Chapter VI: Part 6

That same afternoon I walked down into the valley of the Santa Cruz. The sun was blazing, and the heat intense. The few cottonwood trees scattered along the road were still leafless (I had left my umbrella at home--for the last time) and the only shelter to be found was on the northeasterly side of the telegraph poles. I believe I never before complained of such obstructions that they were not big enough; but everything comes round in its turn. My thoughts ran back to the time when a boy of my acquaintance used to trudge homeward from berry-picking excursions on burning July noons. Also I thought of that comfortable Hebrew text about the “shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The man who wrote that might have lived in Arizona. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I stepped into the yard of a little adobe house, and being obliged to walk almost to the door, said to the motherly-looking woman who came forward to see what was wanted, “Excuse me, please, but I only wish to stand a few minutes in the shade of your house.” She looked surprised, as well she might. No doubt she took me for an invalid, as Arizona people say, a “lunger.” Probably, sitting indoors, and used to summer temperature in these parts, she had been thinking of the day as rather cool, not to say wintry. Wouldn’t I come in and sit awhile? She was sure I should be welcome. But I answered no; I only desired to stand a few minutes in the shade. And two or three hours afterward, within five minutes after the sun went down,--though it had been shining in at my west window,--I needed a fire.

Forty-eight hours later we had a snowfall,--the third within ten days,--the whole world white, with “storm rubbers” barely equal to the emergency; and the next morning, the snow having gone, ice was thick in a big tub of water outside my door.

“Cold?” said an Illinois gentleman, with whom I fell into conversation yesterday, “I’ve been here three weeks, and in that time I’ve suffered more from cold than in all my forty years.”

I suspect that he exaggerated. For my own part, I haven’t suffered from cold. It is the occasional heat that makes me fearful of homesickness. Three days like that one afternoon would set me packing. All of which may seem not very important to a chance reader; but unless he is of a hopelessly unimaginative turn he can perhaps conceive how interesting and important it must be to the parties directly concerned, especially if he remembers that this is a winter resort, where weather is the one thing needful.

But what a perfect afternoon we had yesterday!--cool, yet not too cool; and warm, yet not too warm; with a softness and yet a gently bracing, uplifting, pulse-quickening, life-reviving quality in the air; and the sky, too, clear, but not too clear, so that wisps of cloud floated here and there over the bare, steep sides of the Santa Catalinas, giving them beauty. I was out upon the desert in a mood of absolute indolence, contented to walk a mile an hour, and breathe and breathe, and look. At such times it seems hardly too much to say, strange as the words may sound, that I am falling in love with the desert, a desert bounded only by mountains. Already I can believe that men are fascinated by it (the right men), and having once been here cannot long stay away.

Looking and dreaming, the bird-gazer within me pretty well laid asleep, suddenly I heard a strange voice in the air, thin, insect-like, unknown. By the time it had sounded twice the sleeper was wide-awake, with his opera-glass in play. The voice came from yonder thin clump of creosote bushes. Yes, the bird flits into sight--a gnatcatcher; and being a gnatcatcher, with such a note, it must be “the other one,” known as the plumbeous, which I have been looking for ever since my arrival in Tucson. And so it was--a pretty creature with a jaunty black cap. I shall know him henceforth, I hope, even without seeing him. We are fortunate, both of us, I take leave to say, to have made each other’s acquaintance on so ideal an afternoon.

The gnatcatcher disappeared, and the dreamer was just dozing off again, when two large birds were seen to be having a hot encounter, high overhead. This time the field-glass came into requisition. A raven was teasing a red-tailed hawk, with all a raven’s pertinacity and spite. Again and again and again he swooped upon him, while the hawk ducked and turned to avoid the stroke. Why the big fellow, biggest of all our hawks, larger and stronger in every way than the raven, did not face his tormentor and lay him out was a mystery. I confess, I should have been glad to see him do it. Instead, he made off toward the mountains, and after a long chase and much croaking, the raven turned away.

This also had passed out of mind, and I was on my way homeward, barely putting one foot before the other, enjoying the air and the sun,--and the mountains,--when, happening to glance upward, I beheld a grand sight. “That’s the golden eagle,” I said aloud (in the desert a man soon falls into the neighborly habit of talking to himself), and one look through the field-glass proved the words correct. The great bird was in perfect light, sailing in circles, so that his upper parts came every minute into full view as he swung about, the old gold of the head and neck, as well as the contrasted brown and black of the wings, perfectly displayed, with nothing left for guesswork. I was all eyes, and watched him and watched him, admiring especially the firm set of his wings, till he, too, sailed away, not chased, but moving of his own royal will, and dropped at last out of sight behind the rolling desert.

He was my first golden eagle, in some respects one of the noblest of all North American birds. I knew him to be not uncommon in the mountains, and had hoped some day to see him passing, especially when I should be far out on the edge of the foothills; and behold, here he was on my idle afternoon, close at home. Who says that the lame and the lazy are not provided for?

