Chapter V: Part 5

Well, the next day I was out in the country again, this time in a pecan grove, with tall seed-bearing weeds standing by the acre under the tall, leafless trees (a paradise for sparrows), when I heard a chickadee whistling his four notes in the distance. “How closely his music resembles that of his relative as we hear it in Florida,” I said to myself. And this reflection set me asking, “Where is that odd little titmouse, the verdin, that was said to be common about San Antonio at all seasons?” And then, like a flash, came the answer: “Why, man, that was a verdin you saw yesterday, out in the chaparral, and mistook for a warbler.” And so it turned out. Red shoulder-strap and all, everything suited. The verdin, by the by, is a distinctively Southwestern species, not _Parus_, but _Auriparus_. My bird had been a female, I suppose, showing less yellow than her mate would have done. Perhaps if I had seen him instead of her, I should not have been so befooled.

No sooner was the puzzle thus satisfactorily solved, than I began to meditate, with something less of satisfaction, upon the letter I had written the evening before. I thought, too, of the many more or less foolish letters that I had myself received (and sometimes smiled at, I fear) in the past twenty years, letters in which eager searchers after ornithological knowledge had confided to me marvelous accounts of the wonders they had seen afield, and by an unhappy fate could find no description of when they returned to the study. Not many of these correspondents, as well as I could now remember, had ever mistaken a titmouse for a warbler! I must dispatch a postscript to my letter by the earliest mail. And so I did, ostensibly, of course, to save my friend the trouble of a reply, but really to prove to her that, though I was capable of blundering, I was also capable of a second thought.

And now, having made my confession, I am bound to add that some who may laugh at me would possibly have been little wiser than I, had they stood in my shoes; for the verdin does not look the least in the world like anything that goes by the name of titmouse or chickadee up in our Northern country. I hope to see more of it, and especially to hear its song, which is said to be of surprising volume.

Really (and this is why I have told this not very exciting tale at such length), it is the chief delight of bird-gazing in a strange country that one has to begin, as it were, all one’s studies over again; as I have seen a professor of botany in similar circumstances fingering the leaves of the manual like the veriest schoolboy, as for the time being he was. It is not the proudest way of renewing one’s youth, but it will answer. And conditions being as they are, nothing else will answer.

Such is my present case here in Texas. Even now, in the dead of winter, with the number of species greatly reduced, the novelties seen in one walk are so many that the man who uses no gun, and so can take no specimens home with him for inspection, is often put to his trumps when he comes to run over his day’s notes. Though he may have done his best, he is certain to have overlooked or forgotten some detail which, with the book before him, turns out to be all important. What a pity he did not note with more exactness the proportion of white on the tail feathers, or the position of a certain black spot on the side of the head! He must go out again, and--if he is fortunate enough to find the bird--secure a stricter and more intelligent observation. It is plaguing fun, but it is fun, nevertheless, and good practice, besides; and withal, it leaves work for to-morrow.

It must be admitted, moreover, if the truth is to be told,--and it is sometimes better to tell it,--that no amount of observation in the field will be likely, in a month or two, at any rate, to settle all the nice questions that confront the student in a new region in these latter days; especially if the region happens to be, like this about San Antonio, one in which Eastern and Western forms of the same species are to be found overlapping each other. It was very well for Emerson to speak, poetically, of naming all the birds without a gun. He lived before the day of trinomials; or if that be not quite true, before our younger brood of ambitious closet ornithologists had set themselves so zealously at the work of dividing and subdividing. Time was when a song sparrow was a song sparrow, and there was an end of it. Now to call a bird by that name is only the beginning of sorrows. What kind of song sparrow is it? My Western handbook enumerates about fifteen sub-species, and the differences, I suspect, are many of them almost too fine for opera-glass determination. For what I know, a microscope might be more to the purpose.

The man who refuses a gun must accept the limitations that go with that refusal. Time and repeated observation will do much; a good ear will help--in some cases it will do the larger half of the work; but he must not expect to accomplish with a glass and patience exactly what another man accomplishes with powder and shot and a pair of dividers. In the study of ornithology, as elsewhere, there are diversities of operations, and possibly not the same spirit.

If I cannot be certain whether the vesper sparrows I saw to-day were light-colored enough to pass for _Poœcetes gramineus confinis_, or were probably nothing but plain _Poœcetes gramineus_, I must put up with my ignorance, distressing as it is. Possibly, if I were to see species and sub-species side by side, even in the field, I could tell them apart; possibly I could not. Whether their songs differ, is a point concerning which my book, after the manner of books, has nothing to offer; and as the birds are now dumb, there is nothing for me to do but to call them vesper sparrows, and await developments.

And some things can be settled, even in Texas, with no weapon but a field-glass. I know, for example, that I have to-day seen Mexican goldfinches, and Arctic towhees, and red-shafted flickers. That is more than half a loaf, by a good deal, and several times better than no bread.

LUCK ON THE PRAIRIE

A well-groomed hobby will carry its rider comfortably over many a slough.

