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. >"|^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