepherd has in mind. In
reality he is bursting with pride of his dog, and
thinks only to exhibit him.
It is the expansiveness of affection that ele-
vates the customary performance to an achieve-
ment. As for the other man's dog, why should
it not do well? unless his master being a dull
fellow has spent his pains to no end. But in
the Pinto there with the listening ears and
muzzle delicately pointed and inquiring, with
the eye confident and restrained as expressing
the suspension of communication rather than
its incompleteness, you perceive at once a tan-
gible and exceptionable distinction.
IX
THE STRIFE OF THE
HERDSMEN — now the
GREAT GAME IS PLAYED IX
THE FREE PASTURES, AND
THE cattlemen's WAR.
CHAPTER IX
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN
The mesa was blue with the Httle blue larkspur
the Indians love; a larkspur sky began some-
where infinitely beyond the Sierra wall and
stretched far and faintly over Shoshone Land.
The ring of the horizon was as blue as the
smoke of the deputy sheriff's cigar as he lay in
the shade of a boulder and guessed almost by
the manner of the dust how many and what
brands stirred up the visible warning of their
approach. The spring passage of the flocks
had begun, and we were out after the tax.
156
THE FLOCK
r
Two banners of dust went up in the gaps of
the Alabamas and one below the point, two at
Symmes Creek, one crowded up under Wil-
Hamson, one by the new Hne of willows below
Pinon, that by the time the shadows of the
mountains had shrunk into their crevices,
proved by the sound of the bells to be the flock
of Narcisse Duplin. The bell of Narcisse's
best leader, Le Petit Corporal, was notable ;
large as a goat-skin wine-bottle, narrowing at
the mouth, and so long that it scraped the sand
when the Corporal browsed on the bitter brush
and lay quite along the ground when he cropped
the grass. The sound of it struck deeply under
all the notes of the day, and carried as far as
the noise of the \vater pouring into the pot-hole
below Kearsarge Mill.
The deputy sheriff had finished his cigar,
and begun telling me about Manuel de Borba
after he had killed Mariana in the open below
Olancha. Naylor and Robinson bought the
flock of him in good faith, though suspicion
began to grow in them as they came north
with it toward the place where Mariana lived ;
then it spread in Lone Pine until it became
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN 157
a rumor and finally a conviction. Then Relies
Carrasco took up the back trail and found, at
the end of it, Mariana lying out in the sage,
full of knife wounds, and the wounds were in
his back. When the deputy had proceeded as
far as the search for de Borba, Narcisse came
up with us.
Where we sat the wash of Pine Creek was
shallow, and below lav the rude, totterins^ brid2:e
of sticks and stones, such as sheepmen build
everywhere in the Sierras for getting sheep
across troublesome streams. Here in the course
of the day came all the flocks we sighted, with
others drifting into view in the south, and at
twilight tide a dozen of their fires blossomed
under Kearsarge in the dusk. The sheriff
counted the sheep as they went singly over the
bridge, with his eyes half shut against the sun
and his finger wagging ; as for me, I went up
and down among the larkspur flowers, among
the lupines and the shining bubbles of mariposa
floating along the tops of the scrub, and renewed
acquaintance.
"Tell me," I said to Narcisse, who because of
the tawny red of his hair, the fiery red of his
158 THE FLOCK
face, the russet red of his beard, and the red
spark of his eye, was called Narcisse the Red,
"tell me what is the worst of shepherding?"
" The worst, madame, is the feed, because
there is not enough of it."
" And what, in your thinking, is the best?"
" The feed, madame, for there is not enough
of it."
" But how could that be, both best and
worst ? "
Narcisse laughed full and throatily, throw-
ing up his chin from the burned red chest all
open to the sun. It was that laugh of Nar-
cisse's that betrayed him the night he carried
away Suzon Moynier from her father's house.
" It is the worst," said he, ''because it is a
srreat distress to see the flock iio huno-rv, also
it is a loss to the owner. It is the best, be-
cause every man must set his wits against
every other. When he comes out of the hills
with a fat flock and good fieeces it is that he
has proved himself the better man. He knows
the country better and has the greater skill to
keep other men from liis pastures. How else
but by contriving shall a man get the feed
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN 159
from the free pastures when it goes every year
to the best contriver? You think you would
not do it ? Suppose now you have come with
a lean flock to good ground sufficient for yours
onl}^ and before the sheep have had a fill of it,
comes another blatting band working against
the wind. You walk to and fro behind your
flock, you take out a newspaper to read, you
unfold it. Suddenly the wind takes it from
your hand, carries it rustling white and fear-
some in the faces of the approaching flock.
Ah, bah ! Who would have supposed they
would stampede for so slight a thing ? And by
the time their herder has rounded them up,
your sheep will have all the feed."
When Narcisse Duplin tells me this the
eyes of all the herders twinkle; glints of amuse-
ment run from one to another like white hints
of motion in the water below the birches.
" It is so," said Octavieu, the blue-eyed
Basque, " the feed is his who can keep it.
Madame goes much about the Sierras, have
you not seen the false monuments ? "
" And been misled by them."
"They were not meant for such as madame.
i6o
THE FLOCK
but one shepherd when he finds a good meadow
makes a false trail leading around and away
from it, and another shepherd coming is de-
ceived thereby, and the meadow is kept secret
for the finder."
When Octavieu tells me this I recall a story
I have heard of Little Pete, how when he had
turned his flocks into an upper meadow he met
a herder bound to that same feeding-ground,
and by a shorter route ; but the day saved him.
No matter how much they neglect the calen-
dar, French shepherds always know when it is
the fourteenth of July, as if they had a sense
for divining it much as gophers know when
taboosc is good to eat. Pete dug up a bottle
from his cayaques.
" A lions, man vicux, cest le quatorze yitilletl'
cried the strate-
gist ; " come, a
toast ; Le Qua-
toj^zc Juillet ! "
" Le Qua-
toi^zc Jtcillet I "
The red liquor gurgled in their throats.
Never yet was a Frenchman proof against
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN i6i
patriotism and wine and good company. The
arrested flock shuffled and sighed while Pete
and their master through the rosy glow of wine
saw the Bastile come down and the Tricolor
go up. Incidentally they saw also the bottom
of the bottle, and by that time Pete's flock was
in full possession of the meadow. Pete laughs
at this story and denies it, but so light-heart-
edly that I am sure that if it never happened
it was because he happened never to think
of it.
" However, I will tell you a true story," said
he. " I was once in a country where there was
a meadow with springs and much good feed in
that neighborhood, but unwatered, so that if
a man had not the use of the meadow he could
get no good of it. The place where the spring
was, being patented land, belonged to a man
whose name does not come into the story. I
write to that man and make him a price for the
water and the feed, but the answer is not come.
Still I think sure to have it, and leave word
that the letter is to be sent to me at the camp,
and move my flock every day toward the
meadow. Also I observe another sheepman
i62 THE FLOCK
feeding about my trail, and I wish greatly for
that letter, for I think he makes the eyes at
that pasture with springs.
"All this would be no matter if I could trust
my herder, but I have seen him sit by the
other man's fire, and I know that he has what
you call the grudge against me. For what ?
How should I know ? Maybe there is not
garlic enough in camp, maybe I keep the wine
too close ; and it is written in the foreheads of
some men that they should be false to their
employers. When it is the better part of a
week gone I am sure that my herder has told
the other man that I have not yet rented the
springs, so I resolve at night in my blanket
what I shall do. That day I send out my man
with his part of the sheep very far, then I write
me a letter, to me, Pierre Giraud, and put it in
the camp. It is stamped, and altogether such
as if it had come from the Post Office. Then
I ride about my business for the day, and at
night when I come late to the camp there is
the herder who sings out to me and says : —
"' Here is your letter come.' "
Pete chuckles inwardly with true artistic
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN 163
appreciation of finesse. " Eh, if you do this
sort of thing it should be done thoroughly.
I see the herder watch me with the tail of his
eye w^hile I make to read the letter.
" ' Is it rifjht about the meadow? ' savs he.
" ' You can see,' say I, and I hand him the
paper, which he cannot read, but he will not
confess to that. That niiiht he o'oes to the
other man's fire, and the next day I see that
that one drops off from my trail, and I know
he has had word of my letter. Then I move my
sheep up to the meadow of springs."
"And the real letter, when it came — if it
canie } "
"That you should ask me!" cries Pete, and
I am not sure if I am the more convinced by
the reproachful waggings of his head or the
deep, delighted twinkle of his eye.
In the flanking ranges east from the Sierras
are few and far between water-holes the posses-
sion of which dominates great acreage of tol-
erable feed. For the control of them the herders
strive together as the servants of Abraham and
Abimelech for the wells which Abrahan^ digged.
1 64 THE FLOCK
There was a herder once out of Dauphiny who
went toward Panamint and found a spring of
sweet water in a secret place. The pasture
of that country was bunch grass and mesquite,
and the water welled up from under the lava
rock and went about the meadow to water it.
When he had fed there for a fortnight and
there was still grazing in the neighborhood for
a month more, he looked out across the mes-
quite dunes and saw the dust of a flock. Then
he considered and took a pail and went a long
way out to meet it. Where the trail of the
sheep turned into the place of the secret
spring, but more than a mile from it, there
was also a pool of seepage water, but muddied
and trampled by the sheep. When he had
come to this place the shepherd scooped out
a hollow and made believe to dip up the water
where it ran defiled into the hole he had digged,
while the stranger came on with his flock.
It seems that at shearino^s and lambino^ where
they met they were very good friends, but on
the range —
" How goes the feed, inon viatx?''
" Excellently well, inon amir
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN 165
" And the water? "
" Ah, vou can see." The herder cast a con-
templative eye at the turgid liquid in the pail ;
assuredly no sheep would drink of it. Also he
looked at the feed and sighed, for it was good
feed, but one really must have water.
" I think of moving to-da}''," said the first
shepherd, but the second drew off his flock at
once and returned by another trail.
The desire to be beforehand with the feed
becomes an obsession ; herders of the same
owner will crowd each other off the range.
The Manxman told me that once he had a
head shepherd who played the flocks in his
chars^e one aoainst another, like a man cheat-
ing himself at solitaire, Thouo;h there ori'ows
tacitly among the better class of sheepmen the
understanding that long-continued use estab-
lishes a sort of priority in the pastures, among
themselves the herders will still be " hosfOfingr
the feed."
When Sanger went on his little exodus to
Montana, he went out by way of Deep Springs
Valley to cross Nevada, that same valley where
Harry Quinn, hoping for winter pastures in '74,
i66 THE FLOCK
lost all but twenty-two hundred out of a flock
of twenty-two thousand in the only deep snow
that fell there, drifting over the low, stubby
shrubs shoulder high to the sheep. When
Sanger first broke trail across it there was
feed enough, more than enough, if pastured
fairly ; but out of Deep Springs came another
shepherd, taking the same general direction,
but forging always ahead, forcing his flock out
by dawn light to get the top of the grazing.
Sanger considered and made sure of the other
man's intention. Presently they came to a
pleasant place of springs.
" Now," said Sanger, hiding his purpose be-
hind the honestest blue eyes and an open Ger-
man countenance, " the feed is good and I can
rest here some days." So assured, the enemy
slept with his flock and w^oke late to see the
dust of Sanger's sheep, kept moving in the
night, vanishing northward on his horizon.
And Sanger is not the only man who has been
sharpened to the business by being first a set-
tler in the time when every season called for
some new contrivance against the herder's plan
of feeding out the homesteader ; though when
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN 167
he became a sheepman it is doubtful if he
could have been drawn off from pasture by his
own device of sprinkling salt on the range in
the face of the herders so. that they turned their
flocks away from that country in great alarm,
reporting the feed to be poisoned, a reprisal
not uncommon in the early sixties.