I was on my way westward to El Paso, and knowing that the train was due there before daylight, I left my berth early, and had gone out upon the porch of the observation car to catch a bite of fresh air and enjoy the first faint flushes of the dawn, when a train-hand, passing in the semi-darkness, informed me that the wreck of a freight train was on the track in front of us, and that we should probably not be able to move for eight or nine hours. I had noticed that we were standing still upon a “siding,” but such halts are not infrequent on a single-track road, and having my mind upon pleasanter themes, I had passed the circumstance by without further thought.

The news of our trouble spread, as one passenger after another made his unhandsome, half-civilized appearance from behind the curtains, and though we proved to be a pretty philosophical company, as transcontinental travelers have need to be, the general run of comment was not hilarious.

A turn outside, as it grew lighter, showed that we were at a station called San Elizario (a pleasing name, surely), some three thousand two hundred feet above sea-level. The westerly breeze was a refreshment, and three or four ranges of jagged mountains glorified the horizon. If we must be delayed, the Fates had chosen a favorable place for us.

I, for one, soon began to feel reconciled to the turn affairs had taken, and went back to the car for an opera-glass. It must be a dull day in Texas when a tender-footed bird-gazer cannot find at least one novelty, and till the “first call for breakfast” I would be out trying my luck.

An adobe building, windowless and unoccupied, stood not far off, and near it was a cottonwood tree, still holding, in spite of all those Texas winds, part of its last season’s crop of dry leaves. I walked in that direction, and at the moment three birds, with musical, goldfinch-like twitters, flew into the tree. A glance showed them to be not goldfinches, but small birds of the purple finch group, very bright and rosy (the two males), and thickly streaked underneath. “The house finch!” I exclaimed.

This is a Western beauty, greatly beloved for its color, its music, and its engaging familiarity, by all to whom it is a neighbor. I had read of its charms, and had freshly in mind an enthusiastic eulogy of it by an old friend, now a resident of Colorado, whom I had chanced to fall in with a fortnight before in a railway car. With those three lovely creatures talking to me, I felt that the day was saved.

A Say’s phœbe was near by, in a pear orchard (for the piece of prairie land on which we so unexpectedly found ourselves was under irrigation), and as I had met it first only forty-eight hours before--at Del Rio--I was glad to see more of its very demure and pretty habits, especially of its clever trick of hovering at considerable length just over the grass. The rather bright buff of its under-parts is one of its striking characteristics, and now, when I caught sight of it in the distance, I had for a moment thoughts of some unfamiliar kind of oriole.

There was barely time to pay my respects to the phœbe before a flash of blue wings made me aware of something more interesting still, a bevy of bluebirds. It would be good fortune, surely, if they should turn out to be of one of the several Western forms that I had never seen. I drew near, therefore, with all carefulness, and needed but one look to assure myself that such was indeed the case. Their backs were not blue, but of a chestnut shade. The blue of the wings, moreover, was not quite the same as that of our common Eastern _Sialia_.

Whatever they were, the color of the backs would probably be enough to name them, and I returned to the car for breakfast and, first of all, to make sure of my new birds’ identity. A consultation of the handbook showed it to be reasonably certain that they were of the sub-species _Sialia mexicana bairdi_, the chestnut-backed bluebird; but I had failed to observe one important mark: the throat should have been “purplish blue.” I wished very much to see them again, but they had disappeared. Doubtless they were migrants or stragglers, and by this time were far away. A pity I had not been more painstaking while I had the opportunity. The one safe rule is to note everything, though it is a rule more easily laid down than lived up to, to be sure, especially in a new place, with many distractions. Anyhow, the birds must be of the chestnut-backed sub-species, I reassured myself, for the sufficient reason that it was impossible, here in western Texas, that they should be anything else.

Allaying my scruples thus, I started across a field toward a farmhouse, and on the way noticed a crow flying over. It was the first one I had seen since reaching San Antonio,--the chaparral country not favoring birds of the crow-jay tribe,[11]--and I remarked it with pleasure. And then, remembering something I had lately read of Arizona, I thought, “But is it a crow, after all? Isn’t it one of the white-necked ravens that are set down as so common and familiar in this part of the world?” And, in fact, it was; for the next moment it began calling in a voice that put the possibility of its being a common American crow, the only one that could possibly be met with in all this region, quite out of the account. Another new bird! The third within half an hour! Surely this was better than getting into El Paso on schedule time. Let El Paso wait. It would probably last the day out.

But the story was not yet done, for after a little the meadow larks, of which there were many in the fields (with large flocks of horned larks, also), began singing. I was disappointed in the song, of the beauty of which I had formed the most exalted expectations, but consoled myself with believing that the birds were not Western meadow larks proper, but the Texan sub-species; otherwise I must conclude that their voices were still somewhat winter-bound, or at least, not yet keyed up to concert pitch.