My dreamy saunter was turning out ornithological in spite of myself, and as if the gnatcatcher and the eagle had not done enough to that end, the ubiquitous raven now took a hand at the business. My thoughts were just settling back into vacancy, when the ravens were seen to be commencing their regular afternoon progress to their roosting grounds, wherever those may be, on the other side of the city. A detachment of some scores was already on the move. And presently I observed what was to me a strange and interesting thing, although, for aught I can affirm to the contrary, it may be only an every-day occurrence.

A great part of the birds were playing by twos, one chasing the other, as if engaged in a frolic to which all parties were perfectly accustomed. I had not expected such a pitch of levity on the part of these black-suited, and as I should have thought, rather gloomy-natured scavengers. But they were going to roost, and like children at the hour of bedtime, they were making a lark of it. Perhaps the day’s picking had been uncommonly good; they had been over by a certain cattle-slaughtering establishment; something, at all events, had put them in high spirits, and so Tom was having it out with Dick, and Bob with Harry. To look at them, it seemed as much fun as a pillow-fight, and as I have said, the greater part of the flock were engaged in it.

But the point I started to speak of was not the game itself, but a certain acrobatic feat by which it was accompanied. Again and again, in the course of their doublings and duckings, I saw the birds turn what looked to be a complete sidewise somersault. It may have been an optical illusion; probably it was; but if so, it was absolute. Sure I am that more than once I saw a bird flat on his back in the air (as flat on his back as ever a swimmer was in water), and to all appearance, as I say, he did not turn back, but came up like a flash on the other side. Fact or illusion, clean over or halfway over, it was a clever trick, and I could not wonder that the birds seemed to take pleasure in its repetition. I imagined they were as proud of it as a young gymnast ever was of his newly acquired back handspring. And why not? A man must be extremely well contented with himself, or possess a feeble imagination, not to feel sometimes a twinge of envy at sight of a bird’s superiorities.[16]

And while one flock of ravens were playing “it” in this brilliant fashion, another and larger flock were sailing in mazy circles after the manner of sea-gulls; a fascinating spectacle, to be witnessed here every afternoon by any who will be at the trouble to look up. More than once I have watched hundreds of the birds thus engaged, not all at the same elevation, be it understood, but circle above circle--a kind of Jacob’s ladder--till the top ones were almost at heaven’s gate. It is a good time to be out on the desert when the ravens are going to roost. And what with their soarings and tumblings, I have begun to think that perhaps the big hawk was not such an absolute fool, after all, to decline an aerial combat. The white-necked raven may be only a little larger kind of crow, but he is a wonder on the wing.

SHY LIFE IN THE DESERT

After the desert and the mountains, and some of the longer-desired birds, I have enjoyed few sights in Arizona more than that of two coyotes. Old beaters about the wilds of this Western country will be ready to scoff, I dare say, at so simple a confession. “Two coyotes, indeed! A great sight, that!” So I think I hear them saying. Well, they are welcome to their fun. It is kindly ordered, the world being mostly a dull place, that men shall be mutually amusing, and there is no great harm in being laughed at, provided it be done behind one’s back.

The fact remains, then, as I state it. To me the coyotes were very interesting and unexpected beasts. And the pleasure of my encounter with them was heightened materially (this, too, is a laughable admission; I know it as well as anybody), when I learned that hereabouts, whatever may be true elsewhere, it was to be esteemed a piece of rather extraordinary luck, unlikely to be soon repeated. To all men of science, though they be nothing but amateurs and dabsters, rarity is one of the cardinal virtues of a specimen. My good fortune, be it accounted greater or less, came about in this way.

Six or seven miles across the desert, where the plain comes to an end at the buried Rillito River, and the foothills of the Catalinas begin to rise from the opposite bank, are the adobe ruins (hospital, barracks, and what not) of Old Camp Lowell, a relic of the Apache wars. I had heard of the place (in fact, I had been happy enough to meet a young man who is camping there with his brother), and started early one morning to visit it.

Perhaps it was because of the earliness of the hour, though the sun was well above the horizon; at any rate, I had gone but a short distance before my steps were arrested by the sight of a gray, long-legged, wolfish-looking animal not far ahead. He had seen me first, I think (strange if he had not, so alert as every motion showed him to be), and was already considering his course of action, starting away, then stopping to look back. My glass covered him at once (he was easily within gunshot), and then, following a turn of his head, I saw that he had a companion. The second one had already crossed the trail, and the question between the two seemed to be whether he should come back or the other should follow him. The point was quickly decided; the second one recrossed the trail, and the two ran off among the creosote clumps on the left, and in a few seconds were lost; but the hesitation had given me time to note their color, size, build (especially their long, sharp, collie-shaped noses), and their general appearance and action, all very “doggy.”

