very soon, but there is dread, in open sand stretches
sometimes justified, of being over blown by the drift. It is hot, dry,
fretful work, but by going along the ground with the wind behind, one
may come upon strange things in its tumultuous privacy. I like these
truces of wind and heat that the desert makes, otherwise I do not know
how I should come by so many acquaintances with furtive folk. I like to
see hawks sitting daunted in shallow holes, not daring to spread a
feather, and doves in a row by the prickle bushes, and shut-eyed cattle,
turned tail to the wind in a patient doze. I like the smother of sand
among the dunes, and finding small coiled snakes in open places, but I
never like to come in a wind upon the silly sheep. The wind robs them of
what wit they had, and they seem never to have learned the self-induced
hypnotic stupor with which most wild things endure weather stress. I
have never heard that the desert winds brought harm to any other than
the wandering shepherds and their flocks. Once below Pastaria Little
Pete showed me bones sticking out of the sand where a flock of two
hundred had been smothered in a bygone wind. In many places the
four-foot posts of a cattle fence had been buried by the wind-blown
dunes.

It is enough occupation, when no storm is brewing, to watch the cloud
currents and the chambers of the sky. From Kearsarge, say, you look over
Inyo and find pink soft cloud masses asleep on the level desert air;
south of you hurries a white troop late to some gathering of their kind
at the back of Oppapago; nosing the foot of Waban, a woolly mist creeps
south. In the clean, smooth paths of the middle sky and highest up in
air, drift, unshepherded, small flocks ranging contrarily. You will find
the proper names of these things in the reports of the Weather
Bureau--cirrus, cumulus, and the like--and charts that will teach by
study when to sow and take up crops. It is astonishing the trouble men
will be at to find out when to plant potatoes, and gloze over the
eternal meaning of the skies. You have to beat out for yourself many
mornings on the windly headlands the sense of the fact that you get the
same rainbow in the cloud drift over Waban and the spray of your garden
hose. And not necessarily then do you live up to it.

THE LITTLE TOWN OF THE GRAPE VINES

There are still some places in the west where the quails cry
"_cuidado_"; where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle; where
al