A sparrow hawk beside the farmhouse before mentioned allowed me to stand almost under his low tree before he took wing, and when at last he did so I had a feeling that he was rather surprisingly long. I thought nothing more of the matter at the moment, but later, discovering by a reference to the handbook that a variety of _Falco sparverius_, somewhat larger and with a longer tail, had been described from this region, I concluded it probable, not to say certain, that my impression had been correct, and that the bird was not my old acquaintance of the East, but _Falco sparverius deserticola_. That would make the new birds of the morning four instead of three.

All this while, it must be understood, there was always the possibility that the train might start at any moment, no positive information upon that point being obtainable, so that I could move about only within a narrowly limited area. For a man thus tethered I was doing pretty well, whatever my unornithological fellow-travelers might think of my peculiar movements and attitudes. And to increase my enthusiasm, as I turned to go back to the train for dinner, in crossing an irrigation ditch (now dry), bordered with a dense thicket of low shrubs, I caught the tinkle of junco voices and presently a glimpse of white tail feathers. Now, then, since luck was the order of the day, it was as likely as not that these were not simple _Junco hyemalis_ such as I had found at San Antonio, but one of several Western kinds that might, for aught I was aware, be looked for hereabout.

And so it proved. The birds were amazingly shy and secretive, but with patience I had three or four of them under my glass one after another; and they were noticeably different from our Eastern junco, and belonged, as the book’s description made clear, to the variety _Junco hyemalis connectens_, the intermediate junco, so (not very poetically) called.

I went to dinner with an excellent appetite, and afterward, the delay of the train still continuing, though with rumors that its end was near, I took one more turn in the field, and this time happened upon still another stranger, the handsomest of the day, so wonderfully handsome, though “handsome” is too cheap a word, that a man would have to go far to beat it--an Arizona _Pyrrhuloxia_; a bird--related to the cardinal grosbeak group--having no representative in the East. It would be a shame to attempt a description of it here at the end of a hurried sketch, but it made a glorious sixth in my list of the day’s findings. I shall see more of it, I trust, when I reach the territory to which it more distinctively belongs.

One other piece of good fortune I must not fail to chronicle, though I have omitted to do so in its proper place. Late in the forenoon, after I had given the bluebirds up for lost, I discovered them sitting, the six together, a lovely company, among the leaves of a cottonwood tree, as if they had taken shelter from the wind; and the book’s description was borne out: their throats were “purplish blue.”

The nine hours--for so long the embargo lasted--passed all too soon. If I could have had two or three hours of free wandering, who knows what other bright names I might have brought back? I went so far, indeed, as to inquire of the postmaster and variety storekeeper--a genial, smiling German--whether there was any place in the neighborhood where a stranger could be put up for the night; but he thought not, and advised me, not at all inhospitably, to stick to the train. And possibly, after all, I had found more rather than less for being compelled to beat a small space over again and again, instead of ranging farther afield. At all events, I had discovered a new use for ornithological enthusiasm, and I might almost add for railway accidents. I do not expect to find many birdier places, no matter where my wanderings take me, than that piece of dry, winter-bleached prairie about San Elizario.

OVER THE BORDER

On my first morning at El Paso, where, by good luck, as already explained, I arrived nine or ten hours behind time, I made an early start for Juarez, the Mexican city on the opposite bank of the Rio Grande. As I waited for the car at the corner of the street, a rosy house finch stood on the top of a telegraph pole overhead, singing ecstatically. The pretty creature, it is evident, is very much at home in this bustling city, at least in winter, for I was hardly in my room on the afternoon of my arrival before I heard its warble, and looking out of the window beheld the bird perched upon the eaves of a building across the way, where more than once since then I have heard and seen it. I am sorry to add that the English sparrow, its most unworthy rival, is here also, though for the moment in small numbers.

When the car came along, it proved to be an open one.

“A rather cold morning for open cars,” I said to the youthful conductor.

“Oh, we run open cars all winter,” he answered. “But I suppose we don’t mind the cold so much,” he continued, emphasizing the pronoun, “because we are out of doors all the time.”

A Northern tenderfoot might naturally be less inured to frigidity, he seemed to imply; but I remarked that he wore the heaviest of overcoats with the collar up. Warm days (much like New England June), cool nights, clear skies, constant winds, dryness and dust--such is the January climate of El Paso, if my four days have given me a fair impression of its quality.

Presently we crossed a short bridge.

“Was that the river?” I asked my seatmate, a minute afterward, a sudden suspicion coming over me, though it seemed so absurd that I was half ashamed to betray it.

“Yes, sir; that was the Rio Grande. You’re in Mexico now,” he answered.

Yes, and that must have been the Mexican Custom House officer whom I had seen step out of the door of a small building on the southern bank of the river and salute our conductor so politely. None of us looked like smugglers, I suppose. At all events, the car was not “held up,” as happened at the other end of the bridge, a day or two later, while two rather boisterous young fellows on the rear seat made themselves merry over the attempt of Uncle Sam’s official representative to collect a duty. International travel, even in an electric street-car, is liable to complications.