This, as I have said, was but a little way beyond the university buildings, and, knowing no better, I assumed the occurrence to be a common one, and spoke of it in a matter-of-fact tone to the campers at the fort. They exclaimed at once that I had been surprisingly fortunate; they themselves, passing their days and nights in the desert, seldom or never saw one of the animals, though they often heard them barking after dark. The circumstantiality of my description, and it may be their politeness,--for they were gentlemen, “baching it” here for the older brother’s health,--made it impossible for them to suggest a doubt as to the identity of the animals; but I had no difficulty in perceiving that if I wished to pass as a man of veracity among ordinary dwellers hereabouts I must not see coyotes too frequently. In point of fact, the very next man to whom I mentioned the circumstance, a man who has lived here for several years, on the rim of the desert, answered promptly: “They weren’t jack rabbits, were they?” He had never seen a coyote in Arizona, he said, though he had seen plenty in Colorado.

As for the big jack rabbits, if I have not seen “plenty” of them (and I cannot truthfully profess so much as that), I have seen a good many. One cannot walk far in the desert, with his eyes ranging, without discovering, to right or left or in advance, a pair of long ears, followed by a black tail, making quick time out of sight. Generally the creatures seem to run by fits and starts (“leaps and bounds and sudden stops” would express it), but the other morning a fellow had evidently been frightened almost out of his five senses by something--not by me--when a long way from home. There were no stops in his schedule. Straight across the desert he bounded, going like an express train--a mile a minute at the very least.

So lively as these large rabbits are (there is a smaller kind that I have not yet seen[17]) they would be as interesting as the much larger coyotes but for their greater commonness. For grace and lightness, as well as speed, their gait is next to flying. All the words in the dictionary could not describe it. I never see one on the move without admiration and an impulse to give him three cheers. Surely, man is a slow coach, and a race-horse is clumsy.

To one who comes this way for the first time in winter, as I have come (and may Heaven save me from ever being here in summer, so long at least as I am in an embodied state!), the desert seems thinly inhabited. Of the scarcity of bird-life upon it I have before spoken; and the reason is obvious: there is little here for birds to feed upon. The smaller quadrupeds, too, are of surprising infrequency. Once in a long while a striped squirrel, as I should call it, with its tail over its back, will be seen squatting beside a hole in the ground, ready to slip into it long before you can get near; and somewhat oftener a gray, rat-tailed, big-eyed squirrel (if it _is_ a squirrel--I have only half seen it) will dart across an open space, tail in air, barely visible before it, too, has ducked into its burrow; but two or three such small fry, with as many jack rabbits, in the course of a half-day tramp, do not go far toward constituting anything to be accounted populousness.

One morning I walked out upon the desert immediately after a snowfall. It would be a favorable time, I thought, to study zoölogical hieroglyphics; and I believe I walked a mile before I saw a single footprint. Think of doing that, or anything like it, in our poor, frost-bitten, winter-killed, over-civilized New England! The tracks would have been a perfect crisscross.

And, notwithstanding all this, footprints or no footprints, the desert is not without its own world of little people. It is a desert only to our dull, provincial, self-absorbed, self-sufficient, narrow-minded, egotistical human apprehension of it. So much ought to be plain as day to the most undiscerning traveler; for if he so much as looks where he steps (lest a snake should bite him), he cannot help seeing that the ground all about is almost as full of holes as a colander. Larger and smaller, the earth is riddled with them. If the diggers of the holes happen to be just now within doors instead of gadding abroad like so many restless tourists, probably their conduct is not without a reason. Possibly they object to cold feet. More likely they have an eye to bodily safety. One thing you may wager upon, homekeepers though they be--the sharpness of their wits.

Whatever would live on this bare, open plain must be as wise as a serpent. The remainder of the text may be omitted as locally inapplicable. The desert-dweller--_Deserticola_, as we name him in zoölogical Latin--must know the times and the seasons, and catch the scent of danger afar off. You will find no trustful innocence in these diggings. If there ever was any, it long ago perished. Everything is shy, and has need to be. “Nature red in tooth and claw” has here its ancestral seat. He that cannot fight must run; and however it may be elsewhere, in the desert the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. In one way or another everything goes armed. It may be set with thorns like the mesquite and the cactus, or it may have an offensive oil like the creosote; it may run like the rabbit, or strike like the rattlesnake. If it can do nothing else, it must hide. And even the strong and the speedy must hide when that which is stronger and speedier heaves in sight. The desert is open to the sky, but its life is not open. Like the currents of the rivers, the current of animal existence runs mostly underground.

A Tucson business man was telling me about the great antiquity of the town: the oldest settlement in the country, I think he called it, with the exception of St. Augustine, Florida.

“But how in the world came a city to grow up here?” I inquired. “I can see no sufficient reason.”

“Well,” said he, as if he could think of nothing else, “the river comes to the surface here, you know.”

