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BOOKS BY JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH
a selected list

The Modern Temper
Samuel Johnson
Henry David Thoreau
The Twelve Seasons
The Desert Year
The Best of Two Worlds

Editor of Great American 'Nature Wnting

JOSEPH WOOD KRUTCH

the voice of the

desert

A NATURALIST'S INTERPRETATION

WILLIAM SLOANE ASSOCIATES

NEW YORK

Second Printing, October 1955

Copyright 1954 by Joseph Wood Krutch. Copyright © 1955 by Joseph
Wood Krutch. All rights reserved. Published simultaneously in the Do-
minion of Canada by George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto. Manufactured
in the United States of America by H. Wolff, New York. Library of Con-
gress Catalog Card Number: 55-8485

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals for permis-
sion to reprint material which appeared originally in their pages :

The American Scholar, for "Conservation Is Not Enough" and "He Was

There Before Coronado"
The Virginia Quarterly Review, for "The Moth and the Candle"

DESIGNED BY MARSHALL LEE

to the memory of Margaret Pickel and Numa Zinty

The author thanks Professor Lyman Benson of Pomona
College for reading the chapter on the development of
the cacti. He is not, however, responsible for any of the
statements made.

The photographers, Marvin Frost and Lewis Wayne
Walker, are associated with the Arizona-Sonora Desert
Museum, Tucson.

ONE the what and the why of desert country, ii

TWO it suits him fine, 26

THREE strange forest, 40

FOUR how they got that way, 53

FIVE he was there before Coronado, 65

SIX the moth and the candle, 79

SEVEN the mouse that never drinks, 98

EIGHT settlers — old and new, 114

NINE and every single one of them is right, 133

TEN first on the mountain top, 151

ELEVEN love in the desert, 165

TWELVE conservation is not enough, 186

THIRTEEN thc mystiquc of the desert, 208

11

ONE

the what and the why
of desert country

ON THE BRIGHTEST AND WARMEST DAYS MY DESERT IS MOST

itself because sunshine and warmth are the very essence
of its character. The air is lambent with light; the caress-
ing warmth envelops everything in its ardent embrace.
Even when outlanders complain that the sun is too daz-
zling and too hot, we desert lovers are prone to reply,
"At worst that is only too much of a good thing."

Unfortunately, this is the time when the tourist is least
likely to see it. Even the winter visitor who comes for a
month or six weeks is mostly likely to choose January or

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT "12

February because he is thinking about what he is es-
caping at home rather than of what he is coming to here.
True, the still warm sun and the usually bright skies make
a dramatic contrast with what he has left behind. In the
gardens of his hotel or guest ranch, flowers still bloom and
some of the more obstreperous birds make cheerful sounds,
even though they do not exactly sing at this season. The
more enthusiastic visitors talk about "perpetual summer"
and sometimes ask if we do not find the lack of seasons
monotonous. But this is nonsense. Winter is winter even
in the desert.

At Tucson's twenty- three hundred feet it often gets
quite cold at night even though shade temperatures dur-
ing the day may rise to seventy-five or even higher. Most
vegetation is pausing, though few animals hibernate. This
is a sort of neutral time when the desert environment is
least characteristically itself. It is almost hke late Septem-
ber or early October, just after the first frost, in southern
Nev/ England. For those who are thinking of nothing ex-
cept getting away from something, rather than learning
to know a new world, this is all very well. But you can't
become acquainted with the desert itself at that time of
year.

By April the desert is just beginning to come into its
ovvm. The air and the skies are summery without being hot;
the roadsides and many of the desert flats are thickly car-
peted with a profusion of wildflowers such as only Cali-
fornia can rival. The desert is smiling before it begins to
laugh, and October or November are much the same. But
June is the month for those who want to know what the
desert is really like. That is the time to decide once and
for all if it is, as for many it turns out to be, "your country."

]3 ^^^ what and the why of desert country

It SO happens that I am writing this not long after the
twenty-first of June and I took especial note of that as-
tronomically significant date. This year summer began at
precisely ten hours and no minutes, Mountain Standard
Time. That means that the sun rose higher and stayed
longer in the sky than on any other day of the year. In
the north there is often a considerable lag in the seasons
as the earth warms up, but here, where it is never very
cold, the longest day and the hottest are likely to coincide
pretty closely. So it was this year. On June 21 the sun rose
almost to the zenith so that at noon he cast almost no
shadow. And he was showing what he is capable of.

Even in this dry air 109° Fahrenheit in the shade is
pretty warm. Under the open sky the sun's rays strike with
an almost physical force, pouring down from a blue dome
unmarked by the faintest suspicion of even a fleck of cloud.
The year has been unusually dry even for the desert. Dur-
ing the four months just past no rain — not even a light
shower — has fallen. The surface of the ground is as dry as
powder. And yet, when I look out of the window the dom-
inant color of the landscape is incredibly green.

On the low foothills surrounding the steep rocky slopes
of the mountains, which are actually ten or twelve miles
away but seem in the clear air much closer at hand, this
greenness ends in a curving line following the contoiir of
the mountains' base and inevitably suggesting the waves
of a green sea lapping the irregular shore line of some
island rising abruptly from the ocean. Between me and
that shore line the desert is sprinkled with hundreds, prob-
ably thousands, of evenly placed shrubs, varied now and
then by a small tree — usually a mesquite or what is called
locally a cat's-claw acacia.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 1 ^j.

More than a montli ago all the little annual flowers and
weeds which spring up after the winter rains and rush
from seed to seed again in six weeks gave up the ghost at
the end of their short lives. Their hope of posterity hes now
invisible, either upon the surface of the bare ground or just
below it. Yet when the summer thunderstorms come in late
July or August, they will not make the mistake of germi-
nating. They are triggered to explode into life only when
they are both moist and cool — which they will not be until
next February or March when their season begins. Neither
the shrubs nor the trees seem to know that no rain has
fallen during the long months. The leathery, somewhat
resinous, leaves of the dominant shrub — the attractive
plant unattractively dubbed "creosote bush" — are not at
all parched or wilted. Neither are the deciduous leaves of
the mesquite.

Not many months ago the creosote was covered with
bright yellow pealike flowers; the mesquite with pale yel-
low catkins. Now the former is heavy with gray seed and
on the mesquite are forming long pods which Indians once
ute and which cattle now find an unusually rich food.

It looks almost as though the shrubs and trees could live
without water. But of course they cannot. Every desert
plant has its secret, though it is not always the same one.
In the case of the mesquite and the creosote it is that their
roots go deep and that, so the ecologists say, there is in the
desert no wet or dry season below six feet. What little
moisture is there is pretty constant through the seasons of
the year and through the dry years as well as the wet.
Like the temperature in some caves, it never varies. The
mesquite and creosote are not compelled to care whether
it has rained for four months or not. And unlike many

] 5 *'^® what and the why of desert country

other plants they flourish whether there has been less rain
or more than usual.

Those plants which have substantial root systems but
nevertheless do not reach so deep are more exuberant
some years than others. Thus the Encelia, or brittlebush,
which, in normal years, literally covers many slopes with
thousands of yellow, daisy-like flowers, demands a normal
year. Though I have never seen it fail, I am told that in
very dry years it comes into leaf but does not flower, while
in really catastrophic droughts it does not come up at all,
as the roots lie dormant and hope for better times. Even
the creosote bush, which never fails, can, nevertheless,
profit from surface water, and when it gets the benefit of
a few thunderstorms in late July or August, it will flower
and fruit a second time so that the expanse which is now
all green will be again sprinkled with yellow.

On such a day as this even the lizards, so I have noticed,
hug the thin shade of the bushes. If I venture out, the
zebratails scurry indignantly away, the boldly banded ap-
pendages which give them their name curved high over
their backs. But I don't venture out very often during the
middle of the day. It is more pleasant to sit inside where
a cooler keeps the house at a pleasant eighty degrees. And
if you think that an advocate of the simple life should not
succumb to a cooler, it is you rather than I who is incon-
sistent. Even Thoreau had a fire in his cottage at Walden
and it is no more effete to cool oneseK in a hot climate
than it is to get warm before a stove in a cold one. The
gadget involved is newer, but that is all.

In this country "inclemency" means heat. One is "sun-
bound" instead of snowbound and I have often noticed

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT -j^

that the psychological effect is curiously similar. It is cozy
to be shut in, to have a good excuse for looking out of the
window or into oneself. A really blazing day slows down
the restless activity of a community very much as a bliz-
zard does in regions which have them. Without the one or
the other any society, I imagine, would become intoler-
ably extroverted. Where there is either, a sort of meteor-
ological sabbath is usually observed even by those who
keep no other.

In Connecticut the chickadees came to see me when I
did not go to see them. In Arizona the desert birds do the
same, though the attraction — which was certainly not me
in either case — is water rather than food. A cmrved-billed
thrasher, his threatening beak haH-open like the mouth of
a panting dog, approaches defiantly, scattering the smaller
birds as he comes. A cactus wren, the largest and boldest
of the wren tribe, impudently invades my porch and even
jumps to a window sill to peer at me through the glass.
And as I know from experience, he will invade even the
house if I leave a door open and will carry away for his
nest any material available. Only the large white-winged
dove does not seem to notice that this is an unusually
warm day. He will fly away to Mexico at the first hint that
summer is over and now, when the temperature in the sun
must be at least 120 degrees, he seems to be saying, "But
we don't call this hot in Campeche."

From my window I see also the furry and the scaly as
well as the feathered. A jack rabbit approaches cautiously
and after looking carefully about dares to lower his head
long enough to take a long drink; a few minutes later a
lizard does the same. What did either do before I kept a
vessel always full? Most of the time, I imagine, they did

1 7 the what and the why of desert country

without. But like human beings who have access to con-
veniences and luxuries, they probably prefer to do with.

Obviously the animals and plants who share this coun-
try with me take it for granted. To them it is just "the way
things are." By now I am beginning to take it for granted
myself. But being a man I must ask what they cannot:
What is 3L desert and why is it what it is? At latitude thirty-
two one expects the climate to be warm. But the desert
is much more than merely warm. It is a consistent world
with a special landscape, a special geography, and, to go
with them, a special flora and fauna adapted to that geog-
raphy and that climate.

Nearly every striking feature of this special world,
whether it be the shape of the mountains or the habits
of its plant and animal inhabitants, goes back ultimately
to the grand fact of dryness — the dryness of the ground,
of the air, of the whole sum-total. And the most inclusive
cause of the dryness is simply that out here it doesn't rain
very much.

Some comparisons with regions where it rains more may
help us understand what that means. Take, for example,
southern New England. By world standards it gets a lot —
namely some forty inches of rain per year. Certain parts
of the southern states get even more: about fifty inches
for east Tennessee, nearly sixty for New Orleans. Some
areas on the West Coast get fantastic amounts, like the
seventy-five inches at Crescent City, California, and the
unbelievable 153 inches, or nearly four times what New
York City gets, recorded one year in Del Norde County,
California.

Nevertheless, New England's forty is a lot of water,

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

18

either comparatively or absolutely. The region around
Paris, for instance, gets little more than half that amount.
Forty inches is, in absolute terms, more than most people
imagine. One inch of rain falling on an acre of ground
means more than 27,000 gallons of water. No wonder that
irrigation in dry regions is quite a formidable task even for
modern technology.

In terms of what vegetation can use, forty inches is
ample for the kind of agriculture and natural growth
which we tend to think of as "normal." It means luxuriant
grass, rapid development of second growth woodland,
a veritable jungle of weeds and bushes in midsummer. In
inland America the rainfall tends to be less than in the
coastal regions. As one moves westward from the Missis-
sippi it declines sharply and begins to drop below twenty
inches a year at about the one hundredth meridian or,
very roughly, at a line drawn from Columbus, Ohio
through Oklahoma City. This means too little water for
most broad-leaved trees and explains why the southern
Great Plains were as treeless when the white man first saw
them as they are today.

Our true deserts — the Great Basin Desert in Utah and
Nevada, the Chihuahuan in New Mexico, the Sonoran in
Arizona, and the Mohave in California — all lie still further
to the west. The four differ among themselves but they
are all dry and hot and they all fulfill what is probably
the most satisfactory definition of "desert" — namely a re-
gion where the ground cover is not continuous; where,
that is, the earth remains bare of vegetation between such
plants as manage to grow. Over these American desert:s
the rainfall varies considerably and with it the character
and extent of the vegetation. In southern Arizona, for in-

] 9 the what and the why of desert country

stance, it is about four inches at Yuma, nearly eleven near
Tucson. Four inches means sand dunes which look like
those pictures of the Sahara which the word "desert" calls
to most people's minds. Eleven means that where the soil
is suitable, well-separated individuals of such desert plants
as the cacti and the paloverde trees will flourish.

But if scanty rainfall makes for deserts, what makes for
scanty rainfall? To that there are two important answers.
One is simply that most regions other than the mountain-
ous ones tend to be dry if they lie in that belt of perma-
nently high atmospheric pressure which extends some
thirty or thirty-five degrees on each side of the equator
where calms are frequent and winds erratic. Old sailors
used to call this region "the horse latitudes" though no-
body knows why and you can take your choice of three
equally unconvincing explanations. One is that it was be-
cause horses tended to die when the ships lay long in the
hot calms. Another, because the boisterous changeable-
ness of the winds when they do come suggests unruly
horses. A third is that they were originally called after the
English explorer, Ross, which was mistaken by the Ger-
mans for their old word for "horse." In any event, the
latitude of Tucson puts it just within the "horse latitudes."
Most of the important deserts of the world, including the
Sahara and the Gobi, lie within this same belt.

The other important answer to the question, "What
makes for scanty rainfall?" is, "Mountains lying across the
path of such moist winds as do blow." In our case the
Coast Ranges of California lie between us and the Pacific.
From my front porch, which looks directly across the
desert to some nearer mountains of the southernmost
Rockies, I can see, on a small scale, what happens. Many,

^

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

20

many times a moisture-laden mass of air reaches as far as
these closest mountains. Dark clouds form, sometimes the
whole range is blotted out. Torrential rains are falling. But
on me not a drop. Either the sky is blue overhead or the
high clouds which have blown my way dissolve visibly
as the warm air rising from my sun-drenched flats reaches
them. I am in what the geographers call a "rain shadow"
cast by the mountains. Up at their summit the rainfall is
nearly twice as much as it is down here and they are
clothed with pines beginning at six or seven thousand
feet and going on up to the nine-thousand-foot peak.
When I do get rain in midwinter and in midsummer, it
is usually because winds have brought moisture up from
the Gulf of Mexico by an unobstructed southern^ route,
or because in summer a purely local thundershower has
been formed out of the hot air rising from the sun-beaten
desert floor. Most of the time the sun is hot, even in win-
ter, and the air is usually fantastically dry, the relative
humidity being often less than ten.

Naturally the plants and animals living in such a region
must be specially adapted to survive under such condi-
tions, but the casual visitor usually notices the strangeness
of the landscape before he is aware of the flora or the
fauna. And the peculiar features of the landscape are also .
the result of dryness, even in ways that are not immedi-
ately obvious.

The nude mountains reveal their contours, or veil them
as lightly as the late Greek sculptors veiled their nudes,
because only near the summits of the mountains can any-
thing tall enough to obscure the outlines grow. A little
less obvious is the fact that the beautiful "monuments" of

21 the what and the why of desert country

northern Arizona and southern Utah owe their unusual
forms to the sculpturing of wind-blown sand, or that sheer
cliffs often rise from a sloping cone of rocks and boulders
because the talus slopes can accumulate in just that way
only where there is not enough draining water to dis-
tribute them over the whole surrounding plain, as they
would be distributed in regions of heavier rainfall. But
the most striking example of all is the greatest single
scenic wonder of the region, the Grand Canyon itself.
This narrow gash, cut a mile deep through successive
strata until the river flows at last over some of the oldest
rock exposed anywhere on earth, could have been formed
only in a very dry climate.

As recently as two hundred years ago the best informed
observer would have taken it for granted that the river
was running between those sheer walls at the bottom of
the gorge simply because it had found them out. Today
few visitors are not aware that the truth lies the other way
around, that the river cut its own course through the rock.
But most laymen do not ask the next questions: Why is
Grand Canyon unique, or why are such canyons, even on
a smaller scale, rare? And the answer to those questions
is that a set of very special conditions was necessary.

First there must be a thick series of rock strata slowly
rising as a considerable river flows over it. Second, that
considerable river must carry an unusual amount of hard
sand or stone fragments in suspension so that it will be
able to cut downward at least as rapidly as the rock over
which it flows is rising. Third, that considerable river must
be flowing through very arid country. Otherwise rain,
washing over the edges of the cut, will widen it at the
top as the cut goes deeper. That is why broad valleys are

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

22

characteristic of regions with normal rainfall; canyons,
large and small, of arid country.

And Grand Canyon is the grandest of all canyons be-
cause at that particular place all the necessary conditions
were fulfilled more exuberantly than at any other place in
the whole world. The Colorado River carries water from
a relatively wet country through a dry one, it bears with
it a fantastic amount of abrasive material, the rock over
which it flows has been slowly rising during several mil-
lions of years, and too little rain falls to widen very rapidly
the gash which it cuts. Thus in desert country everything
from the color of a mouse or the shape of a leaf up to the
largest features of the mountains themselves is more likely
than not to have the same explanation: dryness.

So far as living things go, all this adds up to what even
an ecologist may so far forget himself as to call an "un-
favorable environment." But like all such pronouncements
this one doesn't mean much unless we ask "unfavorable
for what and for whom?" For many plants, for many ani-
mals, and for some men it is very favorable indeed. Many
of the first two would languish and die, transferred to
some region where conditions were "more favorable." It
is here, and here only, that they flourish. Many men feel
healthier and happier in the bright dry air than they do
anywhere else. And since I happen to be one of them, I
not unnaturally have a special interest in the plants and
animals who share my liking for just these conditions. For
five years now I have been amusing myself by inquiring
of them directly what habits and what adjustments they
have found most satisfactory. Many of them are delight-
fully ingenious and eminently sensible.

23 *h® what and the why of desert country

The "hard" conditions they sometimes have to cope with
appear to strangers much more difficult than they are,
merely because they are not those to which the strangers
are accustomed. After all, few environments are entirely
favorable. No one out in a blizzard or ice storm in south-
ern New England is likely to think of it as calculated to
coddle man, beast or vegetable. For months in a New Eng-
land winter, every living thing has been on the desperate
defensive; most have temporarily given up the struggle
and are lying low. A great many will never revive from
the inanition into which they have sunk. In the desert,
heat and drought are no more difficult to survive. Some
of the techniques of survival are different, some are sur-
prisingly similar to those which are used to cope with cold.

We human beings are not very rugged as living organ-
isms go. In fact we are extraordinarily tender creatures
who can exist even uncomfortably only within a very nar-
row range of temperature and only if protected from most
of the manifestations of nature. In the New England win-
ter we warm ourselves with fires and if we go out we
bundle ourselves up in wool or even in rubber to ward
off cold and dampness. We think it nothing extraordinary
to stay all day in the house because the weather is a little
more unfavorable than usual. In the desert the only dif-
ference is that the inclemencies from which we protect
ourselves are different. If we tend to keep out of the sun
in midsummer, occasionally even stay in the house almost
all day because it is too hot to go out, inhabitants of the
so-called temperate regions are compelled even more fre-
quently to keep out of the cold and the wet. Actually we
are considerably less at the mercy of the elements than
they are.

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 24

Men of most races have long been accustomed to speak
with scorn of the few peoples who happen to live where
nature makes things too easy. In the inclemency of their
weather, the stoniness of their soil, or the rigors of their
winter they find secret virtues so that even the London
fog has occasionally found Englishmen to praise it. No
doubt part of all this is mere prejudice at worst, making
a virtue out of necessity at best. But undoubtedly there
is also something in it. We grow strong against the pres-
sure of a difficulty, and ingenious by solving problems.
Individuality and character are developed by challenge.
We tend to admire trees, as well as men, who bear the
stamp of their successful struggles with a certain amount
of adversity. People who have not had too easy a time of
it develop flavor. And there is no doubt about the fact
that desert life has character. Plants and animals are so
obviously and visibly what they are because of the prob-
lems they have solved. They are part of some whole. They
belong. Animals and plants, as well as men, become espe-
cially interesting when they do fit their environment,
when to some extent they reveal what their response, to
it has been. And nowhere more than -in the desert do they
reveal it.

I have lived in this house and been lord of these few
acres for nearly five years and the creatures who share the
desert with me have already summed me up as a softy
and have grown contemptuously familiar. It is not only
that the cactus wrens sit on the backs of my porch chairs.
The round-tailed ground squirrels — plain, sand-colored,
chipmunk-like animals — are digging rather too many bur-
rows rather too close about the house. The jack rabbits
— normally the most timid as well as the fleetest of crea-

25 ^'^® what and the why of desert country

tures — take nibbles at the few plants I have set out and
refuse to leave off until I arrive shouting and waving my
arms a few feet from where they are. Sooner or later
something may have to be done to discourage this im-
pudent familiarity, but for the present I am getting some
good looks at creatures who usually don't wait to be
looked at. Yesterday, for instance, I saw what at first I
thought was a bird eating seeds from the upper branches
of a creosote bush. It turned out to be a ground squirrel
belying his name by climbing several feet above ground
among the slender swaying branches of the creosote to
eat the small fuzzy seeds. This is doubtless no addition
to Knowledge with a capital K. But it is an addition to my
knowledge and that is the next best thing. I like to inves-
tigate such matters for myself when I can. "What on
earth do they live on?" is a common question from those
newcomers not too egotistical to notice that creatures
other than those of their own kind do live here somehow.
Obviously "creosote seeds" is one answer so far as the
ground squirrel is concerned.

26

TWO

it suits him fine

NOT ALL THE ANSWERS I GET WHEN I ASK THE QUESTION

"How do you live in the desert?" are as simple as that of
the ground squirrel who does not stay on the ground*
What then are some of the others?

Some creatures, it must be admitted, behave like the
pampered part-time human inhabitants who run away to
the mountains when the desert is being most exuberantly
itself. These I tolerate as I do their human analogues. But
it is we year-round residents who interest me most. And
I soon noticed one grand persistent difference between the

27 '* s^'*5 '^'"^ ^'"6

plants and animals who do stick it out and those of us
human beings who seem to do the same.

As usual, the animals are healthy and happy because
they have adapted themselves to the environment. As
usual, man is healthy and happy because even when, like
me, he prides himself on being not too timid about those
aspects of nature which are not familiar, he has modified
the environment to make it conform to his own fixed needs.
Man can change things as no other animal can. But by
way of compensation he can change himself much less.

Of that difference and what it implies we shall perhaps
have something to say later on, but it is obvious that his
method implies penalties as well as advantages and in the
long run the penalties may count for more than he now
suspects. For the moment, however, I am most interested
in those creatures who have taken things as they found
them and then found out how to find them good. It is sur-
prising how many different ways there are of doing just
that.

On the desk beside me as I write is a largish glass jar,
its bottom covered with two inches of damp, sandy soil.
In one corner, buried to the eyes and nose, is a small toad
who has grown from half an inch to two inches long under
my eyes. Occasionally he sits fully exposed on a miniature
hillock and surveys his world. Most of the time, however,
he prefers to remain covered or almost covered by the
nice, soft mud.

While he was very small and I waved in front of him
a microscopic piece of raw beef on the end of a broom-
straw, he would seize it with absurd ferocity and, if it was
rather large for the size of his gullet, he would use a front

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 28

paw to stuff it down after the usual fashion of toads as I
have observed them in places very different from this. For
him and for many captive creatures, as well as for so many
Americans, hamburger became the Very staff of life. But
like most of the reptiles and amphibia, he does not seem
to take much pleasure in eating. It is a rather diflficult
business to be got over with as soon as possible, and his
attitude has not changed much now that he has gradu-
ated from hamburger to living insects.

Small as he is, there is no difficulty in determining to
what species he belongs. Exposed to bright light, the pu-
pils of his eyes contract to vertical ellipses like the eyes
of a cat, and that fact suggests that he is one of the spade-
foot toads. The tiny speck of black horny tissue on each
hind foot clinches the matter. Moreover, since these
"spades" are crescent rather than wedge shaped, he stands
revealed as the Sonoran spadefoot or, more formally,
Scaphiopus couchii. When he is grown his spades will
be only a few millimeters long, but they will help him
to become a phenomenal digger.

He has been my guest for some ten months now and
it was one of his kind who gave me one of my big sur-
prises during my first summer in the desert. One evening
after a heavy thundershower, the air was suddenly filled
with mysterious nasal "baas" and a flashlight revealed
hundreds of the small toads disporting themselves amo-
rously and otherwise in the unusual wetness. Two nights
later they had disappeared completely and were not to
be seen again until the next year.

Even during most of the short, relatively wet season,
adults are not seen except rarely, though for one or two
nights the surface of the earth literally swarms with those

29 '* ^"'^^ ^'"^ ^"^®

who have come forth from somewhere to celebrate their
pervigihum veneris. The yoimg are not quite so scarce
dming a few months after they are hatched, but I count
myself very lucky to have found my specimen by accident
near a well-watered trench around some shrubs a few feet
away from my door. For one thing this proves — and even
this has not been recorded in the almost nonexistent scien-
tific literature about the Sonoran spadefoot — that at least
the very young toadlets do not always dig in immediately.
For another thing, I have been able to observe his be-
havior during the months when his fellows seem to have
disappeared from the earth. And that, it appears, has sel-
dom been done.

I feel certain that I know almost to a day how old he is.
One late afternoon last July we had our first real thunder-
shower and I said to myself, "Tonight the spadefoots will
sing." And of course they did. Next day I searched the
area where I had seen them, hoping to find at least one
rain puddle which had lasted long enough to hatch the
eggs. I knew from previous experience that they are often
laid in such puddles and require only about twenty-four
hours to hatch. Less lucky than I had been on my first
summer, I found none. But some there must have been,
because here is the young toad apparently very comfort-
able indeed in the jar on my desk. After that July night
there were at least three heavier showers, but the spade-
foots, having had their night, put in no second appearance.

Except for his age I do not know much about my speci-
men. Neither, apparently, does anyone else know either
how he has spent his time between the days when the
tadpole transformed itself with remarkable celerity into a
toad and the time when I took charge, or how, had he

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 3Q

been left to his own devices, he v^ould have spent the
months until the next July. The ancient belief that many
lowly creatm'es were simply born every year out of the
mud would seem, on the face of things, to get its strongest
support right here.

Those ^vriters of textbooks and manuals who are com-
pelled to say something about Scaphiopus couchii seem
agreed that he must spend the major part of his time
buried somewhere in the earth. But where, under what
conditions, and doing what (if anything) nobody knows.
Aheady, however, I think I am beginning to hav6 evidence
which permits certain presumptions. Perhaps if I get more
I shall some day return to the subject. But I introduce him
now for a different reason, which is this: Without know-
ing any more than I aheady do, it is clear enough that the
spadefoot represents, in a very extreme form, one of the
ways of living in the desert — namely by lying low most of
the time.

Many plants do the same. They exist only as seeds dur-
ing all but about six weeks out of the fifty-two. And though
it seems less extraordinary for a plant to do this than it
does for an animal to remain buried for an even greater
proportion of the time, the analogy is obvious and will re-
main so, even if it should turn out that the spadefpot's
inactivity is not so nearly absolute as has sometimes been
assumed.

Now one might object that in the case of this toad what
we have is not really an example of how to live in the
desert, but merely of how to sm*vive there by surrender-
ing ninety-nine hundredths of one's supposed right to hve.
It might seem to give the lie to my rash contention that

31 it suits him fine

for desert creatui'es the desert is not "an unfavorable en
vironment."

Instead of disputing this point, it would be better to
admit right away that quite a few other creatures either
elude the problems which desert living presents, or are so
cosmopolitanly undemanding that they get along very well
either in the desert or in a quite different environment.
Within the desert states there are, for instance, several
toads other than the spadefoot, though most of them, in-
stead of managing as he does to survive in the desert itself,
confine themselves to areas which happen for one reason
or another to be undesert-like. The Colorado River toad —
commonly seven inches long and quite the largest of his
kind in the United States — is a notable example who sticks
pretty close to water holes, natural or artificial; one finds
him about swimming pools in desert homes or water holes
maintained for cattle on the ranches, and to this habit he
owes his local name cow toad. As the most recent text-
book, Stebbins' Amphibians of Western North America,
says of him: "Dwells in arid regions but appears to be
dependent, to a considerable extent, upon the presence
of permanent springs or streams. Has entered the Im-
perial Valley of California with the development of irri-
gation." In other words the cow toad spreads when man
makes the desert less desert-like. The road runner does
not, as we shall see.

Or take the case of the familiar robin. You are not likely
to find him in the desert, though he is common enough in
the mountains at, say, five or six thousand feet where the
vegetation and climate are approximately that of the more
northerly parts of the United States. Yet I once saw a robin
on a tiny patch of grass not more than ten by twenty feet

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

32

in size but carefully nursed by the owner of a rather large
house. The robin was digging for worms for all the world
as though he were on a New England lawn and any
worms he found had been introduced by man. No doubt
if large estates with artificially sustained lawns and trees
were more numerous and closer together than they are,
then the robins would move in.

Still other creatures range naturally over vast and vastly
different areas simply because the few things indispensa-
ble to them are found everywhere, even in desert areas.
Not too long ago, for instance, a neighbor brought me a
large bat which had fallen into his swimming pool. Neigh-
bors are very generous with such gifts once they know that
you are willing to take the responsibility for them, and this
one I was glad to get. He rested for a while hanging upside
down in a cardboard box and then flew away, apparently
none the worse for his experience. But what interested me
particularly was the fact that, though I had never before
seen out here this particular sort of bat close enough to
recognize him, the white-tipped fur of his back was enough
to identify him as the hoary bat which is found all over
the United States except for the southern tip of Florida,
and which ranges well northward into Canada. Like our
other native bats, he is dependent upon flying insects for
food and that means that he must either hibernate in win-
ter or fly south to some place where insects are on the wing
the year around. But grant the hoary bat his necessary
food, and it appears that mountains, valleys, plains and
even deserts are all one to him.

Ecologists like to "explain" the survival of a particular
animal or plant by noting its various "fitnesses." One crea-
ture, so they say, is peculiarly adapted to the temperature

33 it suits him fine

or the food supply of a certain region. This other one pro-
duces a great number of offspring; this third species gives
exceptionally effective care to its one or two young, etc.,
etc. All these statements are usually true enough, but there
are so many w^ays of surviving that there are almost as
many different explanations as there are different creatures.
But since we are interested in the problem of how to live
in the desert, the most interesting answers are not those
which are really how to live almost anywhere, and that is,
after all, the answer the hoary bat is prepared to give.