It is also allowable, finding intruders on your
accustomed ground, to burn their corrals and
destroy their bridges. Meaner measures than
this are not often resorted to, though there are
instances.
One of the guardians of the flock whose
brand is the Three Legs of Man, working up
a shallow caiion toward the summer meadows,
found a pertinacious Portuguese herder feeding
in that direction. The flocks of the Manxman
had the advantage of the near side of the
caiion, and all the clear afternoon they manoeu-
vred forth and back to keep in front of the
Portuguese, he drawing close until the com-
mingling dust of their bands hid all his motions
in a golden blurr. They looked for him to
break through at this point, or for some mis-
chief which should stampede the dock, but
i68 THE PXOCK
nothing other than the quickened scurry of
feet and the jangle of the bells came out of
the thick haze of dust. When it cleared, the
enemy was shown to have turned off sharply
in retreat. The rate of his going, as well as
the unexpectedness of it, bred suspicion. Not,
however, until the Manxman rounded up did
he discover that the fellow had. under cover of
the dust, incorporated with his own band and
carried away a bunch of best merinos.
Recovery of stolen sheep, detected in time,
is not difificult ; a much harder matter for the
shepherd to explain how sheep not of his
brand came in his keeping. If he is sensible
he does not try to do so, and if they have come
legitimately as being gathered up after a storm,
accepts a small sum for their care and restores
them to the claimant. If, however, they have
been passed to an accomplice and out of the
country, rebranded and marked anew, there is
little to be done about it. For the most part,
all the business amenities prevail on the open
range, for this also is a part of the Great
Game.
Every quarter section of land in the neigh-
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN 169
borhood of a watershed is potentially irrigable
and attracts settlement. We breed yearly
enough men of such large hopefulness as to be
willing to live on that possibility, or of an in-
curable inability to live anywhere else. Ordi-
narily they put more zest into the struggle for
the use of grazing lands that they do not own
than improving those they do, but here in Cal-
ifornia there has not been between these and
the cattlemen the bitterness and violence that
grow out of the struggle for the range in Mon-
tana and Arizona. But for the sake of what I
shall have to say touching the matter of the
Forest Reserves, I shall put the case to you as
it is handed up to me by men whose business
has been much about the open range. In this
it is well to be explicit though I appear as a
mere recorder.
Two years out of three there is not pasture
enough for the whole number of flocks and
herds to grow fat. In good seasons they feed
in the same district without interference, but
sheep are close croppers, and in excessive dry
years cut off the hope of renewal by eating
into the root-stocks of the creeping grasses.
I/O THE FLOCK
Their droppings also are an offense, and being
herded in a bunch they defile the whole ground.
After rains the grass springs afresh and the
scent passes into the earth, but in the rainless
Southwest it lies long and renders objectionable
the scanty grass. Set against this that cattle
perform the same office of fouling the pastures,
so that even in starvation times one notes the
flock veering away from the fresh rings of grass
where cattle have passed ; also the horned
cattle love oozy standing ground, and work
even their own distress by trampling out the
springs. In the Southwest where the land is
not able to bear them because of their numbers
and the sheep get advantage by reason of their
close method of herding, the cattlemen retort
with violence. They charge the flock and run
it over a cliff, or breaking into the corrals en-
gage in disgusting butchery the like of which
has not yet been imputed to herders. Also
there have been killings of men, herders
dropped stilly in the middle of the flock, cow-
boys crumpling forward in the saddle at the
crossing of the trails.
The mutual offenses being as I have set
THE STRIFE OF THE HERDSMEN 171
them forth, it. is to be seen that much is to be
imputed to mere greed and the desire for mas-
tery. Moreover it is indisputably allowed by
cowmen that they are inherently, and on all
occasions, better than any sheepman that ever
lived. I being of neither party will not sub-
scribe to it, for the seed of that ferment which
makes caste betw^een classes of men, the sums
of whose intelligence and right dealing are not
appreciably different, is not in me.
Just at this point it is well to recall that of
all the men who grow rich by hides and fleeces,
not one in ten does so on his own land. All
these millions of acres of mesquite and sage
and herd grass and alfilaria belong to Us.
Supinely we let them out to be the prize of
trickery and violence. That is why there can
l;-i^S!'
mil- 1
172
THE FLOCK
be so few reprisals at law for offenses done on
the ranore. What is no man's no man can be
O
remanded for taking strongly. Consider then
the simplicity of allotting fixed pastures of pub-
lic lands by rental. But the present arrange-
ment is our superior way of being flock-minded.
X
^#:^'*#'
i^>.^^^^i^^
LIERS-IN-WAIT — WHAT thev
DO TO THE FLOCK, AND WHAT
THE SHEPHERD DOES TO THEM.
'^ ^»
- jfnH
p^'^
CHAPTER X
LIERS-IN-WAIT
There is a writer of most agreeable animal
stories who takes pains modestly to disclaim
any participation in the event, but in fact he
need hardly be at so much trouble. It is not
the man to whom such adventures occur as by
right who makes a pretty tale of them, and I
am oftenest convinced of the truth of an inci-
dent in an ancient piece of writing rather mis-
doubted these wordy days, because it is so much
in the manner of people to whom these things
happen in their way of life. It is also an ex-
176 THE FLOCK
cellent model for an animal story and is told
in three sentences :
" Then went Samson down ... to Timnath
. . . and behold a young lion roared against
him. . . . And he rent him as he would have
rent a kid . . . but he told not his father or
his mother what he had done."
" Jean Baptiste," say I, " where did you get
that splendid lynx skin in your cayaca ? "
" Eh, it was below Olancha about moonrise
that he sprung on the fattest of my lambs. I
gave him a crack with my staff, and the dogs
did the rest."
You will hardly get a more prolix account
from any herder, though there are enough of
these tufted lynxes about the dry washes to
make their pelts no uncommon plunder of the
camps. It is only against man contrivances,
such as a wool tariff or a new ruling of the
Forestry Bureau, that the herder becomes
loquacious. Wildcats, cougars, coyotes, and
bears are merely incidents of the day's work,
like putting on stiff boots of a cold morning,
running out of garlic, or having the ewes cast
their lambs. As for weather stress, they endure
LIERS-IX-\VAIT 177
it much in the fashion of their own sheep,
which if they can get their heads in cover make
no to-do of the rest of them.
Of four-footed plagues the coyote is worst
by numbers and incalculable cunning; and of
him there is much that may be said to a
friend able to dispense with the multiplication
of instances.
In seventeen years a hill frequenter is not
without occasion to listen at lairs when the
sucking pups tumble about and nip and whine
under a breath ; to observe how they endure
captivity among the wickiups or at some
Greaser's hut ; to fall in with them going
across country and not be shunned, they under-
standing perfectly that skirts and a gun go
infrequently together; to hear by night the
yelping two-toned howl by which they deceive
as to numbers, the modulations by which they
contrive to make it appear to come from near
or far, but never absolutely at the point from
which it issues. And one has not to hear it
often to distinguish the choppy bark by which
the dog of the wilderness defies the camp from
the long, whining howl that calls up a shape
178 THE FLOCK
like his shape from the waste of warm, scented
dusk.
On the high mesas when the thick cloud-
mist closes on three sides of the trail, a coyote
coming out of it unexpectedly trots aside with
dropped head or turns inquiringly with a clipped
noise in his throat like a man accosting a wo-
man on the street before he is quite sure what
sort she is, and may wish his hail to seem
merely an inadvertence. But with all this,
there is not the hint of any sound by which
they talk comfortably together. Nothing passes
between them but the fanged snarl when they
fight, and the long, demoniac cry of the range.
Once when there was a pestilence among
the rabbits so that they died in inconceivable
numbers, lying out a long time on the bank of a
wash under the Bigelovia to discern, if I might,
the behavior of scathless rabbits toward those
that were afflicted ; lying very still toward the
end of the afternoon, a coyote came down the
wash, trotting leisurely with picked steps, as if
he had just come from his lair, and not quite
certain what he should be about. At that mo-
ment another crossed his trail at right angles,
LIERS-IN-WAIT 179
trotting steadily as one sure of his errand.
They came within some feet of each other, the
nostrils of both twitched, they turned toward
each other with a look, lono- and considering
— ah, such a look as I had from you just now,
when I said that about the likeness of a man
to a coyote, intelligence deepening in the eye
to a divination of more than the fact says. And
at this look which hung in suspense for the
smallest wink of time, the one coyote fell in
behind the other and continued out of sight,
trotting with the same manner of intention
toward the same unguessed objective. Their
jaws were shut, no sound loud enough to be
heard at twenty feet passed between them ; but
this w-as open to understanding, that whereas
one of them before that look exhibited no sense
of intention, they were now both of the same
mind. And if we cast out all but the most
obvious, and say it signifies no more than that
one followed the other on the mere chance of
its being worth while, we are only the more at
a loss to account for all that they do to the
sheep.
Knowing the trick of frightened sheep to run
i8o THE FLOCK
down hill and scatter as they descend, coyotes
always attack on the lower side, and shepherds
in a hill country camp below the flock to pre-
vent them. Though seven is the largest pack
I can attest to, they are reported to harry the
sheep in greater numbers, and so rapid is the
flash of intelligence between them that on the
scattering of the flock, when one lamb or sev-
eral are to be cut out, it is always by concerted
action ; and in longer runnings the relays are
seen to be so well arranged for that no herder
who has lost by them instances a failure that
can be laid to the want of foreplanning. It is
hardly the question whether coyotes in a raid
will get any of your lambs, but how few.
Once slaughter is begim it is continued with
great wastefulness unless arrested by the dogs.
The coyotes understand very well how to esti-
mate the strength of this defense, and finding
attack not feasible, love to stand off in the
thick dark and vituperate. No dog can forbear
to answer their abuse with like revilings, and
it is understood by them that when coyotes
bark they do not mean thieving. Now this is
most interesting, that the coyotes know that
LIERS-IN-\VAIT i8r
they have made the dogs so beheve. Not only
have they learned the ways of sheep and sheep
dogs, but also — and this is going a step beyond
some people — they are able to realize and play
upon the dog's notion of themselves. So on
a niorht when there is no sound from the flock
but the roll of the dreaming bells, warm glooms
in the hollows and a wind on the hill, three or
four of the howlers slip to the least assailable
side of the flock and there draw the dogs by
feints of attack and derisive yelpings. Then
the rest of the pack cut noiselessly into the
fiock on its unguarded quarter and make a suf-
ficient killing. And all this time the coyotes
have not said a word to one another.
A trick the herder has imposed on the sheep
by way of frustrating attack is to form the
flock with the heads all turned in, the dogs
being trained, on the hint of coyotes hunting,
to run about the closed herd and nip the fro-
ward members until the throats, the vulnerable
point, are turned away from the enemy. A
coyote will always be at considerable pains to
provoke a suitable posture for attack.
But there are no such killings now as in the
I82
THE FLOCK
time when Jewett destroyed eight hundred
coyotes in two years at Rio Bravo, and in all
that time was unable to keep any dogs, so
plentifully was the range spread with poison-ed
meat for the lean-flanked rogues.
They are still worst at the spring season
when the young are in the lair and about the
skirts of the mountains below the pines, for
the snow prevents their inhabiting high regions
except briefly in mid-season ; and on the plains
where water-holes are far between they will
not follow after the flocks, for meat-eaters must
drink directly they have eaten.
