re as trim as city fronts. It takes man to leave
unsightly scars on the face of the earth. Here on the mesa the abandoned
campoodies of the Paiutes are spots of desolation long after the wattles
of the huts have warped in the brush heaps. The campoodies are near the
watercourses, but never in the swale of the stream. The Paiute seeks
rising ground, depending on air and sun for purification of his
dwelling, and when it becomes wholly untenable, moves.

A campoodie at noontime, when there is no smoke rising and no stir of
life, resembles nothing so much as a collection of prodigious wasps'
nests. The huts are squat and brown and chimneyless, facing east, and
the inhabitants have the faculty of quail for making themselves scarce
in the underbrush at the approach of strangers. But they are really not
often at home during midday, only the blind and incompetent left to keep
the camp. These are working hours, and all across the mesa one sees
the women whisking seeds of chia into their spoon-shaped baskets, these
emptied again into the huge conical carriers, supported on the shoulders
by a leather band about the forehead.

Mornings and late afternoons one meets the men singly and afoot on
unguessable errands, or riding shaggy, browbeaten ponies, with game
slung across the saddle-bows. This might be deer or even antelope,
rabbits, or, very far south towards Shoshone Land, lizards.

There are myriads of lizards on the mesa, little gray darts, or larger
salmon-sided ones that may be found swallowing their skins in the safety
of a prickle-bush in early spring. Now and then a palm's breadth of
the trail gathers itself together and scurries off with a little
rustle under the brush, to resolve itself into sand again. This is pure
witchcraft. If you succeed in catching it in transit, it loses its
power and becomes a flat, horned, toad-like creature, horrid-looking and
harmless, of the color of the soil; and the curio dealer will give you
two bits for it, to stuff. Men have their season on the mesa as much as
plants and four-footed things, and one is not like to meet them out of
their time. For example, at the time of rodeos, which is perhaps April,
one meets free riding vaqueros who need no trails and can find cattle
where to the layman no cattle exist. As early as February bands of sheep
work up from the south to the high Sierra pastures. It appears that
shepherds have not changed more than sheep in the process of time. The
shy hair