To find an answer to the more interesting question; to
find an animal which refuses to live anywhere except in
the desert; to find one which is, in his own peculiar way,
very demanding even though what he demands is what
most animals would not have at any price, I do not have
to go far. Indeed, I do not have to go any further from my
doorstep than I went to find the spadefoot. And it happens
that I intruded upon this perfect desert dweller at a
dramatic moment only a few days ago when I stepped out
in the early morning and was startled by a large chicken-
sized bird — if you can still call him a bird — who was dash-
ing madly back and forth at right angles to my line of
vision. His headlong plunges were so like those of a fren-
zied hen who seems to be rushing madly in all directions
at once, that for a moment I thought I had frightened him
out of his wits. As it turned out, he was merely too busy
at the moment to acknowledge my presence.

As to what he was, that question could be answered by
even the most unobservant person who has ever driven a
highway in the desert. He was one of the commonest, as
well as perhaps the most remarkable, of all desert birds

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

34

— namely a road runner — nearly two feet of relentless en-
ergy from the tip of his wicked bill to the tip of the long,
expressive tail which may trail the ground when he is
calm or depressed, or be raised almost as straight up as
the tail of a confident cat when he is happily angry, as
indeed he seems to be a good part of the time. From his
bold bad eye to his springy tread everything proclaims
him "rascal," and he has, in truth, a number of bad habits.
But there is also something indescribably comic about
him, and he illustrates the rule that comic rascals have a
way of engaging the affection of even the virtuous. Nearly
everybody is curiously cheered by the sight of a road run-
ner. In the old days the cowboys used to be amused by his
habit of racing ahead of their horses and they gave him
his name. The Mexicans of Sonora call him affectionately
"paisano" or "countryman."

My specimen, far from having lost his wits, had them
very much about him. Suddenly he arrested his mad career,
stabbed with lightning rapidity at the ground and, crest
erect, lifted his head triumphantly — with a good sized
lizard in his beak. No one who has ever seen one of our
lizards run would like to be assigned the task of chasing
it from bush to bush and then nabbing it with a hand. But
catching lizards is all in a day's work for a road runner
and mine was merely collecting some for his breakfast.
His diet is varied from time to time by a snake, or even
an insect, if the insect happens to be large enough to be
worth the effort of a leap from the ground to take him
on the wing, as I have seen a zooming dragonfly taken.
Responsible observers say that when the lizard tries his
usual trick of surrendering his tail so that the rest of him
may make a safe getaway, the road runner, unlike some

35 '* suits him fine

other predators, is not to be fooled. He merely takes a
firmer grip on the body and collects the discarded tail
later. Scorpions are also quite acceptable as tidbits.

Inevitably such a creature is the center of many legends.
There seems to be no doubt that he takes the killing of
rattlesnakes in his stride, but old-timers insist that he some-
times first surrounds the snake with a circle of spiny cactus
joints so that the snake cannot get away. In fact, only a
few weeks ago a friend told me that one of his friends had
seen a slight variation on this performance when a road
runner walled the snake in with small stones before at-
tacking him. But like the milk snake milking a cow and
the hoop snake rolling merrily along with his tail in his
mouth, this remarkable performance seems never to be
witnessed by anyone with a professional interest in natural
history and it is usually a friend of a friend who was on
the spot. The situation seems much the same as that with
ghosts. You are most likely to see them if you are a simple
person and have faith.

As a matter of fact, however, you do not always have
to be a simple or ignorant person to believe what the sim-
ple tell you. A well-educated man recently passed on to
me the old superstition that the Gila monster, our only
poisonous lizard, owed his venom to the unfortunate fact
that nature had not provided him with any orifice through
which the waste products of metabolism could be dis-
charged, and that poisons therefore inevitably accumu-
lated. One need only turn a Gila on his back to dispose
of this legend which is sufficiently improbable on the face
of it. Most of the people who repeat it have pointlessly
taken part in the attempt to exterminate these creatures,
but have obviously never looked at the bodies of their

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

36

victims. And yet we still feel superior to the men of the
Middle Ages who insisted that the toad had a precious
jewel in his head, when they might so easily have found
out that he didn't!

Of course it may just possibly turn out that the road
runner really does fence his victims in. Stranger things do
happen and the evidence against it is necessarily only
negative. But the "paisano" is odd enough without the
legends. Almost everything about him is unbird-like at
the same time that it fits him to desert conditions. He is a
bird who has learned how not to act like one. ^

Though he can fly — at least well enough to get to the
top of a mesquite if there is some really urgent reason for
doing so — he would rather not, trusting to his long legs
to catch his prey and to get him out of trouble. The sound
which he makes is like nothing on earth, least of all like
a bird. One writer describes it as a sort of modified Bronx
cheer, which is right enough since it seems to be made by
the raucous expeUing of air accompanied by a rapid gnash-
ing of the bill — if a bill can be gnashed. Like the bird
himself, the sound is derisive, irascible, ribald, threaten-
ing, and highly self-confident. As befits a no-nonsense sort
of creature, the road runner is content to dress himself in
neutral, brown-speckled feathers, but there is a line of red
cuticle behind his eye which he can expose when it seems
desirable to look a bit fiercer than usual.

Sociologists talk a great deal these days about "adjust-
ment," which has always seemed to me a defeatist sort of
word suggesting dismal surrender to the just tolerable. The
road runner is not "adjusted" to his environment. He is
triumphant in it. The desert is his home and he likes it.
Other creatures, including many other birds, elude and

37 it suits him fine

compromise. They cling to the mountains or to the cot-
tonwood-filled washes, especially in the hot weather, or
they go away somewhere else, like the not entirely recon-
ciled human inhabitants of this region. The road runner,
on the other hand, stays here all the time and he prefers
the areas where he is hottest and driest. The casual visitor
is most likely to see him crossing a road or racing with a
car. But one may see him also in the wildest wilds, either
on the desert flats or high up in the desert canyons where
he strides along over rocks and between shrubs. Indeed,
one may see him almost anywhere below the level where
desert gives way to pines or aspen.

He will come into your patio if you are discreet. Taken
young from the nest, he will make a pet, and one writer
describes a tame individual who for years roosted on top
a wall clock in a living room, sleeping quietly through
evening parties unless a visitor chose to occupy the chair
just below his perch, in which case he would wake up,
descend upon the intruder, and drive him away. But the
road runner is not one who needs either the human in-
habitant or anything which human beings have introduced.
Not only his food but everything else he wants is amply
supplied in his chosen environment. He usually builds his
sketchy nest out of twigs from the most abundant tree, the
mesquite. He places it frequently in a cholla, the wicked-
est of the cacti upon whose murderous spines even snakes
are sometimes found fatally impaled. He feeds his young
as he feeds himseK, upon the reptiles which inhabit the
same areas which he does. And because they are juicy,
neither he nor his young are as dependent upon the hard-
to-find water as the seed-eating birds who must sometimes
make long trips to get it.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

38

Yet all the road runner's peculiarities represent things
learned, and learned rather recently as a biologist under-
stands "recent." He is not a creature who happened to have
certain characteristics and habits and vv^ho therefore sur-
vived here. This is a region he moved into and he wsiS once
very different. As a matter of fact, so the ornithologists tell
us, he is actually a cuckoo, although no one w^ould ever
guess it v^ithout studying his anatomy. Outv^ardly, there
is nothing to suggest the European cuckoo of reprehen-
sible domestic morals or, for that matter, the American
cuckoo or "rain crow" whose mournful note is familiar
over almost the entire United States and part of Canada —
not excluding the wooded oases of Arizona itself. That
cuckoo flies, perches, sings and eats conventional bird food.
He lives only where conditions are suited to his habits. But
one of his not too distant relatives must have moved into
the desert — slowly, no doubt — and made himself so much
at home there that by now he is a cuckoo only to those
who can read the esoteric evidences of his anatomical
structure.

Despite all this, it must be confessed that not every-
body loves the road runner. Nothing is so likely to make
an animal unpopular as a tendency to eat things which
we ourselves would like to eat. And the road runner is
guilty of just this wickedness. He is accused, no doubt
justly, of varying his diet with an occasional egg of the
Gambel's quail, or even with an occasional baby quail it-
self. Sportsmen are afraid that this reduces somewhat the
number they will be able to kill in their own more efficient
way and so, naturally, they feel that the road runner
should be eliminated.

To others it seems that a creature who so triumphantly

39 '* suits him fine

demonstrates how to live in the desert ought to be re-
garded with sympathetic interest by those who are trying
to do the same thing. He and the quail have got along
together for quite a long time. Neither seems likely to
eliminate the other. Man, on the other hand, may very
easily eliminate both. It is the kind of thing he is best at.

40

THREE

strange forest

IN THE PLANT WORLD THE ROAD RUNNER S OPPOSITE NUM-

ber is certainly the cactus. To most people — and quite
properly — it is the desert plant par excellence. Many kinds
are, like the road runner, at home in the desert and no-
where else. Like the road runner also they belong to a
family of pioneers which moved into arid America and
changed itself radically to meet the new conditions. Most
of the cuckoo tribe live by following other habits in other
environments. The relatives of the desert cacti do the same.
Members of the Sonoran branch of the family come in all
shapes and sizes from tiny two-inch pincushions full of pins

41 strange forest

to the giant saguaro which towers sometimes seventy-five
feet, weighs six or seven tons, and hves for as much as
two hundred years. Some eleven sorts of cactus have been
found only in Arizona, other kinds are more widespread.
But they all have the same general characteristics and em-
ploy very similar devices in their determination to make
a good best of desert living.

Most have the succulent stems which store water, when
they can get it, to be saved for a non-rainy day — or month,
or even year. Leaves are vestigial or completely absent
because too much moisture would evaporate from them,
and the stems are green with chlorophyll so that they can
perform the functions of leaves. These stems are also often
coated with wax to economize water still further and
usually they are provided with formidable spines — partly
to discourage animals which would be only too glad to
use the succulence for their own purposes, partly because
spines limit the free circulation of the hot, desiccating
atmosphere, perhaps also because they provide broken
shade to the surface of the plant.

All these devices have been independently invented by
other plant families which also moved into the desert.
Succulence, waxy coatings, and reduced or absent leaves
are common. To the layman, indeed, any plant which
exhibits all these characteristics is commonly called
''a cactus," though he is often wrong because the true
cactus is a member of a family strongly marked in other
ways. That graceful spray of ten-foot wands tipped with
flame-colored flowers and called ocotillo is no more a
cactus because it has spines and bears no leaves except
during wet weather than a butterfly is a bird because it
has wings.

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 42

In the case of the butterfly and the bird two quite dif-
ferent creatures learned to fly by inventing wings. In the
case of the ocotillo and the cactus two different kinds of
plants discovered the same methods of economizing on
water. Nevertheless, true cacti are common enough and
a number of species are growing within a few feet of my
door. The why and wherefore of their diverse shapes and
habits is an interesting subject, but at the moment we are
concerned rather with the general methods by which cacti
have learned to live in the desert.

The question might be asked of any one of a dozen
sorts but we may as well address it to the giant saguaro.
For one thing, it is in many ways among the most re-
markable of all. For another, not even the most casual
visitor to the region where it grows can have failed to be
aware that it is unlike anything to be seen elsewhere.
There must be few Americans who are not at least vaguely
famiHar with drawings or paintings or photographs of the
saguaro towering starkly over the desert and stretching
out its grotesquely extended arms. As a matter of fact,
artists and cartoonists have established it as a conventional
symbol of location. When you see a saguaro that means,
"Scene: The Desert" just as the Eiffel Tower means
"Paris" or The Public Library lions mean "New York."
Actually it has been employed far too widely for even
reasonable accuracy. To many artists it seems to mean
not only "desert" but "any desert," though the truth is
that the saguaro's range is extraordinarily hmited. There
are some in northern Mexico; there are also a very few
in California just across the Colorado River from Arizona.
But, except for these, there are no others anywhere in the

43 strange forest

world and the symbol ought to mean not "desert" but "tlie
Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona and northern
Mexico." To the traveler approaching from the east or
the north, the first sight of a saguaro standing sentinel is
the announcement, "I have arrived."

Under the special conditions prevailing where it flour-
ishes best — loose rocky soil, low rainfall and high tem-
perature— no other growth achieves such a height or such
a bulk. Inevitably the saguaro suggests some strange kind
of tree, not a succulent plant, and its weight is tremendous.
As we said a few minutes ago it may tower fifty feet and
may weigh 12,000 pounds. Indeed, fully grown plants are
quite commonly not much smaller. Yet they are obvi-
ously, in everything except size, very much like other
members of the sometimes quite modest cereus subgroup
of the cacti. The waxy green skin is tender; the flesh is
pulpy and moist, though the moisture contained is too
bitter to drink. In spring when a little circle of white
flowers opens at the tip of one or more of the arms, the
flowers are unmistakably cactus flowers. When the red
fruits follow they look like many other cactus fruits, even
very much like the familiar prickly pear sometimes sold
in fruit stores.

Yet everything about the saguaro is somehow odd. The
seeds, like most cactus seeds, are tiny. The disproportion
between the acorn and the oak is not nearly so great. And
they grow with extraordinary slowness. After two or tliree
years a seedling is only a few millimeters high; after ten
years, less than an inch. From then on the rate of growth
is variable, but a three-foot specimen may be twenty to
fifty years old. In middle age (or shall we say adolescence)
it will grow faster, but it will take about a century to

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

44

reach maturity, after which an individual may have an-
other hundred years to hve. Planting a tree is often taken
as a symbol of the farseeing and the unselfish. One puts
an acorn in the ground with a certain sense of demon-
strating both faith in and concern for a future other than
one's own. But if anyone ever planted a saguaro for the
sake of future generations, he was carrying such faith and
such concern to fantastic limits.

Yet in favorable areas the saguaros form veritable
forests, thousands of specimens covering hundreds of
acres grow almost as close together as giant trees do.
Obviously the saguaro is extremely well suited to what
it is suited to. There is no suggestion that it would prefer
any other environment. Indeed, the fact that it is so re-
stricted in its distribution, that it does not tolerate in-
troduction into other parts of the world, is proof enough
how perfectly it has adapted itself. What makes it so fit
to live just here?

The most uninstructed visitor who saw a forest of these
giants for the first time would almost certainly assume that
their roots go very deep down. If he happened to know
something about the habits of certain other desert plants
— ^how, for example, a yucca no more than six or eight
feet high may send a root forty feet below the surface
in search of water — ^he would probably suppose that the
saguaro must reach half the way to China. But he couldn't
be more wrong. The taproot of a huge specimen is seldom
more than thi'ee feet long and seems ridiculously inade-
quate. As a matter of fact the saguaro is so insecurely
anchored that it often meets its end by being blown over

45 strange forest

in a storm, and wanton horsemen have been known to de
stroy in a few moments a centmy of slow hving with a
tug upon a lasso.

Yet there is method in the saguaro's seeming madness.
It does not go deep for water because where it grows
there usually isn't any. In fact its preferred areas are
those buried under the loose rocky detritus of disinte-
grating mountains and therefore the very ones which are
the despair of the well digger. But the saguaro has learned
that when the occasional torrential rains do come, the
water does not run off as quickly as it does on the hard-
backed flats because it sinks a few inches into the rocky
soil. And while the saguaro was learning that, it was also
learning how to take advantage of the fact. It sends out
a network of lateral roots only eight to twenty inches be-
low the surface but as much as ninety feet in length, so
that the great trunk rises from the center of a sort of huge
disk just below the surface.

Thanks to this arrangement it is ready to take full ad-
vantage of the occasional periods when these roots are
bathed in water. Moreover the trunk is longitudinally
accordion-pleated and as moisture is absorbed the pleats
unfold. As much as a ton may be absorbed after a single
downpour and the supply, carefully hoarded, can last if
necessary for a full year.

In fact the saguaro cannot live where rains are frequent
because, for one thing, it may take up so much water as
to burst itself open. Even when growing under ideal con-
ditions, it may have a moisture content of from seventy-
five to ninety-five percent of its green weight. In a saguaro
forest the large plants are usually fifteen or twenty feet
apart, because each needs a considerable area from which

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

46

to draw water, and the mature specimens are those
which have successfully defended the plot of ground to
which a seedling staked a claim perhaps a century ago. In
a deciduous forest the contest between individuals is liter-
ally for a place in the sun. Where the saguaro grows there
is enough of that for everybody. But every individual
must protect his water rights in his own area.

For all the soft succulence of the saguaro's trunk, for
all the fact that it is not, like a tree, predominantly woody,
there is nothing weak about its structure. It may sway
in the wind like an oak or an elm; in a storm, branching
"arms" may sometimes break off, or the whole may be up-
rooted. But the massive trunk is surprisingly strong. In-
deed, when you realize that the flesh beneath the waxy
skin is soft and pulpy, it is astonishingly so.
" Examine the skeleton of a dead specimen lying on the
desert and the mystery is explained. The soft part decayed
rapidly but there remained the almost indestructible
woody "ribs," each as long as the saguaro was high. Among
the many remarkable discoveries of this cactus was the
discovery of the principle of "reinforcement" which man
now takes advantage of when he embeds steel rods in his
concrete walls. The center of the saguaro is pulpy and
so is the outer flesh. But imbedded in this pulp is a cylin-
der of closely placed rods which give the whole a flexible
strength. Since the time before history, Pima and Papago
Indians living in the saguaro country have used these
rods to construct wooden shelters which must be as im-
mune to decay as cypress.

In another way also, the saguaro finds that its ability to
produce either pulpy or extraordinarily hard tissue comes
in handy. It is very much subject to the attack of wood-

47 strange forest

peckers. In fact one species of the latter, the gilded flicker,
seldom nests in anything except a hole which it has ex-
cavated in the saguaro, and its range is almost coexten-
sive with that of the giant cactus. Moreover, this particular
bird insists upon digging a new home ever so often, leaving
abandoned dwellings to be used by quite a few other
species of nesting birds — by cactus wrens, elf owls and
others, even sometimes, as I have happened to observe,
by honeybees who have left their man-made hive. The
result of all this is that there are very few mature saguaros
which do not have from one to a dozen cavities in their
trunks. But the saguaro handles this situation very success-
fully. The wound inflicted by the flicker is quickly sealed
off by a layer of extraordinarily tough scar-tissue. Not
infrequently one finds among the bleached ribs of some
long dead saguaro a curious boot-shaped receptacle which
represents the lining of a flicker's nest. The Sonoran Desert
must be one of the few places in the world where one
may come home from a walk carrying a hole — and a very
dinrable one at that.

For plants which grow only in one or more isolated and
very restricted areas the botanists have a word: "endemic."
Endemics contrast most sharply with "cosmopolitans"
which sometimes almost circle the globe, somewhat less
sharply with other species or genera which cover large
areas without being actually cosmopolitan. But there are
few species whose endemism is more striking than that of
the saguaro which is limited to this one small area. And
there are few if any endemics which are so striking a
feature of the one region where they are at home.

Both cosmopolitanism and endemism present problems

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 4g

for the evolutionist and the plant geographer. How did the
cosmopolitans spread from, say, Africa to South America?
Why haven't those endemics which are found only in one
place set forth to colonize others? How did those which
exist in several widely separated but restricted areas come
to have this "discontinuous distribution"?

The answers to those questions when either found or
guessed at are various. Obviously a plant species or genus
can't migrate past barriers which it cannot cross. A plant
adapted, for instance, to desert conditions obviously can't
get to another desert thousands of miles away across a
damp, humid stretch any more than a moisture-loving
plant can cross a desert from one moist region to another.
If, as happens to be the case, there are very closely re-
lated cosmopolitan genera in Africa and in South America,
they must have made their way from one continent to
another via some land connections either now or once
existing. No less obviously, if endemics are "discontinu-
ously distributed" in several small, widely separate areas,
that presents a different problem. And in some cases at
least they probably represent "relicts" — surviving patches
of some once large continuous distribution.

All this is part of a very large and complicated subject
into which we need not try to enter very deeply. But once
one has turned from astonishment at the saguaro as an
individual to contemplate the fact that it is not to be
found anywhere except in this one region where it is so
very abundant indeed, one cannot help wondering why
that should be. Were there ever saguaros anywhere else?
Are they "relicts" or did they first develop here and never
get any further?

Such questions cannot be answered fully and positively

49 strange forest

but some very probable guesses can be made. No remains
of a saguaro, fossil or otherwise, have ever been found
except in this region. By itself that is not very strong evi-
dence because fossil cacti of any kind are almost unknov^n.
But certain other facts can be added. The cactus is an
American family so there can't be much doubt that the
saguaro originated in this hemisphere. It is so highly spe-
cialized that it will not flourish except under the very
special conditions which it finds in this one kind of desert.
If it ever colonized a larger area, it must have been one
which was at that time almost precisely what the Sonoran
Desert is now. And for all these reasons it seems a fairly
safe guess that there never were any saguaros in any place
very far from where they are now found.

Look again, therefore, at any one of the thousands to
be seen in southern Arizona. Probably nowhere else was
one ever seen. They represent about as close an approxi-
mation to a "special creation" as one is likely to find. They
certainly look improbable, and in a sense they were im-
probable— until, for some reason which evolutionists don t
even pretend to understand fully, an organism's ability to
vary produced at last this strange plant perfectly adapted
to the narrowly defined conditions which existed right
here. The first known mention of the saguaro is said to
be in 1540. Surely the botanical Cortez who first saw it
must have felt "a wild surmise."

Nowadays we are all too familiar with the sad fact that
many interesting plants and many interesting animals are
"near extinction." Perhaps most people don't care but at
least there are some who do. Like Thoreau they may say —
and have even stronger reasons than he had for saying

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

50

it — "I seek acquaintance with Nature ... I take infinite
pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for in-
stance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and
then to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy
that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn
out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and
mutilated it in many places."

For the immediate present, however, the saguaro insists
upon being paradoxical in still another respect. In all prob-
abihty there are now, or at least were quite recently, more
saguaros in southern Arizona than there ever were before.
The primeval forest of giant cacti which the first white
man saw was probably neither as thick nor as imposing
as the one you and I can see today!

Careful study of the composition of the existing forests
seems to demonstrate conclusively that they experienced
a rather short period of unusual prosperity not so very
long ago, that neither before nor since that time did the
species ever reproduce itself so abundantly or so vigor-
ously. This does not mean that young saguaros are not
even at this moment moving slowly through the stages
of their growth. One may find them a few inches or a few
feet high, usually in the shade of some bush or some cactus
of a different species which shaded them from the. too
fierce sun during their earliest years. But from the propor-
tion of existing specimens of approximately the same age,
it seems clear that about two hundred years ago conditions
were more nearly perfect than they were before or have
been since. Nowadays, so it is estimated, only about one
out of every 275,000 seeds reaches maturity. Once the
proportion must, for reasons not definitely known, have
been much greater. And since the saguaro is so demand-

51 strange forest

ing a plant, even though what it demands is not what
most other plants would, the situation is not really sur-
prising. A very slight change in temperature, amount of
rainfall, or any one of a number of other things, would
no doubt react sharply upon it.

Already the heyday is past. As old specimens die there
are fewer new ones to take their place. Gradually the
forests are thinning out and though measures are being
taken to protect so unique an example of the wonders of
creation, it seems likely enough that the saguaro is doomed,
at least sometime during the centuries to come. That also,
however, is not too surprising. Ecologists have long rec-
ognized the fact that too high a degree of specialization
is usually fatal to a species whether it be plant or animal.
The more adaptable kinds roll with the punches when
conditions change. But no matter how perfectly a plant
or animal may be suited to some very narrow range of
conditions, it is almost certain to be helpless when either
man or the slow evolution of the earth's surface changes
those conditions only slightly.

Thus the great ivory billed woodpecker will almost cer-
tainly be extinct in a few years if it is not extinct already.
It must have great forests with many dead trees. Great
forests are shrinking and even in those that remain, good
forestry which requires the removal of dead wood is bad
forestry for the ivory bill. Meanwhile the very adaptable
English sparrow survived even the disappearance of the
horse and, according to reliable report, has in places taken
to haunting filling stations for the purpose of picking in-
sects from the radiators of the very automobiles which
drove the horse, its former supplier, from the roads.

One wonders what will happen to the gilded flicker.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

52

He is very nearly what the ornithologists call an "obligate"
of the saguaro, i.e., a species which cannot live except
where the saguaro does. But it is said that he does not
refuse absolutely to nest in any hole except one which
he has excavated in the giant cactus. Perhaps that con-
cession will save him, as a similar one saved (or perhaps
profited) the chimney swift of the East when he moved
from caves into the more numerous man-made chimneys.
In any event, one thing seems pretty certain. Those
of us who admire the saguaro arrived just in the nick of
time. A few centuries ago would have been too soon. A
few centuries hence would probably be too late.

53

FOUR

how they got that way

ONCE, A VERY LONG TIME AGO, DINOSAURS LUMBERED OVER

parts of what is now Arizona and, departing, left behind
them footprints in the muds of time. Occasionally the mud
hardened into stone and the prints are pointed out to
visitors. Concerning them a pleasant story is told.

"Them footprints," said a guide, "is four hundred million
and four years old." "But how can you be so precise as all
that?" "Well, (apologetically) of course I don't really
know nothing about it myself. But when I came they
told me they was four hundred million years old. And
I been here four years."

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ^^

This tale is one it is well to bear in mind when discussing
either geology or evolution. Even the most confident scien-
tists admit that they can't "be so precise as all that." In
fact they much prefer to talk about the relative age of
either rocks or fossils rather than to assign dates, and of
course amateurs have even better reason to be cautious.
But it is impossible to talk about cuckoos which turned
into road runners and plants which lost their leaves with-
out beginning to wonder when they did it.

How long ago did the road runner colonize the desert
and the cactus begin to live there? How long, for that
matter, has there been a desert in this region for them to
colonize? None of these questions can be answered as
definitely as students of rocks, or plants, or animals would
like to answer them, but they are not totally unanswerable
either. And we might as well start with the desert itself.

Many parts of the earth have been desert-like at many
diflPerent periods. During at least part of Paleozoic times
(and that means hundreds of milHons of years ago ) much
of New York and Pennsylvania, for example, was a desert,
though there were certainly no road runners or cacti there
because that was a long long time before there were any
birds or any flowering plants of any kind. And the region
around New York City was to be buried under the ice at
least twice between then and now.

Similarly, the Southwest also has had its ups and downs,
literally as well as figuratively. About the time when New
York and Pennsylvania were desert, spreading seas were
lapping about the region of Tucson, as sedimentaiy rocks
in what are now the Santa Rita and the Tucson Mountains
show. Later deposits, formed in other parts of Ailzona,
indicate that highly arid conditions prevailed there then.

55 ^ow ^'^^y 9°^ *hat way

Nevertheless, and still later, toward the end of the Mcso-
zoic era, or say a hundred million years ago, most of what
is now the Rocky Mountain region was part of a great
seaway five hundred to a thousand miles wide, stretching
from the Gulf of Mexico to the arctic, and covering parts
of New Mexico, Texas and eastern Arizona, so that much
of what is now arid was drowned in salt water then.

Presently the Rockies, the Sierra Nevadas, and the Cas-
cade Mountains appeared, cutting ofiF, as they were lifted,
the moist winds blowing in from the Pacific. Hence the
Great Basin area of Utah was soon very dry and the
Great Plains semi-arid. But until the mountain ranges
reached their greatest height, their eastern flanks were
probably warmer and moister than they are now. And as
for the Sonoran Desert, it is probably relatively recent,
though the Sonoran has been something like what it now
is since the Miocene, which means for approximately ten
million years.

The evidence indicates that the eastern or dry flanks of
the Andes were also very dry by then, and because close
relatives of some of our most characteristic desert plants
are found in South America, it is thought that they prob-
ably originated there. Moreover, the soil of the Sonoran
Desert floor is much younger than the mountains which
surround it, because it is a thick layer of detritus washed
down from these same mountains as they have weathered
away and it now fills the once deeper valleys. In places
it is at least 1800 feet thick, as we know from the fact
that well drillers in the Tucson area have failed to find
rock even at that depth. Even now the desert is chang-
ing— in some respects rapidly, because of what man has
done to it since he set cattle and sheep to grazing and

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT ^^

overgrazing the desert vegetation, in others slowly, be-
cause nature herself does not stand still.

On the other hand, new as the desert is in terms of
geology and relatively new as it is in terms of its flora
and fauna, it is still very ancient from man's own stand-
point. It seems to be quite definitely established that In-
dians were aheady inhabiting some parts of the South-
west as much as ten thousand years ago, and if any of them
had aheady got to southern Arizona, they must have found
it not too unlike what it is today, though some of the
vegetation was probably less sparse. But "ten thousand
years ago" really is "today" so far as the story of evolution
is concerned. Long before that, European man had reached
a stage of mental development which made his skull
nearly identical with that of us moderns. Long before that
a road runner, scarcely if at all distinguishable from those
now rejoicing in the desert and dry coastal areas, had
fallen into the famous tar pits near Los Angeles where
its bones remained until they were dug up a few years ago.

Since the cactus is even stranger as a plant than the road
runner is as a bird, it is perhaps of the cactus that we
had better ask, diffidently but more specifically, the ques-
tions proposed a few paragraphs back. "How and \yhen
did you get here? Where did you come from? What were
your ancestors like? By what stages did you adapt your-
self so admirably to the very special conditions you found
in the southwestern deserts?"

At least a partial answer can be given to these ques-
tions, though the answers have to be based not on geo-
logical evidence but upon a study of the living members
of the cactus family. Some of them grow in regions only

57 1^°^ *^^y 9°^ ^^cjt way

slightly arid and some of those which do so, do not look
at all like what we think of when we hear the word
"cactus." They have quite ordinary leaves and stems. In
fact they are not very unusual in appearance. And the
assumption is that it was some such quite orthodox mem-
ber of an orthodox family which learned to live with less
and less water as it turned itself into a desert species.

Now, at some of these statements the layman may well
bristle. "Why on earth," he may ask, "do you tell me that
the ocotillo — which has thorns, green stems, and only
small temporary leaves — is not a cactus, while some quite
ordinaiy-looking plant which lives in a reasonably damp
environment is? Why wouldn't it be more sensible to say
that the ocotillo and the cactus are alike, that they de-
scended from some common ancestor which was, and
perhaps always had been, desert dwelling and cactus-
like?"

The answer to that protest is very much like the answer
to the question, "Why call the road runner a cuckoo?"
You call him that because of certain fundamental ana-
tomical characteristics which, as we know from fossil and
other evidence, change much more slowly than the super-
ficial peculiarities which make him seem at first glance
uncuckoo-like.

All botanists, whether they be students of the living
species or of fossils, agree that the anatomy of the flower
is one of the more stable characteristics of a plant group.
Classification is based upon all the characteristics of a
plant, and the flower structure and the obscure anatomy
of all desert cacti are similar, while they are different from
those of the ocotillo and other superficially similar plants.
The tropical cactus of a moist environment may not look

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ^O

like its desert cousin, but its flower is much like theirs,
while that of the ocotillo is different.

Of course it would be nice if we had a complete series
of dated fossils which would illustrate the emergence in
time of the relatively superficial characteristics of the
desert cactus. In the case of various animals, such series
do exist, notably in the case of the horse, whose evolution
was illustrated quite early in the study of evolution and
whose gradual loss of toes can be neatly demonstrated in
the successive cases of a museum. Unfortunately, however,
nothing of the sort is possible in the case of the cacti.