Wanton killers as the coyotes are, one bob-
cat can often work greater destruction in a
single night, for it
comes softly on the
flock, does not scat-
ter it, kills quickly
without alarm, and
since cats take little
besides the blood
and soft parts of the throat, one requires a
cood bunch of lambs for a meal. Both cats
and cougars have a superior cunning to creep
LIERS IN-WAIT 183
into the flock unbeknown to the dogs, and the
cougars, at least, go in companies ; so if they
manage not to stir the sheep and set the bells
ringing to alarm the herder they get away un-
hurt with their kill. A cous^ar will hansf about
a flock for days, taking night after night a
fresh wether of a hundred pounds weight,
throwing it across his shoulder and carrying
it miles to his young in the lair, with hardly
so much as a dragging foot to mark his trail.
It is chiefly by tracking them home or by
poisoning the kill which the beast returns to,
that the herder is avengred ; for in the nio;ht
lit faintly by cold stars, when the flock mills
stupidly in its tracks with the cougar killing
quietly in its midst, a gun is no sort of a
weapon to deal with such trouble. Jewett re-
ports four of these lion-coated pirates visiting
his corral in a single night, each jumping the
four-board fence and making off with a well-
grown mutton ; and on another occasion the
loss of sixty grown sheep in a night to the
same enemy.
It is the conviction of most herders that
all the slinking cat-kind are cowardly beasts,
i84 THE FLOCK
though stubborn to leave the kill unsatisfied,
valuing their skins greatly, and even when
attacked, fighting only to open a line of re-
treat. You will hear no end of incidents to
convince you of this, but find if you swing the
talk to bears that the herder's knowledge of
them is like the ordinary man's understanding
of wool tariff reforms, contradictious general-
ities in which he dares particularize only from
personal experience. A bear, it seems, can, if
he wishes, get his half-ton of weight over the
ground with the inconceivable lightness of the
wind on the herd grass ; but he does not often
so wish. He may carry his kill to his den or
elect to eat it in the herder's sight, growling
thunderously. He may be scared from his
purpose by the mere twirling of your staff with
shouts and laughter, and when he has gone
a little way decide to return with wickedness
glowing phosphorescently in the bottoms of his
little pig's eyes, and grievously affiict the in-
sulter. At one time the snapping of a wee bit
collie at his heels sends him shuffling embar-
rassedly along the trail, and at another he sits
back on his haunches inviting attack, ripping
LIERS-IN-WAIT
185
open clogs with great bats of his paws, or snatch-
ing them to his bosom with engulfing and dis-
astrous hugs. He is not crafty in his killings,
but if he finds the mutton tender will return
to it with more bears, making two and three
fiock-journeys in a night.
Singular, even terrifying, as evincing the
insuperable isolation of man, is the unaware-
ness of the wild kindred toward the shepherd's
interests, his claims, his relation to the fiock.
The coyote alone exhibits a hint of reprisal in
that he nesflects not to defile the corners of
the herder's camp and scratch dirt upon his
belongings, but to the rest he is, it appears, no
more than a customary incident of the flock, as
it misht be blue flies buzzino: about the kill.
All their strategies are directed toward not
i86 THE FLOCK
arousing the dogs, man being uneatable, though
annoying, not necessar}^ to be closed with ex-
cept in the last resort.
All these years afford me no more than two
incidents of herders being damaged by beasts,
one in Kern River having come to close quar-
ters with a wounded bear which the dogs
finally drew off, but not until the man's hurts
were past curing. Yet in that region bears
are so plentiful that they come strolling harm-
lessly across the recumbent shepherds in the
night, or burn themselves with savory hot
frying-pans lifted from the fire when the
herder's back is turned. Or so it was in the
days before the summer camper found that
country.
At San Emigdio a she bear brought down
her cubs on a moonless night to teach them
killing, and Chabot, the herder, waked by the
sound of running, hearing her snuffling about
the flock, set on the dogs and himself attacked
with his staff. This he would never have
done had he been aware of the cubs, for though
a 2:rown bear suffers cudoelinc^ with tolerable
good humor, she will not endure that it should
LIERS-IN-WAIT 187
threaten her young. Therefore, Chabot car-
ried the marks of that indiscretion to his grave.
But if you could conceive of the ravagers
of the sheep-pens being communicative, it is
plain that they would remark only, with some
wonderment, but no recognition of its rela-
tivity, the irritating frequency with which man-
things are to be found in the vicinity of flocks.
XI
THE SHEEP AND THE
RESERVES
CHAPTER XI
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES
When the Yosemite National Park was first
set apart, I said to a shepherd who was used
to make his summer grazing there, —
"What shall you do now, Jacques?" —
Jacques not being his real name, as you will
readily understand, seeing the thing I have to
relate of him. Jacques threw up his head from
his hairy throat with a laugh.
" I shall feed my sheep," he said, •' I shall feed
them in the meadow under the dome, in the
192 THE FLOCK
pleasant meadows where my camp is, where
I have fed them fifteen years."
" But the Park, Jacques, do you not know
that it is closed to the sheep and the whole line
of it patroled by soldiers? "
" Nevertheless," said the shepherd, " I shall
go in."
Afterwards I learned that he had done so,
and at other times other shepherds had fed
there, and at times the newspapers had a note
to the effect that sheep had been caught in the
Park Reserve and driven out. Sierra lovers
who frequented the valley of falling waters came
often upon fresh signs of flocks and spoke freely
of these things, which, however, did not reach
to places of authority. There was a waif word
going about sheep camps, and now and then
a herder who, when he had two thirds of a bot-
tle of claret in him, waswillinc: to make stranQ-e
admissions.
" Five gallons of whiskey," said Jacques, " I
pay to get in and take my own chance of being
found and forced out. We take off the bells
and are careful of the fires. Last year I was
in and the year before, but this summer some
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 193
fools going about with a camera found me and
I was made to travel. Etarre was in, and the
Chatellard brothers."
" And did these all pay } "
" How should I know ? They would not pay
unless they had to. But it is small enough for
two months' feed ; and if the officers found us
we had only to move on."
All the gossip of the range is by way of
proving that the shepherd spoke the truth. It
is not impossible that the soldiers despised
too much the work of warding sheep off the
grass in order that silly tourists might wonder
at the meadows full of bloom. The men rode
smartly two and two along the Park boundary;
one day they rode forward on their appointed beat
and the next day they rode back. Always there
w^as a good stretch of unguarded ground behind
them and before. If they found tracks of a
flock crossing their track they had no orders
to leave the patrol to go after it ; they might
report — but if it were made more comfortable
not to ? This is not to say that all the enlisted
men of that detachment could be bought, —
and for whiskey too ! But in fact a flock can
194 THE FLOCK
cross a given line in a very narrow file, and it
was not necessary that more than two or three
of the patrol should be complaisant.
During the Cuban war, the military being
drawn off for a business better suited to their
degree, and the Park left to insufficient war-
dens, the sheep surged into it from all quarters.
They snatched what they could, and when
routed went a fiock-length out of sight and
returned to the forbidden pastures by a secret
way. I dwell upon this, for it was here and by
this mismanagement that the foundation was
laid for the depredations, the annoyance, and
misunderstanding that still make heavy the
days of the forest ranger.
After the return of the soldiery, enforce-
ments were stricter but trespasses made more
persistent by a season of dry years that short-
ened the feed on the outside range. The sheep-
men were not alone in esteeming the segrega-
tion of the Park for the use of a few beauty-
loving folk, as against its natural use as pasture,
rather a silly performance. No proper penal-
ties were provided for being caught grazing on
the reserve. An ordinance slackly enforced is
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 195
lightly respected. More than that, sheepmen
who had by long custom established a sort of
right to those particular pastures considered
themselves personally misused. They must now
resort to infringement on the grazing rights of
others or be put out of business ; not, however,
before they had made an efTort and a tolerably
successful one, to break back to the forbidden
ground.
All this time there were going on in Cali-
fornia remote and incalculable activities that
should turn the general attention at last toward
the source of waters. One feels perhaps that we
affect to despise business too much ; it is in
fact the tool by which the commonalty carves
toward achievements too big for their under-
standing, which they laugh at while forw^ard-
ing. At this time and for some years before,
in all the towns of the San Gabriel and the San
Joaquin and the coastward valleys there were
men going about on errands of the business
sense, seeing no farther than their noses, per-
ceiving no end to their adventure other than
the pit of their own pockets, denying and not
infrequently contriving against the larger pur-
196 THE FLOCK
pose which they served. The bland Promoter
who sold irrigable lands for a price that made
the buyer gasp, and while he was gone around
the block to catch his breath raised it a hun-
dred per cent, hastened, though unaware, the
conservation of the natural forests. Incidentally
he worked the doom of the hobo herds.
It is fortunate that the heads of government,
like the tops of waves, move forward under
pressure of an idea at rates much in advance
of the common opinion. The breaking of that
surge toward forest preservation was in a line
about the chief of the watersheds beyond which
it was not lawful for sheep or cattle to pass.
Here in my country it cuts off squarely south
of Havilah, runs straightly north to the spur of
Coso Hills, where the desert marches with it
past Olancha, trends with the Sierras north by
west past Lone Pine, past Tinnemaha, past
Round Valley and Little Round Valley, and
turns directly west to meet the Yosemite Park.
Returning on the other slope, it encompasses
the Northfork country, the country of Kaweah,
the sugar-pine country, and the place of the
sequoias, Tule River, Kings and Kern, all the
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 197
noble peaks that rear about Mt. Whitney and
the pleasant slopes of Three Rivers and Four
Creeks, in short all that country of which I
write to you.
I said that at first neither sheep nor cattle
might pass it, but very shortly it was granted
that cowmen living near the reserve should,
by special perniit, feed their stock on certain
of the most generous meadows at the set time
of the year. It is not to be wondered at that
the sheepmen conceived this a blow directed
at the wool and mutton industry, and finding
the price of stock sheep forced down by these
measures, excused their trespasses by their
necessities. Some there were who slipped in
by night and slipped out, ashamed and saying
nothing, others who infringed boldly and came
out boasting, as elated, as self-gratulatory as if
they had merged railroads or performed any
of those larger thieveries that constitute a Cap-
tain of Industry.
There was a Basque, feeding up and down
the Long Trail, who was notably among the
offenders. A trick of his which served on more
than one occasion was to start a small band
198 THE FLOCK
moving, for he had fifteen thousand head, and
having attracted the ranger's attention by
boasts and threats made with the appearance
of secrecy, in places most likely to reach the
ranger's ear, to draw him on to following the
decoy by suspicious behavior. Then the Basco
would bring up the remainder of the flocks
and whip into the Reserve behind the ranger's
back. Once a day's journey deep in the Sierra
fastnessess, it would be nearly impossible to
come up with him until, perhaps, he neared
the line on his fall returning. The sheepmen
had always the advantage in superior know-
ledge of the country, of meadows defended by
secret trails and false monuments, of feeding
grounds inaccessible to mounted men, remote
and undiscovered by any but the sheep. They
risked much to achieve a summer's feeding in
these fair, inviolate pastures. The most the
rangers could do against them was to scatter
and harry the flock so as to make the gather-
ing up difficult and expensive. The business
was also hindered by the inadequacy of the ran-
ger force. Every man had more territory than
he could well ride over, and rode it fast at the
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 199
end of a red tape centred in Washington, D. C.
The service did not know very well what it
wanted, and the pay was much below the price
of the fittest men. Whatever the ranger did
was at the mercy of the man at the other end
of his tape, who like enough had never seen
a forest off the map. Whatever went on, the
ranger reported in a detailed account of each
day's proceedings. After which he explained
the report. If the Tape Spinner wrote back to
know why on a given day he had but covered
the distance between two places no more than
five miles apart on the map, and the next day
had ridden fifteen, no matter what was doing
200 THE FLOCK
in the way of trespass or forest fires, the ranger
paused politely to explain that the first day's
riding was pretty nearly straight up in the air,
over broken ground, and the second through
a pleasant valley. Still, if the explanation failed
to satisfy, the forester's pay was docked.