He spoke of the Santa Cruz. And it is true. The river comes to the surface; the stretch of watered farms and the brimming irrigation ditches bear witness to the fact; but it does not stay there. I have frequent occasion to go over the four roads that cross it from the city. On the southernmost of these, where Mexican women are always to be seen washing clothes, spreading the garment over a stone and beating it clean with a stick (“mangling,” I should suppose the word ought to be), carriages drive through the stream, while foot-passengers cross by means of stepping-stones; six or eight boulders of the size of a man’s head, perhaps, picked up at random and laid in a row. The next road is furnished with a bridge, though it is hard to see why. The other two (they are all within the distance of a mile) have neither bridge nor stepping-stones, nor need of any. The river bottom, so called, though it is rather roof than bottom, is as dry as the Sahara.

So it is with the Rillito, and, I suppose, with all the rivers of the desert. They are shy creatures. They love not the garish day. Like the saints of old and the capitalists of our own time, they abhor publicity. Water, they think, shouldn’t be too much in sight. With the squirrel and the rabbit, they live mostly in burrows.

Of certain more highly specialized inhabitants of the desert-- rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, tarantulas, and the like--a winter stroller can have little or nothing to relate. They are all here, no doubt, and will disport themselves in their season. No midsummer sun will be too hot for them. For myself, in three weeks’ wandering I have seen one lizard, nothing else. And it, too, was shy, legging it for shelter; running, literally, “like a streak.” That was really all that I saw--a streak of brown over the gray sand. I was neither a road-runner nor a hawk, and for that time the lizard was more scared than hurt.

If this shy life of the desert is happy, as I believe it is, after its manner and according to its measure, we can only admire once more the beneficent effect of use and custom. The safest of us are always in danger. Whether we tread the sands of the desert or the shaded paths of some Garden of Eden, our steps all tend to one end, the one event that happeneth alike to all; and if we, who look before and after, go on our way smiling, why not the humbler and presumably less sensitive people whose homes are under the roots of the creosote bushes?

A NEW ACQUAINTANCE

A student of nature, differing from some less fortunate folk that one meets at wintering places, is never at a loss what to do with his day. In a strange land, at least (the stranger the better), he possesses one of the prime requisites of a contented life: he knows every night what is on his docket for the morrow. His days, so to express it, are all dovetailed together. Tuesday’s work is to finish Monday’s; Wednesday’s is to finish Tuesday’s; and so the weeks run by. What could be simpler, or more conducive to cheerfulness? A day should have a motive, as well as a piece of music or a poem.

I am still at Tucson. Two mornings ago there was but one thing for me to do. I knew it before I rose. I must take the half-past seven horse-car, ride down town as far as Simpson Street, walk thence across the Santa Cruz Valley to the base of Tucson Mountain, and from there follow the narrow road that winds between the foot of the cliffs and the old canal, till I came to a certain bush. The name of this bush I cannot give, not knowing it, but it bears millions of small, fleshy leaves, and, what is more to the present purpose, is covered with thousands, if not millions, of small purple flowers.

I had noticed it for the first time the forenoon before; and I noticed it then because, as I passed, I heard to my great surprise and intense gratification the buzz of a hummingbird’s wings. I was not in the least expecting to see any bird of that sort during my brief winter’s stay in Arizona; and which is better, ornithologically speaking, to find the long expected or the unexpected, is a point that wiser heads than mine may settle. For myself, either happening will do, so it be not too infrequent.

My eyes turned of themselves in the right direction, and there at my elbow was the tiny, emerald-backed, familiar-looking beauty, hovering before the blossoms of this spreading bush. It was only for a second or two. Then for another such period he perched on the slender tip of the nearest mesquite, and then was away on the wings of the wind. I waited for his return, but not long enough, and came back to the city, wondering.

His upper parts, as I say, were green, and he looked at a first glance much like our common ruby-throat of the East. But in the few seconds that my eye followed him--a time too short for catching myself up and making sure even of the little I had seen--I received an impression (it was nothing more) of a black head as well as of a black throat. If the impression was correct, the bird could not be a ruby-throat, and besides, unless my memory was at fault, the ruby-throat was not to be looked for in this longitude. I must see the handbook.

A reference to that authority showed that eight species of hummingbirds had been reported from the Catalina Mountains, but not the ruby-throat. Of the two or three common ones among the eight, the most likely candidate seemed to be the black-chinned, _Trochilus alexandri_, though that bird’s crown is not black. Probably my impression upon that point had been erroneous; so surprised and hurried as I had been, a measure of inexactness was rather to be looked for. At all events, it was impossible to make out how the bird could be any one of the other seven. By the rule of exclusion--a pretty safe rule, I told myself--he ought to be a black-chin.

So the matter rested, not much to my satisfaction, till the next morning. Then, as I have already said, I went immediately after breakfast to stand beside that blossoming bush until the bird should again show himself. If my confidence that he would be there, in that precise spot, no different from thousands of others in all those miles and miles of country, all so exactly alike, beside that particular bush, itself like thousands of others,--if my confidence seems presumptuous, as to many readers I dare say it will, I can only profess that it was based upon no small acquaintance with the ruby-throat’s habit of frequenting day after day the same tree, and even the same twig, as a resting-place, or post of observation. It was not at all unlikely, I reasoned, that the black-chin’s habit would prove to be similar. At any rate, there was no harm in proceeding upon that hypothesis.