In the first place the whole order of flowering plants
may have evolved rather late. In the second place deserts
are not very favorable to the preservation of fossils, which
occur most abundantly in what were once marshes or
shallow seas. As a matter of fact, it is sometimes said that
there are no fossil cacti and that therefore they must be
very recent indeed. But this evidence is purely negative
and a decade or two ago what may be a fossilized- prickly
pear was discovered in southern Utah embedded in de-
posits of the Eocene age. If it really is a prickly pear, then
a cactus very like a modern one must have developed
during an epoch which, according to the latest evidence,
must be placed at least forty million years ago.

It is not even certain whether the drought-resisting de-
vices were developed by plants growing in a region which
gradually dried up, or whether they were developed as
the plants increased their range into more and more arid
regions. But if, by chance, the place where the one fossil
of a prickly pear was found is the place where it developed
its peculiarities, then it seems likely that the process was
one of adjustment to a changing climate because, so the

59 ^"^^ ^'^^y 9°^ ^^'^^ way

geologists say, the Great Basin section of Utah became
drier and drier as the Eocene was succeeded by the Mio-
cene, and by that epoch it may have been as dry as Death
Valley is today. At least the best guess, based upon what
evidence is available, seems to be that the cactus from
Utah first learned somewhere how to survive dry seasons
of the year between relatively wet ones and that then,
having developed methods of saving water for a part of
the year, it was finally able to survive almost continuous
drought. And it might have done this right in Utah, since
it seems pretty certain that this very region where the
Eocene cactus was growing was a region which had be-
come arid all the year around by the time it entered the
next geological epoch.

By way of compensation for the paucity of fossil evi-
dence bearing on the evolution of the cactus, there is
something we do have: a rather remarkably complete
series of living forms which illustrate very neatly many
of the steps by which the not-at-all-cactus-like ancestor
probably took on, one by one, the distinguishing char-
acteristics of the most peculiar and specialized kinds. The
eohippus or "dawn horse" is extinct. To illustrate his evolu-
tion we have only the fossils. In the case of the cactus
the situation is exactly reversed. A plant probably similar
to the "dawn cactus" is still growing in South America.

Perhaps just because cacti are so odd, so unlike what
we expect a plant to be, they have been made the subject
of exhaustive study. In the great four-volume work by
Britton and Rose the living sorts are magnificently illus-
trated. In Berger s Die Entwicklungslinien der Kakteen
the probable lines of development are exhaustively studied.
Instead of the museum case showing the skeletons of

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT ^Q

successive horses, it is perfectly possible for a botanical
garden to exhibit, alive and growing, the unspecialized
ancestor and the most highly speciaHzed desert species
as v^ell as many successive stages in between.

An interesting fact about the family and one which
raises other questions is this: it seems to belong ex-
clusively to the Western Hemisphere. With the possible
exception of one peculiar species which may be native
to Africa, all of the perhaps eight hundred kinds of cacti
grow naturally only on our side of the world. On the other
hand, many, many plant famihes are "cosmopolitan." You
may, that is to say, find them growing as natives on several
of the widely separated continents. But the cactus, un-
less one counts the single dubiously African species, are
all American. If they ever grew naturally on any other
continent they must have become extinct long ago.

This is by no means to say that they wont grow any-
where else if given a chance. Once they were taken to
Africa, to Italy and the Holy Land by the hand of man,
they flourished there. So, too, did they flourish in Aus-
traha. As a matter of fact, when the prickly pear was
incautiously introduced there, it liked conditions so well
that it became a disastrous pest. Beheved to have -been
introduced in 1839 as one plant in a flowerpot, it began
to get out of hand about thirty years later. By 1900 it
had taken over some ten million acres; by 1920 it domi-
nated sixty million; and it was estimated to be rendering
land useless at the rate of a million acres a year. Finally
it was brought under control only after large sums and
great effort had been expended.

This should convince the most skeptical that if cacti

^] how they got that way

did not exist in a wild state anywhere outside the Western
Hemisphere, it was not because they did not hke it any-
where else.

Neither can it be because only in America did climatic
conditions or changes capable of developing drought-
resisting plants occur. As a matter of fact, many difiFerent
plant families in many parts of the world did develop
the special features of desert dwelling plants so that the
casual layman would unhesitatingly call them cacti. There
are succulent mulberries in Australia and Africa, succulent
passion flowers in Africa and, on one of the islands of the
Indian Ocean, there is a succulent member of the gourd
family which develops a sixteen-foot trunk like an inverted
carrot.

Or suppose we take the case of the milkweeds. Nearly
everybody who has paid any attention to our native plants
in either the wet or dry regions is familiar with one or
another member of this family. In our deserts there are
several species and some of them have the narrow, hard,
dry leaves characteristic of so many plants growing in dry
air. Visitors from elsewhere must often have been sm*-
prised to see a cluster of unmistakable milkweed flowers
topping a plant which looks, at first sight, as though it
were clothed in pine needles. Nevertheless, no Arizona
species has a succulent, water-storing stem or looks any-
thing like a cactus. Yet in Africa and also in Asia there
are related plants which, though not spiny, look a good
deal hke cacti. They are nearly leafless and they store
moisture in their stems.

But perhaps the most interesting case of all is that
of the African members of the cosmopolitan Euphorbia
family, of which the Arizona limber bush is a character-

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

62

istic representative. They independently developed almost
precisely the devices which seem typical of the cacti,
though no North American species of Euphorbia ever
did. Some of the African sorts have thick, columnar, leaf-
less stems, waxy coatings and defensive spines, all of
which make them look so cactus-like that even an amateur
who had got beyond the stage, of calling an ocotillo a
cactus might be forgiven if he took it for granted that
at least these African Euphorbias really were cacti. But
they are not. Their flowers are totally different from cactus
flowers, and they have the thick milky juice which is not
characteristic of the cacti but is characteristic of the Eu-
phorbia family as a whole and is, indeed, responsible for
the utility of the economically most valuable members of
the family — namely the rubber plants.

If then, the fact that the true cacti are all American does
not mean that cacti cannot live anywhere else and does
not mean that only in America did plants develop drought-
resisting devices similar to the cactus, then what on earth
does it mean?

No one can answer that question with absolute finality,
but what it probably does mean is that the cactus family
not only began in America, but began quite recently —
as such things go; much more recently than, for example,
the milkweeds and the Euphorbias. And the reason for
this deduction is not hard to understand.

Obviously the cosmopolitan families migrated somehow
from one continent to another. As early as the days of
Darwin and Wallace it was assumed that such families
were older than the "endemic" which, in some cases at
least, were endemic simply because they did not arise
until after the routes along which the other groups had

(J3 ^^^ t^^y 9°^ *^<^^ way

spread were closed in one way or another. The classic
example of a similar phenomenon in the animal world is
the nearly complete absence of native mammals in Aus-
tralia despite the fact that they are native to every other
continent. Obviously their ancestors, the marsupials, had
got to Australia across some bridge which had disappeared
before the marsupial stock had evolved true mammalian
form somewhere on one of the continents by then isolated
from Australia.

No botanist would say today that every endemic family
or genus is bound to be younger than any cosmopolitan
one. It is not so simple as all that. For one thing the
existence of "discontinuous distributions" (i.e., genera en-
demic in several widely separated regions) is sufficient
to suggest that an endemic genus may sometimes be
merely the relict of a cosmopolitan one which has be-
come extinct except in a few places. But if a plant found
in one place never did exist anywhere else, then it prob-
ably originated fairly recently and somewhere not too far
from where it is now found. Something like that is prob-
ably (but only probably) the case with the cactus.

In any event, most would probably agree that this much
may be said with a fair degree of assurance: the cactus
originated, either in Mexico or South America, as a normal
enough plant with slender stems and orthodox leaves like
one member of the family (Pereskia) still growing in the
West Indies and South America. That ancestral cactus
may have been accustomed then to a fairly moist en-
vironment and it is in such an environment that it still
flourishes. But from a remote period it has always been
distinguished by the anatomical peculiarities of the family
— notably by a certain floral structure and the presence

THE VOrCE OF THE DESERT

64

of a unique organ called the areole from which spines
are produced. Members of this family spread both north-
ward and southward and somewhere, possibly in what is
now one of the American deserts, they developed char-
acteristics which enabled them to survive a long annual
dry season. Then, when the slow Hfting of mountains
either in North or South America turned a seasonally
dry climate into a perpetually arid region they were
well on the way to their present ability to tolerate not
only seasonal but almost continuous drought. If all our
western mountains had always been where they are now,
there might be no cactus here because the country would
always have been too dry to permit the slow adaptation
of the family to arid conditions. If, on the other hand,
the mountains were not there now, then at least many of
the kinds of cactus now decorating the landscape would
not be there either, because the climate would be too
moist for them.

What it all comes down to is this: the casual visitor
to the desert may not always be sure what is a cactus
and what is not. But he is quite right when he thinks of
cacti as the most characteristic plants of the region. Few
others have managed so successfully to make themselves
so completely at home there. No compromises, no. elud-
ings, no picking out of damp spots for the cactus. When
he came to the desert he took possession of it. Like the
road runner, he can say, as few other things can, "Veni,
vidi, vici/'

^%

Typical road in tlie Sonoran desert during the season of
summer rains. (Marvin Frost)

Two saguaros, or giant cacti, linking arms. Both are prob-
ably more than a hundred years old; the small one between
is at least sixty. (Marvin Frost)

Young road runner. Raised by fond parents on a diet of
snakes and lizards, he will soon be as cocky and obstreper-
ous as his elders. (Marvin Frost)

>^;

""''^B^-yiii

White winged dove back from Mexico to nest in saguaro.
(Lewis Wayne Walker)

The wicked cholla cactus which human beings hardly dare
approach but in which various birds build their nests.
(Marvin Frost)

*%'»■•''•-' '•...

The desert scorpion-impopular with all except biologists
who recognize in him the first air-breathing animal. (Mar-
vin Frost)

Oddest of the desert growths, nicknamed the Boojum Tree
because it looks as though Lewis Carroll might have in-
vented it. A native of Mexico but sometimes grown as a
curiosity in the American desert. (Lewis Wayne Walker)

.^^ • . •

This fleetest of desert creatures is called a jack rabbit,
though he is really a hare not a rabbit. Warned by his long
ears, his long legs take him to safety. (Marvin Frost)

Dipodomys, the kangaroo rat. Otherwise known as The
Mouse that Never Drinks. (Marvin Frost)

I

kv

The barrel or compass cactus leaning, as usual, to the
southwest. The only Arizona cactus which really does sup-
ply drinkable, life-saving water to the lost traveler. (Marvin
Frost)

Saguaros climbing the steep slopes of a desert mountain.
(Marvin Frost)

The so-called tarantula spider. Unpopular but not danger-
ous, his love life is extremely odd. (Marvin Frost)

Curved-bill thrasher, who welcomes the protection of the
cholla cactus's murderous spines. (Lewis Wayne Walker)

Desert fox creeping in at night for a drink at a water hole.
(Marvin Frost)

Troupe of the wild pigs called peccaries or javelinas. Pho-
tographed at night about twenty miles from the center of
Tucson. (Marvin Frost)

^v'

1 1

i

y^

Mule deer. Wild buck, doe and fawns cominor to water
hole for their nightly drink. (Lewis Waijne Walker)

65

V E

he was there before Coronado

ACCORDING TO AN ANCIENT AND ANONYMOUS JOCOSITY THE

bravest man who ever lived must have been the first to
eat an oyster — ahve.

A soberer judgment might want to make a case for that
equally forgotten hero of paleolithic times who first do-
mesticated fire. It must have been one of the first of his
home-building achievements, but no woK destined to turn
into a dog and no buffalo destined to become a cow can
possibly have seemed one-tenth so dangerous as devour-
ing flame. Early man, like every other animal, must have
long been accustomed to flee from it in abject terror. We

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ^^

shall never know vv^hat Prometheus first dared snatch a
bit from some forest fire or some erupting volcano. But
when he put it down in the middle of the domestic circle
he must have said, "This I can tame and use/'

Long before even his day, courage of some sort must
have been a characteristic of living things and even the
tamer of fire was not the first hero. Perhaps the first and
greatest of all was whatever little blob of jelly — not yet
either plant or animal but a little of both— first consented
to take on the responsibility of being alive at all. And
surely the second greatest was that plant or animal which
first dared leave the water where, ever since the very
dsLwn of creation, every other organism before it had been
born and died. Men are talking now about journeys to the
moon or to Mars, but neither is more unsuited to human
life than the bare earth was to the first creatures who
risked it.

For millions of years only the submerged areas of the
earth had been habitable. It was in water that the first
hypothetical one-celled creatures, too insubstantial to leave
fossil remains, must have been generated. None ventured
out of it during millions of years while stony skeletons
were evolved and became the earliest sure evidence of
life in some of the oldest rocks. In water also stayed all
the wormlike and squidlike and shrimplike creatures
which represented, in their day, the highest development
of life. Meanwhile, during the major part of the earth's
history, during considerably more than half the time since
life began, aU dry land was desert to a degree almost in-
conceivable— without soil of any kind, as bare as the
moon, and subject to no changes except those produced
by geological forces. Volcanoes flowed and mountains

(fj he was there before Coronado

heaved. Rain falling on an earth without any plant cover
to protect it washed cruel gullies as remorselessly as they
are cut in the most unqualified "bad lands" of today. Had
any creature of that time been capable of thought, life
in any medium other than water would have seemed as
fantastic as life without an atmosphere would seem to us.

Then at some time, geologists say it was probably some-
thing like three hundred million years ago, the first living
thing dared to expose itself temporarily to the deadly air.
If it was an animal, as some think most probable, then it
must have rushed back ( or perhaps ducked back ) before
the gills through which it breathed could dry out. It could
hardly have done much more during many thousands of
years after the first bold venture, because it could not
actually live beyond easy reach of water until its whole
anatomy and physiology had undergone fundamental
changes. But patience is a quality which the universe
seems never to have lacked (until man came along) and
it was always the animal which broke most rashly with
all previous tradition, which presently became the most
highly developed and the most competent — as well as
the least patient.

So far as I am concerned I see no reason to apologize
for calling that animal a "hero'' or for referring to his
"courage." Such terms can have no real meaning except
in connection with something which is alive and when we
talk about "the suffering earth" or the "nobility" of a
mountain range we are merely using a figure of speech.
But it is hard to say just where reality begins or to decide
just which animal or even which plant is still too simple
to be capable of something genuinely analogous to daring
and courage. If these virtues are real in man, then they

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

68

are real because they began to be so as soon as there was
anything in the universe vs^hich could defy law^ and habit
by risking something v^hich had never been done before.

Fev^ of us are so committed to a merely mechanical
behaviorism that we would refuse to call brave and ad-
venturous the first human pioneers who came to live in
the American West. So in their own way were the plants
and animals who had preceded them there. And so, a
fortiori, were those far back in time who first dared learn
how to adapt themselves to that desert which all dry land
then was. If daring to do what our intelligence recognizes
as dangerous constitutes "courage," then the animal who
similarly rejects the imperatives of its instinct is exhibiting
a virtue at least analogous, and so, in some still dimmer
fashion, is the simplest creature, animal or even vegetable,
which refuses to obey its long established reflexes. The
whole course of evolution is directed by just such cou-
rageous acts. It must have its countless unremembered
heroes who created diversity by daring to do what no
member of its species had ever done before.

Most scientists, I am well aware, would object strenu-
ously to any such line of reasoning.. But then many scien-
tists are firmly convinced that in man himself there is
also no such thing as either daring or courage as dis-
tinguished from a reflex, congenital or conditioned. 'And
perhaps that conclusion is inevitable if you begin by deny-
ing their reality to all creatures "lower" than man. If every
other animal is a machine then why shouldn't human
beings be machines also. And if to speak of the "courage"
of some very lowly creature is to indulge in exaggeration,
it is at least an exaggeration opposite and corrective to
a more usual one.

^9 ^® ^°^ there before Coronado

Is it possible, one may ask, to guess at the identity of
the first great pioneer and radical who came to dry land?
Or is it, like the song the Sirens sang, "beyond all con-
jecture?" Does he have a name and can we honor liim
by saying, "But for you and your enterprise I might still
be a fish?" At least our own direct amphibious ancestors
came to land only because that pioneer's descendants were
there to be eaten!

Well, if the paleontologists are right — and their evi-
dence seems pretty good — we can answer this question.
As a matter of fact, I met only the day before yesterday
one of the almost unchanged relatives of the first air-
breathing creatures, and he did not seem especially proud.
He crawled on eight legs out from under a board in my
storeroom and I confess that, though I do not do such
things lightly, I put my foot upon him. Before he was
crushed into nothing he was about two inches long and
pale straw in color. He carried two pinchers before him
and over his back he carried a long tail with a sting at
its end. He was, in short, one of the least popular of desert
dwellers — a scorpion.

Finding out about one's ancestors, especially correlative
ones, is often a risky business and perhaps most people
would rather not know how much all of us are indebted
to this rather unattractive creature. But so far as geolo-
gists can tell from the fossils they study and date, the
first animal actually capable of breathing air was not only
a member of the scorpion kind but amazingly like the one
we step on when we find him.

To even the most uninstructed eye a scorpion fossilized
during the Silurian or Devonian epoch — say something
like three hundred million years ago — is unmistakably a

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

70

scorpion. If one of them were to come to life again and
crawl out of his stone sarcophagus into your desert patio,
you would not be particularly surprised by his appearance
unless you happened to be a biologist especially devoted
to the study of that group of animals called arachnids to
which the scorpion belongs. There are several species now
common hereabout — some, like the victim of my brutal-
ity, only two inches long and some several times that
length. A three hundred million year old specimen would
look to the casual eye like merely a sort one had not hap-
pened to see before and not much more different from
the familiar kinds than they are from one another.

In the highly improbable event that a living dinosaur
should be found in some African or South American hiding
place, it would create quite a stir in even the popular
press and any big-game hunter would count it a high dis-
tinction to shoot one. Yet anyone who happens to live in
one of the many parts of the earth where scorpions abound
can have the privilege of stepping upon a creature who
has been going about his business (such as it is) far
longer than any dinosaur went about dinosaur business.
As a matter of fact, scorpions put in their appearance more
years before the first dinosaur than have slipped away
since the last known dinosaur decided that he and his
kind had had their day.

The horseshoe crab and the gingko tree are sometimes
called "hving fossils," and the epithet has more recently
been applied to that strange fish known as Latimeria
which was taken not many years ago off the coast of Africa
in spite of the fact that it, as weU as all its immediate
relatives, was supposed to have become extinct a very
long time ago. Yet no sort of fish is much older than the

71 he was there before Coronado

scorpion, and the horseshoe crab is not as nearly like anv
very ancient form as the scorpion in my storeroom is like
his Silurian ancestor. He may not be much to look at, Init
the least we can do is to regard him in the spirit of the
naturalist Sutherland when he contemplated the living
members of a tribe somewhat less ancient than the scor-
pions: "If the test of nobiUty is antiquity of family, then
the cockroach that hides behind the kitchen sink is the
true aristocrat. He does not date back merely to the three
brothers who came over in 1640 or to William the Con-
queror. Wherever there have been great epoch-making
movements of people he has been with them heart and
soul. . . . Since ever a ship turned a foamy furrow in the
sea he has been a passenger, not a paying one certainly
but still a passenger. But man himseK is but a creature
of the last twenty minutes or so compared with the cock-
roach, for, from its crevice by the kitchen sink, it can
point its antennae to the coal in the hod and say: 'When
that was being made my family was abeady well es-
tablished.' " Scorpions have never been as closely asso-
ciated with man as the cockroach, but they may not
consider that anything to be ashamed of and on the score
of antiquity they have a right to snub the cockroaches as
upstarts, relatively speaking at least.

It may seem odd that they have hung on so long while
changing so little. It may seem even odder that they
should be found in deserts despite the fact that they are
so similar to the scorpions which had recently left the
water. But they do not insist upon its being dry and some
species will even tolerate a certain amount of cold. Though
there are none in New England or in the Great Lakes
region, they are found in the Alps and on our continent

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 72

as far north as southern Canada. On the whole, however,
they prefer warm chmates and they have been in the
Southwest for a long, long time. Tracks almost precisely
like those made by a living species have been found in
the Coconino sandstone which was laid down in Permian
times or not more than a million or a million and a half
years after scorpions took the first drastic step out of the
water.

Most people today underestimate the intelligence and
awareness of most creatures other than man because re-
cent official science has often encouraged them to do so.
But the scorpion is probably even dumber than he looks.
At first sight you would have no reason to suppose that
his senses were much less keen or his awareness much less
dim than those of any common insect. But they are. By
comparison even a beetle, to say nothing of a bee, an ant
or a fly, is a miracle of alertness and competence. The
life which! extinguished when I stepped on my specimen
was about as dim as we can imagine life to be. The scor-
pion's brain stopped growing not long after he left the
water and braininess had not got very far by then.

Neither his habits nor his character are very engaging
even as such things go. The young — miniature replicas of
their parents — are born alive and like the young of the
woK spider they clamber about on their mother's back
until they are old enough to take care of themselves. But
maternal solicitude is probably a rather large term to use
in connection with the mother's tolerance, and at least
until mating time comes around, scorpions do not seem
to do anything very interesting. They skulk under bits of
wood or stone and they sometimes choose to hide in shoes

73 ^® ^^^ there before Coronado

incautiously left in their neighborhood. I have never seen
a scorpion outside captivity do anything more interesting
than to nibble rather languidly at the body of a moth who
had come to my light.

In fact, watching scorpions closely even in captivity
does not provide much excitement most of the time. If
two or three are kept together one sometimes absent-
mindedly eats a companion but the cannibalism, which is
usual, is probably nothing very deliberate. The poor things
not only have a very rudimentary brain but also eyesight
which is probably just keen enough to distinguish the
dark corners where they hide from the bright light they
avoid and too dim even to make them aware of move-
ment. Probably they do not actually perceive anything
they do not touch.

As one observer has put it, if you see two together then
they are either making love or one of them is being eaten.
Even anatomically the most interesting thing about scor-
pions is their curious way of breathing. Insects have, of
course, no lungs. They have merely ramifying tubes open
to the outside which permit the penetration of air into
the body cavity. But scorpions, being even older than the
insect tribe, have what are called book lungs — curious
pursehke organs which no insect possesses, though spiders,
more nearly related to scorpions than to insects, often have
both the insect's tubes or tracheae and the scorpion's book
lungs. No doubt book lungs, which are a sort of air-
breathing gills, were invented close to the water's edge.

So far as I know no detailed account of the mating
habits of the Arizona species has ever been published,
but in a creature which varies so little they are probably
the same as those described in Henri Fabre's classic ac-

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 7^

count of the kind which hve in Provence and also, more
recently, of a Philippine species. Male and female stand
face to face with their tails raised and their stings touch-
ing. The male takes his partner by the claw and then backs
away, leading her with him. This holding of hands in a
sort of dance may last for more than an hour, after which
the couple disappears under a stone or into some other
recess, the male walking backward as he conducts his
partner. This sounds almost romantic and it probably does
involve a sort of courtship. But the holding of hands is
also probably necessary because creatures which are deaf
and almost blind can't afford to lose one another once
happy accident has brought them together. And though
human lovers have been known on occasion to call one
another "good enough to eat," we are likely to be shocked
when the female scorpion takes this extravagant metaphor
literally, as she frequently does.

Even the scorpion's venom is said to be of some very
ancient kind quite different from that of the serpent. And
for once a creature commonly regarded as dangerous really
is so to some slight extent. The largest kind are relatively
innocuous and capable of giving, as' I have been informed
by a friend who knows from direct experience, nothing
worse than a wasp sting. But two Arizona species, neither
more than about two inches long, can be deadly to small
children and may give even an adult several painful days
in bed. Records kept at the Arizona State College over
a period of nineteen years ending in 1948 charge them
with causing sixty-four fatalities during that time, or more
than four times as many as rattlesnakes can be blamed for.
Naturalists get rather tired of insisting that few animals
are dangerous at all and very few indeed anything like

y5 ^^ ^°^ there before Coronado

SO dangerous as we like to imagine them, and it is almost
a relief for them to be able to say: Scorpions really do
sting, some species really are deadly to small children, and
even adults should beware of them.

Even so, we tend to exaggerate their dangerousncss both
because we always do exaggerate such dangers and also
perhaps because in the scorpion we recognize some-
thing terrifyingly ancient. Nevertheless, even the so-called
deadly sort are deadly only to the very young or the very
feeble and I myself have seen a healthy adult who had
been stung by one ready to go back to his work after
keeping fingers in ice water for an hour. By comparison
with the automobile, they have very little effect upon the
life expectancy of any inhabitant of the desert country.
And though men have doubtless been killing them on
sight at least since the earliest stone age, men must have
found them impressive also, because Scorpio was put
among the zodiacal constellations a very long time ago.
And it is appropriate that this constellation, inconspicu-
ous in the north, becomes very prominent in the summer
sky above the desert.

So much, then, for this creature which, only a few pages
back, I insisted upon endowing with "daring" and with
"courage" because it ventured upon the land some three
hundred millions of years ago. Judged even by the acute-
ness of its senses, much less by its intelligence, it belongs
very low indeed in the hierarchy of life. What a long, long
way it was from, say, the scorpion's eye — too primitive al-
most to deserve the name — to the eye of even so primitive
an insect as the praying mantis. Yet the fact remains that

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

76

between the scorpion and man himself the distance is not
nearly so great as it is between the scorpion and anything
which does not live at all. The difference between seeing,
no matter how dimly, and not seeing at all is greater than
the difference between the scorpion's vision and ours. It is
easier to imagine how, given time enough, a scorpion
could become a man than it is to imagine how sea water
and mineral substances could have become a scorpion.
Primitive as his eye is, it is indubitably an eye. Its ov^nier
can see with it — however dimly. And seeing itself is a
process beyond comprehension. It involves awareness of
some sort. Perhaps the difference between the scorpion's
courage and what is possible for us is no greater than that
between his eyesight and ours. Yet who would refuse to
use the word "seeing" to describe what even a scorpion
can do? Why should we not assume that his courage and
ours are no less essentially, though remotely, the same?

Granting all this it is, however, stiU possible to wonder
why this once so adventurous creature became so soon a
very paragon of conservatism. As the first air-breather he
may very well have been the remote ancestor of all the in-
sects who were to proceed from originality to originality
until they became capable of achievements which even
man cannot wholly grasp. But this prototype of the insect
himself continues to crawl upon the desert and to poison
human beings with his ancient venom milhons of years
after almost all the other creatures which were even his
near contemporaries gave up their effort to survive in
their original forais. Like the horseshoe crab and the
gingko tree, he should have become extinct eons ago. But
he has changed even less than they and become one of the
most striking examples not of evolution but of a refusal to

77 ^® ^°^ there before Coronado

evolve. Some of the irrational distaste and fear wliich the
sight of him inspires in most people is partly the result of
their dim half -realization that he comes down from a past
too remote not to suggest unimaginable horrors. He is a
living reminder of "the dark and backward abysm of time"
and, like the earliest myths of the human race, he suggests
the monstrous beginnings of instinct and mind and emo-
tion. He is altogether too much like some bad dream and
we would rather not be reminded of it.

As to the mystery of why he is still here, we shall have
to be content to put him down as a left-over without know-
ing precisely how he managed to achieve that humble sta-
tus. A long time ago he wandered into the desert pretty
much what he is. now and found that he could survive
there, partly no doubt because his demands are modest
and he can satisfy them without exposing himself very
much. He eats insects which are plentiful and he can do
without water as well as without food for long periods.
Like the members of certain very old human families he
has little to be proud of except the achievements of his re-
mote ancestors, and if he were capable of pride he might,
like them, grow prouder just in proportion as he comes to
be more and more remote in time from them and their
virtues. Like such people, he also makes us wonder what
became of all the greatness which was once in his race.
Did the scorpion use up all the daring of his tribe in his
one great exploit all those millions of years ago? Did he
squander it all at once like the wits at the Mermaid Tav-
ern, each of whom seemed resolved to:

Fut his whole wit in one jest
And live a fool the rest of his dull life?

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

78

It is a pleasant fancy but one had better not put it into
words when there are any paleontologists about. We
honor the scorpion for his early achievement but it has to
be admitted that he doesn't seem to have done much to
be proud of in recent years.

79

the moth and the candle

THE MOTH WHO SINGES HIS WINGS HAS POINTED MANY A

moral but he does not "desire" the flame, not even in the
dim way that the first scorpion to leave the water may
have "desired" to succeed in his dangerous adventure.
The moth accomplishes no purpose of his own and none
appropriate to nature at large. He is merely the victim of
a situation which can seldom have arisen before man put
in his appearance long after moths and many other insects
had developed a tropism which was usually harmless dur-
ing millions of years.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

80

A motli's wings beat faster when light falls upon his
eyes, and when it falls more strongly on one eye than on
the other, the wings on one side beat faster than those on
the other. Irresistibly his flight curves toward the source
and if he reaches it, he dies- — a victim of one of the mis-
takes which nature sometimes makes because even she
cannot foresee every eventuahty.

But in the case of a certain moth which lives in the
desert and of a certain candle which grows there the situa-
tion is different.

Almost anywhere in the Southwest you will^find as a
conspicuous feature of the landscape one or another of the
yuccas with their large bundle of stiff, sword-sharp leaves
and, in early summer, an incredibly tall spire of innumer-
able creamy white blossoms held high on a great spike
which shot up suddenly from the middle of the sword
cluster. Pass by again in the fall and the spire will be
bearing handsome pods which spHt open as they dry and
scatter innumerable shiny black seeds on the sand. Though
a bit difficult to gather, the pods make a fine addition to
a winter bouquet and those who gather them often notice
that each is perforated by at least- one hole from which
some insect has obviously emerged.

Sometimes the collector will search for a "perfect" spec-
imen but perfect ones are not to be found. The "infesta-
tion" was necessary. Either the ovary from which the pod
developed was "infested" or it didn't mature. Thereby
hangs a tale as strange as any the desert has to tell and
in certain important respects the most difficult to explain
of all the strange tales which are told of the interdepend-
ence of insects and flowers. The hole was made by the
larva of a moth, and just to make the question we are about

81 the moth and the candle

to ask as neat as possible, it happens that certain species of
yucca are still commonly called by the name which the
Spaniards gave them: Our Lord's Candle.

Does Pronuba yuccasella, the moth in question, "de-
sire" this particular candle? Please wait until you have
heard the whole story before you answer.

Everybody — or at least everybody old enough to have
been a child before directer methods of sex instruction
came into fashion — knows about the bees and the flowers.
If he did not lose all interest in the subject as he began to
realize its remoter personal implications, he probably now
knows at least in a very general way that many plants de-
pend upon many insects and some, even, upon certain
birds, to help them in what the eighteenth century liked to
call "their nuptial rites." Orchard growers tend bees prin-
cipally to increase their yield of apples and plums and
pears; Darwin wrote a classic on the pollination of orchids;
the Smyrna fig would not fruit in California until the par-
ticular wasp which acts as marriage broker for it in the
Near East was imported to perform his function here, etc.,
etc.