On one occasion a ranger saw against the
morning sky the pale saltire of forbidden fires
at a time of the year when forest fires were
most to be abhorred. Two days' hard riding
discovered the fire to be in a small granite
fenced basin, nearly burnt out with its own
fury. He so reported and had his pay cut for
the whole time of his fruitless errand. But
suppose the fire had not been in an isolated
basin, and suppose he had not gone to see?
Another ranger requiring powder for blasting
a landslip from a ruined and impassable trail,
went to the nearest town, which happened to
be a day's ride from the reserve. Timidly he
submitted the bill for the powder and it was
allowed, but the man was cut two days' pay for
being out of the Reserve without leave. I could
tell you more of these absurdities, but I am
ashamed of them ; besides, the sense of the ser-
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 201
vice is always toward greater efficiency; more-
over the sane, inspiring work of forest pre-
servation sweeps to its larger purpose not too
much hindered by the fret of departmental
inadequacies. But when these things are so,
you can understand that the herders could the
more easily take the advantage.
I shall not here recount the whole of that
struggle between the rangers and the sheep,
the experimental kindnesses, the vexed repris-
als, the failures, triumphs, and foolish heroisms.
It is true that not all the keepers of sheep
forged over the viewless line of the Reserve
unless it might be by inadvertence, for in the
beginning it was not very clearly determined.
Respectable sheep-owners sat at home and
ordered their herders to bring fat mutton and
full fleeces back from the curtailed pastures.
These simple-hearted little men came near to
achieving the impossible. Those who would
have done nothing on their own behalf stole
stoutly in the interest of their owners. One
caught at it would have shot the ranger, only
the ranger shot first. And if their very dogs
were not in league with them, how is it that
202 THE FLOCK
the flock of Filon Gerard stampeded so for-
tunately as they were crossing, under escort
of the rangers, at Walker's Pass. True, Filon
had been kept hanging about the Pass on the
barren mesa for several days, waiting for the
arrival of the escort, and the narrow strip of
crossing allowed was already eaten off to the
grass-roots by earlier passing. No doubt the
sheep then were crazed by hunger, as Filon
avowed. It seems certain that some sis^ns
passed between him and the dogs at the mo-
ment of stampeding ; and by the time the
ranger had helped to gather them up they had
all a fill of the fresh, sweet grass.
When Jean Rieske camped where he had
been wont to rest on his passage up from Mo-
jave, over-tired, with a footsore, hungry flock, —
for he had attempted the passage too early, be-
fore the desert feed was well advanced, — when
he had no more than lighted his fire to warm
his broth, it being then long past dark, down
came the rangers upon him with orders to move.
For what ? A new regulation ; that was all
they knew. Three days ago it had been lawful
to camp in this })lace, now it was not. Jean
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 203
Rieske moved on. There were some miles to
cover to another camp, the season was early,
and the lambs were young; in the darkness,
fatigue, and confusion they became separated
from the ewes. The rangers were also tired,
cold, and hungry, and harried unnecessarily the
flock. Nights on these high mesas the keen
still cold bites to the bone — and Jean Rieske
could not carry all the lambs of one flock in
his bosom. What indeed are half a hundred
lambs to the letter of the law ?
There was a ranger rode out of town to
pass over the gap between two bulky, grey,
and wintry mountain heads, in the month of
frequent rains ; and a mile over the line of the
Reserve came upon a Portuguese herder of
two thousand blackfaces, working straight to-
ward the lake basins of the ten thousand foot
level. He turned the man back, saw the sheep
out of bounds, watched them dip away, the
herder still protesting the virtue of his inten-
tion, into a hollow where there was thick black
sage, and urged by his errand, pricked forward
on the trail. Even with this delay he hoped to
make the pass and the meadow of Bright Wa-
204 THE FLOCK
ter by night, but when he had come to the first
of the lingering drifts he found the trail choked
with rubble, and just beyond, obliterated in a
long, raw scar where the whole front of the
hill, made sodden by recent rains, had sloughed
away into the cafion below. This sent him
back on his tracks in time to find the same
herder working industriously over the same
ground from which he had been routed earlier
in the day. The ranger told me afterward
with great relish how he pulled his gun — in
this country when we say gun we mean a six-
shooter — and drove the Portuguese down the
trail before him. I am told there are places on
that grade where a man in a hurry may cover
as much as twenty feet without hitting the
ground. The flock was all of that year's in-
crease, lately weaned and not yet iiock-wise ;
they began to drop behind on the steep, in the
pitfalls of the strewn boulders, in the stiff wat-
tles of the chaparral. The ranger and his man
came out of the Reserve at a flying jump, where
the ranger breathed his horse and the Portu-
guese lay on the ground, bellowed with anger,
and tore up handfuls of the scant grass.
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 205
In the midst of rage and trickery there were
two who knew nothing of it, but remembered
only their devotion to the f^ock. At the last
it was in pity for the incredible great labors of
the doQ^s who covered, with tono^ues out and
heaving sides, the broken steeps of the canon
so many times in the breathless afternoon, that
the ranger permitted the herder to get upon
his feet and gather the remnant of the fliock. I
should say that the fellow lost the half of the
year's increase by that venture. And no longer
ago than the time when every swale of the long
mesa overflowed with the blue of lupines, as
blue as sea water, the rangers found a shep-
herd feeding on the tabooed ground. He said,
and the rangers believed him, that he was not
aware of trespass. Nevertheless, as their orders
ran, they began to drive the sheep outward,
scattering as they went. The little Frenchman
wearied himself to keep them close, he was fit
to burst with running, he sobbed with the labor-
ing of his sides, tears streamed from him ; and
when at last he was able to send hired men to
gather up his flock, it had cost him as much as
a whole summer's feed in fenced pastures.
206 THE FLOCK
" And all the time," said the ranger, " I was
perfectly sure that he had crossed the line
without knowing it, as he might easily have
done, for there were no monuments at that
place." I confess to a great liking for these
lean, keen, hard-riding fellows, who have often
an honest distaste for the orders they execute
with so much directness and simplicity, and
from whose account it appears that the law at
times out-does itself, and, thinking to prevent
infringement, inflicts a damage.
Do not suppose I shall enter a proof or a
denial of all the sheep have done to the water-
sheds, what slopes denuded, what thousand
years of pines blackened out with willful fires.
These things have been much advertised with
all the heartiness and particularity of those sure
of the conclusion before the argument is in-
itiated. I might add something to the account,
instancing the total want of young shrubs of
the bitterbrush, the wheno-iiabc of the Paiutes,
purshia tridentata of the botanist, greedily
sought by sheep and cattle. This extraordin-
arily bitter-savored shrub of dark green, shin-
ing, small foliage, has a persistent bark, brown
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 207
and fibrous, grown anew every year, half
sloughed away so that a stem might display an
inch or more of this shaggy covering, strong as
hemp, which the Indians of old time shredded
and wove into mats for lining their caches and
storing pine nuts against need. No vermin at-
tacked it, nor rot nor dampness. Two of these
mats I have, taken from a cache in the Coso
hills, forgotten as long ago as before the white
man inhabited there, which was before the
Gunsite mine was lost or ever Peg-Leg Smith
had made his unfortunate " passear ; " and the
fibre is yet incredibly fresh and strong. But
when the Indians discovered cloth and
canned goods so much more to their taste, then
the demand for the wheno-nabe fell off and the
strip of country where it grew became part of
the Long Trail. Normally the plant should
have increased in those years, but when after
an interval it was thought possible to reinstate
the ancient craft, the sheep and cattle had left
us no plants of the bitterbrush in that neigh-
borhood but such as appeared as old as the
Indians who remembered the knack of its use.
Also I could say something of the hills be-
2o8 THE FLOCK
hind Delano that once were billowy and smooth
as the backs of the ocean swell, and after so
many years of close-herded sheep trampling in
to the annual shearing are beaten to an imper-
vious surface that sheds the rain to run in hol-
lows and seam them with great raw gullies so
that the land shows when the pitiless high light
of noon searches it, like the face of an old
courtesan furrowed with the advertisement of
a too public use.
You will find the proof of things like that in
the government reports, together with many
excellent photographs of before and after, to
convince you of the plague of sheep. For you
notice, curiously, all this anathema is directed
against sheep, whereas we who have followed
after the bells know that it is to be laid to the
sheepman, and to a sort of sheepman fast dis-
appearing from the open range. What I mean
to say, while admitting the damage, is that
there is nothing, practically nothing, in the na-
ture of sheep inimical to the young forests or
the water cover. Is it not the custom other-
where to put sheep on worn-out lands to renew
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 209
them? Have not flocks been turned to the vine-
yards to lighten the pruning ? Does any farmer
complain who has hired his alfalfa fields to the
herders, or manure them other than with the
droppings of the sheep? Do sheep eat young
pines except of starvation, or crop the grasses
into the root-stock, or trample the earth into
a fine dust, or break down the creek banks in
passage except the herder imposes such a ne-
cessity? Do sheep light forest fires or turn
streams from their courses?
But suppose you have man laying his will
heavily on the flock, a man say who has a wife
or a sweetheart in France and looks in six or
seven years to sell out and go back to her,
knowing nothing of the ultimate disaster, car-
ing nothing for those who come after him.
Such an one with sheep under his hand can
use them to incalculable damage. It needed
some illuminating talks with a man who had
run his stock on the fenced pastures of Men-
docino to get this matter fairly into shape.
Shepherds who feed on their own ground blame
only themselves if their pastures deteriorate,
and they chiefly suffer for it. Seeing how all
2IO THE FLOCK
creatures so use the face of the earth to better
it, it is ridiculous to suppose that sheep left
reasonably free from man-habits and not
encourao^ed to increase in excess of the feed
produced, should incontinently work us harm.
They clean up the dry grass and litter by
which the smouldering fire creeps from pine
to pine ; ranging moderately on the hillslopes
they prune the chaparral which by smothering
growth and natural decay covers great areas
with heaps of rubbish through which the shrub
stems barely lift their leaf crowns to the light
and air. Frequently in such districts after a
fire, trees will spring up where no trees were
because of the suffocating growth.
There is always a point beyond which it is
not well to push any native industry to the
wall. Consider what the price of wool and
mutton must orrow to be when these are raised
o
on irrigated lands. But what if it were granted
to sheepmen as to cattlemen for a small rental
to graze on the withdrawn pastures under proper
circumstances of supervision ? As to this mat-
ter there is much that wants learning. What
the forester must know is the precise time be-
THE SHEEP AND THE RESERVES 211
tween the two nodes of the year when grazing
is accomplished without liarm to the water
cover. As to the first, when the annual grasses
begin to stool in the spring, before their roots
are established, when they perish from a single
cropping ; as to the last, the hour beyond which,
if cut off in mid-stem, they ripen no seeds. He
is to choose also the times of moving from
meadows across the forested lands. Fortun-
ately the wild pastures are still deep under
stained, sludgy snows when there is over all
the leaves of the pine, the burnished bloom,
the evidence of the rising sap, at what time
a break or a scar retards the season s growth.
But a little later than the time when rains be-
gin, the forces of life and death are so evenly
balanced that the rake of the sharp hoofs
downward, still more the impact of the heavy
tread of the steers, jars out the little dryad of
the sapling tree. It sticks in my mind that there
is not enough attention paid to the moving of
cattle through the pine woods in the climac-
teric of the year.
It is an instance of how the right conduct
of any business forces itself on those who con-
212 THE FLOCK
cern themselves about it with an open mind,
that no longer ago than the time when this
book began to shape in my mind, there was no
forester but regarded the sheep with abomina-
tion, and now none, in my district at least,
otherwise than generously inclined toward the
properly conducted flock. Though it is not
often and so completely that one is justified in
the comfortable attitude of having known it
all the time.