As for the river, it was practically dry. Pedestrians were crossing it--to save toll--on a few small stepping-stones at a point where the current could not have been ten feet wide nor more than half of ten inches deep. My seatmate explained that so much water was drawn off above this point for irrigation purposes that the river had little left for its own use; and in fact, more than once afterward I saw its bed absolutely dry, so that even the stepping-stones had for the day gone out of business. Yet it is a real _rio grande_, for all that, and the life of a long, long strip of Texas.

Drought is the mark of this country. A friendly citizen (of whom, in my ignorance, I had inquired about “suburban trains”!) warned me earnestly against wandering far out of the town. If some Mexican did not kill me “for the sake of the clothes I had on” (an ignoble death, surely), I might get lost (an easy matter, by my adviser’s tell), in which event, if nothing more serious happened to me, I should infallibly perish of thirst.

The car took me through the compact little _ciudad_ (a five-minute passage, perhaps), and I struck out for the country, along the line of the Mexican Central Railroad, in the direction of the mountains, heading my course for a cemetery out on the slope, in the midst of the chaparral. White-necked ravens were foraging beside the track, as little disturbed by human approach as so many English sparrows might have been. “How soon the strange becomes familiar!” I thought. I had never seen a white-necked raven (there is no whiteness visible,[12] the bird being a very imp of darkness to look at it) till less than twenty-four hours ago, and already I was passing it with something like indifference. I was far from indifferent, however, two afternoons later, when for the first time I watched a flock of several hundred soaring in mazy circles high overhead, after the manner of buzzards or sea-gulls.

No other birds showed themselves till I drew near the cemetery gate, when suddenly the bushes just in front, straight between me and the sun, were alive with sparrows. My eyes, dazzled as they were by the sunshine, caught sight of one lark bunting as the flock took wing. I must see more of it,--it was my first one,--and started eagerly in pursuit. But the creatures were timid beyond all calculation, and though I pursued them with cautious haste for some distance, I could never come up with them. Wherever I looked, there was nothing but white-crowned sparrows; handsome birds, the sight of which is almost an event in Massachusetts, but so abundant in Texas at this time of the year--as Lincoln finches are, also--that I have begun to turn away from them as almost a nuisance. It becomes vexatious to a man in search of novelties when even an old favorite keeps itself too persistently under his glass. As the proverb has it, there is reason in all things.

While I was beating the chaparral over, still in search of those missing white wing-patches, I noticed a funeral procession coming from the city. Heading the cortege was what in a Massachusetts town would be called a “depot carriage.” It served the purpose of a hearse, I suppose, and in it sat two men bareheaded. It seemed a neighborly and Christian act to accompany a brother mortal to the grave in this fraternal manner. The second carriage was an open buggy, drawn by a white horse.

These things I took note of while the procession was still a long way off (a military band, still farther away, at the barracks, no doubt, was playing a march), and meantime I went up to the cemetery fence and looked over. The monuments were mostly, if not wholly, wooden crosses, with the ordinary run of affectionate epitaphs. A man, who appeared to be the keeper of the place, came out of the one house near at hand, and asked me something in Spanish, to which I replied in English. We were unable to communicate with each other till finally I said, “_No sabe._” It was not precisely what I intended to tell him; but it was all one. He saw for himself that I spoke no Spanish, and with that left me to myself.

I returned to El Paso on foot, and as I reached the northern end of the bridge, walking, as it happened, on the far side of the road, with my overcoat on my arm, as careless as could be, I was hailed by an officer in uniform. I halted, and he approached. Then he waited. It was my place to speak first, as it seemed, and I began:

“Do you wish to inspect me?”

“Well, what did you buy in Mexico?” he asked.

“A postal-card, and mailed it.”

“Was that all you bought?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

The souvenir postal-card industry, though comparatively infantile, is not “protected,” it appears, although, if I had brought the five-cents’ worth away with me, I might, for aught I positively know, have been called upon for duty. The rights of American laboring men must by all means be looked after. To think what ruin might befall this great republic if its people, with all the rest of their freedom, should in some fit of madness insist upon the freedom to buy and sell!

That was three days ago. Since then I have been to Juarez twice, pushing a little farther each time into the country southward. On both visits I found lark buntings in plenty. They move about--and sit about--in peculiarly dense flocks. One such, that I saw this morning, might have numbered a thousand birds. If disturbed, they rise in a cloud, and on coming to rest again every one seems to desire a perch at the very tip of a bush. As they must all alight in the same one or two bunches of scrub, however, though there are hundreds of others exactly like them all about, there are by no means top seats enough to go round, and there is a deal of preliminary hovering, accompanied by a grand confusion of formless twittering, during which--the white patches of the quivering wings and outspread tails showing through--the spectacle is most animated and pleasing.