But in every known case except that of the moth and the
candle it is a somewhat one-sided affair with all the "in-
tention" being on the part of the flower. Though the insect
may be lured by a scent which it likes — even by the stench
of rotten meat in the case of certain tropical blossoms pol-
linated by flesh-eating flies — and though he may be re-
warded with nectar or with edible pollen, he does not do
anything directly calculated to fertilize the flow^er. Some-
times the flower is.§?> constructed that, for instance, the in-
sect cannot get a^the nectar without brushing against the

% . ^ /-

'^ . r^^^'^

V

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

82

pollen-bearing anthers and then against a stigma which
will ultimately conduct the gene-bearing protoplasm of the
pollen down to the ovules below. But he does not deliber-
ately fertilize the plant and it would not affect his chances
of passing on the torch to his posterity if the flower were
not fertilized. The plant uses the insect but there is no
active cooperation on the insect's part.

Consider, on the other hand, what happens in the unique
case of the yucca and its attendant moth. In the first place,
though there are many species of yuccas, only a single
one of them — and it does not grow in this region — ap-
pears to be capable of getting along without the moth upon
which all the rest depend. Moreover the moths, in their
turn, are no less completely dependent upon the yuccas
because their larva cannot feed upon anything except its
maturing seeds. But this situation, which is odd without
being unique, is not all. What is unique is the fact that the
moth goes through a series of purposeful actions which
have no other function except to fertilize a flower which
could not be fertilized in any other way. If we naively
interpreted its actions, we should find ourselves compelled
to say that it "knows what it is doing."

The classic observation was made seventy-five years ago
by the remarkable Missouri entomologist, Charles V. Riley,
though the subject has been much studied and written
about since Riley himseH fully described the crucial, in-
credible event as he observed it on a cultivated species
grown in the neighborhood of St. Louis. Several different
insects frequent the flowers to eat the nectar or the poUen
but perform no service in return. Meanwhile the female of
the indispensable B:ioth rests quietly in the half-closed
blossoms.

83 *^® "^°^^^ ^'^^ ^^6 candle

When evening comes she goes in turn to several of the
flowers just opening for their one night of perfect bloom.
While the male, who has already done his duty, flutters
uselessly about, she collects from the anthers a ball of the
pollen which is surrounded by a sticky gum to prevent its
accidental dispersal. After she has collected under her chin
a mass somewhat larger than her head, she climbs the pistil
of a different flower and into it she inserts her egg tube
about a third of the way dowa from the top and injects
several eggs. However she "knows" that if she left it at
tliat her larva would have nothing to feed on. Accord-
ingly, she mounts the rest of the way up the pistil, deposits
the pollen ball on the stigma, and moves her head back
and forth to rub the pollen well in. She eats neither nectar
nor pollen. She gets no immediate benefit from her action.
It has no purpose other than to fertilize the flower.

The insect which does these remarkable things is noth-
ing much to look at — a little inch-long moth, silvery white
in color and, so far as anyone knows, quite conventional
in behavior except during the one great moment when it
is impelled to act as though it knew a great deal about the
physiology of plants as well as about the life history of its
own species.

Most of what happens after the fertilization of the flower
follows a familiar pattern. The flowers wither and a few
days later the wormlike larva can be found. In time it will
bore its way out of the maturing pod, drop to the ground,
spin a cocoon a few inches below the surface, and there
transform itself into an adult completely equipped to re-
peat, next year, the whole complicated process. Since there
are commonly not more than two larvae per pod, they eat

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

84

only a few of the perhaps two hundred seeds which the
pod produces. From the standpoint of the yucca it is a very
good arrangement since the sacrifice of a few seeds is a
small price to pay for a very efficient job of fertilization.
The staggering question for anyone who has committed
himself to "explaining" nature is simply this : How on earth
was such a system of mutual cooperation for individual
ends ever worked out?

Evidently the yucca and the }aicca moth came to their
mutual understanding a long time ago — certainly before
the plant genus had evolved the many species now flour-
ishing— because^ with the one exception previously men-
tioned, they all seem to be signatories to tlie agreement;
certainly, also, long enough ago for the Pronuba moth to
have itself evolved into at least several distinguishable spe-
cies, because those which visit certain yuccas are slightly
different from those which visit others. On tlie other hand,
moth and yucca have not always worked together, be-
cause the flower continues to secrete a nectar which now
merely attracts useless insects of various sorts and pre-
sumably it learned to do that at a time before Pronuba got
into the habit of paying a visit on business of her own for
which no honeyed inducement is necessary.

Apparently, sometime during the millennia when the
two were engaged in a late phase of their evolution and
separating themselves into the different species of m^oth
and yucca, they must themselves have kept together.
"Wherever thou goest I go," said the moth, because, again
with the one single exception, w^iere a yucca is native, so is
a Pronuba. Attempt to grow the former outside its range
and it may flower very nicely. But "no moth, no seed"
seems to be the absolute rule.

85 *^® moth and the candle

William Trelease, student and monographer of the yueea
genus, calls attention to the fact that "the mutual depend-
ence seems absolute" and he then, permits himself a cau-
tious, scientific understatement when he remarks that the
fact is "no doubt of the greatest suggestiveness," though
"its meaning has escaped both botanists and zoologists."

Now the relatively simple one-sided arrangement which
is so prevalent in the plant world is difficult enough to
understand. Geology seems to demonstrate that the earli-
est flowering plants depended, as the conifers do today,
upon the chance that some of their abundant pollen would
be carried by the wind to the waiting ovaries. Then, since
all organic matter is potentially edible by something, it is
assumed that certain insects got into the habit of eating
pollen, accidentally got some of it entangled in the hair on
their bodies as many still do, and accidentally rubbed some
of it off on the stigmas of the other flowers they visited.
Since, for the plant, this was more effective than wind pol-
lination and involved less waste of vital material, those
plants which were most attractive to insects got along best.
And as the degree of attractiveness accidentally varied,
"natural selection" favored those which were most attrac-
tive, until gradually all the devices by which plants lure
insects or birds — bright colored petals, nectar which serves
the plant in no direct way, and perfume which leads the
insect to the blossom; even the "guide Hues" which some-
times mark the route to the nectar glands^were mechani-
cally and necessarily developed.

Gardeners usually hate "bugs," but if the evolutionists
are right, there never would have been any flowers if it
had not been for these same bugs. The flowers never waste

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

86

their sweetness on the desert air or, for that matter, on the
jungle air. In fact, they waste it only when nobody except
a human being is there to smell it. It is for the bugs and
for a few birds, not for men, that they dye their petals or
waft their scents. And it is lucky for us that we either hap-
pen to like or have become "conditioned" to liking the
colors and the odors which most insects and some birds like
also. What a calamity for us if insects had been color blind,
as all mammals below the primates are! Or if , worse yet,
we had had our present taste in smells while all the insects
preferred, as a fev/ of them do, that odor of rotten meat
which certain flowers dependent upon them abundantly
provide. Would we ever have been able to discover
thoughts too deep for tears in a gray flower which ex-
haled a terrific stench? Or would we have learned by
now to consider it exquisite?

The whole story, as it is usually told, of how flowers
developed is thus a rather tall tale, as indeed the whole
story of evolution is. But it does fall just short of the com-
pletely incredible even though we are likely to feel an
additional strain when we begin to bring in the more re-
markable features and find ourselves compelled to believe
in the gradual blind development of the more mtricate de-
vices by which a flower is often adapted to some particu-
lar insect or bird and the exact correspondence between,
say, the length of a given flower's tube and the length of
the moth's proboscis or the hummingbird's bill which is
going to reach down into it. But when we come to Pronuba
and the yucca we get something more staggering still.
That two different organisms should have simultaneously
adapted themselves one to another is, if I understand the
laws of probability, at least four times as improbable as

87 *^® "^°*h <^"d the candle

that one should have adapted itself to the other. I am not
saying I don't beheve it did. On the whole I think I do, at
least with one reservation. But sometimes I can't help say-
ing to myself, "A man who will believe that will believe
anything."

Since Darwin's day the fact that evolution did, somehow
or other, take place has been made overwhelmingly clear.
Because that fact could not really be doubted, most stu-
dents felt compelled to accept what seemed to be the best
available explanation of "how" it could possibly have hap-
pened. Yet the fact remains that a great many students
have been just a little unhappy about that 'Tiow" and that
a good deal of the work which has been done since Dar-
win's day has been concerned with an attempt to make
the whole thing seem a little more credible.

Nearly everybody came to feel that Darwin's summary
reliance on minute, accidental variation and natural selec-
tion was a bit too casual. The discovery that organisms
were capable of sudden big-step "mutations" as well as
minute variations helped. All sorts of experiments were
designed to prove that some slight accidental advantage
like the lighter color of a mouse living on sand really did
increase significantly its chances of survival. The mathe-
matically minded got into the game, notably Sir Ronald
Aylmer Fisher who recently summarized in formidable
equations his contention that chance is not chance when
statistically studied and that the "progress" made in the
course of evolution was no more merely fortuitous than
the profits of the proprietor of a roulette wheel are. Given
time enough he is bound to win. The "laws of probabiUty"
take the chanciness out of chance.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

88

All of this helps. But one might as well admit also that
the work done since Darwin constitutes a tacit admission
on the part of the investigators that they would feel a bit
more comfortable about the whole business if it could be
made less hard to swallow, that quite possibly there is
some factor operating which has not been taken proper
account of. And when we come to the case of Pronuba and
its elaborate working arrangement with the yucca we have
an especially hard nut to crack. Accident, mutation, selec-
tion, statistical probability, etc., all seem to leave it a little
mysterious still. Even granted a very long time for the
thing to work itself out, we seem to be approaching the
Hmits of credibility. It has been argued, to take the most
extravagant case, that if a hundred apes were to bang
away at a hundred typewriters for a long enough time,
then, sooner or later, one of them would have to compose
accidentally "Paradise Lost," complete and exact to the
last comma. But do we beheve that he ever would?

Many would admit that most of the difficulties could be
made to vanish if only we might assume the intrusion of
some factor not wholly accidental and mechanical. If tjiere
were only some intelligence, however feeble; some inten-
tion, however dim; some power of choice, however weak,
which the evolving organism could have used, to take ad-
vantage of the opportunities which chance provided. If
only, in other words, the whole process of evolving life
were not assumed to be so lifeless.

Nevertheless, most of the scientists who would even ad-
mit the convenience of such an assumption are aghast at
the suggestion that it might be made. They throw up their
hands in horror crying, "Teleology," "VitaHsm," "Lamarc-

g9 *l^e moth and the candle

kian nonsense," and tlie rest. There is no evidence, they
say. And if you go beyond evidence you open the way to
the most baseless speculations. The whole enterprise of
science might just as well be given up. "No, no, no. Hard
as it may be to swallow the official version of how either
the Pronuba moth or Homo sapiens came to be what he is,
you must not ask us to admit the possibility that there is
purpose at work in the universe at large or even that the
scorpion who came to land and the moth which joined up
with the yucca had the dimmest conception of what he
was doing."

We would be particularly happy, they say, to argue the
whole question out in connection with your moth because,
of all the highly evolved creatures, the insects are notori-
ously the most completely in the grip of their reflexes and
their instinctive patterns of behavior. On the one hand,
their life histories are extraordinarily complex. The spider's
web, the wasp's wise provision of living but paralyzed prey
for its young, and the complicated organization of ant so-
ciety, are unparalleled in their intricate effectiveness by
the procedures of any other creature except man. Ento-
mology is one long tale of marvels. Yet, on the other hand,
no other creatures are demonstrably so incapable of vary-
ing the set pattern of their behavior, so demonstrably un-
aware of what they are doing, or of why they do it. Thus
the very class of animals which appears superficially to be
the most purposeful is the very one in which not only pur-
pose but even the possibility of consciousness seems most
obviously absent. They are capable of behavior a thou-
sand times more impressive than any a dog could ever rise
to, yet a dog is far more intelligent. Not mentality of any

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

90

kind but the reflexes established by chance are what pro-
duce the greatest wonders and those "evidences of design"
which seem, at first sight, so convincing.

This makes a strong case against the simple assumption
that purpose in the universe at large or intelligent plan-
ning in an individual animal species furnishes a sufficient
explanation for what has happened in the course of evolu-
tion. Probably most of the mechanisms which science has
so painstakingly explored really have operated effectively.
But does this really demonstrate that something besides
mechanism, say merely some very dim awareness and pur-
pose, has never, to return to the word chosen a moment
ago, "intervened" to tip the balance in one direction or
another, to make the successful working out of some such
arrangement as that of the moth with the yucca easier to
understand than it is on the basis of a purely mechanical
process? And are there not, after all, some observable
phenomena which hint at powers present in even a modem
insect which make such intervention not unthinkable?

We must grant that the insects as we know them today
really do seem to come close to being those mere mecha-
nisms which Descartes and the Cartesians insisted that all
animals really are. Perhaps nobody — ^not even the most ex-
treme mechanist — would today maintain, as Descartes did,
that when a dog howls with pain he only seems to be suf-
fering because he merely "operates like a watch by springs"
and cannot feel anything; or that, as one of Descartes'
disciples put it, all animals "eat without pleasure, they cry
without pain, they grow without knowing it; they desire
nothing, they fear nothing, they know nothing." But much
of the time many insects really do seem to be almost purely
mechanical.

91 t^ie moth and the candle

Nevertheless, "much of the time" is not the same thing
as "always." As a matter of fact, one single incontrovcrti])le
instance of an insect which did not behave mechanically,
which exhibited desire, or will, or the power to choose a
preferable alternative, would be enough to make it not
only possible but probable that he had powers which
might intervene in the course of evolution even now. Those
powers would suggest that his primitive ancestors may
have been able to intervene more effectively before they
came — as they may have — to rely more and more on the
instincts into which acquired habits gradually hardened.
In man, "conditioned reflexes" are usually something which
do not precede but succeed acts directed by consciousness.
Why may not the conditioned reflexes of the insect have
arisen in the same way out of habits of behavior first ac-
quired with the help of his dim consciousness?

But can an "incontrovertible instance" of purposeful be-
havior in insects be cited? That would seem to be the
crucial question and the answer to it is that quite a number
of instances can be cited which are at least not usually
controverted even though they are often brushed aside.

Take for example a few recently cited by Evelyn Chees-
man, a recognized authority who was for many years
Curator of Insects for the Zoological Society of London.
Most of her most recent book, Insects: Their Secret World,
is concerned with describing what appear to be the fixed,
invariable, perhaps almost completely unconscious, be-
havior patterns of insects, including even the highest. But
there is a last chapter called "Individual Actions" in which
she cautiously describes observed cases where instinctive
behavior seems to have been momentarily superseded by
a purposeful action designed to meet an unusual situation.

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 92

I shall choose only one, partly because it is both simple and
comic.

The individual which exhibited this instance of what
must amount to genius in an insect was a solitary wasp of
the New Hebrides. It had got into the habit of visiting
Miss Cheesman s breakfast table for sweets and she had
got into the habit of performing little experiments upon it.
When it had retired to its tiny burrow for the day and
stood just within the entrance on guard against intruders
who might steal its larder of insect food, the experimenter
would tap threateningly with a pair of forceps and the
wasp would emerge to do battle, leaping upon the forceps
and trying to bite into the steel.

''. , . When the forceps remained still she seemed satis-
fied that the enemy was slain and would return to the bur-
row, rushing in head foremost as was her habit. Directly
she turned her back to do this I would give her a httle tap.
Now what is interesting is that such habits are hereditary.
That particular species always enters her burrow head
first . . . but that particular wasp after several times hav-
ing a tap from the forceps wouldn't turn her back again.
She lowered herself very cautiously backwards into the
burrow, keeping a bright look-out for this treacherous
enemy which pretended to be dead and then came to life
again when she was not looking. It is an interesting point,
because it proves once more that some insects are not com-
pletely hide-bound by their instincts, but that individuals
can change a hereditary habit on occasions."

Why should Miss Cheesman and I after her make such
a fuss about so small an event? Simply because upon its
interpretation some very important implications depend.
If this particular wasp could change its behavior to meet

93 ^^^ moth and the candle

intelligently a new situation, then it was not a machine
"wound up like a watch." It was not merely something to
which things happen. It was also capable of playing an
active not merely a passive role in "adjusting to circum-
stances." And i£ Pronuba, admittedly now a creature far
less bright than a wasp, has or ever did have any similar
capacities, then her working agreement with the yucca
need not have been wholly the result of chance. She may
have taken advantage of a situation which presented itself
and, however feebly, played her part as an individual in
the course of evolution.

To admit that is to make a thousand times less incredible
the fact that every spring thousands of moths perform the
actions without which neither the yucca nor the moth
could produce another generation. But that is not all. It
relieves us from the necessity of assuming that the universe
has been, at least up to the appearance of man, as will-less,
as purposeless, as meaningless — one must almost say as
dead — as the orthodox view tends to assume.

Some of the reasons why this commonly is assumed are
sound enough, at least as far as they go, but some of them
are merely the result of a human weakness which scientists
share with the rest of mankind. Mechanisms are much
easier to study than intelligence or purpose are. A great
deal of progress has been made during the last hundred
years in understanding them and the scientists are prob-
ably right in saying that such progress would not have
been made if they had permitted their determination to
discover these mechanisms to be weakened by too ready a
willingness to say, when faced with a problem, merely "in-
telligence," "purpose," etc. If we may be peimitted the
military terms with which recent years have made us all

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

94

too familiar, their procedure was tactically sound because
it served the immediate purpose. But it may be proving to
be strategically unfortunate because it has resulted in a
dogged adherence to a "nothiag but" hypothesis which
some believe is already being exposed as untenable.

A merely human weakness accounts for the fact that
many scientists, like many laymen,, hold onto a hypothesis
both because they are stubborn and because the hypothe-
sis implies something which they want to believe; because,
to put it more brutally, it confirms a prejudice. And it is an
amusing fact that the wholly mechanistic theojy of insect
behavior can be made to serve the interests of either of two
diametrically opposed prejudices.

On the one hand, it is commonly upheld by atheists so
fanatical that they are afraid to admit the reahty of pur-
pose or intelligence or will lest the admission lead some-
how to a belief in God. On the other hand, one of the most
fanatical insisters upon the dogma that never, under any
circumstances, does an insect contribute anything to the
seeming "wisdom" of its behavior was that sincere and
orthodox Roman Catholic, Henri Fabre.

Probably he had never heard of the yucca moth. At least
I remember no mention of it in the ten volumes of his
Souvenirs Entomologiques. But it would have delighted
him as a notable addition to his imposing collection of the
elaborately effective procedures followed by creatures
without intelligence. Every one of them was, he insisted,
proof of the existence of a God who, in his wisdom, had
contrived the little living machines which unconsciously
do precisely what they need to do if they are to live their
often outrageous Hves.

Face to face with such phenomena as the cruel shrewd-

95 the moth and the candle

ness or seeming shrewdness of many parasites, he spoke of
"le savant brigandage de la vie" — the expert criminaHty of
hfe. And he never faced the problem which seems to arise
when one places the responsibility for such a villainous
system of exploitation directly upon a personal God. But
he never wavered. The wonders of instinct confirmed his
Cathohc theology as conclusively as they confirm the athe-
ism of many mechanists.

Somewhere along the line of this argument, the less
trusting of my readers may have wanted to raise doubts
not so much concerning the argument itself as concerning
the alleged facts upon which it is based. Does Pronuba
really do any of these things it is said to?

After all, entomologists are always coming up with
wonders about ants, bees and what not. Laymen seldom
see them with their own eyes and if by any chance they
take an hour off to look, they are more hkely than not to
see nothing remarkable. Insects take their time. For long
periods they behave in what seems like a completely wit-
less fashion — as Mark Twain discovered when he con-
vinced himself that the ant and his extraordinary reputa-
tion for sagacity was a complete fraud.

The Mr. Riley who first told the world about Pronuba
was a distinguished entomologist. He had the confidence
of his professional brethren and textbook after textbook
has repeated his tale. But is it just possible that he was
overenthusiastic? How many other people have w^atched
the performance and can vouch for it from their own ex-
perience?

Well, I confess that the shadow of such doubts crossed
my own mind. Of the various references to Pronuba with

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

96

which I was famihar, only one after Riley's own seemed
on internal evidence to be indubitably first hand. The most
learned entomologist of this region where yucca flourishes
confessed that he had never seen the performance and
didn't know anybody who had. Not too willingly — since I
knew the difficulties, which include, besides the dilatori-
ness of the insect, darkness, a limited blooming season, and
flowers lifted high above one's head — I decided to try to
see for myself. And not to sustain any suspense which
any reader may feel, I did. Three times Pronuba demon-
strated before my eyes how she performed the crucial act,
mounting the pistil of the recently opened flower and with
prolonged purposefulness rubbing the pistil vigorously to
get the pollen well in.

Partly to avoid the possibility that some amateur ahen-
ist might telephone a mental hospital that for several
evenings a maniac had been seen standing for two hours
and more peering at yucca flowers with a flashhght, I de-
cided to make my observations well out into the desert
and some twenty miles from town. And for poetic if not
for strictly scientific reasons it was a good idea. It is one
thing to read about what Pronuba does.. It would be quite
another to see her at work in a neighbor's back yard. But
the performance belongs properly among the mysteries
which one can only appreciate fully when the context is
remote from the human and as exclusively as possible in
that of almost timeless nature.

The moonless night was brilliant with stars. In the dis-
tance a coyote pack obligingly set up its chorus which is
as v^ld a sound as one is likely to hear anywhere. And
then, presently, there was Pronuba, even more insignificant
looking than I had expected her to be, performing her

97 *^® moth and the candle

delicate operation precisely, no doubt, as her ancestors had
performed it millions of times dm'ing millions of springs.
On the horizon the lights of town were just visible. In all
that town few knew about, perhaps none had ever seen,
the strange actions of this silent moth without whom the
tall spires of flowers would never conceive their seeds and
without whom, therefore, the whole race of yuccas would
gradually die out. It was for the almost invisible moth, not
for you or me or any aesthetically appreciative human
spectator, that the great masses of flowers were lifted high.

As little Pronuba moved her head back and forth I re-
membered the question once asked by the American
essayist Charles D. Stewart after he had described what
looked like a remarkably purposeful action on the part of
a spider who suddenly cut the main cable of his web and
thereby sent flying an intruder of another species with
designs upon an insect caught in the owner's web. "Is it
God who is doing these things," Stewart asked, "or is it
a spider?"

Fabre would have answered without hesitation, "God."
Most biologists, would reply with equal assurance,
"Neither." But few are willing to admit what seems to me
not wholly improbable — namely that the spider himself
had something to do with it.

98

SEVEN

the mouse that never drinks

FOR SEVERAL YEARS I WAS ON QUITE INTIMATE TERMS WITH

the common house mouse and I attempted to celebrate his
charm in print. There is, therefore, nothing odd in the fact
that I have recently been associating with the so-called
kangaroo rat of the desert, who is, really, more mouselike
than ratlike. I keep a pair of them in a glass case from
which they enjoy frequent sorties to sit on the palm of my
hand, rest in my pocket, or run through paper tubes which
they seem to accept as easily recognizable substitutes for
an underground passageway.

99 *^® mouse that never drinks

So far as I am concerned there is, I say, nothing odd
about this. But there is something very odd indeed about
my companions. In fact the kangaroo rat is famous as "the
mouse that never drinks," and because of his incredible
abstention from all potations, he has attracted the atten-
tion— considerably more unwelcome than mine — of labo-
ratory scientists w^ho have analyzed his blood, examined
his urine, and imposed fantastically abnormal conditions
upon him to force him to break his inveterate teetotalism.

They find that it can be done. But it is not certain that
in nature he ever does so. Obviously he is the most tri-
umphant imaginable example of adaptation to the most
characteristic desert diflSculty, the absence of v^ater. It is
no w^onder that the largest of all the kangaroo rats lives in
Death Valley, the hottest and driest spot in the United
States, w^here it sometimes never rains at all for a year and
more. To get along w^ithout is the most radical solution
in any economy of scarcity.

In the appearance of the sleek little creatures there is
nothing to suggest the underprivileged. Their manner is
exuberant and, unlike many desert plants, they do not look
at all desiccated — which as a matter of fact they are not.
You would never suspect that they did not drink like any
other flourishing animal. In fact it is hard to beheve that
they don't. And to realise fully just how extraordinary that
fact is one should know them personally as well as tech-
nically. But let us begin with technicaHties.

From the zoologist's standpoint the kangaroo rat is
actually neither a rat nor a mouse because he belongs to a
different order of the rodent family, one of the reasons
being that he has twenty teeth while both Rattus and Mus
have to get along with only sixteen. Still, his general ap-

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 1QQ

pearance is mouselike enough. He has thick, silky brown
hair and a pointed bewhiskered nose. His crowning glory
— worn at the opposite end from that on which crowning
glories are usually worn — is a handsome tail half again as
long as all the rest of his body and with a furry banner at
the end, much like that on the tail of a Hon. Moreover,
this tail turns out to be very useful as well as ornamental.

Actually there are some sixteen different species of
kangaroo rats resident in the arid parts of the West and
one of them, also found about Tucson, goes in for a fine
decorative touch by choosing to have his banner a con-
trasting white. Mine, whose scientific name is Dipodomys
merriami, is tlie smallest of the tribe and consists of about
four inches of body with six or more of tail. I choose him
rather than his larger cousin because he happens to be the
one whose independence of any external water supply has
been tested and vouched for by relentless laboratory ex-
perimenters.

Dipo's large black eyes are a clear enough indication
that his habit is nocturnal, and the casual traveler ordi-
narily sees him only as some sort of small rodent hurrying
across the road in the headlights of an .automobile. In
nature he makes extensive burrows entered through many
surface holes and usually under a considerable mound of
earth, perhaps fifteen feet in circumference and often so
thoroughly tunneled just below the surface that it will
collapse if one attempts to walk across it.

Other desert rodents, ground squirrels and gophers,
make similar holes, but the Dipo's residence is usually
recognizable by the fact that the mound is elevated well
above the surrounding surface of the ground. Apparently,
however, he does not always have this well-constructed

]Q] the mouse that never drinks

home to himself. It seems that rabbits sometimes enlarge
one of his entrances and move in. So probably does an
occasional snake, who cannot be a very welcome house
guest. Moreover, though Dipos probably have a home
base, they take refuge in the nearest hole when danger
threatens and they must often be surprised by what they
find there.

In Austi-alia there is also a kangaroo rat which really is
a kangaroo — a marsupial that is, complete with a pouch
in which to carry its young. Sticklers say it should be
called rather a "rat-kangaroo" just as, so these same stick-
lers insist, an aviator ought to be called a "manbird" and
only an ornithologist a "birdman." But, in any event, Dipo
is a rodent, not a marsupial, and the only true American
marsupial, the 'possum, does not live in the arid South-
west. Nevertheless Dipo gets his common name from the
obvious fact that he looks like a kangaroo — because of his
long tail, his stubby little forelimbs which are not much
good for walking, and his habit of sitting or jumping on
his long hind legs. Like a real kangaroo he will also box
with a neighbor while sitting on his tail and striking out
with his hands.

In the gobbledygook of technical description, all the
species of Dipodomys are said to be "admirably adapted to
a bipedal, saltatory existence." In other words, they jump
on their hind legs! Even in captivity and though normally
rather placid creatures, they may, when some not-too-
amiabie brush between one and another takes place, sud-
denly begin to bound erratically a foot and a half high
and to land after each bound no one can predict where.
But why? The ability to do without water is obviously a
very useful accomplishment for a desert dweller. What

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 1Q2

good are a disproportionately long tail and the ability to
make prodigious, unpredictably erratic leaps?

There must be some reason, because in other faraway
deserts, those in Africa for instance, other creatures have
adapted themselves to the same "bipedal, saltatory exist-
ence." The African jumpers and the American are not
descended from a common ancestor w^ho just happened to
develop this habit. The African jerboa, even though he
looks and acts like a kangaroo rat and is also a rodent, is
not even very closely related. His analogue of the Aus-
tralian desert is also not descended from either of the other
two long tailed, short fore-legged desert creatures. Plainly
we are again faced with a case of "convei*gence" hke that
of the desert cacti of America and the desert Euphorbias
of Africa. Two different animals and two different plants
have independently developed useful tricks for living in
arid country. And the tricks are so similar that the two
organisms have come to look very much alike. But the
utility of the devices is evident in the case of the plants,
not nearly so evident in that of the animals. Still, though
no one is quite sure what the answer to the riddle is, a
guess seems pretty probable.

Dipo can walk, or rather hobble, when he wants to.
When he is tranquil that is usually what he does. But
when he becomes excited or afraid, he begins to bound,
switching his tail in the air as he leaps. And it is the switch
of the long tail which makes his course unpredictable.
Whether or not he himself knows where he is going to land
is a question; certainly nobody else does. And that must
be a great help when being pursued by a predator, espe-
cially an owl or a hawk. When one of them swoops at a
Dipo, the Dipo usually turns out to be somewhere else.

"103 *^^ mouse that never drinks

That must have saved many a hfc in Africa and Australia
as v^ell as in America. And if you accept the most mechani-
cal theory of evolution, then the more erratically a rodent
leaped and the longer tail he had, the better were his
chances to survive and to hand on his longer tail to a
goodly number of progeny.

Other kinds of rodents didn't develop in the same di-
rection because most of them live where cover is available.
But in the desert cover is scarce and the ability to elude
capture by unpredictable movement much more impor-
tant. On this assumption the tuft at the end of the tail,
which is as characteristic of the jerboa as it is of the kanga-
roo rat, simply makes the tail more effective as a rudder.
One observer reports that a captive Dipo who had lost a
considerable part of his tail in some accident, still leaped
high but landed any old way instead of on his feet.

Among themselves Dipos seem rather quarrelsome.
Mine, the merriami, are said to be the most peaceable of
the tribe, and it is also said that for that reason several
individuals of this species can be kept together in captivity.
I have not found it so. My pair, even though they are male
and female, have to be kept separated most of the time or
they will soon take to boxing and from boxing to biting
in a manner alarming to anyone anxious to keep them in
good health. They seem, on the other hand, to have little
fear of man and no tendency, even under provocation, to
be aggressive toward him. They will run away if you ap-
proach them at liberty, but once caught, they will rest
quietly on a human hand and, in fact, often come to it if
one reaches down into a cage. It is said that even when
roughly handled, merriami, at least, will make no attempt
to bite, and mine have showed no resentment even when.

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT ] Q^

on occasion, I have had to end a fight quickly by Hfting
one suddenly by the tail. Obviously they are very satis-
factory pets, requiring a minimum of care. With a hopper
of seeds there is no reason, so far as I can see, why they
might not be left unattended for weeks. At least there is
no water problem to be met. Mine have had none during
the three months I have had them. And that brings us to
Dipo's most extraordinary claim to fame.