XII
i
1
RANCHOS TEJON — SOME ac-
i"^
'^^^^
count OF A\ OLD CALIFORNIA
i 4
1
SHEEP RANCH AND OF DON JOSK
JESUS AND THE LONG DRIVE. ''
CHAPTER XII
RANCHOS TEION
This year at Button Willow they sheared the
flocks by machinery, which is to say that the
most likable features of the old California
sheep ranches are departing. That is why I
am at the pains of setting down here a little of
what went on at the Ranchos Tejon before the
clang of machinery overlays its leisurely pic-
turesqueness.
When Mexico held the state among her de-
pendencies she gave away the core of it to the
most importunate askers. A good lump of the
2i6 THE FLOCK
heart land went in the grants of La Liebre,
Castac, and Los Alamos y Agua Caliente, to
which Edward Fitzgerald Beale added in '62 the
territory of th-e badger, called El Tejon. This
principality is three hundred thousand acres
of noble rolling land, lifting to mountain sum-
mits and falling off toward the San Joaquin
where that valley heads up in the meeting of
the Sierra and Coast Ranges. The several
grants known as Ranchos Tejon dovetail to-
gether in the high, wooded region where the
Sierra Nevadas break down in the long, shal-
low passage of Cafiada de las Uvas.
Besfinninof as far south as the old Los An-
geles stage-road, which enters the grant at
Cow Springs, the boundary of it passes thence
to Tehachapi ; northward the leopard-colored
flank of Antelope Valley heaves up to meet it.
Here begins the Tejon proper, crossing the
railroad a little beyond Caliente, encompassing
Pampa on the northwest; from hence trending
south, stalked by blue mirages of the San
Joaquin, it divides a fruitful strip called since
Indian occupancy the Weed Patch, and coasts
the leisurely sweep of the Sierras toward Pas-
RANCHOS TEJOX 217
toria. This o-utterino- rift lets throu<rh the
desert winds that at the l^eLrinninor of Rains fill
the cove with roaring yellow murk. About
the line of the fence, bones of the flock over-
blown in the wind of '74 still stick out of the
sand. Hereabout are the cleared patches of
the homesteaders, where below the summer
limit of waters the settlers play out with the
cattlemen and the sheep the yearly game of
Who Gets the Feed. Thence the boundary
runs west to Tecuya ; here the oaks leave off
and the round-bellied hills of San Emigdio
turn brownly to the sun. Castac, which is to
say The Place of Seeping Springs, basks
obscurely in the shallow intricacies of cafion
behind Fort Tejon, finding the border of La
Liebre a little beyond the brackish lake, wholly
to include the ranch of the cottonwoods and
warm water, otherwise Los Alamos y Agua
Caliente. Beginning at Pampa, a fence rider
should compass the whole estate in a week
and a day.
For those so dry-as-dust as to require it
there is an immense amount of stamped paper
to certify the time and manner of Beale's
2i8 THE FLOCK
purchases, but I concern myself chiefly with
the moment when he married the land in his
heart, coming first out of the dark, tortuous
caiion of Tejon, not the fort caiion, but that
one which opens toward the ranch house, and
looked first on the slope and swale of the bask-
ing valley. If it is yet called the loveliest land,
judge how it looked to him after the thirsts,
the vexations, the epic fatigues of his explora-
tion of the thirty-fifth parallel. Back of that
lay San Pascual, the figure of himself as a
swarthy young lieutenant carrying to Wall
Street the news and the proof of the first
discovery of gold ; and through a coil of high
undertaking as a bearer of dispatches looping
back to the day when President Jackson saw
him fight out some boyish squabble in the
streets of the Capital and appointed him to
the Navy.
" The boy is a born fighter," said Old Hick-
ory, *' let him fight for his country." He was
not the less pleased when he learned that the
lad was a grandson of Commodore Truxton
whom the President had admired to the extent
of naminir ^ race-horse after him.
RANCHOS TKJON 219
It was all a piece of the simplicity of the
time that grandmother Truxton, when she
heard of the appointment, cut the buttons off
the dead Commodore's coat to sew on the
midshipman's jacket, so that the boy arrived
at the frigate Independence wearing that in-
signia, whereat the other middies laughed.
Something less than a score of years stretched
between the time when the boy of twelve lay
miserably in his berth contriving how to get
rid of the Commodore's buttons and the time
when he rode with Fremont into the full-
blossomed Tejon ; but if you said no more of
them than that they had sharpened and shaped
the man for knowing exactly what he wanted
and being able to get it, you would have im-
plied a considerable range of experience.
Knowing about San Pascual, you conceive
that the man must have had extraordinarily
the faculty of dealing with primitive peoples.
I suppose that Beale was the first official to
discover, or to give evidence of it, that it is
wiser for Indians to become the best sort of
Indians rather than poor imitation whites.
That part of the estate known as Rancho el
220 THE FLOCK
Tejon had been an Indian Reservation, gather-
ing in broken tribes from Inyo, from Kern
and Tule rivers and Whiskey Flat, prospering
indifferently as Indians do in the neighborhood
of an idle garrison such as Fort Tejon. Beale,
being made Superintendent of Indian Affairs,
began to prove the land and draw to him in
devotion its swarthy people, and the Reserva-
tion being finally removed to Tule River, there
passed to him with the purchase of El Tejon,
the wardship of some dozens of Indian families.
Such of them as longed homesickly for their
own lands melted from Tejon like quail in
nesting time, by unguessed trails, to the places
from which they had been drawn, and to those
remaining^ were accorded certain riorhts of
home-building, of commons and wage-work-
ing, rights never abated nor forsworn during
the lifetime of Edward Beale.
There were notable figures of men among
these Tejon Indians ; one Sebastian whom I
have seen. Born a Serrano in the valley of
San Gabriel, he was carried captive by the
Mojaves, one spark of a man child saved alive
when the hearth fires were stamped out in
RAXCHOS TEJON 221
war. He being an infant, his mother hid him
in her bosom ; with her long hair she covered
him ; between her breasts and her knees she
suckled him in quietness until the lust of kill-
ing was past. Among the captive women lie
grew up, and escaping came to know the coun-
try about Kern River as his home. Here when
Fremont came by, exploring, the river was at
flood, a terrible, swift, tawny, frothing river,
and no ford. However, there was Sebastian.
This son of a chief's son stripped himself,
bound his clothing on his head, swam the
river, brought friendly Indians, made fast a
rope across, brought the tule boats called
" balsas," ferried over the explorers, and got
from Fremont for his pains — nothing; a rank-
lino- slio^ht until the old man died. But be-
tween Sebastian and Beale grew up such
esteem from man to man as lasted their lives
out in benefits and devotion.
One finds tales like this at every point of
contact with the Tejon, raying out fanwise like
thin, white runways of rabbits from any water-
hole in a rainless land. The present master of
the estate has told me, himself all unaware, and
222 THE FLOCK
I secretly delighted to see the land rise up and
grip him through the velvet suavity of years,
how when he was a boy and the court between
the low adobes closed at night as a stockade,
red eyes of the Indian campfires winked open
around the swale where the ranch house sat,
and at the end of the first day's drive toward
Los Angeles, as they would ride at twilight
over the Tejon grade, the circling fires blos-
somed out from the soft gloom, watching on
their trail. More he told of how he went up
the canon, full of little dark bays of shadow,
with his father to bury old Nations, of how the
dead mountaineer looked to him through the
chinks of the cabin, large in death, and how
being no nearer than sixty miles to a Bible,
the General — he was Surveyor-General at one
time — contrived a ceremony of what he could
remember of the burial service, and the Navy
Chaplain's prayers, and the tall, hard-riding
Texans and Tennesseeans, clanking in their
spurs, came down to be pall-bearers, lean as
wolves drawn from hollows of the mountains
as lonely as their lairs.
I should have said that, inside of the ranch
RANCHOS TEJON 223
boundaries, there were sections and corners of
government land, these drawing to them, by
election, westward-roving clans of southern
mountaineers. Here they brought the habits
of freedom, their feuds, yes, and the seeds of
the potentialities that make leaders of men.
Here grew up Eleanor and Virginia Calhoun,
nourished in dramatic possibilities on the
drama of life. I remember well how Virginia,
during the rehearsals of Ramona, when we
milled over between us the possibilities of what
an Indian would or would not do, broke off
suddenly to say how clearly the peaks of Tejon
would swim above the middle haze of noon, or
how she had waked mornings to find the deer
had ravaged the garden, or a bear in her play-
house under the oaks.
But the real repository of the traditions of
Tejon is Jimmy Rosemeyre, — and in the West
when a whole community unites to call a man
by his first name, it is because they love and
respect him very much. Jimmy, who crossed the
plains in '54, and was drawn down from Sacra-
mento by natural selection to Tejon; Jimmy,
who, ^Decause of his comeliness among so
224 THE FLOCK
many dusky folk, was called Jimmy '' iverito''
Jimmy the Ruddy; who, when he had a good
horse under him, a saddle of carved leather-
work, dofas, deep-roweled spurs and a silver-
trimmed sombrero, knew himself a handsome
figure of a man; James Vineyard Rosemeyre,
who saveys the tempers and dispositions of
men, who knows the Tejon better than its own
master, the man whose hand should have been
at the writing of this book.
It is well here to set forth the shape of the
land, to know how it colors the life that is lived
in it. Between the point of San Emigdio and
the Weed Patch there is a moon-shap6d cove,
out of which opens, westerly, the root of the
caiion by which Fremont and Kit Carson came
through. The ranch house sits by the water
that comes down guardedly between tents and
tents of wild vines. Below the house by the
stream-side the Indian washerwomen paddle
leisurely at the clothes and spread them bleach-
ing in the sun. Silvering olives and mists of
bare fig branches slope down to the blossomy
swale ; deep in the court between the long-
adobes, summer abides, and yearly about the
RANCHOS TKJOX 225
fence of the garden the pomegranates flame.
The beginning of all these, and the oranges,
Jimmy Rosemeyre brought up from the Mis-
sion San Fernando, going down with two live
deer in a waoon and
returning with cut-
tings and rooted
trees. Six miles up
the canon are the
adobe huts and the
ramadas, the bits of
fenced garden that
make the Indian
rancheria. Rising out of laps and bays of the
oak-furred ridges, pale smoke betrays the
hearths of the mountaineers.
Below the ranch house in a wet spring the
land flings up miles of white gilias and forget-
me-nots, such as the Spanish children call
nicvitas, little snow ; spreads on the flowing
hill bosses the field of the cloth of the dormi-
dera, collects in the hollows pools of purple
wild hyacinth, deep enough to lie down in
and feel the young wind w^alk above you on
the blossom tops. Days of opening spring
226 thp: flock
the cove is so full of luminosit}^ that the
backs of crows flying over take on a silver
sheen. You sit in the patio when the banksia
rose sprays out like a fountain, and hear the
olives drip in the orchard ; awhile you hear
the stream sing and then ripe drojDpings from
the young full-fruited trees. At night the hills
are silent and aware, and all the dreams are
Straight out from the ranch house runs the
road to Castac and La Liebre. It turns in past
the house of Jose Jesus Lopez, and runs toward
Las Chimeneas. Here, to the left, is the camel
camp. Nobody much but Jimmy Rosemeyre
and the Bureau of Animal Industry knows
about the camels that the government, by the
hand of Lieutenant Beale, undertook to domes-
ticate on the desert border. Twenty-nine of
them, with two Greeks and a Turk, came up
by way of The Needles, across the corner of
Mojave to Tejon. There I could never learn
that they accomplished more than frightening
the horses and furnishing the entertainment
of j'aces. They throve, — but no American
RANCH OS TEJON 227
can really love a camel. Whether they admit
it or not, the Bureau of Animal Industry is
balked by these things. Nothing remained of
them at Tejon but tradition and a bell with
the Arabic inscription nearly worn out of it
by usage, cracked and thin, which Jimmy
Rosemeyre, in a burst of generosity, which I
hope he has never regretted, gave to me. Hang-
ing above my desk, swinging, it sets in motion
all the echoes of Romance.