I went at once to the place, therefore, took a favorable position with the sun at my back, focused my eight-power glass to a nicety upon the topmost twig of the mesquite bush (quarter seconds might be precious), and waited. As the capable reader has already divined, the bird did not fail me, nor keep me long in suspense. There was a sound of wings, and in another instant the hummer stood on the top spray of the mesquite. And his crown was black, like his throat. He could not be _alexandri_. But before I had time to take in the full awkwardness of my dilemma--since I had already ruled the other seven species out of the account--the bird turned his head to one side, the sun struck him at the right angle, and behold, his gorget had long, flaring wings, like the loose ends of a broad necktie, or, to use the homely comparison which occurred to me at the moment, like a pair of big mutton-chop whiskers, and was no longer black, but of a most exquisite and brilliant shade of violet. The radiant vision shone upon me for an instant; then, at another movement of the head, all was black again, and in another instant the bird was gone.

Now, then, I began to see daylight. The bird, having a ruff, was not of the genus _Trochilus_, and the question was so far simplified, though it would be necessary to consult the book again before it could be settled. Meanwhile, I must by all means have another look at the beauty. Such splendor of color was worth waiting for, though it came only in flashes. And I waited. But though the creature finally returned to the mesquite he persisted in sitting with his back to the sun, and I came away without seeing him again transfigured.

Another reference to the handbook, and I knew him for _Calypte costæ_, the Costa hummingbird. But now mark how one day’s work is linked with another’s. The book informed me that the crown, as well as the gorget and the ruff, was “brilliantly burnished amethyst violet.” I had not seen that, doubtless because the light had not fallen upon the crown at the necessary angle. The detail must nevertheless be verified. Here, then, was my business for to-morrow.

I was late in arriving,--a full hour, at least, behind my appointment,--having walked the whole distance this time, and by a roundabout course; and the hummer was waiting for me. “You are late,” I fancied him saying; but of course that was my “pathetic fallacy.” In the course of my stay he “gave me three sittings,” as my penciled memorandum puts it, and I saw that his forehead and a spot behind the ear were of the same dazzling, indescribably beautiful color as the gorget and ruff. The whole crown I did not see illuminated, but the forehead sufficed.

At one time a ruby-crowned kinglet came and played about in the same bush, and in that comparison he seemed almost a giant. “The hummer is smaller and smaller,” my pencil remarked, “every time I see him.” I might have addressed him as Charles Lamb addressed the shade of Elliston, when he saw that worthy, all his stage trappings removed, seated in Charon’s boat,--“Bless me, how little you look.”

The identification was now complete. I had doubled my list of hummingbirds, having seen but one species in all my previous years, and the next morning I might reasonably have turned my steps elsewhere. But when the hour came round I could think of nothing else I wanted so much to do as to see that hummer again. And I followed my inclination. It was well I did.

We were both prompt. As I drew near I saw the tiny creature perched as usual at the tip of the mesquite. How many times he came and went during the hour that I stayed by him I fail to remember; but on the second or third occasion a verdin happened into the neighborhood. The hummer descended upon him hotly, drove him away in no time, and then, as if in celebration of his triumph, mounted straight into the air till he was like a dot, and came down again almost vertically to his perch. It was a brilliant and lovely display, an ebullition of vital spirits well worth a forenoon of any man’s life to witness. There are city parades, hours in length, with martial music and all manner of bright regalia, that might better be skipped. And a few minutes later, the enemy having returned, the entire performance was repeated, ecstatic flight, vertical drop and all. The verdin’s presence, it appeared, was extremely annoying to the hummer. This place was his. Trespassing was forbidden, and the verdin ought to know it.

Once, watching for another flash of color, I had my glass on the hummer as he sat quiet. Suddenly the verdin began sputtering to himself, after his manner, a little way off. Quick as thought the hummer cocked his head, waited an instant as if to make sure he had heard correctly (it seemed impossible, I suppose, after such a drubbing), and then, like a bullet out of a gun, flew at the persistent intruder. His spirit was wonderful, and being roused to his work, he finished by descending at full speed upon a black phœbe that just then blundered innocently along. The big flycatcher, many times bigger than the hummer,--but so is a man many times bigger than a rifle ball,--did not stand upon the order of his going, but went at once. I did not wonder. The fellow might have driven me away, also, had he taken it into his head to try. He was irresistible. Talk of a strenuous life!

At another time he darted from his perch in a quite unwonted direction, and flew on the line to a palo-verde shrub off on the hillside. The verdin was there, it turned out, down at the very bottom of the bush,--though to my senses he had made no sign,--and must be dislodged forthwith.

Why the hummer offered no objection to the kinglet’s presence is beyond my knowledge. Perhaps he took into account the fact that the kinglet was here only for the winter; for it was impossible not to surmise that the hummer had selected this particular spot for his summer home, and as such meant to hold it against all comers, exercising over it all the rights of sovereignty. Let the verdin and the phœbe go elsewhere.