How absolute is the independence of water? How is the
seemingly impossible accompHshed? The closer these
questions are pushed, the more surprising the answers are.

To begin with, one should realize that many desert ani-
mals, like many desert plants, can get along on far less
water than would suffice for the survival of most creatures.
Sometimes it is said that even the jack rabbit does not
drink, though this is so far from being absolutely true that
I have often seen him taking a long draught from my bird-
bath. Quite possibly he can get along for a long time with-
out any water, possibly he can get along indefinitely, but
he drinks gladly and deep when he gets a chance. What
is more important, the jack rabbit eats succulent green
food when he can get it and is a great depredator of flower
gardens when he gets a chance at them. With him it is
not a question of doing v^thout water but simply of get-
ting the comparatively little which is indispensable from
his food instead of in hquid form.

The same is true in the case of many desert creatures.
The road runner also visits the birdbath, but since he eats
such other animals as snakes, lizards and mice which have
a good deal of water in their blood, he is in much the same
position as the rabbit who likes a tender watery morsel
when he can get it. The pack rat, another desert dweller,

] 05 ^^^ mouse that never drinks

can, it has been demonstrated, get along without drinking
at all. But he also must have succulent food. Dipo, on the
other hand, belongs in an entirely different class. It is not
only that he can get along without water. He will not take
it if it is offered to him. And he does not have to have any
succulent food either. He can live indefinitely on the driest
of dry seeds.

This fact has been abundantly demonstrated by brutally
thorough and rigorously controlled experiments. Kept un-
der desert conditions of heat and of dryness for fifty-two
days and fed on an exclusive diet of dried barley seeds,
Dipodomys merriami not only lived but, when subjected
to a post-mortem examination, showed no diminution in
the proportion of water to total body weight; and that re-
mained true even of those of the victims who gained in
total weight during the course of the experiment. "Control"
individuals who were given access to watermelon during
the same period and w^ho ate some of it retained no more
water in their blood or tissues than did those who had
eaten only dry food. As a matter of fact, Dipodomys needs
to maintain the same water content in his blood as other
rodents and will die from dehydration at about the same
degree of deficiency in this respect.

The secret, then, is not merely the one we have met so
often — rigid economy in the expenditure of water. In the
first place, you cannot save what you have not been able
to get. In the second place, Dipodomys isn't even as stingy
in this respect as some other creatures. Unhke some insects
and all birds, he does not save water by voiding uric acid
only in solid form, though his urine is about twice as con-
centrated as that of the white rat, and when fed on dry
food his excrement is forty-five percent water as compared

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT -jQ^

with sixty-five percent for the white rat. He does save in
another way because, unUke most mammals, he uses no
water for heat regulation either by sweating from the pores
of the skin or from the mouth by panting. As pitiless ex-
perimenters have demonstrated, only when subjected to
heat of a nearly fatal degree will he slobber slightly at the
^outh, thus using a little of the precious water to try to
rtave himself in extremity. And one reason for his nocturnal
habit probably is that he can keep relatively cool in his
burrow during the day, thus avoiding the risk of being
called upon to pant.

But no economy can explain a complete getting along
without. Dipo's secret is simply — if you can call it simple
— that he manufactures his own water from the dry ma-
terials present in starchy foods. In one sense the chemistry
is elementary enough. Starch is a hydrocarbon and there-
fore contains hydrogen. Oxygen is abundant in the air he
breathes. And as every high school student of chemistry
knows, water is H2O — or a chemical combination of one
part oxygen with two parts hydrogen. You can make it by
one of the simplest of laboratory experiments if you ex-
plode a mixture of the two. But you- can't do it effectively
enough in your own body, as Dipo does, who takes it all
in a day's work. The result is what the biochemists call
"the water of metabolism" and for Dipo, with his very un-
usual metabolism, it is no doubt a routine matter. The only
way you can force him to drink is to feed him on a diet so
largely protein that he does not get enough hydrocarbon
to furnish him with hydrogen. In that unhappy state he
will drink water — I wonder if it tastes very nasty — when
it is given him.

If in one sense this is all simple enough, in another it

] 07 *^® mouse that never drinks

is as mysterious as anything very well eould be. Dipo
"evolved" the capacity to produce water of metabolism
sufficiently to supply his needs and they are quite as great
as those of many other desert creatures. It is obviously a
gift with great "survival value." But why didn't all the
creatures, some of which certainly sometimes perish of
thirst, "evolve" it too? What inborn capacity, if that is
what it was, made him potentially independent of an ex-
ternal water supply?

Moreover, while Dipodomys was evolving his unusually
effective gift for manufacturing water internally, he had
also to evolve at the same time a certain special efficiency
in an organ which is part of the standard equipment of all
except the very simplest animals, and actually has at least
an analogue even in the one-celled protozoa: namely the
kidney. One authority on this organ. Dr. Homer W. Smith,
Professor of Physiology at the New York University Col-
lege of Medicine, enthusiastically maintains that the whole
story of evolution can be told in terms of the evolution of
the kidney. He has also the highest admiration for Dipo's
renal equipment.

Most of us, it seems, do the kidney, whether our own or
that of other animals, less than justice. We think of it as
merely an organ of excretion, but it is actually far more
than that. It is responsible for that "internal environment"
in which all our vital organs and the very cells themselves
live, isolated from the air which would be fatal. Ever since
the days of the first vertebrates it has had a very difficult
job to accomplish. So far as the invertebrate animals which
still live in the sea are concerned, they have the same salt
content as that of the sea itseK, and all their rudimentary

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 1 Qg

kidneys have to do is to get rid of any excess solids, includ-
ing salt. But all vertebrates, including of course all those
which Hve on land, have to maintain in their bodies blood
of a density which must not vary except within small limits
and which, as it happens, is considerably less dense than
that of sea water.

There are those who believe that its density corresponds
to that of the once less salty sea at the time when the first
vertebrates developed. But however that may be, the kid-
neys have to see to it that the density remains constant by
ehminating excess water or excess minerals as .the case
may be. To get rid of excess salts they must dehver to the
bladder for excretion a fluid much denser than the blood.
But there is a limit to what they can do in preparing this
concentrated fluid. Men and nearly all animals will quickly
die if they drink a quantity of sea water, because it is far
denser than any fluid their kidneys can concentrate and it
simply increases that oversaltiness of the blood of which
thirst is a sign. So far as is known, only one animal can
drink sea water, for though sea birds have sometimes been
assumed capable of it, they probably are not. The one ani-
mal who can — as the reader has probably guessed — is our
hero Dipodomys.

He does not want to waste water merely to get rid, as
he must, of excess mineral matter. Hence he has developed
an unparalleled capacity to concentrate urine. Man can-
not concentrate a fluid to more than 4.2 times the osmotic
concentration of his blood plasma, but the kangaroo rat
is capable of concentrating to 17 times the density of his
blood and that is considerably denser than sea w^ater.
Hence if he is forced by a special diet to drink when only
sea water is available, he can quench his thirst with that.

] Q9 the mouse that never drinks

You and I may be amazed at this feat witliout being
greatly stined by it. But to a man with Dr. Smith's en-
thusiasm for the kidney it imphes a feat worthy of tlie
highest admiration, and with real fervor he lets himself go
with a flat statement: "The kidney of the kangaroo rat can
concentrate to the greatest extent of any known animal."

Feeling that I have, perhaps, not admired Dipo suffi-
ciently for this particular talent, I let him stand for a few
minutes in the palm of my hand. I see again that he is an
unusually attractive Httle beast but that there is nothing
in his external appearance to reveal what a physiological
marvel he is. Nor does he himself seem to be aware of it.
Like any ordinary mouse he seems a very modest little
creature. Why should the heart of mortal man, or the kid-
ney of mortal mouse, be proud? God, the blind chance
which is responsible for all evolution, or, perhaps, some-
thing somehow in between, has given him the kidneys he
needs to live comfortably in the desert. Whether man and
mouse want much or little here below depends on how you
look at it. But both sometimes get what they want.

Some chapters ago we commented on the fact that there
are three ways of meeting the water problem — ^by econo-
mizing, by storing, and by lying low. Dipo introduces us
to the fourth and most radical method: making your own.
Certain other animals probably make some, but so far as
is known, the kangaroo rat is the only one who can make
enough to be entirely independent.

Making your own is not only the most radical solution;
it is also the only one of the fom' which is not adopted to
a greater or lesser degree by both plants and animals. In
other words, no plant can exist, as Dipo can, wdthout some
external source of water. In the damp air of the tropics

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

no

many plants grow upon trees, have no roots in the ground,
and depend upon rainfall or dew. But no plant in the
desert can do that because rainfall is too infrequent and
dew nonexistent, except perhaps in winter. In air so dry,
the dew point is usually at a below-freezing temperature
— ^which is certainly not to be looked for except during the
early mornings of midwinter. And no plant of either the
desert or the tropics can imitate Dipo's feat. Plants do not
eat hydrocarbons from which the kangaroo rats make their
water. As a matter of fact plants make hydrocarbon and
to do that you have to use up water, not create if.

Moreover, though all of the three less radical solutions
have been hit upon by both plants and animals, they do
not seem to be equally characteristic of both. On the
whole, plants tend to store as well as to economize; on the
whole, animals tend to have httle or no provision for stor-
ing. They can get along on little and hence go long periods
without replenishing the supply, but that is principally be-
cause they use so little, not because they put aside a supply
to be drawn upon. Dipo doesn't. Even his blood is not un-
usually watery at any time.

There is, however, at least one desert ailimal who may
violate the general rule and is worth mentioning for that
reason, as well as for some others. He is the desert tortoise,
a great lumbering fellow, scaly skinned and hard backed,
who may be almost a foot in length, eight inches wide, and
stand five inches off the ground. He is a formidable look-
ing creature who appears, as most turtles do, not only very
ancient as a type but almost equally ancient as an indi-
vidual. He also looks rather threatening, though he is ac-
tually completely inoffensive — which all turtles certainly
are not, as anyone who has ever had any experience with

1 "I ] the mouse that never drinks

a snapper well knows. Though quite frequently found in
very dry, cactus-covered desert areas, he is always a sur-
prise when one comes across him crawling slowly along or
holed up headfirst in some httle recess under a rock.

It is also surprising to discover that, despite his robus-
tious appearance, he is a vegetarian who favors salads of
one sort or another and in captivity eats lettuce with as
much enthusiasm as turtles show for anything. He sleeps
in the shade at midday and he sleeps through most of the
winter. Moreover he seems to have been bom old as well
as resigned and wise. If you should happen across one, you
will see that he is a kind of box-turtle, though the front of
his under shell is not hinged and he cannot shut himselE
in completely. You may be puzzled by a curious triangular
projection in front and wonder what he uses it for. He uses
it to fight with when a tank battle between two individuals
takes place.

This turtle, of course, gets his water from the succulent
vegetables he eats. But the most remarkable thing about
him is the way in which he stores it up against a rainless
day. Just under his upper shell is an unusually large blad-
der which in good times is full of water to be drawn upon
as needed. Obviously he could be called the camel of our
deserts. As a matter of fact, I shouldn't be at all surprised
if he could far outdo the real camel's somewhat over-
pubhcized abihty to go for a long time without a drink.

Among animals, then, Dipo and the desert tortoise rep-
resent two ultimates in adaptation. What plant, I have
been wondering, should get first prize in this same cate-
gory? Some might say "the barrel cactus" which, even
under conditions of extreme aridity, may hold in its pulpy

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

112

center enough water to save a human life. But water stor-
age to a greater or less degree is common among the cacti
and my candidate is one which stores little water and yet
represents a sort of ultimate in the twin arts of economy
and lying low.

Wander down into the driest desert region in northern
Sonora, Mexico, and you are hkely to find lying about
under thorny bushes certain amorphous ma5ses of grayish
wood eight inches or more in diameter. They look rather
like a gnarled bur from some old apple tree; they have
neither roots nor stems, and they seem about as dead as
anything could be. Pick one up and you will find it heavy
as well as dry, and quite hard — as Httle like a living plant
as anything you can imagine.

This, however, is the resting stage of Ibervillea sonorae,
a member of the gourd family. Sometime towards the end
of May, it comes to life by sending out a few shoots up-
ward and a few roots dovmward. It "knows" that Sonora's
one season of scanty rainfall is about due and that it must
be prepared to take advantage of it. If the rain does come,
flowers and fruits appear before the whole thing dries up
again into a state of suspended animation which seems
almost as complete as that of a seed. At best, Ibervillea is
not much to look at: a few straggling stems, sriiall yellow.
flowers and, finally, a small berry-like fruit rather like a
small, soft gourd. Moreover, membership in the gourd
family is revealed by the structure of the flowers which, as
in most gourds and melons, are "monoecious," i.e., sepa-
rately sexed as male and female though both sorts are
borne on the same plant.

Some years ago a specimen of Ibervillea was placed on
exhibition in a glass case at the New York Botanical

"I "I 3 ^^^ mouse that never drinks

Garden. There was no intention to have it grow, but it
showed what it is capable of. For seven years, without soil
or water, simply lying in the case, it put forth a few an-
ticipatory shoots and then, when no rainy season arrived,
dried up again, hoping for better luck next year.

My specimen, transplanted to a situation somewhat like
its native one, has put forth its stems at the appropriate
time. Just how much it could endure I do not know. I
would be less reluctant to find out than I would be to feed
my Dipos an abnormal diet, deprive them of water and
bake them with heat until they frothed at the mouth, and
then note whether those given sea water would survive
while those which were denied even that died. But I would
be reluctant to push to its hmits even a vegetable. It is
enough for me to know without experimentation that the
vegetable psyche — if there is any such thing — is even
more patient, persistent and enduring than the animal.

114

G H T

settlers— old and new

IT IS SOMETIMES SAID THAT IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA THE DOGS

have no fleas. This is certainly an exaggeration though they
do seem to have very few. Odd, you may say, because fleas
are supposed to require nothing for their happiness except
the dog himself. Yet here is a creature who has never
really learned how to Hve well in the desert. Perhaps the
dryness of the air is too much for him.

On the other hand, the law of compensation works for
dogs too, and they are subject to a local annoyance. Dur-
ing the summer months all those near Tucson spend half

] "I ^ settlers— old and new

their time running about on three legs — which many of
them do not seem to mind too much until one of the re-
maining three is put out of commission. When that hap-
pens they have to do something about it and what the
wiser of them do is to approach their masters with an up-
lifted paw from which the master then extracts a section of
a little three- or four-seeded fruit provided with sharp pro-
jecting spines perhaps an eighth of an inch long. The seeds
were only thumbing a ride into new territory and if fortune
favors the seeds rather than the dogs, they will come up
next summer as an inoffensive-looking prostrate weed with
small compound leaves and humbly pretty little yellow
flowers. Few inhabitants of the region have escaped some
acquaintance with the fruit because it sometimes gets in-
side a human shoe and is said in the old days to have some-
times punctured a bicycle tire— whence the local name,
"puncture vine," for the plant.

Many probably do not connect the fruit with the fa-
miliar weed, but Linnaeus knew all about it two hundred
years ago and gave it its current botanical name — Tribulus
terrestris. The first half of this name is Latin for those
wicked iron balls with spikes so arranged that one is always
pointing upw^ards. Medieval ingenuity scattered them, over
the ground when enemy cavalry was expected to attack.
Linnaeus was only borrowing an ancient name for a thorny
plant and I am not sure whether it was first applied to the
seed or to the weapon. In any event, here is another case
where nature was the first inventor of a device man later
hit upon for himself.

But how did it happen that Linnaeus knew about this
inconspicuous weed growing way out in Arizona at a time
when even the Spanish fathers were but precariously

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT "j "j ^

established there? The answer to that question is simply
that he didn't. As a matter of fact, Tribulus probably
wasn't even there then. Today it seems at least as much at
home as we do but, hke us, it is really a native of the Old
World and it came as an unnoticed colonist. Nobody is
sure just when it arrived, but it was first noticed near the
Pacific Coast in comparatively recent times and the pil-
grim fathers of its tribe probably landed there. By now it
is common as far east as Nebraska or Kansas and is found
sometimes in the Atlantic states.

Thus, of plants as of people it is perfectly proper to ask,
"Where did your forefathers come from?" The recent plant
invaders have not, to be sure, ousted the natives as effec-
tively as the white man has ousted the Indian, but if one
goes back far enough it is often difficult to know who really
is an aborigine. The Indians came from somewhere else
and so, probably, did the cactus even if it got here a long
time before they did.

Over the whole of the United States many of the most
taken-f or-granted plants were not here a few centuries ago,
though they are now so thoroughly at home that sometimes
only recorded history can distinguish the newcomers from
those who have been here for thousands of years. The
daisy and the Queen Anne's lace, so familiar in New Eng-
land, are Europeans; so are the dandelion and the mullens
of the East, the West, and everywhere else. Probably the
Pilgrims had dandelions almost as soon as they had
meadows, but there were none here before European man
arrived.

Within our continent itself hardy pioneers, plant or
even animal, go both west and east. Within the last quarter

] ] 7 settlers— old and new

of a century the starling, so overly familiar in eastern cities,
has been gradually advancing westward toward the Pacific
Coast. Plants also have been moving in both directions for
a long time. Few easterners who gather black-eyed susans
know that they moved (or more probably were carried
unintentionally as seed) from our own West within the
period of our national history. Few who plant the giant
"Russian" sunflower know that it belongs to an exclusively
American genus which was taken to Russia in the nine-
teenth century, taught gigantism there, and then returned
to us with the benefits of a foreign education. Probably
the comrades who munch its seeds would deny its origin
at the same time that they claimed credit for its improve-
ment.

In Arizona alone there are some two hundred different
plants which are recognized as having been introduced by
man — in most cases unintentionally. Some of them arrived
as the now dominant population did — westward across the
continent from the eastern seaboard. But quite a few
others came overland from the Pacific Coast or up from
Mexico. And a number of those which moved in from the
West are, like the Indian, Asiatic, not European, immi-
grants.

Meanwhile, perhaps an equal number of plants have
been deliberately introduced or gone as stowaways from
the New World to the Old. Everybody knows about to-
bacco, potatoes and Indian corn, but that is merely be-
cause they happen to be of great economic importance.
Many European weeds came from the Americas and so, of
course, do many now familiar European garden flowers,
a surprising number of which are horticulturists' develop-
ments from California species.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

118

Moreover, there are a few spectacular cases which it
would astonish most Europeans to hear about. Most of the
stately palm trees which grow along the Riviera ( and for
that matter in Hawaii) grow as natives only in California
and a few places in Arizona. Or consider the so-called
mimosa which seems so characteristic of southern France
in the region around Grasse where it makes a very im-
portant contribution to the perfume industry. What could
be more "typically French?" Actually it is a native of
Mexico, Texas and Arizona, not of Europe at all. Some-
time early in the seventeenth century it was imported into
the famous gardens of the Cardinal Odorardo Farnese, a
relative by marriage to the Borgias and the Medicis. It is
quite possible that all the French "mimosas" came from
that Italian garden and the botanical name of the plant,
Acacia famesiana, honors one of the more innocent activi-
ties of the Cardinal.

Botanists try to distinguish among plants introduced by
human agency by calling those which grew only when man
tends them, "cultivated"; those which linger more or less
precariously after cultivation, "escaped"; and those which
now go it completely alone, "adventitious." But it is some-
times impossible to distinguish sharply between the last
two because there are some which are certainly almost,
though not quite, capable of going it alone.

Perhaps the most familiar eastern example is the orange
day lily which not only lingers but spreads for generations
about the site of an abandoned house; perhaps the most
conspicuous desert example is the straggling shrub with
gaudy yellow and red blossoms, commonly called bird of
paradise, which came up from South America into Mexico

1 ] 9 settlers— old and new

and is now so common in thickly inhabited portions of
southern Arizona that one hardly knows whether to call
it cultivated, escaped, or adventitious. In any event, a
slow-motion movie of the United States since the sixteenth
century would show the vegetative as well as the human
population ebbing and flowing — ^mostly flowing — in all di-
rections.

Nearly everywhere he goes man intentionally carries
with him such directly useful plants and animals as can be
persuaded to grow in whatever new country he is coloniz-
ing: cattle, sheep, horses, Indian corn, cotton, etc., etc.
Sometimes he unknowingly brings animals which had once
lived there but subsequently became extinct, as he did
when he brought the horse to America. To the southwest-
em deserts he brought even the camel, which is said to
have survived there as an escapee for forty years or more.
The organisms which go along with him as stowaways are
far more numerous. Wherever one of his ships lands, rats
are pretty sure to go ashore with him. The dandelion fol-
lows him into almost every temperate climate, the cock-
roach into the tropics and the arctic as well.

Even today he is far less master of his environment than
he likes to imagine. New destructive pests and new diseases
make the headlines. No one notices the arrival of other
organisms, desirable, undesirable or merely harmless. But
they do not ask our permission to come. It is said that most
of the earthworms of the northeastern part of the United
States were killed during the Ice Age and that most of
those now performing their indispensable service to agri-
culture in New England are of various European species
unwittingly introduced by early colonists in the soil about
the roots of imported plants. To find native American

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

120

worms dominant you must go south of the Mason and
Dixon Line. During the century just past, the winkle, be-
loved of cockneys, has invaded the Atlantic Coast.

Since the true desert areas constitute a very special and
difficult environment, they are not readily colonized and in
Arizona few if any plants except those under cultivation
were intentionally introduced by man. Every conspicuous
feature of the desert landscape has been there for a long,
long time slowly adapting itself to heat and aridity, either
here or in some other not too distant desert from which it
could spread without the necessity of passing through any
region unsuited to it. The vast majority of the nearly two
hundred introduced plants counted in the flora of the state
grow principally either in the portions not naturally desert,
or in the neighborhood of houses or cultivated fields where
conditions have been mitigated.

There is, however, one interesting exception which hap-
pens to be of some economic importance and is found
everywhere on plains and mesas if not in full desert. Cattle-
men have a popular name for it and call it "filaree," a word
corrupted from the Spanish, and they are well aware of the
plant because it is green in midwinter and is eaten by their
herds when little else is available. I have found it bloom-
ing in January about my house in places where enpugh
water is spilled to make the difference between natural
desert and the slightly moister conditions of the mesas. It
is believed to have been accidentally introduced at a very
early time by the Spanish settlers, but it is really a Euro-
pean member of the wild geranium family.

The question how and when species were unintention-
ally introduced is quite as interesting as the question where

"121 settlers— old and new

they came from. In many cases the "when" can be
answered only in such general terms as "long ago" or "re-
cently," but the "how" is often pretty obvious. A few come
with the seeds of useful and ornamental plants or in the
soil around roots when the desired sorts are imported. A
great many were certainly what botanists call "ballast
weeds," delivered unintentionally to our shores by ships
which dumped here the ballast loaded at some foreign
port. Many western ones came mixed with the hay brought
by early explorers and colonists. In fact it has been pic-
turesquely suggested (though it can hardly be proved)
that some already well-established inland when first ob-
served may have been distributed along the way by Coro-
nado and his horsemen when they made their long trek
from Mexico into Kansas in the midsixteenth century, a
good fifty years before any colony was established on the
eastern seaboard.

The finding of Asiatic, not European, weeds in parts of
Arizona and the Great Basin region would be a puzzle in-
deed, if it were not knov^ni that at one time alfalfa seed in
considerable quantity was imported by the inhabitants of
those regions from Siberia and Turkistan. And as is usual
in such cases, more was imported than the importers knew.
No sight is more characteristic of the wide-open West than
the tumbleweeds which go bowling across the landscape in
late summer or autumn and sometimes pile high along the
fences. They are not all of one species, but. one of the com-
monest in irrigated regions is the so-called Russian thistle
which is actually a Eurasian and must have been recog-
nized by the Indians as an importation because its Hopi
name means "white man's plant."

It is an odd fact that the most completely cosmopohtan

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

122

of all plants and animals are the microscopic one-celled
ones, just possibly because they are supposedly the oldest
and have had the most time in which to colonize every-
w^here. Except for those which are parasitic on some spe-
cial animal, nearly all the protozoa of fresh water are
found everywhere in the world except in those parts
eternally frozen. Before that fact was known biological
specialists used to go exploring like the specialists in other
fields in the hope of discovering new species. In the eight-
een nineties, for instance, a distinguished Swiss proto-
zoologist came all the way to the American Far West for
that purpose. At first he considered his expedition not en-
tirely a failure because he thought that he had found just
one. But when he got back to Switzerland he found it there
also.

To the curious who poke about as I often do in the out-
of-the-way places so abundant in this region where so
many places are still really out-of-the-way, nothing is more
usual than the abandoned shack, the forgotten shaft of
some one-man mine, or even a rather imposing collection
of buildings v^th pieces of machinery rusting on a hillside
where they were left perhaps half a century ago. They re-
mind us that settlers do not always settle, that populations
move away from as well as into sparsely occupied regions.
And the same thing is true of nonhuman creatures, vege-
table as well as animal. Throughout the West there are
ghost tov^Tns and towns in the process of becoming ghosts
as well as thriving new settlements. And there are plant
communities precisely analagous to both. When such com-
munities appear to have shrunk until they now occupy
only small isolated areas, the botanists call them "relict

] 23 settlers— old and new

floras." What lias been happening to them is what hap-
pened to such a human community as Tombstone which
once flourished, but now survives at all largely because
tourist curiosity keeps it alive much as it keeps alive the
bison herds and the flocks of wild turkeys now "protected"
because people like to see them.

Such relict floras occur in many parts of the world, but
they are especially conspicuous and perhaps especially
common in regions like this where only a small margin
makes life possible, and where organisms which have
achieved very special adaptations to very special condi-
tions cannot survive even slight changes. It is just possible
that even the giant saguaro which grows nowhere else in
the world except within a rather small area may be such
a relict flora in an early stage of its coming extinction. I
know of no evidence that it once grew much more widely,
but it is certainly not reproducing itself at a rate which
will maintain its dominance in many of the areas which it
now does dominate. And in any event there are other
plants which are obviously only lingering in one or more
spots isolated by many miles from the only other com-
munities of their kind. In many cases it is, for a change,
not man but nature herself who is gradually making it im-
possible for them to live where they once flourished. Slight
changes in temperature, or rainfall, or what-not are prov-
ing to be decisive, and we can only guess whether such
minor changes in the flora really are only minor or whether
they mark the beginnings of a change which, in the course
of centuries or millennia, may change the whole face of
the country as that of America or Europe has changed re-
peatedly during the course of the ages.

One case happens to interest me especially. In northern

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 124

Mexico there is a rather common tree with a white ex-
fohating bark rather hke that of a sycamore and with curi-
ously tapering branches responsible for the common name,
elephant tree. At one place and one place only has it ever
been found in the United States — namely in a canyon at
an elevation of about 4000 feet in the Baboquivari Moun-
tains west of Tucson. The nearest Mexican specimen is
many miles away. Plants do not leap such distances. It can
be pretty safely taken for granted that the Arizona speci-
mens were once joined by lines of communication to their
fellows in Mexico.

What broke those lines and isolated these few speci-
mens? Why did all the rest of this region become unin-
habitable to them? In all probability the elephant tree will
be as extinct in the United States as the elephant itself be-
came so long ago. And it happens that this particular tree
draws attention to itself because it has a very famous close
relative in the East. To the Indians in Mexico it supplies a
gum which they burn as incense. Its Eastern relative sup-
plied the ancient peoples with their frankincense.

The story of how plants and animals were knowingly
or unknowingly introduced by man into different parts of
the earth is only part, and usually the clearest part,. of a
larger story — how the whole flora and fauna of a given
region got to be what it is. By their own efforts plants and
animals were advancing and retreating, colonizing and
abandoning through all human history as well as through
milhons of years before there were any human beings to
have a history. In many cases no one can do more than
offer a more or less convincing guess concerning what

1 25 settlers— old and new

actually happened. Until comparatively recently no one
even asked the questions in any rational form.

For many years the late medieval herbalists v^ent about
northern Europe with a copy of an ancient Greek catalogue
in their hands trying to identify in Germany or Sweden
the flowers which the ancient author had found about the
Mediterranean. They were loath to realize that theirs was
what they would have thought of as a barbarous flora un-
known to tlie ancients and no doubt loath also to face the
fact that there was so much still to be learned. When the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries finally did realize
something of the vast variety of living forms, they were
concerned first of all to describe and list as many of them
as possible, simply taking variety for granted. For them
one sort of animal or plant lived in one place and another
sort in another place because God had put them where
they belonged. Each was a "special creation." If they all
originated in the Garden of Eden then they must have
been scattered as the sons of Noah were scattered in order
that they might found the different races of mankind.

Consider how simple and how picturesque the situation
was even as Linnaeus, child of an enlightened age, saw it.
And he is delightfully explicit on the subject. There is, so
he says, certainly more dry land now than there used to be.
Probably Eden was situated upon a single small island
while all the rest of the surface of the earth was under
water. On this island, God crowded at least a specimen
of every kind of plant or animal that now exists. Eden was
a kind of Noah's Ark or, as he puts it, "a living museum
of natural-history specimens." Linnaeus then concludes
that Adam must have been the most fortunate of mankind

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ] 26

because he had at hand everything w^hich nature affords
for use or pleasure, and that Adam's first duty in this "com-
plete natural-history collection," v^as "to regard the Cre-
ator's v^ork." It v^as^ — as Linnaeus does not add — too bad
that w^hen he named each according to its kind he did not
realize the usefulness of the binomial system.

At other times even Linnaeus was somev^hat troubled
by the question v^hether tv^o plants or animals which dif-
fered only shghtly had, nevertheless, been to just that de-
gree distinct since the fifth day of creation. He was, in
other words, troubled by the need for a definition of
"species," even if it was to be taken for granted that species
had never changed. A century later Darv^n's imagination
and reason boggled at the assumption that God had cre-
ated a special creature to live only on one rocky island in
the Galapagos, a different one to live only on a neighbor-
ing island. But either God had gone to that pointless
trouble or species were not fixed.

In any event, the flora and fauna of the world had to be
described and catalogued, and then some theory of how
the individual species of that flora and fauna had Come
into existence had to be formulated', before men could be-
gin to study intelligently these various flora and fauna as
self-contained entities or to ask how they had become
estabhshed where they are. And it is a curious fact that
biology began to be especially concerned with such
questions at about the same time that sociology began to
attract more and more attention among the students of the
human animal. In some respects the cases are quite paral-
lel. Ecology, the study of plant and animal associations, is
merely the sociology of the whole plant and animal world.
The biologist's shift of interest in the direction of ecological

■] 27 settlers— old and new

studies is parallel to the increasing tendency of students
in another field to shift their interest from the study of in-
dividual men to the study of "society."

Something was said about all this when we raised the
question how and when the cactus got to the Sonoran
Desert. But the same question might be asked about any
plant or animal anywhere — including, especially, every
one that is fitted to live in arid country. When Tribulus
terrestris was brought in and found that in many places
things were quite to his liking, a member of the same
mostly tropical and subtropical family — namely the creo-
sote bush — was actually already the dominant shrub in
regions drier than Tribulus really likes. How did it get
here and why didn't Tribulus come with it?