The road runs whitely by Rose's Station.
Los Angeles stages used to stop there, but I
like best to remember it as the place where
Jimmy Rosemeyre had a circus once, in the
time when circuses traveled overland by the
stage-roads from camp to roaring camp. Never
was a more unpromising quarter than this
j^^/ • T iS- . T '^'V^i'- ^ ^\ 5S
hi\ J) JMj^
228 THE FLOCK
tawny hollow with one great house bulking
darkly through the haze. But Jimmy wanted
to see that circus.
" You go ahead with the show," said he,
" I '11 get the crowd ; " and he sent out riders.
No lean coyote went swiftlier to a killing than
word of the circus went about the secret places
of the hills. The crowd came in from Teha-
chapi, from Tecuya and San Emigdio and the
Indian rancherias ; handsome vaqueros with
a wife or a sweetheart before them in the saddle,
— and that was the time of hoopskirts too, —
Mexican families with a dozen or fifteen mu-
chachos and muchachitas in lumbering ox
carts, squaws riding astride with two papooses
in front and three behind. They brought food
and camped by the waterside, sat out the after-
noon performance, and after feasting returned
with unabated zest at night. But in the year I
spent at Rose's Station I found nothing better
worth watching than the antelope that signaled
in flashes of their white rumps how they fared
as they ran heads up in the golden amethyst
light of afternoon.
The road climbs up the grade from the foot
RANG 1 1 OS Tl':jON 229
of which trends away the ineffaceable dark line
of the old military road, visible only from the
heights as the trail of forgotten armies from
the summits of history. It leads to the ruins
of Fort Tejon, built under the sprawly old oaks
where the canon widens, costing a million dol-
lars and accomplishing less for the pacification
of the Indians than one Padre, says Jimm}'
Rosemeyre. Across the brook from the road,
across the meadow of yerJDa mansa, across the
old parade-ground, at the lower corner of the
quadrangle of ruined adobes is the Peter Lebec
tree. Under it the first white man died in that
country and under it the first white child was
born. General Beale himself showed me the
great bough that was lopped away to rid the
woman of fear of its overhanging weight when
she came to her distressful hour. Lebec, I
spell it now as it was rudely carved in the in-
scription, was buried in 1S37, and after more
than fifty years, by the rediscovered inscription
printed in reverse on the bark grown over the
blaze, and by exhuming of the body was proved
the current Indian tradition that while he lay
under it, heavy with wine, and his camp-mate
2 30 THE FLOCK
away hunting, a bear came down out of the oak
and partly devoured him.
You get more than enough tales of killings
and wickedness hereabout, bandit tales of Ma-
son and Henry, and Vasquez the hard rider.
I could show you the place by the dripping
spring where 1 found the pierced skull, —
pleasanter to walk in the white starred meadow
and hear tremulous, soft thunder of wild
pigeons in the oaks, to wind with the road's
windings up the summit to Gorman and see
the shadows well out of the caiions and over-
flow the land and the lit planets flaring low
above the glade that holds the ranch house of
La Liebre. This was the end of the second day's
driving, when one went from Tejon to San
Francisco by way of Los Angeles and the sea.
The present lord of the Ranchos Tejon would
follow this road w^ith reminiscences past Eliza-
beth Lake, through San Francisquito caiion,
clothed on with stiff chi'parral, lit by tall can-
delabra of the Spanish bayonet, as far as the
stark old Mission San Fernando with Don
Andreas Pico bowing open the door and an
Lidian servitor in a single garment behind each
RANCHOS TKJON 231
chair of the hospitable board. Hut he could go
as far as that without getting away from the
spirit of Tejon which
in General Beale's life
much resembled the
best of mission times.
The measure of regard
which he won from
the Indians was paid
for in respect for usages
of their own ; as you
shall hear and judge in
the case of the Chiscra.
A Chisera you must
know is a witch, in this
instance a rainmaker. In a dry year the Gen-
eral put the Indians to turning the creek into
an irrigating ditch to water the barley. Said
they : —
" Why so much bending of backs and break-
ing of shovel handles 'i There is a woman at
Whiskey Flat who will bring rain abundantly
for the price of a fat steer."
" Let her be proven," said the General, like
Elijah to the prophets of Baal.
232 THi: FLOCK
The Chisera wanted more than a steer, —
beads, caHco, the material for a considerable
feast, all of which was furnished her. First
the Indians fed and then the Chisera danced.
She leaped before the gods of Rain as David
before the Ark of the Lord when it came up
from Kirjath-jearim; she stamped and shuffled
and swung to the roll of the hollow skins
and rattles of rams' horns ; three days she
danced, and the Indians sat about her singing
with their eyes upon the ground. Day and
night they sustained her with the whisper and
beat of their moaning voices. Is there in fact
a vibration in nature which struck into rhythm
precipitates rain, as a random chord on the
organ brings a rush of tears } At any rate it
rained, and it rained, and it Tained! The bar-
ley quickened in the field, a thousand acres of
mesa flung up suddenly a million sprouting
thino-s. Rain fell three weeks. The barlev
and the wheat lay over heavily, the cattle left
off feedino- the buddins; mesa was too wet to
bloom.
" For another steer," said the Chisera, " I
will make it stop."
RANCH OS TKJOX 233
So the toll of food, and cloth, and beads was
paid again, and in three days the sun broke
gloriously on a succulent green world. It is
a pity, I think, that the Chiscra is dead.
Under the General's patriarchal hand there
was never any real difficulty with the Indians
at Tejon, though there was an occasion once
at shearing-time, when there came out of Inyo
a Medicine Man who gathered the remnant of
the tribe to him at Whiskey Flat. He was
credited with an unfailing meal-sack and pro-
mised healing to the sick, the maimed, and the
blind. No doubt the easily springing hope of
such as this augurs to the primitive mind its
possibility. Whispers of it ran with the click
of the shears in the sheds. Question grew into
conviction and conviction to a frenzy. Useless
to argue that these things, if true, would keep
and the shearing would not ; man after man,
they dropped their shears with the undipped
merinos, and for this defection, a serious hin-
drance when no workers were to be had for
sixty miles, they were never taken back into
employnient.
234 THE FLOCK
It was against this background of wild
beauty, mixed romance, and unaffected sav-
agery, that the business of wool-growing went
on at Tejon much as I have described it for
the Open Range, though running a flock on
patented lands lacks the chance of adventure
that pertains to the free pastures. It was
Jimmy Rosemeyre who brought the first
sheep to the territory of the badger, having
purchased as early as '57, a band of mus-
tang sheep driven up from Mexico by Pablo
Vaca and Joaquin Peres, shaggy and unbid-
able little beasts that must be herded on horse-
back. Afterward he sold them to Beale, and
when by improvement of the breed they grew
tractable, the herding fell to the Indians.
Threescore herders in the best of times went
out with the parted flocks, and at that time
when the grass on the untrampled hills ripened/-
its seeds uncropped through successive years,
the feed grew shoulder high for the sheep.
The head shepherd moved them out from the
shearing like pieces on a board ; mostly they
could make stationary camps, feeding out cir-
clewise for weeks at a time.
RAXCHOS TKJON 235
The sheep had no real enemies at Tejon but
drouth and the bears. Against the drouth, the
Chisera being dead, there was no remedy. The
tale of the flocks was very strictly kept ; every
herder was required to show the skins of all
that he killed or that were slain by beasts, or
such as died of themselves, and in the driest
year the number reached twenty-two thousand
head. In '76, all the earth being sick with
drouth prolonged, the fifty-eight thousand
sheep were turned out in December unshep-
herded, the major-domo being at the end of
contrivances for saving them alive. They
sought the high places among the rocks, the
secret places of the most high hills, and no
man spied on their distresses. Being so trusted,
the land dealt with them not unkindly, for
when the first rains of, October drove them to
the foothills there were gathered up, of the
original flock, fifty-three thousand. But in
Sfood vears thev saved all the increase, and
made good with equal killings the ravages of
beasts.
There were once great grizzlies at Tejon, but
mostly the bears are of the variety called black
236 THE FLOCK
by scientists because they are dark brown, or
even reddish when the slant Hght shows them
feeding on the mast under the oaks or gather-
ins: manzanita berries on the borders of hano-
ing meadows, wintry afternoons. Black enough
they look, though, lumbering up the trail in the
night or bulkino- larg-e as their shadows cross
the herder's dying fire. Pete Miller is the of-
ficial bear-killer of the Ranchos Tejon, though
his account of the killings^ are as short as the
items in a doomsday book.
" Tell me a bear story, Pete," say I, sitting
idly in the patio about the time of budding-
vines. Says Pete, —
" Up here about three mile from the house
there was a deef old Indian saw a bear going
into a hollow tree ; he heaved a chunk of fire
in after him and shot him with a six-shooter
when he came out."
The stamp of simple veracity is in Pete's
open countenance.
" Another time," he said, " tliere was a bunch
of bears up the canon stampeded the sheep so
they piled up in a gulch. No 'm, they won't
anything but a gulch stop sheep once they get
RANCHOS FEJON 237
a-running ; they was about two hundred of
them killed. Mc and two other fellows went
up the next night — yes 'm, bears they always
come back. We got the whole bunch. They
was six." Pete sat on the edge of a chair and
told tales like that for an hour. They all began
with a bear getting after the sheep, and ended
with Pete getting the bear.
" How many bears have you killed, Pete ? "
say I.
" I fergit, exactly," says Pete, fumbling em-
barrassedly with his hat; but current tradition
makes it near to three hundred.
Nearly everybody at Tejon can tell a credit-
able bear story; this from Jimmy Rosemeyre,
not to be behindhand.
" I went up to Plaza Blanco to see a herder,"
said he ; " I was packing some venison on my
horse ; yes, you can put a deer on a horse if
you blindfold him. The herder was toasting
some strips of meat on a stick.
'"What's that.?' said I.
" ' Cougar,' he says, ' it 's better than venison.'
" Thinks I, I '11 try it, so I let my deer be and
went to toasting pieces of cougar on the coals.
238 THE FLOCK
It was. Good and sweet. The herder was
sleeping in a tapestre — that 's a bed on a plat-
form in a tree. He said the bears bothered him
some. But he was an all-right fellow ; he wanted
me to sleep in the tapestre and let him sleep
on the ground. Along in the night we heard
the sheep running. It was dark as dark, a thick
dust in the corral, and big lumps of blackness
chasing around among the sheep. We could n't
see to shoot, but there were oak poles smoulder-
ing in the fire. We whacked the big lumps over
the head with them. Leastways we aimed to
whack 'em on the head, but it was pretty dark.
I guess we scorched 'em considerable by the
smell. There was one wallowed in the creek
to put himself out. Seemed as if that corral
was full of bears, but in the morning when we
counted the tracks there were only four."
But think of knowing a man who could
whack four big California bears over the head
with a fire-brand !
There was never anything to equal the spring
shearing at old Tejon; when there were eighty
thousand head to be clipped, you can imagine
it was a considerable affair. Seventv-five or
RAN'CHOS Ti:jON 239
eighty Indians bent backs under the sheds
for five or six weeks at a time, and Nadeau's
great eight-ox teams creaked southward to Los
Angeles, a hundred and twent)- miles, with the
wool. All this finished with a fiesta lasting a
week, with prizes for races and cockfights, with
monte and dancing, and, of course, always a
priest at hand to take his dole of the shearing
wage and confess his people where the altar
was set out with drawn-work altar-cloths and
clusters of wild lilies in the ramada, that long
two-walled house of wattled brush that served
the Indian so well. Once there was a cloud-
burst in the canon behind the rancheria and
the water came roaring against the huts, and
the ramada — but one must really make an
end of incident, and follow after the sheep.