As for the city itself, it is squalid, but well worth a visit; having so strange and other-worldish a look that one seems to have crossed at least an ocean rather than a trickling streamlet. The white church; the little shops, with their curious wares; the game cocks in the street, tethered each by a yard of cord to a peg driven into the ground on the edge of the sidewalk, crowing defiance to each other, and regarded proudly by their owners, who now and then take them up in their arms, caressing them fondly, or shaking one in the face of another, to see the feathers of their necks bristle; the bust of Bonito Juarez in the fenced plaza, the bust itself of a size to adorn a parlor mantel, while the marble pedestal is ten or fifteen feet high and at least ten feet square at the base; the Spanish signboards and placards; best of all, the people themselves, men, women, and children--the children, some of them, half naked, even on a cold, windy forenoon, while the men saunter about, or lean against an adobe wall in the sun, wrapped in thick, bright-colored blankets (I shall think of a Mexican, as long as I live, as leaning against the side of a house)--all these go to make a memorable picture for a Yankee on his travels.

FIRST DAYS IN TUCSON

What is more fickle than New England weather? Nothing, perhaps, or nothing inanimate, unless it be the weather of some Southern winter resort, say in Florida or Arizona.

I reached Tucson in the evening of January 31, a stop at El Paso having saved me from participation in a railroad accident, as a result of which many passengers (nobody knows how many) were burned to death. The first of February was bright and warm; so that in a long forenoon jaunt over the desert a very light overcoat quickly became burdensome. The next morning, therefore, it was left at home.

My course this time was into the valley of the Santa Cruz, where farmers live by irrigation and barley fields are already green. I had crossed the river, pausing on the bridge to enjoy the sight of my first black phœbe,--a handsome, highly presentable fellow with a jet-black waistcoat,--when all at once the dusty road before me was seen to be fast becoming inundated. Beside the fence, wading in mud and water, the owner of the fields, having taken up arms--a long-handled spade--against this sea of troubles, appeared to have been working hard to repair the mischief. At that moment, however, he had given over the attempt in despair and was lifting his boots, first one, then the other, out of the mire and scraping them, rather ineffectually, with the spade.

I ought to have known better, but it is easy to see the comical side of other people’s misfortunes, and I remarked in a cheerful tone:

“Well, well, you seem to have water to burn.”

Thereupon other floodgates were opened, and out poured a stream of language, the greater part of it too “colloquial” for print. The substance of it all was that a Mexican (the opprobrious word being dwelt upon and forcibly qualified) had come in the night and let on the water, without giving him, the farmer, any notice of the unseasonable action. Now the water was all over the road, and all over the yard, and close up to the back door of the house. He had sent for a man to help him.

Seeing nothing better to do, I picked my steps among the dust-bounded streams as best I was able, and passed by on the other side. I had always understood irrigation to be a kind of predictable and controllable rain, but it appeared that, if this were the rule, the rule had exceptions. The sight set me thinking that possibly if the general management of the weather were put into human hands, as the least presumptuous of us are more or less in the habit of wishing were possible, it might still be found difficult to escape an occasional fault of administration. As for my farmer’s emphatic language, I held it excusable. He certainly had provocation, and as the Scripture says, with commendable toleration, there is a time for everything under the sun.

The river valley is narrow, like the river itself, and on the farther side is bounded sharply by steep foothills, behind which are high mountains. I was barely beginning to climb the nearest hill, over its loose covering of small stones, when some bird broke into voice a little above me; one of those peculiar voices, I said to myself, that at a first hearing afford almost no indication as to the size of their owners.

My uncertainty lasted for some minutes, while I made my way cautiously upwards, a step or two at a time. The bird proved to be a small wren,--the rock wren, so called,--said to be “more or less abundant” in this region; “more” rather than “less,” I hope, for I fell in love with the creature immediately.

One of the birds,--for there were two, talking “back and forth,” as we say,--his fit of nervousness over, dropped into a lyrical mood, and regaled me with a very pleasing bit of simple music, all in brief phrases, but with a surprisingly wide range of pitch. Some of the measures had a peculiar vibrant quality suggestive of the finest work of our common Eastern snowbird. But withal, I received the impression that the musician was rather trying his instrument than aiming at a serious performance.

While I stood listening, a bunch of a dozen Mexican house finches, more than half the number in rosy plumage, happened along with the usual chorus of twitters, and alighted in a very peculiar and graceful shrub (_ocotillo_, I am told is its Mexican name), which grows in clusters of a dozen or so of slender, angular stems, leaning away from one another in all directions and covered sparsely with reddish leaves, which look for all the world like the autumnal foliage of the common barberry. The rosy finches, perched upon this group of slanting, wandlike, fountain-like stems,[13] were exceedingly pretty to look at.

All about me stood tall, fluted columns of the giant cactus, fifteen or twenty feet in height, and large enough for telegraph poles. On the day before, my first day in the city, I had turned a field-glass in this direction, and to my surprise had seen the hills covered with verdure. “Why,” said I, noticing what I took for the trunks of trees amid the green, “those hills are forested.” Now I discovered that the greenness was mostly that of the desert-loving creosote bush (a low shrub, noticeable for being thornless, which covers thousands on thousands of acres hereabouts, and just now is putting forth small yellow blossoms), while the boles of trees were nothing but giant cacti.