The phœbe pretty certainly would have gone elsewhere, hummer or no hummer. As to what the verdin will conclude to do, things being as they are, my mind is less clearly made up. He is not so swift as his bullet of a rival, but I fancy him to be a pretty dogged fighter, able to be whipped a good many times without finding it out. Still, as between the two, if I were compelled to wager, I think I should risk my money on the hummingbird.

THE DESERT REJOICES

What was foretold in Judea is fulfilled in Arizona--the desert has blossomed like the rose.

I could hardly believe it, a month ago, when a Tucson business man, who in the kindness of his heart had turned the city upside down, almost, seeking to find a home for a man who was not a consumptive and did not wish to live in a hospital or a pest-house--I could hardly believe it, I repeat, when he said: “Oh, you mustn’t go back to Texas yet. You must stay and see the desert in bloom. After these unusual rains and snowfalls it will soon be all like a flower garden.” “So may it turn out,” I thought; “but time will tell.”

He spoke, according to the privilege of prophets, in the language of hyperbole; for, although his prediction has come true, its fulfillment is more than a little straitened and stingy. The desert has blossomed, but it is like a flower garden only in this respect--that there are flowers in it. They are numbered by millions, indeed; or, rather, they are beyond all thought of numeration; but, as far as the appearance of the place is concerned, it is scarcely more like a flower garden than like a billiard table. A careless traveler--and not so very careless, neither--might tread the blossoms under his feet for miles without seeing so much as one of them. They are desert flowers; vegetable Lilliputians; minute, almost microscopic, for the most part, as if moisture had been doled out to them by the drop or the thimbleful, as indeed it has been; and the few that are larger have in the main a weedy aspect, such as blinds the eye of the ordinary non-observer, to whom, rightly or wrongly, a flower is one thing and a weed another. As for the tiny ones, the overwhelming majority, a blossom that you can see in its place only by getting down on your knees to look for it may be a “flower” to a botanist, but hardly to a plain, unlettered, matter-of-fact citizen.

And still, after the prophetic manner, the prediction has come true. The desert has blossomed abundantly. As it now is, I can imagine that it would be a place of unspeakable interest to a philosophic botanist. He would know, presumably, what I do not, whether these starveling races, existers upon nothing, are to be accounted species by themselves, or only stunted representatives of species that under favoring conditions grow to a more considerable size. To his mind numberless problems would be suggested touching the methods by which plants, sturdy and patient beings, adapt themselves to untoward circumstances and keep themselves alive--so perpetuating the race--upon the chariest of encouragement. He would understand the significance of the prevailing hairiness of desert-inhabiting species, as well as of the all but universal light bluish or dusty color of the foliage; for, saving the yellow-green creosote, there is hardly so much as a bright green leaf from one end of the desert to the other.

The state of my own unphilosophic mind is peculiar, like the circumstances in which it finds itself. It is (or perhaps it would be more honest to say, it ought to be) humiliating, but it has something of the charm of novelty.

I spoke a month ago of my ornithological predicament when, newly arrived in Texas, I found myself surrounded by a quite strange set of birds. I was back in the primer, I think I said. Well, botanically, here in Tucson, I have retrograded a long step farther even than that. If I may say so, my state is pre-primeric. I am not even a primary scholar. I am no scholar at all. My condition is what it was in childhood, when I had never heard of botany. In those days, in what for some reason was known as a grammar school, we studied reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and grammar. One older girl, long since dead (poor child, I can see her now, reciting all by herself), studied “Watts on the Mind!” At the high school we added algebra, geometry, Latin, and Greek. As for “nature study,” neither the name nor the thing was ever mentioned to us. Mr. Burroughs had not yet written, and if Thoreau had written, his books were not yet heard of. Botany and Hebrew were alike absent from our curriculum. For my own part, at any rate, whatever may have been true of my cleverer or more home-favored contemporaries, I neither knew the names of the flowers I saw, nor did I aspire to know them. If I ever thought of such knowledge, I regarded it as permanently beyond my ken. Who was I, that I should be wiser than all my betters? I contented myself with liking the things themselves.

Then, years afterward, I somehow began to “botanize,” as we say, by myself; and from that time to the present, whether at home or abroad, I have always had a “manual” at my elbow or in my trunk. A strange flower must be looked up and set in its place.

But now, in Arizona, all this is done. I have no manual. This carpet of desert plants I walk over almost without curiosity, as I might walk over a flowery carpet in a parlor. Their names are nothing more to me than the jabberings of the Mexicans who pass me on the desert with loads of wood. Sometimes, indeed, I guess at a relationship, as now and then I catch a word of Spanish. This flower, I say, may be a _Myosotis_. But nine chances to one I do not so much as guess. It’s a pretty red flower, or a dainty white blossom, and there’s an end of it. As I said just now, the state of my mind is pre-primeric. I am too ignorant even to ask questions.