You should have seen Don Jose Jesus let-
ting his cigarette die out between his fingers
as he told the story of his Long Drive, young-
vigor and the high, clean color of romance
lightening the becoming portliness of middle
years. Even then you would miss something
in not being able to pronounce his name with
240 THE FLOCK
its proper soft elisions and insistent rhythm,
Jose Jesus Lopez.
Senor Lopez began to be major-domo of the
sheep at Tejon in '74, shaped to his work by
much experience in the Southwest. In '79, that
year of doubtful issues, he left La Liebre on
the desert side to drive ten thousand sheep to
Cheyenne. He had with him twelve men, none
too well seasoned to the work, and a son of
the only Henry Ward Beecher for his book-
keeper. How this came about, and why Beecher
left them before accomplishing the adventure,
does not belong in this story, but there is no
doubt Don Jose Jesus^ proved himself the bet-
ter man.
They went out, I say, by La Liebre, north-
ward across the Antelope \'alley when the
chili-cojote was in bloom and began to traverse
the Mojave desert. Well I know that country!
A huge fawn-colored hollow, drawn on its bor-
ders into puckery hills, guttered where they
run together by fierce, infrequent rains ; moun-
tains rear on its horizons out of tremulous
deeps of air, with mile-long beds of lava simu-
lating- cloud shadows on their streaked sides.
RANCHOS Ti:jON 241
Don Jesus went with his sheep in parted bands
like Jacob taking out his flocks from Padan-
aram, dry camp upon dry camp, one day like
to every other. If they saw any liuman traces
on that journey it might have been the Owens
Valley stage whirling on the thin, hard road,
or the twenty-mule ore wagons creaking in
from the plain of Salt Wells, stretching far
and flat.
All trails through that country run together
in the gorge of Little Lake, untwining on their
separate errands as they open out toward Coso.
Don Jose kept on northward until he had
brought the ten thousand to pasture in the
river bottom below Lone Pine, where the scar
of the earthquake drop was still red and raw.
Enough Spanish Calif ornians had been drawn
into that country by Cerro Gordo and neigh-
boring mines to make entertainment for so
personable a young man as Don Jose Jesus,
dancing in the patios at moonrise with the
sefioritas and drinking their own vintages
with courteous dons. The flock rested here-
about some weeks and passed up the east side
of the valley loiteringly, finally crossing through
242 THI-: FLOCK
the White Mountains to Deep Springs Valley,
thus far with no ill fortune. That was more
than could be laid to most adventurers into
that region. A little before that time John
Barker had foraged as far north with twenty-
two thousand sheep, retiring disgustedly with
nine thousand. Said he, " Where we camped
we left the ground kicking with dying sheep."
This was the time of the great drouth, when
season after season the rains delayed, flinging
themselves at last in wasteful fury on a baked,
impervious soil. Rack-boned cattle died in
the trails with their heads toward the place of
springs, and thousands of flocks rotted in the
dry ravines. Lopez took his sheep by the old
Emigrant Trail, southward of the peak I watch
daily, lifted clear white and shining above the
summer haze, and came into the end of Deep
Springs. The feed of that country is bunch
grass with stubby shrubs, shoulder high to the
sheep. The ten thousand passed here and
reached Piper's in good condition, having
drunk last in Owens Valley. Piper was a
notable cattleman of those parts, annexing as
much range as could be grazed over from the
RAN'CHOS TKJON 243
oasis where his ranch house stood, and looked
with the born distrust of the cowman on the
sheepherder. Notwithstanding, the manners
of Don Jose won him permission to keep the
sheep along the stream-side until they should
have their fill of water. But sheep are fastidi-
ous drinkers, and the water of Piper's Creek
was not to their likino;.
Now observe, the flock had come over a
mountain range and across a considerable
stretch of sandy and alkali-impregnated soil
since last watering, but they would not drink.
Lopez hoped for a living stream at Pigeon
Springs, but here the drouth that fevered all
the land had left a caked and drying hole.
Now they pushed the fagged and footsore
sheep toward Lida Valley, where there was
a reservoir dammed up for a mine, for there is
gold in that country and silver ore, very pre-
cious; but an imp of contrariety had been be-
fore them, and though the sheep were pushed
into it and swam about in the pool sullenly,
they would not drink.
All that country was strange to Don Jose
Jesus, bewildering whitey-brown flanks of hill
244 THE PXOCK
and involved high mesas faced by dull blue
mountain ridges exactly like all other dull
blue ridges. A prospector, drifted in from the
outlying camps, reported abundance of feed
and water at a place called Stonewall. Lopez
sent men forward with picks and shovels to
make a drinking-place while he came on slowly
with the flock, but after two days he met his
men returning. No water, said they, but a
slow^ dribble from the cracks of seepage in the
stone wall. Now they turned the flock aside
toward Stone Cabin, footsore, with heaving
flanks and shrunken bellies. At home, they
might feed a winter long on the rain-bedewed
tall pastures without drink, but here on the
desert where the heat and dryness crumple
men like grass in a furnace, the sheep, though
traveling by night, suffered incredibly. All
through the dark they steered a course by the
stars that swung so low and white in the desert
air ; morning and evening they fed as they
might on the dry sapless shrubs, and at noon
milled too:ether on the sand. Each seekino;
protection for its head under the body of an-
other, they piled hot and close and perished
RANCHOS TEJON 245
upon their feet. Made senseless by heat and
thirst, they strayed from the trail-weary herders.
Lopez, following such a band of estrays into
the fawn and amethyst distances, at the end of
two days had lost all his water, and persisting-
to the end of the third day, began to fail. His
men, not finding him where he had appointed
a meeting, returned to his point of starting
and took up the clue of his tracks; following
until they saw^ him through a field-glass, at
last, going forward dizzily in the bluish light
of dawn. They had no more than come up
with him, when at the relieving touch of water
in his parched throat, he fell away into a deep
swoon of exhaustion. For three hours his spirit
ebbed and tugged in the spent body while the
men sheltered him in their own shadows from
the sun and w'aited, as they of the desert know
how to wait its processes and occasions. At last,
having eaten and drunk again, he was able to
make the remaining thirty miles to camp and
bring in his sheep to Stone Cabin, where there
was a well of fresh, sweet drink. They had come
a hundred and thirty miles with the f^ock all
waterless ; and Don Jose Jesus laughed when
246 THE FLOCK
he told it. He had companioned with thirst;
failure had stalked him in the bitter dust ; he
had seen death camping on his trail ; and after
six and twenty years he laughed, a little as a
woman laughs for remembered love. By which
I take it, he is a man to whom the taste of
work is good.
The flock drifted northward across Nevada
until they came to where sixty feet of Snake
River roared in the way. Indian agents, it
seems, exist merely to fill agencies. At any
rate, the one in charge of the Bannock Reser-
vation would mediate neither for Seiior Lopez
nor the Indians.
"Any way you fix it, if you get into trouble,"
said the agent, " don't look to me."
Lopez set a guard about his horses and his
camp, sought for El Capitan, and dealt with
him as man to man. Twenty-four hours to go
through on his feet with his sheep, his wagon,
and his men ; ten Indians to be paid in silver
to aid at the river ford; that was the bargain
he made with the chief of the Bannocks. Judge
then his consternation as he came to the river
border in the morning with the last of his bands,
RANCHOS TKJOX 247
to find three hundred braves in })ossession of
the camp. They ate everything in sight with
the greatest cheerfidness.
But El Capitan reassured him. " You pay
onlv for ten."
When there was plainly no more to be eaten,
the chief laid the hollow of his hand to his
mouth and lifted a
long cry like a wolf's
howl. I n s t a n 1 1 }'
three hundred
braves had stripped
and plunged into
the icy swell of the
ford. The chuckle
of their laughter
was louder than the
rush of its waters. Shouting, they drew into
two lines, beating the water with their hands.
When the herders brought up the sheep, one
and another of them was plunged into the living
chute. As they struck the water they were shot
forward by long arms ; the shoulder of one sheep
crowded the rump of another. Spat ! Spat !
went the vigorous, brown arms. The swish of
248 THE FLOCK
the river, cloven by the stream of sheep, was
like the rip of water in closed sluices. The
wall of shining bodies swayed with the current
and withstood it.
" As I live by bread," says Don Jose Jesus,
" ten thousand sheep went over in half an
hour."
The herders, swimming over, formed the
dripping flocks into bands, and pushed them
forward, for the point where the play of savages
turns to plundering is easily passed. Lopez
called up El Capitan, and the chief called up
the ten. Two dollars and a half of silver money
went to the chief, and one dollar and a half to
each of his men. The rest of the two hundred
and ninety naked Bannocks, having swum
the wagons over, played on unconcernedly as
boys in the freezing river. Within less than
their allotted twenty-four hours, Lopez was clear
of the reservation. Some stragglers still stuck
to his trail, bent on thieving, and one, profess-
ing himself son of the chief, rode after them
threateningly, demanding a toll, but was ap-
peased with two dollars in silver, and the flock
turned eastward across the tablelands.
RAXCHOS TKJON 249
All this Iliad of adventure leads merely to
the transfer of the flock by sale at Cheyenne —
squalid and inadequate conclusion! No, but
these are the processes by which the green
bough of the man-strain renews itself in the
suffocating growth of trade. Not that you
should have mutton, but that nature should
have men. It was so she put the stamp of effi-
ciency on Seiior Lopez, who is now at Tejon
as major-domo of the cattle. There have been
no sheep on the ranch for some years except
the few fat muttons that ruminate under the
palms, as effectively decorative in their way as
the peacocks trailing hundred-eyed plumage
on the green and golden grass, lineal descend-
ants of the fowl that Jimmy Rosemeyre brought
across the plains at the tail-board of an emi-
grant wagon in '54.
If you ask me at a distance from its mirage-
haunted borders, I should be obliged to depre-
ciate the holding by one man of so large and
profitable a demesne as the Ranchos Tejon, Cas-
tac, La Liebre, Los Alamos y Agua Caliente,
but once inside the territory of the badger I
basely desert from this high position, frankly
250 THE FLOCK
o'lacl of so wide a reach of hills where mists of
grey tradition deepen to romance, where no axe
is laid wantonly to the root of any tree, and no
wild thing gives up its life except in penalty
for depredation. Most glad I am of the blue
lakes of uncropped lupines, of the wild tangle
of the odorous vines, of the unshorn water-
shed ; glad of certain clear spaces where, when
the moon is full and a light wind ruffles all the
leaves, soft-stepping deer troop through the
thickets of the trees.
XIII
THE SHADE OF THE
ARROWS
ft
CHAPTER XIII
THE SHADE OF THE ARROWS
There is a saying of the Paiutes that no man
should go far in the desert who cannot sleep
in the shade of his arrows, but one must know
the desert as well as Paiutes to understand it.
In all that country east and south from Wln-
nedumah, moon-white and misty blue, burnt
red and fading ochre, naked to the sky, it is
possible for a man to travel far without suffer-
ing much if only he keeps his head in cover;
two hands' breadth of shadow between him and
254 THE FLOCK
the smiting sun or the hot, staring moon. So
if he has a good quiver full of feathered arrows,
reedy shafts with the blood drain smoothly cut,
winged with three slips of eagle feathers, he
sticks them in the sand by their points, cloudy
points of obsidian flaked at the edges, and lies
down with his head in the shadow. This much
is mere hunter's
craft, but the
saying goes
deeper.