Among the stones at my feet grew flowers of various unknown sorts, especially a large yellow one, apparently an evening primrose, rising no more than two inches from the ground, with a tuft of leaves at the base of the stem, or rather at the bottom of the calyx. The only flower of them all that I could certainly name was a pretty blue lupine, smaller than our New England species, both in blossom and leaf, but so exactly like it in other respects that for old acquaintance’ sake, though the lupine was never one of my particular favorites, I plucked it for my buttonhole. I believe it is the only natural-looking, familiar-looking wild plant that I have so far seen in this desert country.

The wrens having become silent, and the finches flown away, I descended the hill and took the road running along its base northward. It must lead, I thought, to another road across the valley, and would make a round of my forenoon’s walk. And so it did; but first it brought me to a large building which proved to be St. Mary’s Sanatorium, more commonly known as the Sisters’ Hospital. I had just passed this and turned the corner, facing the town, when all in a moment, so far at least as my perception of events was concerned, the sky was covered with black clouds, and an icy north wind changed the day from summer to winter as in the twinkling of an eye.

No more loitering by the way. I did at once what every other creature was already doing--I hurried. “Now if I only had that overcoat!” I thought; but speed also is an extra garment, and I put it on.

No more loitering, I said; but I did stop once. Halfway across the valley a flock of blackbirds were feeding beside a barn, and I turned into the yard to look at them.

“I want to see what kind of blackbirds these are,” I explained to the man of the house, who came out of the door at that moment.

“Oh, they’re the same kind that is all over the universe,” he answered, smiling.

But his generalization was hasty, as generalizations are apt to be. They were Brewer’s blackbirds--the handsomest of grackles; birds that I had seen for the first time, at Del Rio, only the week before. I did not stay to admire their iridescence, but declining an invitation to ride (it was too cold for that, though the man was just going to harness up, he said), I buttoned another button and hastened on. The two or three persons I met each had something to say about the weather, but nobody stopped for prolonged comment. Short speeches and quick steps, or another crack at the mule, were the order of the day. Even at the South a man will generally hurry a little rather than freeze to death.

Well, the experience was more amusing than uncomfortable, after all, and I reached the hotel door just as rain began falling. Before night snow was mingled with the rain, and the next morning I saw a small boy, his eyes dancing with brightness, making a tiny snow image to stand upon the front-yard fence, while the mountains--that fairly surround the city, as they do the Holy City in the Hebrew psalm--were dazzling white. The mud was beyond belief, the walking laborious; but as I paused now and then for breath or to recover my footing, and saw all that glory about me, I thanked my stars that I was here. I was glad to see that even in this arid zone (_arida zona_, as the Mexicans are supposed to have begun by calling it) it still knew how both to rain and to snow.

“Well, now, this was a surprise, wasn’t it?” I remarked to a German whom I met in the valley road.

“You bet,” he answered; and then, with a smile, he added: “but it won’t last only a couple of days; that’s all.”

His mastery of American idiom recalls what another German farmer said on the same forenoon. He had been living here and in California since ’82, he told me.

“Which place do you like best?” I inquired.

“Oh, Arizona,” he answered, without hesitation. “Things are freer here,” he went on. “In Los Angeles, now, you have to dress up once in a while; but here, if you dress up, or if you don’t dress up, it don’t cut no ice.”

My first man’s confident “couple of days” was a trifle too confident. Twice two days have passed. In that time we have had summer weather (at noon), a pretty hard freeze (at night), and another rain and another snowfall, both heavier than the first.

The winter visitors, of whom there are many, the greater part, alas, ordered here for “lung trouble,” have naturally been put out,--the more recent arrivals among them greatly astonished; they thought they were coming to a dry climate; but the residents proper, if not jubilant, have seemed at least reasonably well contented with the turn of affairs. There has been a general agreement, to be sure (one heard it on all hands), that it was “pretty muddy;” the wayfaring man, though a fool, could not dispute the statement; but so far as the prosperity of Arizona is concerned, there is no probability of an excessive rainfall. The more the better. So much is evident, even to an itinerant ornithologist, who may stand, if you will, for the wayfaring man before mentioned. What is not so clear to his darkened understanding is why the weather, no matter where one goes, should be every season so strangely exceptional, so utterly different from everything that the oldest inhabitant can remember.

MOBBED IN ARIZONA

I have never known a city more orderly seeming, more evidently peaceful and law-abiding than Tucson. Nowhere have I felt safer in wandering about by myself in all sorts of places, whether within the city proper or in the surrounding country. Here is a town, I have said to myself, where the citizen has small need of the policeman. And yet I know a man, most discreet and inoffensive (not to be shame-faced about it, let me admit that I speak of the bird-gazer himself), who a few days ago, for no assignable reason, was violently set upon, or, to speak plainly, mobbed, just outside the city limits.