We cannot do much more than guess, but probably the
immediate ancestor of the creosote crossed some bridge
which ceased to exist before the immediate ancestors of
Tribulus had developed on the family tree. But the bar-
riers once bridged, later impassable, do not by any means
have to be oceans. One desert can, for instance, be isolated
from another by an intervening barrier of moist fertility
just as eflFectively as one moist area may be isolated from
another by an intervening desert. When Tribulus was car-
ried by man across the barriers it settled down happily to
increase and multiply.

When the question why all animals and plants don't
grow everywhere was first asked in scientific rather than
mythological terms, the first answer was no doubt that
some demand heat and that some won't tolerate it. Proba-
bly most men today would give an answer almost as sim-
ple. And of course it is true as far as it goes. But it is a

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

128

long way from being a full answer. Some don't live where
they very well could for the same reason that, for centu-
ries, Europeans did not live in America — they had just
never got there. Others don't because there are many
things besides temperature to which some are absurdly
sensitive.

Some of the subtler demands are only now beginning to
be understood. For instance: some southern plants won't
bloom and therefore can't reproduce themselves even in
northern greenhouses, because the summer days are too
long and give them too many hours of light; other plants
will not flower except in isolated areas even within their
geographical range, because they demand infinitesimal
traces of certain chemical elements not everywhere pres-
ent. That is probably why, a few miles south of Tucson
and not far from the Mexican border, one will see in
spring certain hillsides covered with yellow poppies, while
another apparently identical hillside a few hundred yards
away has none. As has only recently been demonstrated
these poppies like a trace of copper, which happens to be
present in some places and not in others.

Dates from the Near East will grow wonderfully here
but in many places only if they are irrigated more than in
their native desert habitat, because there is often less ^sub-
surface water in Arizona than in some parts of even the
Sahara. And as we have already remarked, most of the
palms which tourists admire as exotics along the Riviera
are actually imports from California favored in Europe
because they stand lower temperatures than most African
palms like. By way of compensation, the tamarisks, which
took firm hold here in the Southwest when planted by the

I 29 settlers— old and new

Forest Service to reduce erosion along the desert washes,
are native to the same Mediterranean region to v^hich Cal-
ifornia has sent its palms. Smyrna figs grow well in Cali-
fornia but, as I have said before, wouldn't fruit until it
was discovered that they had to have a certain wasp which
not only had to be imported to please them, but which it-
self had to be given an otherwise useless scrub fig from the
Near East upon which it depends during a part of its life
cycle.

In a region of deserts broken up by mountains as our
southwestern deserts are, such mountain or desert barriers
are very important factors in controlling the distribution
of animals as well as of plants, and "islands" of the one or
the other are isolated long enough to begin to develop in-
digenous species very much as the isolated Galapagos Is-
lands produced those which first puzzled and then en-
lightened Darwin. The best known case is that of the
abert squirrel and the kaibab squirrel.

The first I see often at seven or eight thousand feet on
the nearest mountain range. With the possible exception
of the Sonoran fox squirrel, whom I have been lucky
enough to glimpse within the few square miles where Ari-
zona, New Mexico, and Old Mexico meet and where
alone he consents to cross the border from Mexico, the
abert is the handsomest squirrel I know: conspicuously
larger than the familiar gray, brown-backed with an al-
most red saddle, with pointed ears emphasized by pointed
tufts of hair, and with an exuberant tail part gray, part
white. He is a mountain creature inhabiting a rather re-
stricted area and south of the Grand Canyon he is just

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

130

what I have described. North of the canyon his relative
the kaibab squirrel with a pure white tail takes over com-
pletely. As usual there is the dispute — meaningless since
evolution has been understood — whether the two are to be
regarded as separate species or merely as separate varie-
ties. But if the kaibab is not yet a separate species it is in
the process of becoming one. Its race and that of the abert
are separated by the great gash of the Canyon, running
east and west, and they have been so separated ever since
the Colorado River got well started on the cutting job
which began a few million years ago. Perhaps, if man
were to carry a few of each into the territory of the other
they would interbreed and possibly eliminate the distinc-
tion. But unless man does so, or unless squirrels learn how
to travel and to carry their food supplies with them, the
aberts and the kaibabs may very well go on getting more
and more different from one another just as races of men
similarly isolated develop racial characteristics.

Workers in several different sciences are becoming
more and more convinced that both the north temperate
and the arctic climates are growing milder. A minor evi-
dence is the way in which certain animals and birds — no-
tably the 'possum, the turkey buzzard and the cardinal-
are extending their range into New England. Here in the
Southwest the same sort of thing is happening. The coati,
comic relative of the raccoon, which used to belong only in
Mexico and southward, is becoming increasingly common
in southern Arizona. Even more striking is the case of the
armadillo. Formerly known in the United States only
from Texas and the Mexican frontier, it has spread dur-

"131 settlers— old and new

ing a mere seventy-five years into Oklahoma, Louisiana
and even southern Arkansas. Though it is not, I am sorry
to say, native here — sorry because I should like to know
better a creature who is certainly not very smart but has
many quaint habits, including the invariable habit of giv-
ing birth to its young in one or two sets of identical quad-
ruplets. But even to know about the spread of the coati
and the armadillo makes it easier to believe that tapirs
and saber-toothed tigers really did once roam about what
is now New York State.

"The buckeye," as Thoreau once oracularly declaimed,
"does not grow in New England." But who knows? Some
day it may. It was Thoreau also who confessed that, "I had
no idea there was so much going on in Heywood's
meadow.'' So there was and so there is in every meadow,
and plain and mountain: things accomplished in a day,
and others which require thousands of years before even
their intention becomes apparent.

To say that something is as sohd as the ground under
one's feet is not to say much: that ground may be lifted
miles into the air. Forests and grasslands and deserts flow
like rivers. Stability, dominance and security are short-
term words. We haven't a long enough view really to
know what is even now in the process of happening to our
earth or its populations, or what fateful changes are taking
place — changes which may finally add up to something
quite as tremendous as those which made the ice ages, or
may even mark the end of a long geological epoch like the
Paleozoic or the Mesozoic. Few stop to think what a
small change in rainfall or a shift in a flora may mean
even for their children or grandchildren. Like the city

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

132

child who was not interested in cows because he got his
milk from bottles, they forget how dependent we all are
upon things over which we have no control. In the long
run our boasted control of nature is a delusion. Ultimately
all milk comes from cows. There is nothing that we can
really get out of bottles.

133

NINE

and every single one of them is right

IT OUGHT TO BE OBVIOUS BY NOW THAT THERE ISN T JUST

one way to live in the desert. There must be at least thirty-
five and, as Mr. Kipling once said of something else, "every
single one of them is right," if you know how to do it. Ani-
mals and plants have been equally ingenious in finding
them out and equally persistent in sticking to a given way
once it has shown that it will work.

In every case the central problem remains the same:
How to get water, how to keep it when you have got it,
and how to get along with the minimum gettable and

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

134

keepable. It has been demonstrated that only one animal
has the ability to get along without water. None of the
plants can manage without any external source whatso-
ever. But the plants have been most ingenious in the vari-
ety of the less radical solutions which they have worked
out.

After all, they can't go looking for anything. They must
hve or die in the situation to which it has pleased God to
call them. And like all creatures except an occasional man,
they will go to great lengths in order to live. Legendary
tales notw^ithstanding, even the scorpion does not commit
suicide. Even if he wanted to he couldn't do it in the fash-
ion legend long attributed to him, because scorpions are
immune to their ovvti poison. It is even harder to imagine
a plant saying to itself, "Life just isn't worth hving."
Many a desert seed falls on stony ground and quite a few
af them get along quite well anyway.

One of the oddest facts is that even within a group as
strongly marked as the cacti, certain species have de-
veloped characteristic methods quite different from those
usually employed by their relatives. Most of them, hke
the saguaro, have rather shallow root systems which
means that they take up water only at rare intervals and
store it in the thick stem. But one of the most beautiful as
well as improbable of the desert cacti — the one which
Mexicans call reina de la noche, or queen of the night —
prefers a radically different method.

This striking plant stores very little water in the stem.
In fact, it couldn't do so very effectively because the stem,
though commonly three feet long and sometimes even six,
is usually less than an inch in diameter and during most
of the year it is quite dry, indeed to all appearances en-

] 35 °"^ every single one of them is right

tirely dead. In that state it is so inconspicuous that I must
have passed one estabhshed a foot or two from my road-
way hundreds of times before I saw it. Yet once a year,
usually in June or July, the queen suddenly opens lush,
tropical-looking flowers that are pure white, six inches or
more across, and heavily fragrant. Tannhauser's pilgrim
staff looked hardly less promising and produced less ex-
travagant blossoms. Of what sin the queen of the night an-
nounces forgiveness I do not know, but since the miracle
occurs so frequently I like to think that it may be Adam's
and the share all of us have in it. At least the rainbow it-
self is no more surprising.

Though several blooms appear on one plant and some-
times successively, each opens in the evening and usually
closes next morning. A good many different cacti are fa-
miliarly known as "night-blooming cereuses" but this is
the only one which grows wild in Arizona. Moreover, the
astonishing plant prefers very arid situations — often where
nothing else except the unkillable creosote bush will
grow. And the moment it chooses to come to life is one
when the ground is usually dry as powder, not after a
rainy season but toward the end of the driest of the year.
What is its secret?

Dig one up and the answer is obvious. The two or three
slender, dry, wand-like stems grow from the top of a huge
tuber rather like an oversized turnip. The whole above-
ground part of the plant can hardly weigh more than a
few ounces, yet the tuber is sometimes enormous and fre-
quently weighs between five and fifteen pounds. How
many years it takes to grow to this size I do not know, but
it must be many. Yet this peculiar plant's solution of the
problem of how to live in the desert is plainly a practical

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

136

one. Like the saguaro it takes up water when it can get it,
but instead of storing what has been taken in a massive
stem, it stores it underground where loss by evaporation
must be even less. And when the time comes to bloom in
the midst of an absolute drought, it is independent of pre-
vailing conditions. It simply draws upon its private stock.
Nor does it, the poet notwithstanding, "waste its sweet-
ness on the desert air." When a blossom is fragrant that
usually means that it needs some insect to polhnate it.
When the blossom is white and opens at night that means
that some night-flying insect is being invited. And you
may be sure that it will accept the invitation. Before sum-
mer is over many of the stems of the queen will bear larg-
ish, pulpy red "pears" much like those of the commonest
cactus.

If any reader happens to wonder just how well all the
devices for economizing water really work, how efficient
they really are, some very good answers can be given. We
know that desert plants survive and flourish. But how
much do their special mechanisms contribute to this sur-
vival? It happens that studies have been made on the
saguaro, and those which compare it with the date palm,
cultivated commercially in the saguaro belt, are especially
impressive.

The date palm is not especially good at economizing
water. Where it grows in the old-world deserts, in the
Sahara for example, it can do so only where there is abun-
dant subsurface moisture, and when natives want to estab-
lish a new grove they not only have to plant the young
trees deep, but also to water them until the roots have had
time to grow much deeper still. Here in Arizona, where
such abundant subsurface water is not available, even the

"I 37 °"^ every single one of them is right

mature trees have to be irrigated, though of course sagua-
ros which are growing nearby get no such pampering.
Measurement of the moisture lost by evaporation in the
course of a day makes the difference between the one and
the other no mystery. The date palm may transpire five
hundred quarts of water in twenty-four hours; a twelve-
foot saguaro as little as one-fiftieth of one quart, or approx-
imately one twenty-five thousandths as much. Obviously,
if you are a plant and are going to live in the desert,
leaflessness, succulence, a wax-coated skin and thorns to
reduce the circulation of desiccating air all pay off.

But why should the saguaro adopt one device and the
queen of the night another? The two must be quite
closely related. It is not merely that both are cacti. They
actually belong to the same genus of the cactus family and
the structure of the stems v^th, in each case, longitudinal
ridges extending along their entire length, is similar. The
saguaro has taken advantage of this structure by making
the ridges serve as the high edges of the accordion pleats
which open to increase the volume when water is availa-
ble. The queen of the night takes only very minor advan-
tage of this feature and expands its root into a huge tuber
instead.

The different devices adopted become even more inter-
esting when you realize that other plants, not at all related
and certainly having a very different evolutionary history,
have independently recognized the same possibihty of
which the queen of the night took advantage. A good ex-
ample is the common finger gourd of the desert, which
runs for long distances over the ground or clambers over a
shrub ff it can find one.

Now the gourd family, or at least that genus v^th which

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

138

we are concerned, is principally tropical or subtropical
and has supplied the pumpkins and squashes of the vege-
table garden. There are no wild species native to the east-
ern United States and those which are cultivated are
mostly annuals which require a good deal of moisture and
have quite ordinary root systems. The finger gourd of the
desert looks like a typical member of the group, with yel-
low pumpkin-like flowers and striped hard-shelled fruits
three or four inches in diameter, quite similar to those
often grown in the East for ornament. But come upon one,
as I happened to do not long ago, which has been torn by
a torrential summer rain from its bed beside a wash, and
you will be amazed by a tuber weighing eight or ten
pounds. Without leaves or stems it might be anything. In
fact I did not know what my specimen was until I had
planted it in my garden and got, a few weeks later, the
unmistakable palmated leaves with which I had been long
familiar without guessing from what an imposing root
they came. In fact this gourd tuber looks quite a bit like
that of the night-blooming cactus.

The necessity for some special adaptation is obvious.
Gourds need a long growing season to mature their fruits.
Moreover, their leaves are thin and watery, adapted nei-
ther for storing nor for holding water as the succulent
plants do. Under desert conditions they could liot hope to
have soil moisture available during the whole of that long
growing season. Hence the great tank below ground which
can be drawn upon both to get a start in early summer
and then, after the short period of midsummer rain, to
carry on through hot, dry late August, September and
October.

Clearly the queen of the night and the finger gourd hit

] 39 °"^ every single one of them is right

upon this method of survival, or rather of flourishing,
quite independently. Anthropologists have long disputed
whether or not the use of the same tool or instrument, say
the throwing stick or the bow, in widely separated parts
of the world must mean that there was at some time some
contact between the ancestors of the one ethnic group and
the other. But there can be no such question here. Plant
families have spread across vast distances and they carry
their hereditary characteristics with them. But they have
no cultural traditions which can be communicated. The
cactus can't teach the gourd. And when the same device
has been invented by different plant groups there can be
only one possible explanation. To any problem in chemis-
try or mechanics there are a limited number of possible
solutions. Their number is fixed by the nature of things.
And many, perhaps all, of that limited number of possible
solutions have been hit upon again and again.

Nevertheless, there remains a harder question. Since
there are so often several possible solutions, why has one
plant or animal accepted one and another plant or animal
another quite different? Why, to take an example, didn't
the gourd become succulent above ground as so many
plants of so many different families did when they
adapted themselves to desert conditions?

Perhaps the answer would sometimes be clear if we
could trace every step in the organism's history and see
precisely how or under what aspects the problem presented
itself to each plant or animal. But even so, the answer
would probably not always be forthcoming. Something in
the given nature of an individual species probably predis-
poses it to one solution rather than another.

This fact is one which students of evolution and genetics

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

140

have only comparatively recently been coming to recog-
nize. Formerly it liad often been rather casually taken for
granted that all living things were equally and almost
limitlessly plastic. They could vary in all directions. En-
vironment, using natural selection as a method, was the
only thing which determined what the final result would
be. But certainly it is all neither so simple nor so one-
sided a process as that. On the contrary, it now looks as
though an individual species was often capable of develop-
ing in one direction and not in the other. Perhaps even
the possibility of growing tubers was inherent in some and
the possibility of developing succulence was inherent in
others long before they were called upon to do either.

This is only another of the many ways in which evolu-
tion, though it most certainly did take place, has come to
seem in some respects more and more, rather than less
and less, puzzhng as detailed information has accumu-
lated. It is also another of the many illustrations of the
fact that nature, working in her still mysterious ways, has
worked better than she would have worked if man had
been able to impose upon her the uniformity and efficiency
which he seems to be coming more and more to desire.

This world would be a far less interesting as well as a
far less varied place, if every problem which faces either
plants or men was always solved in the same way. Thoreau
remarked that he would like to have as many different
kinds of men as possible. Fewer and fewer seem to agree
with him. But it certainly looks as though nature wanted
as many different kinds of living things as she could pro-
duce. And she pursues her love of variety even down to
the smallest detail. If one beetle has twelve spots, she is
pretty certain to make another with fifteen — and she is

"141 °"^ every single one of them is right

almost as profuse in the desert. Water storage in a thick
stem works very well not only for the saguaro but also for
the great and very common barrel cactus, which, as I have
said before, really does hold enough water in its pulp to
save a human life in desperate cases. But that is no reason
why gourds and the queen of the night shouldn't go in for
underground tubers instead. Thus nature:

. . . fulfills herself in many ways

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Most people whose experience has been limited to cul-
tivated flowers and vegetables think a seed is something
you put into the ground, water a little if necessary and con-
fidently expect to come up. But a desert seed, like every-
thing else about a desert plant, is peculiar. Plant it care-
fully, water it or not as you please, wait patiently and,
four times out of five, nothing at all happens. Dig it up
six months or even a year later and, as often as not, it
looks precisely as it did when you put it in the ground. In
fact it does not look as though it had been planted.

Newcomers who have had this experience — and I was
one of them — feel aggrieved. Native plants, they think,
ought to grow easily. They have been seen flourishing un-
attended in the most unpromising-looking spots. What
perversity has induced them to refuse to grow where you
want them to?

Actually, of course, and even in temperate climates,
wild plants are often much more diflBcult to grow than
tame ones. One of the reasons why the latter are culti-
vated is just that they are, or have been trained to be, rela-
tively undemanding. And that really ought not surprise

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

142

anybody, since the same thing is true of domestic animals.
It is a lot easier to keep a chicken or a canary in New Eng-
land, where neither is native, than it would be to keep a
chickadee, however many hundreds of the latter may be
flourishing in the neighborhood. But what is to some ex-
tent true of many wild plants is especially true of the
desert species. Beginning to live in the desert is, if any-
thing, even more difficult than living there once you have
got started. Many kinds of plants as well as animals can do
it, but they have to do it in their own way.

As usual the number one difficulty for a chance seedling
is created by the shortage of water except during the short
wet periods. Most desert plants produce their seed at the
end of a rainy season which is followed by a long drought.
Obviously if the seeds fell to the ground and germinated
in the possibly still damp earth they would, shortly after,
be burned up. Some method had to be devised to prevent
them from behaving in any such imprudent fashion. In
the California and the Mexican deserts the problem is rel-
atively simple because there is only one wet season, that of
winter rains in the one and of summer rains in the other.
But in southern Arizona it is complicated still further by
the fact that there are two — in midsummer and midwin-
ter. And since some plants do most of their growing after
the winter rains and some after the summer, they have to
be careful not to come up during the wrong wet period.

One way of getting around this difficulty is simply to re-
fuse to come up at all except after one year (or perhaps
two or three years ) has passed. And that can be arranged
by taking advantage of a trick which pharmacists have
recently learned to play when they want to delay the ac-
tion of some pill for a certain number of hours after it is

]2J.3 °"^ every single one of them is right

taken: you coat it with some substance which will require
a known number of hours to dissolve. Many desert seeds
learnefl this trick many thousands of years ago. They are
covered with a layer of wax which prevents the absorption
of water until it has worn away and it wears away after an
appropriate time. The beautiful shrub, Acacia constricta,
which bears pompons of yellow flowers in spring is one
such. The seeds are rather small, black and obviously
waxy. Under natural conditions they will not germinate
in less than a year's time. But if you cut through the outer
coat, they will begin to grow immediately in damp earth.

I happen, however, to have a more intimate personal
acquaintance with an even stranger plant, the coral bean.
In this climate it is a smallish bush whose stems look dry
and lifeless during most of the year. Like the queen of
the night and the ocotillo it makes a specialty of blooming
at the moment when it appears quite incapable of any-
thing of the sort, and in early spring, after the winter rain,
its bare stem breaks forth with bright compact masses of
brilliant red flowers each some two inches long. Usually
it waits until after the summer rains, six weeks or two
months after it has bloomed, before it bothers to put forth
the leaves which it drops again very early in the fall.
Meanwhile, pods, much like those of the string bean and
often well over a foot long, have been forming. By autumn
they have split half -open to reveal a row of large beans,
bright red in color, obviously waxy, and as hard as stones.
In Mexico they are made into necklaces and they last in-
definitely.

Innocently to plant one is to risk losing one's faith in
the seed as a symbol of resurrection, or at least to suspect
that these particular seeds are waiting for the last trump.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

144

It is said that two or three years is the normal time for
them to he dormant, but I have never had the patience to
discover and all I knov^ is that six months after one was
planted in sand and kept moist, nothing whatever had
happened to alter its appearance. When I dug it up it still
looked as though it were waiting to be made into a neck-
lace. Yet, as I also know from experience, it is easy to trick
them because the delay is merely the result of a simple
mechanical device. With a file I scratched a line a few
millimeters long through the wax and the hard outer skin.
When I planted this bean it came up in just eight days
and because I gave it the water it would not have got in
nature at that season, I hope that it will produce seeds of
its own a few years from now. It is already nearly a foot
high and looks very flourishing.

But why should some seeds, like those of the bean, re-
main dormant not merely for one but for two or three
years? That question I have never heard raised but I can
make what sounds like a pretty good guess. In the desert
there are not infrequent years unfavorable even for desert
plants. During such years certain root perennials do not
even come up and obviously it would be very unlikely
that a seedling could establish itself at such a time. If one
whole crop of coral beans was fated to germinate and die
during such a year, it would obviously be a serious blow to
the species in that region. But if some remained domiant
for two and some for three years, the chance that one
group or the other would ultimately produce successful
plants would obviously be greatly increased. I mean to test
this theory by planting a number in the same place to
see if they come up in successive years. But this book will
probably be published before I have the answer.

"145 °"^ every single one of them is right

That the coral bean's reliance on as simple a mecliani-
cal device as the waxy coating works well, seems to be
demonstrated by the fact that the plants are quite com-
mon in rocky canyons at moderate altitudes and their con-
spicuous scarlet flowers add a brilliant touch to the early
summer landscape at a time when most spring flowers are
past and those of late summer have not yet appeared.
Nevertheless, many other plants prefer to depend instead
upon the subtler operations of biochemistry. There is no
visible reason, only a chemical one, why the seeds refuse
to come up except at the one time a year when they can
establish themselves.

In many parts of the world many plants solve their usu-
ally simpler problem in a similar way. Many a wild an-
nual drops its seeds by midsummer when the soil is both
warm and damp, but the seeds refuse to grow until the fol-
lowing spring when they v^dll have before them a season of
warmth long enough to permit them to come to maturity.
Sometimes their secret is that certain necessary chemical
preliminaries to growth are not complete when the seed
falls but take place while it is apparently dormant. Some-
times it is that a winter's cold is necessary before the
chemistry is right for growth. "Unless the seed die . . ."
And dying in these cases means being chilled as well as
dried out.

In southern Arizona things are less simple. There is the
very long hot summer but there are only two very short
wet seasons. Some plants flourish just after the first one,
which ends about as spring begins; others, during and after
the brief midsummer rains. The seeds of both lie in the
ground all winter and those of the first sort during most of
at least one summer as well. But the seeds of spring flow-

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

146

ers won't sprout until the following spring, and the seeds
of midsummer plants won't sprout until the following
summer. Yet in neither case is it merely a matter of how
long they must remain dormant. The spring group waits
until it is wet but cool, the summer group until it is wet
and warm. Elaborate experiments carried on some years
ago at the now disbanded Carnegie Desert Laboratory es-
tablished not only the general fact but the critical tempera-
tures. For most of the winter ephemerals the optimum
temperature for germination is 60 to 65 degrees, for the
summer ephemerals between 80 and 90. Most will do
fairly well within a range of 5 to 8 degrees above or
below the optimum. That leaves a margin of about 5 to 10
degrees between the highest temperature at which the
seeds of the spring flowers will grow and the lowest ac-
ceptable to the summer ones. It seems a narrow margin of
safety where so much is at stake. But it is not too narrow
to work very successfully. No feature of the desert is more
striking than the spring carpet of flowers which covers
large areas with thousands of blossoms. Yet the seed from
which each sprang had to resist, during the whole previous
summer, any temptation to germinate when the ground
was moist and (one would have supposed) pleasantly
warm. It had to wait until moisture with coolness proved
that spring, not summer, had come.

It happens that I am writing this chapter in midwinter,
and on the table beside me are a number of containers
which represent my successes and my failures in various
attempts to deceive desert seeds into believing that the
time for their resurrection is right. One of the most con-

]47 °"^ every single one of them is right

spicuous successes is a little blue wild morning glory
which noimally begins to grow in early summer and can-
not be very exacting because it is found in a variety of
situations and, unlike many plants of this region, at alti-
tudes ranging all the way from fifteen hundred to five or
six thousand feet. Room temperature must have been ac-
ceptable and it is actually blooming in mid-December, thus
demonstrating that in another respect it is far from cranky.

Quite recently experiments have demonstrated that
many plants will grow if temperature and moisture are
right but will stubbornly refuse to bloom unless they get
light for the correct number of hours per day — and that
means neither too many nor too few. This explains, as we
noted earlier, why some southern plants will seem to
flourish in northern greenhouses but refuse nevertheless
to bloom. Asters and chrysanthemums hold off blossoming
until late summer or fall no matter how soon they are
planted, because they want a rather short day and won't
flower even at the appropriate season if so much as an
electric bulb convinces them that long summer days are
still prevailing. My morning glory is getting fewer hours
of light than it would get in nature but it is obliging with
very pretty little blossoms nonetheless. Obviously not a
crank.

My most conspicuous failures probably He among those
plants which are triggered by temperature. Perhaps if I
had thermostatically controlled heat they too could be per-
suaded that it was spring or summer as the case might be;
but I haven't. Often some other specific conditions can't
be met, as I am beginning to suspect must be the case
with an unusually handsome wild four o'clock which

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT "j^g

grows from a large tuberous root and flourished wonder-
fully last summer after it had been transplanted to my
little wild garden.

It produced abundant seed. Yet, though I tried various
tricks, not one seed would grow during the winter. Finally
I put some in a refrigerator for two months and planted
one after it had been permitted to enjoy an artificial hi-
bernation. Not only did it come up promptly, but it seems
to be healthy and promises well for another summer. Per-
haps all it needed was the assurance that a winter had
passed and that it could therefore count upon six or eight
months to get a good start.
\/ All these, I recognize, will seem very mild amusements
to some. But there is no accounting for tastes and I greatly
prefer them to many of the others which most of my fel-
lows choose. At least they serve to remind me how wrong
those early romantics were when they feared that knowl-
edge would destroy that "sense of wonder" they cherished
as though it were a very fragile thing. The wax coat over
my coral bean "explains" why it will not grow in nature
until a year or two has passed. But what will explain the
explanation?

The more one comes to understand the mechanisms, the
more amazing becomes the fact that they exist. And one
must be very easily satisfied if one is satisfied to be told
that they "evolved," With every passing year it becomes
more difficult to understand why or how evolution operates.
Fact after new fact proves that the whole process is much
more complicated than Darwin imagined, and that the
great mystery is not that changing conditions called for
new adaptations but that the power to respond to the de-
mands in certain ways, but not in others, was potential in

"I 2J.9 °"*^ every single one of them is right

living organisms. It is not ignorance but knowledge which
is the mother of wonder.

Since seeds are among the most wonderful things in a
world of wonder, it is not surprising that, ever since Old
Testament times, they have been used in analogies and
metaphors. The Preacher and the Psalmist are both sound
enough — "In the morning sow thy seed" and "He that
goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall
doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves
with him." So too are the Gospel authors: "Unless the
seed die . . ." and "Some seeds fell by the wayside." But
what of the modern preachers who invoke the seed to
"prove" that man is immortal? Are seeds really that?

Unfortunately for the analogy they are not. They are
only astonishingly durable and they prove only how low
life can lie and how long it can endure. Doubtless the
coral bean which frequently waits several years before it
begins to grow could still germinate after a good many
years had passed, though after just how many I have no
idea. And as every gardener knows, the longer you keep a
packet of seeds, the smaller the proportion of them that
win ever grow. Hence it is obvious that the power to re-
sume life after dormancy varies with tlie individual even
within a given species. As an experiment I planted several
hundred seeds of wild plants which had lain in a desk
drawer for at least twenty years and only two sprouted.

Nevertheless, controlled experiments do prove that some
may remain alive for much longer than that. In 1879 a
botanist at Michigan State College fiUed twenty bottles
with weed seed and buried the bottles eighteen inches
below ground. From time to time they have been taken up

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

150

and a few of the seeds planted. In 1950, or seventy-one
years after the seeds were gathered, some from an evening
primrose, a yellow dock and a moth mullen came up.

Botanists agree that the layman's favorite story about the
flourishing of the wheat recovered from an Egyptian
mummy, or of the corn from an Indian clijff dwelling has
never been authenticated and until comparatively recently
they were inclined to be very skeptical of all alleged cases
of viability which endured for centuries. But in 1923 the
most extraordinary case ever definitely established made
the mummy stories seem again v^thin the range of re-
motely possible fact. In that year a Japanese botanist f oimd
in a bog in Manchuria the seeds of a species of lotus extinct
in that region. When he planted them they grew, and he
guessed that they were at least several hundred years old.
But we now know that he was overconservative. Tested by
the new radioactive carbon method, they turned out to
have been produced by a plant which was growing ap-
proximately one thousand years ago. Seeds are almost cer-
tainly not immortal. But they are certainly more enduring
than scientists used to beheve.

151

TEN

first on the mountain top

ARIZONA IS NOT ALL DESERT, BECAUSE SO MUCH OF IT IS

mountain. Scores of separate ranges, each with a name of
its own, are sprinkled here and there, and in the southern
part of the state they often rise abruptly from the desert
floor itself. In fact it is nearly impossible to move any-
where so far away from them that the horizon is not ringed
around with peaks.

Many were formed at about the same time as the main
body of the Rockies, many others are volcanic cores
belched up in more recent times. And all, though espe-
cially of course the ancient ones, are less high than they

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

152

once were. The desert valley is usually "fill" washed off
from the mountain's mass. Around the bases of the moun-
tains is piled the coarser debris in which they are slowly
burying themselves. These "talus slopes," as such collec-
tions of boulders and large stones are called, are among the
most distinctive features of the landscape, because only
where precipitation is low do even the larger fragments
from a decaying mountain remain so close to the slopes
down which they tumbled. Even so, many peaks in the
southern deserts still rise seven to nine thousand feet
above sea level, five or six above the deserts upon which
they are based. Many are higher than any summit east of
the Mississippi.