When Indian
George had shot
Poco Bill, who
had " coyoted "
his children and
caused them to die, — for Bill was a " coyote
doctor " who bore grudges against the cam-
poodie, — so that when, by reason of his evil
medicine-making, four of George's children
had been buried with beads and burnings of
baskets, to save the other two George shot
him, and when I had offered to go his bail,
because it is always perfectly safe to go bail
for an Indian, and because I would have be-
THE SHADE OF THE ARROWS 255
haved as George behaved if I liad believed as
he beheved, Indian George for a thank-offering
brought me treasures of the lore of his clan,
and explained, among other things, that saying
about the shade of the arrows.
Now, when a man goes from his own hunt-
ing-ground, which is the forty or fifty mile ra-
dius from his wickiup, into the big wilderness,
it is to meet perils of many things, against
which, if he carries it not in himself, there is
no defense ; against death and perversions and
terrors of madness, the shade of his arrows.
And when it comes to formulatins: the sense
of man's relations to all outdoors, depend upon
it the Indians have been before you.
There is no predicating what the life of the
Wild does to a man until you know what
arrows he interposes between himself and its
influences. There is much in the nature of the
business that brings him to it, modifying the
play of the wilderness on man ; cowboy shep-
herds and forest rangers, whose work is serv-
ice and concerned with the moods of the land,
reacting from it not in the same case as the
solitary prospector, the pocket hunter, the her-
256 THE FLOCK
mit, the merely hired herder. Every year when
the cattle are driven up from the ranches to
the mountain meadows, the men return from
that venture handsomer, notwithstandinfj the
tan and the three weeks' beard, than when they
set out upon it; and in the beginning of the
forestry service, when one and another of the
villagers had a try at it before the work sorted
them and selected, one could see how in a sea-
son it cleared the eyes and tightened the slack
corners of the mouth. Though they had not
before been tolerable, at the end of that time
they would be worth talking to.
But over the faces of the men whose life is
out of doors, yet to whom the surface of the
earth is merely the distance between places,
comes the curious expression which is chiefly
the want of all expressiveness. They are wise
only in the most obvious, the number of hours
between water-holes, the forkings of the trail,
the points for replenishing supplies; but of all
that vitalizes, fructifies, empty, empty! It is as
if one saw the tawny land above them couched,
lion-natured, lapping, lapping, — it is common
to say in the vernacular of these detached indi-
THE SHADE OE TUK ARROWS 257
viduals that they are "cracked," which is a way
of intimating that all the sap of human nature
has leaked out of them.
These little towns of Inyo sit, as it were, at
the gates of the Wild, where seeing men go in
and out, going all very much of a sameness,
and returning sorted and stamped with the
sign of the wilderness ; it appears that chiefest
of the arrows of protection is a sense of natural
beauty. Those who cannot answer to the stim-
ulus of color and form and atmosphere and
suo^g^estions of tenderness in the vales and
moving strength of mountains, are so much at
the mercy of mere bigness and blind power and
terrible isolation that it seems all graces wither
and die in them. JNIen of this stamp are curi-
ously prone to stop the vacancies of nature
with strong drink, as if somehow they missed
the prick of growing and productive fancy.
Almost any day you might see one such as
this shouldering the door-posts of the Last
Chance saloon, or drooped above the bar of the
Lone Pine.
But shepherding being a responsible em-
ployment, it is evident that if men so unde-
258 THE FLOCK
fended went about it they would soon be
weeded out by its natural demands. Be sure,
then, that the vacant type will not often be
found about sheep camps, except it be an occa-
sional hired herder related to his work by
necessity. Every shepherd will have something
worth while in him, though when you talk to-
gether, since one of you speaks a tongue not
his own, it does not follow that you may draw
it out. Besides it really is not exigent to a
sense of natural beauty to be able to talk about
it. As if without loquaciousness it were impos-
sible for a man's food to nourish him, or medi-
cine do him good. When one premises an
appreciation of the aspect of the land beyond
the question of its service, it is not invariably
because the shepherd has said so, but because
he exhibits its natural reactions. Should he
lack the chiefest arrow, then the Wild sucks
out of him, along with the habit of ready
speech, most of the fitnesses for social living.
Ouickliest you get at the evidence of it by ob-
serving if the man has no shyness in his soul,
but only in h.is demeanor; whether he exhibits
toward you the avoidance of the rabbit, or with
THIC SHADl-: OF THE ARROWS 259
an untroubled bearing eludes you in his thought.
I am convinced, though, that it is not entirely
the inconsequence of other peojDle's affairs that
clips the speech of the outliers, but the faculty
of knowing with the fewest possible hints what
the other is driving at. Two Indians, two shep-
herds, understand each other as readily as coy-
otes when they cut out lambs from the flock ;
so, also, my friend and I ; but I never know
what a sheepherder is thinking about unless
I ask him, and not always then.
Most frequently he is not thinking of his
troubles, for the lesson most completely learned
by the outlier is the naturalness of disaster. It
is bea^innino- to be believed bv a hill-subduino-
river-taming people that trouble also is amen-
able to the hand of man. But the outlier does
not so understand it. He begins by finding
the weather beyond his province, and ends by
determining death and catastrophe, the shud-
dering avalanche, the cloudburst, the pestilence,
so much too big for him as not to be worth
fretting about. As well disturb one's self at the
recurrent flux of nig-ht and day. If the waters
of a dry creek arise in the night, being vexed
26o THE FLOCK
at their source by furious rains, as they did in
Tecuya, and wipe out three or four hundred of
a flock, if they are scourged by the hot dust-
bHnd winds past the herder's power to gather
them up, being a Frenchman he might be seen
to weep, but is not embittered, and begins again.
And when you ask him how he fares, will not
remember to mention such as this without
being asked.
It is said by the casual excursionist into the
outdoor life, and said so often that most be-
lieve it, that it destroys caste by obliterating
the differences of men ; but in fact the wilder-
ness fixes it by rendering their distinctions
natural. For the Wild has not much power to
suo:a:est the human relation. Social ima^'inino-s
are the product of the house-habit and social
use. Much of our interest in other humans
arises in the community-bred necessity of ef-
fecting an adjustment toward them, and to
adjust successfully, needing to know whence
they are derived and how related to other men.
P>ut the life of Outdoors rendering such ad-
justments superfluous, it is possible to meet
THK SHADE OF T1I1<: ARROWS 261
another outlier without prefiguring any relation
toward him, and therefore without curiosity.
There is something more than poetry — I do
not know just what it is, but certainly not
poetry — in the acknowledgment of the power
of the Wild to effect a social divorcement
without sensible dislocation, though one be-
comes aware of it only on returning to close
communities to discover a numbness in the
faculty of quick and multifarious social adjust-
ments. Much of coldness, shyness, dullness,
pride, imputed to those newly drawn from the
wilderness is in fact sheer inability to enter-
tain relations to incalculable numbers of folk.
The relations of the outlier to all other men
are of as much simplicity as of one wild species
to another; liaisons, conspiracies, feuds they
keep locked within their order.
Once when I had a meal with a herder of
Soldumbehry's, I had left my cup with him by
inadvertence, a cheap, collapsible cup which
I was used to carry on the range, and thought
not worth going back for. The herder put
up the cup in his cayaques ; and drifted along
■ the foothills out of my range. Three months
S
262 THE FLOCK
later, not having met with me and about to
pass through the mountains to the east side, he
gave the cup to his brother who held a bunch
of wethers fattening for the local market. This
one kept it until, at the beginning of the fall
returning, he passed it to a herder of Louis
Olcese, a scared, bushy-bearded man, like an
owl looking out of the rabbit-brush, traveling
my way. By the ford of Oak Creek he trans-
ferred the cup to his " boss." Him I met on
the county road trundling south in his supply
wagon. The boss dug up a roll of bedding,
untied it, unwrapped a blue denim blouse, un-
folded a red bandanna handkerchief, and with
this account of it, handed me up my cup. It
was worth perhaps a quarter, and any one of
these men would have stolen feed from his
own brother; but they touched society at no
points not affected by sheep. And when you
think of it, no one ever heard of a sheepherder
" shooting up the town."
Nothing contributes more to the sense of hu-
man inconsequence than the unhoused nights
of shepherding. In the man-infested places
THE SHADE OV THE ARROWS 263
the cessation of laborious noises, the subdued
hum of domesticity, give a sense of pause, a
hint of dominance, as if we had called uj) the
night in the manner of a perfect servant with
sleep upon her arm. Ikit in the Wild the
night moves forward at an impulse flowing
from unknowable control. Darkness comes
out of the ground and wells up to the caiion
rims, light still diffusing through the uj^per
sky, a world of light beyond our world. Few
things beside man suffer a check in their
affairs. The wind treads about the forest litter
on errands of its own ; you hear it but the
more plainly as if blackness were a little less
resistant to sound. The roar of the stream
rises; even by the gibbous moon it finds the
lowest o-round. Plants orive off insistent odors,
have all their power to poison, prick, and tear.
A match struck at any hour of the night shows
you the little ants running up and down the
pine-boles at the head of vour bed regardless
of the dark, for the night is not an occasion,
merely an incident.
Moonlight approaching picks out certain
high patches of snow, filtering through unsus-
264 THE FLOCK
pected yawnings of the peaks. Among the
high close pinnacles it halts and fumbles, glints
like a hard bright jewel along the pillared rocks.
At moonrise the shadows of the hills are in-
conceivably deep, the shade of the pine-trees
blacker than the pines. The lakes glimmer
palely between them with the pellucid black-
ness of volcanic glass, reflecting the half-lighted
steep, the hollow firmament of stars. Over
the rim of them one seems to plunge into the
clear obscure of space. By like imperceptible
lapses, night clarifies to day. Blackness with-
drawing from the sky is reabsorbed by^ the
mountains which show darkling for a time,
revealing slow contours as the shadows sink
in and in. They collect in lakes and pools in
the troughs of the canons and are gathered to
the pines.
The appreciation of this large process, going
on independently of the convenience and the
powers of man, impinges on the dullest sense,
provided only it has a little window where
the knowledge of beauty may come in. Its
ultimate function is to laj) the outlier in an
isolation like to that which separates brute
THE SHADE OE THE ARROWS 265
species from brute species. It is aj3})reciably of
a greater degree in those who sleep always in
the open than in the hill frequenters who roof
themselves o' nights. You come to the camp
of an outlier and are welcome to his food and
his fire, but are no nearer to him than a bird
and a squirrel grow akin by hopping on the
same bough. He accepts you not because you
are on the same footing, but because you are
so essentially differentiated there is no use
talking about it.
" And do you," inquires the community-
bred, " 00 about alone, unhurt and unoffended
in the Wild ? " What else.'' The divination of
natural caste is extraordinarily swift and keen
in the outlier, keen as the weather sense in
cattle. Their women-folk, being house-inhab-
iting, might assume a groundless intimacy,
premise a community of interests when neces-
sarily barred from whole blocks of your ex-
perience, even annoy by a baseless conceit of
advantage, but cowboys and shepherds, trap-
pers and forest rangers, make no such mis-
takes.
It is true that one carries that in one's belt
266 THE FLOCK
to prevent offense at a dozen yards ; such as
this are the teeth and claws which every
inhabitant of the Wild has a right to, and on
the mere evidence of carrying about, avoids
the necessity of using. But the real arrow of
defense is the preoccupation of the motive, the
natural and ineradicable difference of kind.
It is not in fact the dread of beasts nor the
fear of man that causes one to go softly in
the Wild, but the assault it makes on the
spirit. Knowing all that the land does to
humans, one would go fearsomely except that
the chiefest of its operations is to rob one
finally of all fear, — and besides, I have ahvays
had arrows enough.
4
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