A sad case, certainly, but, like sad cases in general, it brings its own partial compensations. I have the more leisure for the birds, and for looking at the mountains. Two months ago it would not have seemed possible, but it has come true; I can sit upon the ground with half a dozen kinds of unknown flowers about me, and gaze upon the Catalinas or the snow-capped Santa Ritas as peacefully or rapturously as if I had never used a manual or a pocket-lens since I was born. Have I been converted, and become as a little child? Possibly; but I anticipate a speedy backsliding when conditions alter.

Yet I perceive that, like the prophet, I am waxing tropical, and using language that requires “interpretation.” There are at least three kinds of flowers in the desert that are not microscopic, and that I call by name. They are not very numerous; you may walk long distances without meeting them; but they are there. I mean the evening primrose, the lupine, and the California poppy. The primrose, which is much the commonest of the three, has no stalk, or none that is apparent; the large, handsome, lemon-colored flower opens directly from a tuft of leaves lying flat on the ground. As for the poppies, I should hardly speak of them as growing in the desert but for the fact that two or three days ago I stumbled upon a place (it would be like trying to find a spot in the ocean to look for it again) where the ground for the space of an acre or more was sparsely sprinkled with them. They were abnormally small, and very short in the stem; but they were bright as the sun, and being lighted upon thus unexpectedly they really made the spot a garden. As the prophet said, the place was “glad for them;” and so was I.

Both poppy and primrose (and the lupine as well) are much more at home on the foothills. There, too, are many flowers not to be seen at all on the desert. I cannot talk about them for lack of names. The brightest and showiest of them all is of a vivid, but, in my vocabulary, nameless shade of red; not scarlet, nor crimson, nor orange, nor pink, but red. The plant stands a foot or so in height and bears a dozen, more or less, of rather large cup-shaped blossoms, the lively color of which would attract notice in any garden.

A very different favorite of mine (I have been intimate with it for a week) is a low--inch-high--composite flower, of the size of a ten-cent piece, with seven or eight white rays and a yellow disk; a dwarf daisy, it looks to be, with soft, cottony stem and leaves. It grows in the driest and most barren places, and as I sit down here and there on the hillsides to rest (looking meanwhile at the green barley fields and the ever-glorious mountains) I am sensibly happier if I see this dainty bit of nature’s loveliness (a child, not a dwarf--I take back the word) within my hand’s reach. It is the very flower to make a pet of; prettier by far than if it were taller and showier. Cultivation would spoil it. It was made for the desert.

And this reminds me to say that, if the hills are to be counted as part of the desert, as in reason they may be, then the prophet’s word has been fulfilled, not partially but in all strictness. The desert has blossomed like the rose. For the slopes of the Tucson range are literally on fire with blossoms. Patches of sun-bright yellow, some of them to all appearance an acre or more in extent, can be seen clear across the plain. I saw them yesterday afternoon as I started homeward from Camp Lowell. The distance could hardly be less than eight miles, and probably they would have been visible had it been twice as far. That the flowers are poppies, and not blossoms of a smaller cruciferous plant that is very abundant and gregarious hereabout, I am confident, not only because I am assured so by residents of the city, but because the patches are much less conspicuous in the early forenoon, when poppies are not wide open, than later in the day. Some of the patches (I can see a dozen from my window as I write, fully five miles off[18]) are well toward the tops of the mountains, which, needless to say, are not of great elevation, perhaps four thousand feet.

The poppy is the Tucson flower. Children go out upon the hills and bring back bunches to sell along the streets and from house to house. Their splendid color need not be praised. It is known to all Eastern people, who grow the plants in gardens (I seem to remember when they came in) under the name of _Eschscholtzia_. And here, on the mountain walls of this Arizona desert, are hanging-gardens so full of them as to form masses of color visible ten or fifteen miles away! “They shall blossom abundantly,” said the prophet; and who knows but he spoke of the Tucson Mountains in poppy time?

NESTS AND OTHER MATTERS

With the first of April approaching, the life of Arizona birds takes on a busier complexion. The idle season is over; now there are nests to be built (no small undertaking, in itself, as a man may easily find out by setting himself to build one), and a family to be watched over and defended. Now the human visitor begins to understand what cactuses were made for. As he walks among the whitish-green chollas, giving them elbow-room, he has only to glance to right and left to see what a considerable proportion of them are inhabited; this one by a pair of thrashers, the other by a pair of cactus wrens. In neither case is there any serious attempt at concealment; partly because the attempt would be useless; partly, we may guess, because concealment is unnecessary. If your safe is burglar proof, why be at the trouble to hide it? Neither squirrel nor snake is likely to climb a cholla cactus, and even a man knows enough to approach it with caution.

Of the two species of thrasher that live in the desert the larger one, known as Palmer’s, seems to be the earlier breeder. I found a nest with eggs on the first day of March; and on the ninth, I came upon a brood of young birds already out of the nest. They were still new to the world, acting as if they found it a strange, unintelligible place; but they were fully fledged, and when put to it, flew from one cholla to another without difficulty. Still, they had more faith in cactus thorns than in wing-power, and allowed me almost to lay hands on them before taking flight.