All these mountains are relatively dry because higher
mountains lie between them and the seas from which
moist winds blow. But they are cooler than the deserts
and they also get more rain, squeezing the last moisture
out. of clouds which have managed to pass over the bar-
riers to the west or from moist air coming from the south
and leaving still less for the flat lands in their rain
shadow. From a distance . their flanks look almost bare,
but near the more humid summits they are often crowned
with pines.

These mountains do much more than please the eye.
Every thousand feet means a perceptible change in tem-
perature and rainfall so that the mountains are responsible
for the fact, so surprising to the newcomer, that Arizona
is astonishingly rich in the number of different plants,
animals and birds native there. Yet most dwellers in the
larger towns are little more aware than town dwellers in
other lands usually are of the biota of which they are a
part. To them the mountains, ff they mean anything.

153 ^""^^ °" ^^® mountain top

mean a drive along one of the automobile roads which
lead up a few of them — in summer, to cooler regions; in
winter, to snow half an hour away from a sunny 70 de-
grees in town.

But to the student of nature they mean several distinct
worlds and the possibility of moving from one to the other
more quickly and easily than is possible in any but a rel-
atively few regions of the earth. Within a distance of a
few hundred miles one may move from a subtropical des-
ert near sea level at Yuma to the summit of the San Fran-
cisco Peaks whose more than twelve-thousand-foot altitude
carries the visitor into a region where some of the plants
are those which grow within the Arctic Circle.

Even more spectacular because one need travel only tens
rather than hundreds of miles is the journey from the
Sonoran Desert around Tucson to the pine and fir forests
which correspond to those found near sea level in south-
ern Canada. To travel a thousand feet upward is, so far
as climate is concerned, the approximate equivalent of
traveling six hundred miles northward. Because this fact is
so spectacularly demonstrated in Arizona and eastern Cali-
fornia, studies there were largely responsible for the con-
ception of Life Zones which was formulated a little more
than half a century ago by C. Hart Merriam and has
now become fundamental in ecology.

Probably the most striking illustration to be found in
America of what this zoning means is supphed by the
now famous Mount San Jacinto in southeastern Califor-
nia. It rises from its base near Palm Springs and almost
at sea level to nearly ten thousand feet. The eastern slope is
so steep that eight thousand feet of altitude is gained in
only three linear miles, so that zones ranging from the

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT "154

lower Sonoran at the bottom to the Boreal at the summit
are compressed within this incredibly short distance. Eco-
logically one travels nearly five thousand miles while ac-
tually traveling only three, and the floral bands represent-
ing each zone are preposterously narrow.

Animals are less rigidly confined to their special zones
than plants, and birds somewhat less than animals. Even
so, the fauna as well as the flora of a mountain slope often
tends to be confined very strikingly to particular zones. In
the mountains around Tucson, for example, one is not
likely to find jays below the level where the evergreen
oaks grow, or to find a gilded flicker much higher than
where these same oaks are just beginning to take over.
Some birds migrate upward a short distance in summer,
downward in winter, thus saving themselves the long jour-
neys taken by others who must change latitudes because
they have not convenient facilities for merely changing
altitude instead. Many animals also stick quite closely to
their own zone on the slope of a mountain, less because
they are sensitive to temperature than because it is only in
a particular zone that their food plants flourish. One will
find them isolated by desert lowlands or by peaks from
their fellows, whom one will find again at the same alti-
tude on another range. Thus a map of any considerable
mountain with the zones marked in color makes a S'ort of
biological pousse-cafe. Carried blindfold to an unfamiliar
region even a very moderately knowing student would
need only a glance about him to guess pretty accurately at
what altitude he found himself.

To climb the east flank of San Jacinto is a bit of an
undertaking but the most sedentary can be shown what a

] 5 jl first on the mountain top

life zone is from the window of a car as it climbs the fine
motor road in the Catalinas near Tucson to a height of
nearly eight thousand feet.

If we begin just northeast of the city hmits we will find
ourselves on a flat plain composed of sandy clay. For at
least several hundred feet below the surface it is a hard-
packed "fill" from the mountains, not very pervious to
water and supporting little conspicuous vegetation except
for the omnipresent creosote bush and the occasional low
mesquite tree. Most birds do not very much favor it,
though the road runner, the irascible-looking curved bill
thrasher and the exuberant cactus wren are common, and
you may see also the crested, jet black, phainopepla
perched at the top of a mesquite after the manner of the
flycatcher kind. Jack rabbits lope off into the distance and
little round-tailed ground squirrels, their plumeless tails
high in the air, dash madly across the road.

Suddenly, ahuost at a line which could be drawn, the
whole appearance changes. A solitary saguaro raises its
arms. Then two, then a dozen. Between them the green-
trunked paloverde spreads its equally green limbs and
twigs or, if this is early spring, is almost obscured in its
yellow blossoms. Prickly pears and choUa cactus are scat-
tered about in profusion. But what has happened? Why
have these things suddenly taken over? The difference in
altitude between the creosote desert and this succulent
desert is hardly perceptible.

Most of the answer lies underfoot. Offliand one would
say that the soil looks less suitable for plant life than what
one has just left. In fact its gravelly surface appears most
unpromising. And for a good many feet below the smface,
gravelly is exactly what it is because this is the region of

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ] 5^

the coarser detritus from the mountains. But when a rain
falls on this porous ground, it soaks in, providing abundant
v^ater for at least a fev^ hours, or long enough for it to be
snatched by shallow, wide-spreading roots. Certain birds,
including especially the beautiful gilded flicker, like it bet-
ter than the creosote flats and so does the Harris ground
squirrel who looks rather like a chipmunk with an unusu-
ally fluffy tail and who puts in a frequent appearance.
Within a mile or two after the first saguaro one is defi-
nitely mounting the talus slope and one is definitely in the
midst of what is called the succulent desert.

Soon the road is climbing steeply, the ancient walls of
the not-yet-eroded mountain on one side, on the other a
sheer drop of several hundred feet into the canyon cut by
a stream which may now be dry but whose bed is followed
by a serpentine line of cottonwoods, perhaps even of wil-
lows. Toward the upper limit of this zone ocotillos, which
wave in spring their blood-red flowers, begin to appear.
Then, somewhere about forty-five hundred feet, again on
a line as sharp as that of the tree limit in colder climes,
the saguaros stop.

Through at least the lower portions of the zone we have
just passed, frost is less common than on the valley floor
because the cold air from the heights flows off and collects
in the valley below. Now, however, the influence of alti-
tude begins to overweigh that of slope and the air grows
cooler. The characteristic tree is now the evergreen oak, of
which there is a bewildering number of species. Yuccas and
agaves, or century plants, have taken over as the most
conspicuous of smaller perennials. The Harris ground
squirrel is seen no more. In his place is the rich brown
cliff chipmunk — a very good "indicator" animal because he

I ^"J first on the mountain top

seldom wanders down into his cousin's country. This,
then, is the upper Sonoran zone at its most typical, and it
continues upward for two thousand feet or more. Only to-
ward its upper limit is snow likely to lie even a few days
at a time in winter.

Now junipers are scattered more frequently among the
oaks and then, almost before we can be aware what has
happened, we have plunged into the pine forests of the
transition zone. Temperature is partly responsible for the
change but rainfall is perhaps more important. At sixty-
five hundred feet some twenty inches, nearly twice what
the desert gets, may fall and, what is almost equally im-
portant, a considerable portion of it may fall as snow to
cover the ground for weeks at a time and to soak slowly
in as it melts. The Arizona pine — barely distinguishable
from the better-knovra. ponder os a yellow pine — may lift its
head a hundred feet, casting a deep shade upon the
needle-carpeted floor precisely as the evergreen forests do
in northern regions. And near the upper limit of this zone
there are many firs. The abert squirrel, one of the largest
and handsomest of its tribe, pricks up pointed ears and
flourishes the extravagant panache of grayish tail as it
searches for edible cones. Large flocks of the steel blue
Arizona jays sail screaming from tree to tree. And quietly
among the branches the little pigmy nuthatch goes about
its business as much at home as it is in the evergreen
forests of the state of Washington.

Here is nothing to remind one of the sunny desert not
half an hour away by car. Not a plant or an animal would
know how to live in the desert. Most do not even know
that the desert exists. The wanderins; animal has alwavs
turned back at the edge of his familiar environment. Seeds

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 128

of plants which fell over the line perished. Only man is
limitlessly mobile. Only he creates everywhere the environ-
ment which he must have. The jay and the squirrel hide
acorns and nuts for the winter. But they have never
learned the trick of establishing food bases in inhospitable
territory, much less how to travel with, as Thoreau puts
it, "shiploads of preserved meats" and, at jom-ney's end,
with the empty cans "piled sky-high for a sign."

Any mountain range in southern Arizona will provide
the opportunity for a journey in altitude and any will tell
two stories. The first is this life-zone story of what is; the
second, almost as clear, is the story of what was. All the
mountains were once not only higher than they are, but
also more barren — originally, indeed, completely so. Even
now the soil is usually thin and great rocky peaks jut
through it. Every plant and every animal that lives there
descends from a race of colonists and each of the succes-
sive waves of colonization prepared the way for the one
which came after. There could be no squirrels until there
were oaks or pines to supply them with food. There could
be no oaks or pines until generations of smaller plants
had grown and died to make the soil in which they grow.
But these smaller plants could not have grown upon the
bare rocks when they were first lifted high in the air some
hundreds of millions of years ago. How did it all start?
By what steps did life conquer the forbidding lifeless
steeps?

Before I leave the heights I usually like to look again
at the answer to this question. And the process is still
going on. Many bare rocks are still completely bare unless
one looks closely. And what is happening on these al-

] 59 ^"^^^ ^"^ *^^ mountain top

most bare rocks is what happened on others so long ago
that that bare rock is now overlaid with pine forest.

The secret lies, of course, in that thin, dry-looking en-
crustation, gray or greenish or yellow, which covers part
of the surface of many of even the barest rocks. The
casual eye takes it so for granted that it is hardly noticed.
And even when noticed it looks less like a living thing
than like some sort of sediment on, or exudation from,
the rock itself. Yet insignificant as it appears, it is an in-
dispensable link. Only because it could grow there where
nothing else had ever grown before, is the mountain ul-
timately carpeted with plants and clothed with forests.

No life seems dimmer than the life of these lichens.
They grow so slowly that some individuals may just pos-
sibly be among the longest-lived organisms on earth. They
also grow almost everywhere — on tree trunks and fences
as well as upon walls and boulders, from the steaming
tropics to the arctic tundra. They may even, so some
sober scientists think, grow on the greenish planet Mars
where no other organism we know anything about could
possibly survive. Almost the only places they do not thrive
are smoky industrial cities.

Everywhere they suggest life at its gentlest, most sub-
dued and most enduring. Nothing else except, perhaps,
the bacteria seems to ask so little in order to stay alive.
And slowly and persistently as they grow they seem to
grow to no purpose. They are so humble that even Tho-
reau was a little apologetic about his interest in them,
and they are so unpromising in appearance that it was not
until after Thoreau's day that the secret of their structure
and physiology was deciphered. Yet they were here mil-
lions of years before we were; they not improbably may

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

160

itill be here millions of years after we are gone, and
much that is here now would never have been here at all
if they had not first colonized the inhospitable rocks.

At the summits of Arizona mountains several different
species flom'ish but the most conspicuous, perhaps, is that
which appears as a golden yellow blotch hugging the stone
so tightly that from a few feet away it might well be
mistaken for a vein of mineral. And even at close range it
seems more part of the rock itself than of anything grow-
ing upon it.

Like all lichens, it is, oddly enough, not one plant but
two, though that surprising fact was only rather recently
discovered. All lichens seem so bafflingly featureless that
Linnaeus, the first great classifier, did not know what to do
with them and ended by putting them into a large pigeon-
hole with a lot of other odds and ends. The penetration
of their secret had to wait for the perfection of the micro-
scope. And what a strange secret it turned out to be!

No species of lichen is, strictly speaking, a species at all.
In every case what we call a lichen turns out to be a fun-
gus— something like the mould on bread — and an alga —
something like the green threadhke scum on a pond — liv-
ing together in close, mutually beneficial association. When
the time comes for reproduction, natLire sees to it that the
partners shall start life again together. In many' cases
what happens is that a bit of the fungus and a bit of the
alga break off together. The wind blows the dry fragment
away and when it comes to rest in some suitable place the
two organisms begin again to grow in partnership.

Many different species of fungi and of algae have been
able to strike up this odd relationship and each different
pair constitutes a different sort of lichen. Sometimes the

1^] first on the mountain top

alga can also be found in nature living on its own. The
fungus seems always to have lost its power to survive in
nature except as one half of a partnership. Less than a
hundred years ago botanists first came to understand the
strange situation and for a while some remained skeptical
about it. But they were convinced when an experimenter
succeeded in actually synthesizing a lichen. He grew the
fungus and the alga separately. Then he brought them to-
gether to form a lichen different from either.

This is not, be it noted, a case of parasitism. One plant
does not live off the other. What we have instead is one of
the closest and most striking cases of symbiosis, of living
together because living together is advantageous to both
organisms. The fungus, having no green chlorophyll, can-
not manufacture its own food from chemical substances
and it gets its organic nourishment from the green alga
which can. In return it protects the alga from drought and
collects the chemicals which the alga can turn into assimi-
lable food for both the partners. Competition and strife
are not the only laws of life. The algae are among the
oldest and most primitive of all living things. The evi-
dence of very ancient rocks indicates that they were flour-
ishing perhaps a billion years before any plant or animal
capable of forming a clearly outlined fossil had appeared.
Yet even an alga is able to cooperate as well as compete.

Man has consciously used lichens in various minor ways.
One species furnishes a dye still used in the Highlands to
color homespun. Another supplies the essential substance
in the litmus paper of the chemist. On the northern tun-
dras the so-called "reindeer moss," as important to grazing
animals as grass in temperate climates, is really a lichen.
So too is the "Iceland moss" which Eskimos eat. Still an-

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

162

other species used as a food in southwest Asia in times of
famine may have been the manna of the Old Testament.
But the hchen s greatest service — one that man was long
unaware of — was paving the way for all other plants.

Imagine a granite peak which some cataclysm has thrust
up into the cold air. It is hard, and smooth and dead. No
root could penetrate it or find nourishment if it did. Frost
might crack and flake the surface in time, but it would
still be incapable of sustaining even the humblest weed.

Presently the wind carries aloft the spore of a lichen
which comes to rest on the bare surface. A little moisture
is all it requires. It can cling to the bare surface without
roots. It can hve on the infinitesimal traces of ammonia
and other chemicals in the air. It carpets the bare rock
with a thin film of hving matter. Some sorts can hve even
on glass and they have been knov^n to damage church win-
dows by eating their way into them!

Presently the lichen on the mountain top dies. But
where life has been, other forms of hf e can estabhsh them-
selves. Perhaps the spore of a moss comes next and is able
to exist because of the less-than-paper-thick coating of or-
ganic matter left by the lichen. When the moss dies that
coating will be considerably thicker. Some less humble
plant — not improbably a fern — can grow there now.' After
it will come something else still larger.

Meanwhile, frost and the mild acids of the growing
things have begun to break dowm the rock. It cracks and
crumbles. Into the little pockets formed here and there
the rain washes the remains of the lichen, the moss
and the fern. They are mixed with the gravel and sand of
the disintegrating granite. They are "humus," that all-

]^3 ^''^* °" *^® mountain top

important ingredient of all fertile soil, supplying food and
moisture for the plants which grow in it.

Each larger herb or shrub adds its contribution to the
humus. After thousands of years a great pine may be grow-
ing where nothing had grown before and where nothing
could ever have grown if the lichen, which asks so little,
had not come first. This process has taken place countless
times in the past. It is following the same sequence of
events today in countless places and one need only look
about in any mountain region to see the various stages.
Where the pine is was once a lichen. Where the lichen is
may some day, perhaps millennia hence, be a pine.

It would be a rash man who would undertake to es-
timate very closely the age of one of the lichens growing
on an Arizona peak or anywhere else. Unfortunately they
produce no annual rings to be counted. They cannot even
be dated by the new carbon isotope method because that
method reveals only how long ago a thing died, not for
how long it has been living. But one thing is certain.
Many lichens grow very, very slowly and they must have
taken a long time to reach the size attained by some in-
dividuals.

It is commonly said that the giant redwoods of Cali-
fornia are the most ancient individual living organisms,
and they are old enough. A fallen giant whose rings can
be counted had lived for a little more than three thousand
years. A still standing tree is almost certainly quite a bit
older. But it has been suggested with some show of rea-
son that certain very large individual hchens may be even
older. Perhaps not the majestic tree but a humble lichen
has lived through more history than any other growing
thing.

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

164

When you see a large one on a boulder you can at least
feel sure that the boulder has not been much disturbed for
a very long time. No wonder that a rolling stone gathers no
moss. It would have to gather some hchens first. And li-
chens take a lot of time to prepare a stone to grow moss
or anything else.

Before I start my downward journey to the warm desert
again I cast a backward look at the golden hchen patiently
spreading over the rock. It carries the reassuring sugges-
tion that nature is preparing for a long future. The acorn is
planted for the sake of the oak to come. No one that I
ever heard of cared to look far enough ahead to plant a
lichen in the conviction that some day a pine would grow
there. Nature did, and her faith was justified. Perhaps it
will be again.

165

ELEVEN

love in the desert

THE ANCIENTS CALLED LOVE THE MOTHER OF ALL THINGS,

but they didn't know the half of it. They did not know, for
instance, that plants as well as animals have their love life
and they supposed that even some of the simpler animals
were generated by sunlight on mud without the interven-
tion of Venus.

Centuries later when Chaucer and the other medieval
poets made "the mystic rose" a euphemism for an anatom-
ical structure not commonly mentioned in pohte society,
they too were choosing a figure of speech more appropri-

THEVOICEOFTHEDESERT 1^^

ate than they reahzed, because every flower really is a
group of sex organs which the plants have glorified while
the animals — surprisingly enough, as many have observed
— usually leave the corresponding items of their own anat-
omy primitive, unadorned and severely functional. The
ape, whose behind blooms in purple and red, represents
the most any of the higher animals has achieved along this
hue and even it is not, by human standards, any great
aesthetic success. At least no one would be likely to main-
tain that it rivals either the poppy or the orchid.

In another respect also plants seem to have been more
aesthetically sensitive than animals. They have never tol-
erated that odd arrangement by which the same organs
are used for reproduction and excretion. Men, from St.
Bernard to William Butler Yeats, have ridiculed or scorned
it and recoiled in distaste from the fact that, as Yeats put
it, "love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excre-
ment." As a matter of fact, the reptiles are the only back-
boned animals who have a special organ used only in mat-
ing. Possibly — though improbably, I am afraid — if this fact
were better known it might be counted in favor of a gen-
erally unpopular group.

All this we now know and, appropriately enough, much
of it — especially concerning the sexuality of plants — was
first discovered during the eighteenth-century Age of .Gal-
lantry. No other age would have been more disposed to
hail the facts with delight and it was much inclined to
expound the new knowledge in extravagantly gallant
terms. One does not usually think of systematizers as given
to rhapsody, but Linnaeus, who first popularized the fact
that plants can make love, wrote rhapsodically of their
nuptials :

] ^7 '^"^^ '" *^® desert

The petals serve as bridal beds which the Great
Creator has so gloriously arranged, adorned with such
noble bed curtains and perfumed with so many sweet
scents, that the bridegroom there may celebrate his
nuptials with all the greater solemnity. When the bed
is thus prepared, it is time for the bridegroom to em-
brace his beloved bride and surrender his gifts to her:
I mean, one can see how testiculi open and emit pul-
verem genitalem, which falls wpon tubam and fertilizes
ovarium.

In England, half a century later, Erasmus Darwin, dis-
tinguished grandfather of the great Charles, wrote even
more exuberantly in his didactic poem, "The Loves of the
Plants," where all sorts of gnomes, sylphs and other myth-
ological creatures benevolently foster the vegetable affaires
de coeur. It is said to have been one of the best-selling
poems ever pubhshed, no doubt because it combined the
newly fashionable interest in natural history with the long
standing obsession with "the tender passion" as expressi-
ble in terms of cupids, darts, flames and all the other
cliches which now survive only in St. Valentine's Day gifts.

Such romantic exuberance is not much favored today
when the seamy side is likely to interest us more. We are
less likely to abandon ourselves to a participation in the
joys of spring than to be on our guard against "the pa-
thetic fallacy" even though, as is usually the case, we don't
know exactly what the phrase means or what is "pathetic"
about the alleged fallacy. Nevertheless, those who con-
sent, even for a moment, to glance at that agreeable sur-
face of things with which the poets used to be chiefly con-
cerned will find in the desert what they find in every other
spring, and they may even be aware that the hare, which

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT ] ^g

here also runs races with itself, is a good deal fleeter than
any Wordsworth was privileged to observe in the Lake
Country.

In this warm chmate, moreover, love puts in his appear-
ance even before "the yonge sonne hath in the Ram his
half e cours y-ronne" or, in scientific prose, ahead of the
spring equinox. Many species of birds, which for months
have done little more than chirp,, begin to remember their
songs. In the canyons where small pools are left from
some winter rain, the subaqueous and most mysteri-
ous of all spring births begins and seems to recapitulate
the first morning of creation. Though I have never noticed
that either of the two kinds of doves which spend the
whole year with us acquire that "livelier iris" which Ten-
nyson celebrated, the hzard's belly turns turquoise blue,
as though to remind his mate that even on their ancient
level sex has its aesthetic as well as its biological aspect.
Fierce sparrow hawks take to sitting side by side on tele-
graph wires, and the Arizona cardinal, who has remained
all winter long more brilliantly red than his eastern cousin
ever is, begins to think romantically of his neat but not
gaudy wife. For months before, he had been behaving like
an old married man who couldn't remember what he once
saw in her. Though she had followed him about, he had
sometimes driven her rudely away from the feeding station
until he had had his fill. Now gallantry begins to revive
and he may even graciously hand her a seed.

A little later the cactus wren and the curved-bill thrasher
will build nests in the wicked heart of the choUa cactus
and, blessed with some mysterious impunity, dive through
its treacherous spines. Somewhere among the creosote
bushes, by now yellow with blossoms, the jack rabbit —

1^9 '°^® '"^ *^® desert

an unromantic looking creature if there ever was one —
will be demonstrating that she is really a hare, not a rabbit
at all, by giving birth to young furred babies almost ready
to go it alone instead of being naked, helpless creatures
like the infant cottontail. The latter will be born under-
ground, in a cozily lined nest; the more rugged jack rab-
bit on the almost bare surface.

My special charge, the Sonoran spadefoot toad, will re-
main buried no one knows how many feet down for
months still to come. He will not celebrate his spring until
mid- July when a soaking rain penetrates deeply enough to
assure him that on the surface a few puddles will form.
Some of those puddles may just possibly last long enough
to give his tadpoles the nine or ten days of submersion
necessary, if they are to manage the metamorphosis which
will change them into toadlets capable of repeating that
conquest of the land which their ancestors accomplished
so many milhons of years ago. But while the buried spade-
foots dally, the buried seeds dropped last year by the little
six-week ephemerals of the desert will spring up and pro-
ceed v^th what looks like indecent haste to the business of
reproduction, as though — as for them is almost the case —
life were not long enough for anything except preparation
for the next generation.

Human beings have been sometimes praised and some-
times scorned because they fall so readily into the habit
of pinning upon their posterity all hope for a good life, of
saying, "At least my children will have that better life
which I somehow never managed to achieve." Even plants
do that, as I know, because when I have raised some of
the desert annuals under the unsuitable conditions of a
winter living room, they have managed, stunted and sickly

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

170

though they seemed, to seed. "At least," they seemed to
say, "our species is assured another chance." And if this
tendency is aheady dominant in a morning glory, human
beings will probably continue to accept it in themselves
also, v^hether, by human standards, it is v^ise or not.

As I w^rite this another spring has just come around. With
a regularity in v^hich there is something pleasantly comic,
all the little romances, dramas and tragedies are acting
themselves out once more, and I seize the opportunity to
pry benevolently.

Yesterday I watched a pair of hooded orioles — ^he, bril-
liant in orange and black; she, modestly yellow green —
busy about a newly constructed nest hanging from the
swordlike leaves of a yucca, where one would have been
less surprised to find the lemon yellow cousin of these
birds which builds almost exclusively in the yucca. From
this paradise I drove away the serpent — -in this case a
three-foot diamondback rattler who was getting uncom-
fortably close to the nesting site — and went on to flush out
of the grass at least a dozen tiny GambeFs quail whose
male parent, hovering close by, bobbed his head plume
anxiously as he tried to rally them again. A quarter of a
mile away a red and black Gila monster was sunning him-
self on the fallen trunk of another yucca, and, for -all I
know, he too may have been feeling some stirring of the
spring, though I can hardly say that he showed it.

From birds as brightly colored as the orioles one expects
only gay domesticity and lighthearted solicitude. For that
reason I have been more interested to follow the home life
of the road runner, that unbird-like bird whom we chose
at the beginning as a desert dweller par excellence. One

]71 'ove in the desert

does not expect as much of him as one does of an oriole
for two good reasons. In the first place, his normal man-
ner is aggressive, ribald and devil-may-care. In the second
place, he is a cuckoo, and the shirking of domestic respon-
sibilities by some of the tribe has been notorious for so
long that by some confused logic human husbands who
are the victims of unfaithfulness not only wear the horns
of the deer but are also said to be cuckolded. The fact re-
mains, nevertheless, that though I have watched the de-
veloping domestic life of one road runner couple for
weeks, I have observed nothing at which the most critical
could cavil.

The nest — a rather coarse affair of largish sticks — was
built in the crotch of a thorny cholla cactus some ten feet
above the ground, which is rather higher than usual. When
first found there were already in it two eggs, and both of
the parent birds were already brooding them, turn and
turn about. All this I had been led to expect because the
road runner, unlike most birds, does not wait until all the
eggs have been laid before beginning- to incubate. Instead
she normally lays them one by one a day or two apart and
begins to set as soon as the first has arrived. In other
words the wife follows the advice of the Planned Par-
enthood Association and "spaces" her babies — perhaps be-
cause lizards and snakes are harder to come by than in-
sects, and it would be too much to try to feed a whole nest
full of nearly grown infants at the same time. Moreover,
in the case of my couple "self-restraint" or some other
method of birth control had been rigorously practiced and
two young ones were all there were.

Sixteen days after I first saw the eggs, both had hatched.
Presently both parents were bringing in lizards according

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

172

to a well-worked-out plan. While one sat on the nest to pro-
tect the young from the blazing sun, the other went hunt-
ing. When the latter returned with a catch, the brooding
bird gave up its place, went foraging in its turn and pres-
ently came back to deliver a catch, after which it again
took its place on the nest. One day, less than a month
after the eggs were first discovered, one baby was stand-
ing on the edge of the nest itself, the other on a cactus
stem a few feet away. By the next day both had dis-
appeared.

Thus, despite the dubious reputation of the family to
which he belongs, the road runner, hke the other Ameri-
can cuckoos, seems to have conquered both the heredi-
tary taint and whatever temptations his generally rascally
disposition may have exposed him to. In this case at least,
both husband and wife seemed quite beyond criticism,
though they do say that other individuals sometimes re-
veal a not-too-serious sign of the hereditary weakness
when a female will, on occasion, lay her eggs in the nest
of another bird of her ovm species — which is certainly not
so reprehensible as victimizing a totally different bird as
the European cuckoo does.

Perhaps the superior moral atmosphere of America has
reformed the cuckoo's habit and at least no American rep-
resentative of the family regularly abandons its eggs to the
care of a stranger. Nevertheless, those of us who are in-
clined to spiritual pride should remember that we do have
a native immoralist, abundant in this same desert country
and just as reprehensible as any to be found in decadent
Europe — namely the cowbird, who is sexually promiscu-
ous, never builds a home of his own and is inveterately
given to depositing eggs in the nests of other birds. In

] 73 '^"^^ '"^ ^^® desert

his defense it is commonly alleged that his "antisocial
conduct" should be excused for the same reason that sucli
conduct is often excused in human beings — because, that
is to say, it is actually the result not of original sin but of
certain social determinants. It seems that long before he
became a cowbird this fellow was a buffalo bird. And be-
cause he had to follow the wide ranging herds if he was
to profit from the insects they started up from the grass,
he could never settle down long enough to raise a family.
Like Rousseau and like Walt Whitman, he had to leave his
offspring (if any) behind.

However that may be, it still can hardly be denied that
love in the desert has its still seamier side. Perhaps the
moth, whom we have already seen playing pimp to
a flower and profiting shamelessly from the affair, can
also be excused on socio-economic grounds. But far more
shocking things go on in dry climates as well as in wet,
and to excuse them we shall have to dig deeper than the
social system right down into the most ancient things-as-
they-used-to-be. For an example which seems to come
straight out of the most unpleasant fancies of the Mar-
quis de Sade, we might contemplate the atrocious behav-
ior of the so-called tarantula spider of the sandy wastes.
Here, unfortunately, is a lover whom all the world will
find it difficult to love.

This tarantula is a great hairy fellow much like the kind
which sometimes comes north in a bunch of bananas and
which most people have seen exhibited under a glass in
some fruiterer's window. Most visitors to the desert hate
and fear him at sight, even though he is disinclined to
trouble human beings and is incapable even upon extreme

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

174

provocation of giving more than a not-too-serious bite. Yet
he does look more dangerous than the scorpion and he
is, if possible, even less popular.

He has a leg spread of four or sometimes of as much as
six inches, and it is said that he can leap for as much as
two feet when pouncing upon his insect prey. Most of the
time he spends in rather neat tunnels or burrows exca-
vated in the sand, from which entomologists in search of
specimens flush him out with water. And it is chiefly in
the hottest months, especially after some rain, that one
sees him prowling about, often crossing a road and some-
times waiting at a screen door to be let in. Except for man,
his most serious enemy is the "tarantula hawk," a large
black-bodied wasp with orange-red wings, who pounces
upon his larger antagonist, paralyzes him with a sting
and carries his now helpless body to feed the young wasps
which will hatch in their own underground burrow.

Just to look at the tarantula's haiiy legs and set of gleam-
ing eyes is to suspect him of unconventionality or worse,
and the suspicions are justified. He is one of those creatures
in whom love seems to bring out the worst. Moreover, be-
cause at least one of the several species happens to have
been the subject of careful study, the details are public.
About the only thing he cannot be accused of is "infan-
tile sexuality," and he can t be accused of that only be-
cause the male requires some eleven years to reach sexual
maturity or even to develop the special organs necessary
for his love making — if you can stretch this euphemistic
term far enough to include his activities.

When at last he has come of age, he puts off the neces-
sity of risking contact with a female as long as possible.

1 75 '°^^ '" ^^^ desert

First he spins a sort of web into which he deposits a few
drops of sperm. Then he patiently taps the web for a pe-
riod of about two hours in order to fill with the sperm the
two special palps or mouth parts which he did not acquire
until the molt which announced his maturity. Then, and
only then, does he go off in search of his "mystic and som-
ber Dolores" who will never exhibit toward him any ten-
der emotions.