Tucson, it should be premised, is a thriving, rapidly growing, modern city--though it has an antiquity to boast of, as well--in the midst of a desert. Its own site was originally part of the desert. The nearest large city is Los Angeles, California, five hundred miles distant; the nearest village, from what I hear, must be fifty or sixty miles away. Many roads run out of the town, but only to ranches scattered here and there along the two watercourses, or to mining camps farther off in the mountains. How a city ever came to grow up in a place so isolated, so seemingly destitute of anything like local advantages, is a riddle beyond my reading; but here it is, a city in the desert. North, south, east, or west, you may start where you will and go in what direction you please, and in fifteen minutes you will be out among the creosote bushes and the cacti, with nothing but a world of creosote and cactus--with perhaps a windmill and a roof rising above them somewhere in the distance--between you and the mountain range that bounds the horizon.

Well, this was exactly what I myself did one fine morning a week ago. I walked up the main street of the city, turned to the right, passed the territorial university buildings, and, taking a course northward toward the Santa Catalinas, sauntered carelessly forward, field-glass in hand, to see what might be stirring in the chaparral.

There would not be much, I knew. By daylight, at least, and in the winter season, the desert is not a stirring place. In the tracts where the creosote occupies the ground alone there proved, as usual, to be nothing; but presently I came to a place where two or three kinds of cactus were sprinkled among the creosote bushes, and newly sprung bluish-green grass (I call it grass, provisionally, although, like almost everything else hereabout, it has an unaccustomed look) carpeted or half-carpeted the ground. Here were the almost inevitable two cactus wrens (how overjoyed I was at the unexpected sight of my first one, at San Antonio, only three weeks ago, and how soon they have become an old story!) perched, one here, one there, at the top of branching cactus trees five or six feet high, calling antiphonally, as their habit is, in a coarse, unmusical, wearisome voice--the same churlish phase over and over and over. Nothing but the lonesomeness of the desert, surely, could ever make that grating, repetitive monotony a pleasure-giving sound. What the birds will do in the way of song when their musical season arrives, if it ever does,[14] is more than I know; but, belonging to be so musical a family, they ought to be capable of something better than this, for music, of all gifts, is a thing that runs in the blood. It would be a strange wren that could not express his happiness in some really lyrical manner.

In the same neighborhood, as has happened on several occasions, were a group of five or six sage thrashers. It was in this very place, indeed, that I first formed their acquaintance; and a sorely puzzled novelty-seeker I was on that eventful afternoon. The whole desert had seemed to be devoid of animal existence, I remember, when of a sudden there stood those strange birds on the ground before me. At the first instant they gave me an impression of overgrown titlarks. Then, when I watched them running at full speed over the grass, all at once pulling themselves up and standing erect with a snap of the tail, I said: “Why, they must be thrushes of some sort.” In attitude and action they were almost exactly like so many robins. The only striking characteristic of their plumage was the peculiarly dense streaking of the under-parts.

The mystery was heightened for me by the fact that they maintained an absolute silence. Indeed, although I have seen them many times since then, I have yet to hear them utter the first syllable. For aught I can positively affirm, they may every one be mutes. I chased them about for half an hour, scrutinizing the least detail of their dress, all the while wondering what on earth to call them, till finally it came over me, I could never tell how, that they must be sage thrashers.

“Yes,” I said, “_Oroscoptes!_ I remember that that bird is described as having a short bill.”

It was a true guess; and in a strange country a man makes so many poor guesses that he may reasonably boast a little over every good one. To this day, I am bound to add, the birds, with their short bills, their extraordinary quickness upon their feet, and their upright carriage, have to my eye very little the appearance of thrashers. Perhaps when I hear them sing, my feeling may alter.

There is at least one real thrasher in the desert, however, and usually in the same places that Oroscoptes affects, places such as I have mentioned, where cacti are mingled with the omnipresent creosote. This is Palmer’s thrasher, so called, a grayish-brown bird, with the characteristic thrasher make-up--long bill, long body, and long tail. He is one of the common birds about Tucson, both in the river valley and on the desert, and one of the few that are already in song. Even he, I suspect, is not really letting himself go as yet, but he is in tune daily; not so versatile a performer, seemingly, as our Eastern reddish-brown bird; with much less range of voice, and more given to repeating the same phrase half a dozen times in succession, so that his music has less the air of a strict improvisation; but a genuine thrasher, nevertheless, with a thrasher’s song. As the season progresses he will probably grow more ecstatic, though to hear him now, one would not expect him ever to become so mad a rhapsodist as the crazy bird that we admire, and sometimes smile at, in the Eastern country.