The two desert-inhabiting thrashers, by the by, Palmer’s and Bendire’s, are so much alike (the Palmer being somewhat longer and darker than its neighbor), that it was some time before I felt sure of myself in discriminating between them. As to the question of comparative length (one of the most uncertain points on which an observer can base a determination), I fell back upon an old method, which it seems worth while to mention here, because I have never seen it referred to in print. It has served one man well, and may do as much for another.

Two of our Eastern birds that are most troublesome to beginners in ornithology are the downy and the hairy woodpecker, the only difference between them--the only one that can ordinarily be seen in the field, I mean to say--being one of size. Well, I long ago discovered for myself that it was much easier to carry in my eye the comparative measurements of the two birds’ bills than the comparative measurements of the birds themselves. Let me see the head in profile, and I could name its owner almost beyond mistake.

This method, as I say, I resorted to in the case of my two desert thrashers, and little by little (time itself being of great service in such matters), I settled the question with myself. And still there remained a certain fact that cast a shade of doubt over my determination. In Mrs. Bailey’s Handbook, the only authority I had brought with me, Mr. Herbert Brown, after twenty years’ experience with Tucson birds, is quoted as saying that the Bendire thrasher almost never sings, whereas the birds that I was calling by that name were in song continually. What was I to think? It seemed a case for a gun. Without it, how could I ever be sure of my reckoning? I was in a box, as we say. But there was a way out. There almost always is. The two species lay eggs of different colors. I must find them; and with patience I did; first, the blue-green eggs of Palmer, and then (two sets in one day), the whitish eggs of Bendire; and my identification of the owners, made before the eggs were examined, turned out to be correct in all cases.

In the way of music, neither bird is equal to the brown thrasher of the East. In fact, if I am to be judge, one Massachusetts thrasher, in his cinnamon-colored suit (and in the top of a gray birch), could outsing any half-dozen of the birds in this Arizona desert. It is to be said, however, that there is a third species here (not on the face of the desert itself, but in the thickets along the Rillito River), the crissal thrasher so called, whose song I have yet to make sure of. He is larger even than the Palmer, and to look at him should have a fuller voice.

And this reminds me that I had been in Tucson more than a month before I saw a mockingbird; and even now, when I have been here almost two months, I have seen but three. The people generally seem to mistake the thrashers for mockers. If I speak to them about the strangeness of the mocker’s absence, they declare that mockers are common here. At least two persons have turned upon me with the assertion, “Why, there’s one singing out there at this minute.” And they point to a thrasher, a bird that wears not one of the mocker’s three colors,--gray, black, and white,--and for music is as much like him as a child’s tin whistle is like a master’s flute. And still it is true, at least the systematists tell us so, and I have no thought of questioning it, that the mockingbird is only a nobler kind of thrasher. And thrashers, the mocker included, are only larger kinds of wrens.

Arizona is the wrens’ country. During my short stay in Tucson I have seen ten species: the sage thrasher, the Western mockingbird, the Bendire thrasher, the Palmer thrasher, the crissal thrasher, the cactus wren, the rock wren, the canyon wren, the Baird wren, and the interior tule wren.

The sage thrashers, whose mysterious silence was commented upon in a previous article, are only now beginning to find their voices; for they are still (March 21) in the desert, though they will go elsewhere to breed. Two days ago, while returning from the Rillito Valley, I came upon a group of them, and to my great pleasure two or three were in song; not letting themselves out, to be sure, but running over a medley of a tune under their breath in a kind of dumb rehearsal. I could barely hear it, but I saw at once why the birds, for all their short bills and unthrasher-like ways, are called sometimes sage thrashers and sometimes mountain mockingbirds. I hope their _sotto voce_ preludings will not outlast my stay among them.

One of my particular favorites here is the Say phœbe. From the first he took my fancy. All his ways please me. As the homely phrase is, I like the cut of his jib. His plaintive call is never wearisome, though he is exceedingly free with it. And I have grown to like him and his mate the better because they are fond of certain places where I myself am given to spending now and then an idle hour. There are four abandoned shanties in different parts of the desert, in the shade of which I often rest; and every one of them has its pair of Say phœbes. I saw the birds with building materials in their bills, and began by expecting to find the nest inside the open building; but by and by I discovered that they liked best of all a site down in a well! It seems a safe position to begin with--as long as the nest contains nothing but eggs; but I ask myself about the danger to the little ones when they become big enough to be uneasy. If they are anything like young robins, for example, a pitiful share of them must perish sixty feet underground. However, the birds may be presumed to understand their own business better than any outsider can teach it to them; and they unquestionably prefer the well. Of the four pairs just mentioned, three have built in that position (the wells, it should be understood, are not stoned), and the fourth would have done likewise, I dare say, only that the well in their case happens to be covered. As it is, the nest is on one of the joists of a shed, and an impertinent stranger has been known to clamber up and examine the eggs. “Oh, if that well had only been left open!” the birds probably thought, as they saw what he was doing.