Whether the thrasher was seen on the day I am supposed to be describing, I do not now remember, but in all probability he was, for I never walk far in the desert without seeing or hearing him. If he does not sing, he salutes me with volleys of sharp, whip-snapping whistles in the style of the wood thrush and the robin. Like the wren, he prefers a perch at the top of a cactus. He prefers it, I say; but in truth it is almost Hobson’s choice with him, since the topmost spray of a creosote bush, the only other thing he _could_ perch on, would hardly support his weight. There he stands, at all events, perfectly at his ease among the closely set spines, sharp as the sharpest needles, though how he manages the ticklish feat so adroitly is more than I can imagine.

I may have seen two or three desert sparrows, also; the black-throated sparrow, that is, with some slight variations, imperceptible in the bush, that make him, in the language of science, _Amphispiza bilineata deserticola_; and possibly, though this is somewhat less to be taken for granted, his long-tailed relative, the sage sparrow (_Amphispiza belli nevadensis_), may have teased me by his shyness. Both these birds are said to be famous enliveners of the desert,--though neither of them in their present silent state quite lives up to his reputation,--and will doubtless become prime favorites with me if I remain here long enough really to know them. Where should simple, hearty melodies find appreciation, if not in the desert?

I am slow in coming to the point of my story; and with reason. It is not pleasant to be mobbed; there is nothing to boast of in such an adventure; nothing to flatter one’s sense of personal importance; one is not apt to speak of it _con amore_, as we say. Some things are best slipped over in silence. So I have noticed that men who have served their country in prison will always contrive by one path or another to go round the name of that unpopular institution. But I have begun, and there is nothing for it but to finish.

Well, then, I had walked perhaps a mile and a half beyond the university buildings, which is the same as to say beyond the limits of the town, and found myself approaching a lonely ranch, when a flock of ravens, white-necked ravens, which abound hereabout--“the multitudinous raven,” I have caught myself saying[15]--rose from the scrub not far in advance, with the invariable hoarse chorus of _quark_, _quark_. I thought nothing of it, the sight being so much an every-day matter, till after a little I began to be aware that the whole flock seemed to be concentrating its attention upon my unsuspecting, inoffensive self. There must have been fifty of the big black birds. Round and round they went in circles, just above my head, moving forward as I moved, vociferating every one as he came near, “quark, quark.”

At first I was amused; it was something new and interesting. I recalled the time when I walked miles on miles over the North Carolina mountains in hope of seeing one raven, and here were half a hundred almost within hand’s reach; I chaffed them as they passed, calling them names and quarking back to them in derision. But before very long the novelty of the thing wore off; the persecution grew tiresome. Enough is as good as a feast; and I had had enough. “Quark, quark,” they yelled, all the while settling nearer,--or so I fancied,--till it seemed as if they actually meant violence. They were doing precisely what a flock of crows does to an owl or a hawk: they were mobbing me. “Quark, quark! Hit him, there! Hit him! Pick his eyes out!”

The commotion lasted for at least half a mile. Then the birds wearied of it, and went off about their business. All but one of them, I mean to say. He had no such notion. For ten minutes longer he stayed by. His persistency was devilish. It became almost unbearable. The single voice was more exasperating even than the chorus. If the famous albatross carried on after any such outrageous fashion, I have no stones to throw at the Ancient Mariner. He acted well within his rights. If I had had a crossbow, and had been as good a marksman as he was,--with “his glittering eye,”--there would have been one less raven in Arizona, and no questions asked. If a dead calm had succeeded, so much the better. “Quark, quark!” the black villain cried, wagging his impish head, and swooping low to spit the insult into my ear.

But all things have an end, as leaves have their time to fall, and even a raven’s perseverance will wear out at last. Perhaps the bird grew hungry. At all events he gave over the assault, stillness fell upon the desert, and an innocent foot-passenger went on his way in peace.

And this is how I was mobbed in Arizona. I could never have believed it.

AN IDLE AFTERNOON

I have heard of a man who invariably begins his letters, whether of friendship or business, with a bulletin of the day’s weather: it rains, or it shines; it is cold or warm; and to my way of thinking it is far from certain that the custom is not commendable. It is fair to sender and receiver alike that the mental conditions under which an epistle is written should be understood; and there is no man--or no ordinary man, such as most of us have the happiness to deal with--whose thoughts and language are not more or less colored by those skyey influences the sum of which we designate by the interrogative name of weather. I say “interrogative,” because I assume, although, having no dictionary by me, I cannot verify the assumption, that the word “weather” is only a corruption or variant of the older word “whether;” the thing itself being an entity so variable and doubtful that remarks about it fall naturally, and almost of necessity, into a discussion of probabilities, in other words, of “whether.”

As to the weather here in Tucson, I could fill all my letters with it, and still leave a world of things unsaid. Its fluctuations are so constant that they tend to become monotonous; as Thoreau said of one of his Concord days, that it was so wet you might almost call it dry.

Three or four mornings ago, for example, I started early for a seven-mile tramp across the desert. I wore overcoat and woolen gloves, and needed them. It was so cool, indeed, that I left word for an extra garment to be put into the carriage that was to come out and fetch me back at noon.