If, as is often the case, she shows at first no awareness
of his presence, he will give her a few slaps until she rears
angrily with her fangs spread for a kill. At this moment he
then plays a trick which nature, knowing the disposition
of his mate, has taught him and for which nature has pro-
vided a special apparatus. He slips two spurs conveniently
placed on his forelegs over the fangs of the female, in
such a way that the fangs are locked into immobility.
Then he transfers the sperm w^hich he has been carrying
into an orifice in the female, unlocks her fangs and darts
away. If he is successful in making his escape, he may re-
peat the process with as many as three other females. But
by this time he is plainly senile and he slowly dies, pre-
sumably satisfied that his life work has been accom-
plished. Somewhat unfairly, the female may live for a
dozen more years and use up several husbands. In gen-
eral outline the procedure is the same for many spiders,
but it seems worse in him, because he is big enough to be
conspicuous.

It is said that when indiscreet birdbanders announced
their discovery that demure little house vvrens commonly
swap mates between the first and second of their summer

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

176

broods, these wrens lost favor v^ith many old ladies w^lio
promptly took down their nesting boxes because they re-
fused to countenance such loose behavior.

In the case of the tarantula we have been contemplat-
ing mores which are far worse. But there ought, it seems
to me, to be some possible attitude less unreasonable than
either that of the old ladies who draw away from nature
when she seems not to come up to their very exacting
standards of behavior, and the seemingly opposite attitude
of inverted romantics who are prone either to find all
beasts other than man completely beastly, or to argue that
since man is biologically a beast, nothing should or can be
expected of him that is not found in all his. fellow creatures.

Such a more reasonable attitude will, it seems to me,
have to be founded on the reahzation that sex has had a
history almost as long as the history of life, that its mani-
festations are as multifarious as the forms assumed by
Uving things and that their comehness varies as much as
do the organisms themselves. Man did not invent it and
he was not the first to exploit either the techniques of love
making or the emotional and aesthetic themes which have
become associated with them. Everything either beautiful
or ugly of which he has found himself capable is some-
where anticipated in the repertory of plant and animal
behavior. In some creatures sex seems a bare and me-
chanical necessity; in others the opportunity for elabora-
tion has been seized upon and developed in many differ-
ent directions. Far below the human level, love can be a
game on the one hand, or a self-destructive passion on the
other. It can inspire tenderness or cruelty; it can achieve
fulfillment through either violent domination or prolonged
solicitation. One is almost tempted to say that to primitive

177 '°^^ '" ^^^ desert

creatures, as to man, it can be sacred or profane, love or
lust.

The tarantula's copulation is always violent rape and
usually ends in death for the aggressor. But over against
that may be set not only the romance of many birds but
also of other less engaging creatures in whom nevertheless
a romantic courtship is succeeded by an epoch of domes-
tic attachment and parental solicitude. There is no justifi-
cation for assuming, as some romanticists do, that the one
is actually more "natural" than the other. In one sense na-
ture is neither for nor against what have come to be hu-
man ideals. She includes both what we call good and what
we call evil. We are simply among her experiments,
though we are, in some respects, the most successful.

Some desert creatures have come quite a long way from
the tarantula — and in our direction, too. Even those who
have come only a relatively short way are already no
longer repulsive. Watching from a blind two parent deer
guarding a fawni while he took the first drink at a water
hole, it seemed that the deer at least had come a long way.

To be sure many animals are, if this is possible, more
"sex obsessed" than we — intermittently at least. Mating is
the supreme moment of their lives and for many, as for
the male scorpion and the male tarantula, it is also the
beginning of the end. Animals will take more trouble and
run more risks than men usually will, and if the Strind-
bergs are right when they insist that the woman still wants
to consume her mate, the biological origin of that grisly
impulse is rooted in times which are probably more an-
cient than the conquest of dry land.

Our currently best-publicized student of human sexual
conduct has argued that some of what are called "perver-

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178

sions'' in the human being — homosexuahty, for example —
should be regarded as merely "normal variations" because
something analogous is sometimes observed in the animal
kingdom. But if that argument is vahd then nothing in
the textbooks of psychopathology is "abnormal." Once
nature had established the fact of maleness and female-
ness, she seems to have experimented with every possible
variation on the theme. By comparison, Dr. Kinsey's most
adventurous subjects were hopelessly handicapped by the
anatomical and physiological limitations of the human be-
ing.

In the animal kingdom, monogamy, polygamy, polyan-
dry and promiscuity are only trivial variations. Nature
makes hermaphrodites, as well as Tiresiases w^ho are alter-
nately of one sex and then the other; also hordes of neu-
ters among the bees and the ants. She causes some males
to attach themselves permanently to their females and
teaches others how to accomplish impregnation without
ever touching them. Some embrace for hours; some, like
Onan, scatter their seed. Many males in many different or-
ders— ^like the seahorse and the ostrich, for example — brood
the eggs, while others vvdll eat theni, if they get a chance,
quite as blandly as many females will eat their mate,
once his business is done. Various male spiders wave vari-
ously decorated legs before the eyes of a prospective
spouse in the hope (often vain) that she will not mistake
them for a meal just happening by. But husband-eating is
no commoner than child-eating. Both should be classed as
mere "normal variants" in human behavior if nothing ex-
cept a parallel in the animal kingdom is necessary to es-
tablish that status. To her children nature seems to have
said, "Copulate you must. But beyond that there is no rule.

1 79 '°^® ''^ ^^® desert

Do it in whatever way and with whatever emotional con-
comitants you choose. That you should do it somehow or
other is all that I ask."

If one confines one's attention too closely to these
seamy sides, one begins to understand why, according to
Gibbon, some early Fathers of the Church held that sex
was the curse pronounced upon Adam and that, had he not
sinned, the human race would have been propagated "by
some harmless process of vegetation." Or perhaps one be-
gins to repeat with serious emphasis the famous question
once asked by the Messrs. Thurber and White, "Is Sex
Necessary?" And the answer is that, strictly speaking, it
isn't. Presumably the very first organisms were sexless.
They reproduced by a "process of vegetation" so harmless
that not even vegetable sexuality was involved. What
is even more impressive is the patent fact that it is not
necessary today. Some of the most successful of all plants
and animals — if by successful you mean abundantly sur-
viving— have given it up either entirely or almost entirely.
A virgin birth may require a miracle if the virgin is to
belong to the human race, but there is nothing miraculous
about it in the case of many of nature's successful chil-
dren. Parthenogenesis, as the biologist calls it, is a per-
fectly normal event.

Ask the average man for a serious answer to the question
what sex is "for" or why it is "necessary," and he will
probably answer without thinking that it is "necessary for
reproduction." But the biologist knows that it is not. Ac-
tually the function of sex is not to assure reproduction but
to prevent it — if you take the word literally and hence to
mean "exact duplication." Both animals and plants could

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

180

"reproduce" or "duplicate" without sex. But without it
there would be little or no variation, heredities could not
be mixed, unexpected combinations could not arise, and
evolution would either never have taken place at all or,
at least, taken place so slowly that we might all still be
arthropods or worse.

If in both the plant and animal kingdom many organ-
isms are actually abandoning the whole of the sexual proc-
ess, that is apparently because they have resigned their
interest in change and its possibilities. Everyone^ knows
how the ants and the bees have increased the single-
minded efficiency of the worker majority by depriving
them of a sexual function and then creating a special class
of sexual individuals. But their solution is far less radical
than that of many of the small creatures, including many
insects, some of whom are making sexless rather than sex-
ual reproduction the rule, and some of whom are appar-
ently dispensing with the sexual entirely so that no male
has ever been found.

In the plant world one of the most familiar and success-
ful of all weeds produces its seeds without pollinization,
despite the fact that it still retains ,the flower which was
developed long ago as a mechanism for facilitating that
very sexual process which it has now given up. That it is
highly "successful" by purely biological standards no' one
who has ever tried to eliminate dandelions from a lawn is
likely to doubt. As I have said before, they not only get
along very well in the world, they have also been astonish-
ing colonizers here, since the white man unintentionally
brought them from Europe, probably in hay. Sexless
though the dandelion is, it is inheriting the earth, and the
only penalty which it has to pay for its sexlessness is the

181 '°^^ ''^ ^^^ desert

penalty of abandoning all hope of ever l)eing anytliing
except a dandelion, even of being a better dandelion tlian
it is. It seems to have said at some point, "This is good
enough for me. My tribe flourishes. We have found how to
get along in the w^orld. Why risk anything?"

But if, from the strict biological standpoint, sex is "noth-
ing but" a mechanism for encouraging variation, that is a
long way from saying that there are not other standpoints.
It is perfectly legitimate to say that it is also "for" many
other things. Fev^ other mechanisms ever invented or stum-
bled upon opened so many possibilities, entailed so many
unforeseen consequences. Even in the face of those who
refuse to entertain the possibility that any kind of purpose
or foreknowledge guided evolution, we can still find it per-
missible to maintain that every invention is "for" whatever
uses or good results may come from it, that all things, far
from being "nothing but" their origins, are whatever they
have become. Grant that and one must grant also that the
writing of sonnets is one of the things which sex is "for."

Certainly nature herseK discovered a very long time ago
that sex was— or at least could be used — "for" many things
besides the production of ofiFspring not too monotonously
like the parent. Certainly also, these discoveries anticipated
pretty nearly everything which man himself has ever
found it possible to use sex "for." In fact it becomes some-
what humiliating to realize that we seem to have invented
nothing absolutely new.

Marital attachment? Attachment to the home? Devotion
to children? Long before us, members of the animal king-
dom had associated them all with sex. Before us they also
founded social groups on the family unit and in some few
cases even established monogamy as the rule! Even more

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

182

strikingly, perhaps, many of them abandoned force
majeure as the decisive factor in the formation of a mating
pair and substituted for it courtships, which became a
game, a ritual and an aesthetic experience. Every device
of courtship known to the human being was exploited by
his predecessors: colorful costume display, song, dance
and the wafted perfume. And hke man himself, certain
animals have come to find the preliminary ceremonies so
engaging that they prolong them" far beyond the point
where they have any justification outside themselves. The
grasshopper, for instance, continues to sing like a trouba-
dour long after the lady is weary with waiting.

Even more humiliating, perhaps, than the fact that we
have invented nothing is the further fact that the evolution
has not been in a straight line from the lowest animal
families up to us. The mammals, who are our immediate
ancestors, lost as well as gained in the course of their de-
velopment. No doubt because they lost the power to see
colors (which was not recaptured until the primates
emerged), the appeal of the eye plays little part in their
courtship. In fact "love" in most of its manifestations tends
to play a much lesser part in their lives than in that of
many lower creatures — even in some who are distinctly
less gifted than the outstandingly emotional and aesthetic
birds. On the whole, mammalian sex tends to be direct,
unadorned, often brutal, and not even the apes, despite
their recovery from color blindness, seem to have got very
far beyond the most uncomplicated erotic experiences and
practices. Intellectually the mammals may be closer to us
than any other order of animals, but emotionally and
aesthetically they are more remote than some others

1 83 '°^® '" ^^® desert

— which perhaps cxplams the odd fact that most compari-
sons with any of them, and all comparisons with the pri-
mates, are derogatory. You may call a woman a "butterfly"
or describe her as "birdlike/' You may even call a man
"leonine." But there is no likening with an ape which is
not insulting.

How consciously, how poetically or how nobly each par-
ticular kind of creature may have learned to love, Venus
only knows. But at this very moment of the desert spring
many living creatures, plant as well as animal, are cele-
brating her rites in accordance with the tradition which
happens to be theirs.

Fortunately, it is still too early for the tarantulas to have
begun their amatory black mass, which, for all I know,
may represent one of the oldest versions of the rituals still
practiced in the worship of Mr. Swinburne's "mystic and
somber Dolores." But this very evening as twilight falls,
hundreds of moths will begin to stir themselves in the dusk
and presently start their mysterious operations in the heart
of those yucca blossoms which are just now beginning to
open on the more precocious plants. Young jack rabbits
not yet quite the size of an adult cottontail are proof that
their parents went early about their business, and many
of the brightly colored birds — orioles, cardinals and tana-
gers — are either constructing their nests or brooding their
eggs. Some creatures seem to be worshiping only Venus
Pandemos; some others have begun to have some inkling
that the goddess manifests herself also as the atavist which
the ancients called Venus Eurania. But it is patent to any-
one who will take the trouble to look that they stand now

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

184

upon different rungs of that Platonic ladder of love v^hich
man was certainly not the first to make some effort
to climb.

Of this I am so sure that I feel it no betrayal of my hu-
manity w^hen I find myself entering w^ith emotional sym-
pathy into a spectacle which is more than a mere show,
absorbing though it would be if it were no more than that.
Modern knowledge gives me, I think, ample justification
for the sense that I am not outside but a part of it, and if
it did not give me that assurance, then I should probably
agree that I would rather be "some pagan suckled in a
creed outworn" than compelled to give it up.

Those very same biological sciences which have traced
back to their lowly origins the emotional as well as the
physiological characteristics of the sentient human being
inevitably furnish grounds for the assumption that if we
share much with the animals, they must at the same time
share much with us. To maintain that all the conscious
concomitants of our physical activities are v^thout ana-
logues in any creatures other than man is to fly in the
face of the very evolutionary principles by which those
"hardheaded" scientists set so much store. It is to assume
that desire and joy have no origins in simpler forms of
the same thing, that everything human has "evolved" ex-
cept the consciousness which makes us aware of what we
do. A Descartes, who held that man was an animal-machine
differing from other animal-machines in that he alone
possessed a gland into which God had inserted a soul,
might consistently make between man and the other ani-
mals an absolute distinction. But the evolutionist is the
last man who has a right to do anything of the sort.

He may, if he can consent to take the extreme position

] 85 '°^® '" ^^^ desert

of the pure behaviorist, maintain that in man and tlie ani-
mals ahke consciousness neither is nor can be anything but
a phosphorescent illusion on the surface of physiological
action and reaction, and without any substantial reality or
any real significance whatsoever. But there is no choice
between that extreme position and recognition of the
fact that animals, even perhaps animals as far down in the
scale as any still living or preserved in the ancient rocks,
were capable of some awareness and of something which
was, potentially at least, an emotion.

Either love as well as sex is something which we share
with animals, or it is something which does not really exist
in us. Either it is legitimate to feel some involvement in
the universal Rites of Spring, or it is not legitimate to take
our ov^^ emotions seriouslv. And even if the choice be-
tween the two possibilities were no more than an arbitrary
one, I know which of the alternatives I should choose to
believe in and to live by.

186

TWELVE

conservation is not enough

SUPPOSE THIS CHAPTER BEGAN BY SAYING THAT THE MORE

thickly populated an area is, the fewer animals other than
man will be found to be hving there. No doubt I should
be told not to waste my reader's time by telling him that.
But the truth of the matter is that the statement would be
false or questionable at best.

Consider for example a few square blocks in one of the
most densely populated sections of New York City. There
are, to be sure, probably fewer insects and worms below
the surface of the soil than in the country. But if you

1 87 conservation is not enough

count the rats, the mice, the cockroaches, the flies, the
fleas, the bedbugs and the whatnots, the chances are tliat
the nonhuman population above ground would be much
greater than it is in most wild areas of equal extent. Even
in the streets and in the air above there might well be
more English sparrows than there are of all kinds of birds
put together in a woodland-bordered meadow.

What we will have to say if we want to be truthful is
something more like this: As man moves in, the larger,
more conspicuous and, usually, the most attractive animals
begin to disappear. Either they "take to the hills," go into
hiding, or are exterminated in one way or another. What
remain, and often prodigiously increase, are the creatures
which either escape attention or find in the filth which
crowds of men bring with them a rich pasture.

Even in a region as thinly populated by man as the
Sonoran Desert, this law began long ago to operate. There
are still a good many of the larger animals to be found if
one looks for them in the right places. But they are both
fewer and more v/ary than they were not so long ago. For
them the problem of how to live in the desert was com-
plicated by a new factor when man put in an appearance,
and the technique which often becomes most completely
indispensable reduces itself to one general principle:
Keep out of his way. Moreover, the cover of darkness
becomes more and more important and some, like the
deer, which were once not nocturnal at all tend to become
largely so. To find even the larger remaining animals the
naturalist with the most benign intentions is compelled
to act like a hunter and stalk his game.

A human community thus becomes a sort of sieve with
the fineness of the mesh depending upon the thickness of

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

188

the population. Just where I hve, ten or twelve miles from
Tucson, you might call the mesh "medium coarse." Jack
rabbits as well as cottontails often come almost to my door
and are pretty certain to spring up whenever one walks
a few hundred yards toward the mountains. There are
ground squirrel burrows all about, pack rats here and
there and an occasional rock squirrel — a pepper-and-salt-
colored creature about the size of an eastern gray squirrel
but with a bushy tail which he always carries behind him
instead of in orthodox squirrel fashion. Infrequently I
hear at night the yipping of a coyote and on at least one
occasion I have had to get porcupine quills out of the nose
of a neighbor's dog. But all the larger, more spectacular
mammals have been screened out, probably within the
last decade. Double the distance from town and you may
see deer crossing the road. Go twenty-five miles away to a
forest ranger's cabin and the ring-tailed cats as well as the
foxes sneak up for table scraps. There are even more sur-
prising animals in the rugged area of recent volcanic
mountains just west of town. But they have to be looked
for.

Though I have never seen a mountain lion in the wild,
they are quite common in some of the more mountain-
ous regions of Arizona and one was shot not long ago
thirty or forty miles away from here. Bobcats roam 'wild,
if very wary, even closer at hand. A week or two ago I sat
for a few hours in a photographer's blind beside a small
man-made water hole about fifteen miles from town. First
came a buck and a doe who stood on guard while their
fawn took a long drink, then the curious little spotted
skunk and, finally, two of the wild pigs or peccaries locally
known as javelinas. At such a moment one feels that even

]| 89 conservation is not enough

this close to a city there is some wilderness left. But if the
city continues to grow it will probably not be left much
longer. Deer and javelinas adapted themselves quite hap-
pily to the saguaro forest, nibbling the smaller cacti and
browsing on the fruit and leaves of desert shrubs. Moun-
tain lions and bobcats kept the population within reason-
able limits without exterminating it. But for the larger
mammals the question of how to live in the desert tends
to become unanswerable when the desert is inhabited by
man.

Some of us might be better reconciled to this fact if the
war to the death between man and the creatures whom
he is dispossessing really was necessary to man's own suc-
cess. But much of the war is not and sometimes it actually
militates against him. To protect his sheep and cattle, the
rancher tries to destroy all the mountain hons and bob-
cats. He comes so near succeeding that the coyote popu-
lation grows larger. He then enlists government aid to
poison the coyotes and when the coyotes are almost elimi-
nated the ground squirrels and the gophers, on which the
coyotes fed, begin to get out of hand.

Somewhat belatedly, certain ranchers are beginning to
talk about protecting the coyote. If they ever get around
to it they will probably, in time, have to begin protecting
the mountain lion also. But by that time it probably will
be too late. If they had only been content to be a little
less thorough in the first place, we might all, including
the wild creatures, be better off. And a natural balance is
pleas ant er than an artificial one, even when the artificial
can be made to work.

That this is no mere sentimentalist's fancy is attested by
the fact that at least one ranchers' association representing

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

190

more than 200,000 acres in Colorado has recently posted
its land to forbid the killing of coyotes and taken as strong
a stand on the whole matter. "We ranchers in the vicinity
of Toponas, Colorado . . . are also opposed to the w^ide-
spread destruction of weasels, hawks, eagles, skunks,
foxes and other predatory animals. . . . The reason for
this attitude is that for ten years or so we have watched
the steady increase of mice, gophers, moles, rabbits and
other rodents. Now we are at a point where these animals
take up one-third of our hay crop. ... What with govern-
ment hunters and government poison . . . the coyote
is nearly extinct in our part of the state. Foxes and bobcats
have succumbed to the chain-killing poisons, etc. . . .
This spring rodents have even killed sagebrush and quak-
ing aspen trees . . . serious erosion is taking place.'*

Yet at last report the government was still setting cya-
nide gas guns and developing the "chain-poisoning" tech-
nique which involves killing animals with a poison that
renders their carcasses deadly to the scavengers which eat
them. And in Arizona the bounty on mountain lions con-
tinues.

Moralists often blame races and nations because they
have never learned how to live and let live. In our time
we seem to have been increasingly aware how persistently
and brutally groups of men undertake to eliminate one
another. But it is not only the members of his own kind
that man seems to want to push off the earth. When he
moves in, nearly everything else suffers from his intrusion
— sometimes because he wants the space they occupy and
the food they eat, but often simply because when he sees

]91 conservation is not enough

a creature not of his kind or a man not of his race liis first
impulse is "kill it."

Hence it is that even in the desert, where space is
cheaper than in most places, the wild life grows scarcer
and more secretive as the human population grows. The
coyote howls further and further off. The deer seek closer
and closer cover. To almost everything except man the
smell of humanity is the most repulsive of all odors, the
sight of man the most terrifying of all sights. Biologists
call some animals "cryptozoic," that is to say "leading
hidden lives." But as the human population increases most
animals develop, as the deer has been developing, crypto-
zoic habits. Even now there are more of them around than
we realize. They see us when we do not see them — be-
cause they have seen us first. Albert Schweitzer remarks
somewhere that we owe kindness even to an insect when
we can afford to show it, just because we ought to do
something to make up for all the cruelties, necessary as
well as unnecessary, which we have inflicted upon almost
the whole of animate creation.

Probably not one man in ten is capable of understand-
ing such moral and aesthetic considerations, much less of
permitting his conduct to be guided by them. But perhaps
twice as many, though still far from a majority, are begin-
ning to realize that the reckless laying waste of the earth
has practical consequences. They are at least beginning to
hear about "conservation," though they are not even dimly
aware of any connection between it and a large morality
and are very unlikely to suppose that "conservation" does
or could mean anything more than looking after their
own welfare.

Hardly more than two generations ago Americans first

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

192

woke up to the fact that their land was not inexhaustible.
Every year since then more and more has been said, and
at least a little more has been done about "conserving re-
sources," about "rational use" and about such reconstruc-
tion as seemed possible. Scientists have studied the prob-
lem, public works have been undertaken, laws passed. Yet
everybody knows that the using up still goes on, perhaps
not so fast nor so recklessly as once it did, but unmistakably
nevertheless. And there is nowhere that it goes on more
nakedly, more persistently or with a fuller realization of
what is happening than in the desert regions where the
margin to be used up is narrower.

First, more and more cattle were set to grazing and
overgrazing the land from which the scanty rainfall now
ran off even more rapidly than before. More outrageously
still, large areas of desert shrub were rooted up to make
way for cotton and other crops watered by wells tapping
underground pools of water which are demonstrably
shrinking fast. These pools represent years of accumula-
tion not now being replenished and are exhaustible ex-
actly as an oil well is exhaustible. Everyone knows that
they will give out before long, very soon, in fact, if the
number of wells continues to increase as it has been in-
creasing. Soon dust bowls will be where was once a sparse
but healthy desert, and man, having uprooted, sl'augh-
tered or driven away everything which lived healthily and
normally there, will himself either abandon the country
or die. There are places where the creosote bush is a more
useful plant than cotton.

To the question why men will do or are permitted to
do such things there are many answers. Some speak of
population pressures, some more brutally of unconquera-

] 93 conservation is not enough

ble human greed. Some despair; some hope that more
education and more pubhc works will, in the long run,
prove effective. But is there, perhaps, something more,
something different, which is indispensable? Is there some
missing link in the chain of education, law and public
works? Is there not something lacking without which none
of these is sufficient?

After a lifetime spent in forestry, wild-life management
and conservation of one kind or another, after such a life-
time during which he nevertheless saw his country slip
two steps backward for every one it took forward, the late
Aldo Leopold pondered the question and came up with
an unusual answer which many people would dismiss as
"sentimental" and be surprised to hear from a "practical"
scientific man. He published his article originally in the
Journal of Forestry and it was reprinted in the posthu-
mous volume, A Sand County Almanac, where it was
given the seemingly neutral but actually very significant
title "The Land Ethic."

This is a subtle and original essay full of ideas never so
clearly expressed before and seminal in the sense that
each might easily grow into a separate treatise. Yet the
conclusion reached can be simply stated. Something is
lacking and because of that lack education, law and public
works fail to accomplish what they hope to accomplish.
Without that something, the high-minded impulse to edu-
cate, to legislate and to manage become as sounding brass
and tinkling cymbals. And the thing which is missing is
love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of,
the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and ani-
mals, of which we are a part.

It is not, to put Mr. Leopold's thoughts in different

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

194

words, enough to be enlightenedly selfish in our deahngs
with the land. That means, of course, that it is not enough
for the farmer to want to get the most out of his farm and
the lumberer to get the most out of his forest without
considering agriculture and wood production as a whole
both now and in the future. But it also means more than
that. In the first place enlightened selfishness cannot be
enough because enlightened selfishness cannot possibly be
extended to include remote posterity. It may include the
children, perhaps, and grandchildren, possibly, but it can-
not be extended much beyond that because the very idea
of "self" cannot be stretched much further. Some purely
ethical considerations must operate, if anything does. Yet
even that is not all. The wisest, the most enlightened, the
most remotely long-seeing exploitation of resources is not
enough, for the simple reason that the whole concept of
exploitation is so false and so limited that in the end it
will defeat itself and the earth will have been plundered
no matter how scientifically and farseeingly the plunder-
ing has been done.

To live healthily and successfully on the land we must
also live with it. We must be part .not only of the human
community, but of the whole community; we must ac-
knowledge some sort of oneness not only with our neigh-
bors, our countrymen and om: civihzation but also 'some
respect for the natural as well as for the man-made com-
munity. Ours is not only "one world " in the sense usu-
ally implied by that term. It is also "one earth." Without
some acknowledgment of that fact, men can no more hve
successfully than they can if they refuse to admit the po-
litical and economic interdependency of the various sec-
tions of the civilized world. It is not a sentimental but a

1 95 conservation is not enough

grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial
globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be
able to live on it for long.

You may, if you like, think of this as a moral law. But
if you are skeptical about moral laws, you cannot escape
the fact that it has its factual, scientific aspect. Every day
the science of ecology is making clearer the factual aspect
as it demonstrates those more and more remote interde-
pendencies which, no matter how remote they are, are cru-
cial even for us.

Before even the most obvious aspects of the balance of
nature had been recognized, a greedy, self-centered man-
kind naively divided plants into the useful and the use-
less. In the same way it divided animals into those which
were either domestic on the one hand or *'game" on the
other, and the "vermin" which ought to be destroyed.
That was the day when extermination of whole species
was taken as a matter of corn's e and random introductions
which usually proved to be either complete failures or all
too successful were everywhere being made. Soon, how-
ever, it became evident enough that to rid the world of
vermin and to stock it with nothing but useful organisms
was at least not a simple task — if you assume that "useful"
means simply "immediately useful to man."

Yet even to this day the ideal remains the same for most
people. They may know, or at least they may have been
told, that what looks like the useless is often remotely but
demonstrably essential. Out in this desert country they
may see the land being rendered useless by overuse.
They may even have heard how, when the mountain lion
is killed off, the deer multiply; how, when the deer mul-
tiply, the new growth of trees and slirubs is eaten away;

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

196

and how, when the hills are denuded, a farm or a section
of grazing land many miles away is washed into gulleys
and made incapable of supporting either man or any other
of the large animals. They may even have heard how the
wonderful new insecticides proved so effective that fish
and birds died of starvation; how on at least one Pacific
island insects had to be reintroduced to pollinate the
crops; how when you kill off almost completely a destruc-
tive pest, you run the risk of starving out everything which
preys upon it and thus run the risk that the pest itself
will stage an overwhelming comeback because its natural
enemies are no more. Yet, knowing all this and much
more, their dream is still the dream that an earth for
man's use only can be created if only we learn more and
scheme more effectively. They still hope that nature's
scheme of checks and balances which provides for a varied
population, which stubbornly refuses to scheme only from
man s point of view and cherishes the weeds and "vermin"
as persistently as she cherishes him, can be replaced by a
scheme of his own devising. Ultimately they hope they can
beat the game. But the more the ecologist learns, the less
likely it seems that man can in the long run do anything
of the sort.

"Nature's social union" is by no means the purely gen-
tle thing which Burns imagined. In fact it is a balance,
with all the stress and conflict which the word implies. In
this sense it is not a "social union" at all. But it is, never-
theless, a workable, seesawing balance. And when it ceases
to seesaw, there is ti'ouble ahead for whatever is on the
end that stays up, as well as for those on the end which
went down.

] 97 conservation is not enough

Thus, for every creature there is a paradox at the heart
of the necessary "struggle for existence" and the paradox
is simply this: Neither man nor any other animal can af-
ford to triumph in that struggle too completely. Uncondi-
tional surrender is a self-defeating formula — even in the
war against insect pests. To the victor belong the spoils
in nature also, but for a time only. When there are no
more spoils to be consumed, the victor dies. That is be-
lieved by some to be w^hat happened to the dominant
carnivorous dinosaurs many millions of years ago. They
became too dominant and presently there was nothing left
to dominate — or to eat. It is certainly what happens to
other creatures like the too-protected deer in a national
forest who multiply so successfully that their herds can no
longer be fed, or, more spectacularly, like the lemmings
who head desperately toward a new area to be exploited
and end in the cold waters of the North Sea because that
area does not exist.

Curiously, the too tender-minded dreamed a dream
more attractive than that of the ruthless exploiters but no
less unrealizable. They dreamed of "refuges" and "sanctu-
aries" where the "innocent" creatures might live in a per-
petually peaceful paradise untroubled by such "evil" crea-
tures as the fox and the hawk. But it required few
experiments with such Utopias to demonstrate that they
will not work. A partridge covey or a deer herd which is
not thinned by predators soon eats itself into starvation
and suffers also from less obvious maladjustments. The
overaged and the weaklings, who would have fallen first
victims to their carnivorous enemies, survive to weaken
the stock, and as overpopulation increases, the whole com-
munity becomes affected by some sort of nervous tension

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

198

— "shock" the ecologists call it — analogous to that which
afflicts human beings crowded into congested areas.

No more striking evidence of this fact can be found
than what happened when it was decided to "protect"
the deer on the Kaibab Plateau in the Grand Canyon re-
gion. At the beginning of this century there was a popu-
lation of about 4000 occupying some 127,000 acres. Over
a period of years the mountain lions, wolves and coyotes
which lived at its expense were pretty well exterminated.
By 1924 the 4000 had become 100,000 and then calamity
struck. In one year, 1924, 60,000 victims of starvation and
disease disappeared and then, year by year, though at a
decreasing rate, the population dvdndled.

Wild creatures need their enemies as well as their
friends. The red tooth and red claw are not the whole
story but they are part of it, and the park superintendent
with his gun "scientifically" redressing the balance is a
poor but necessary substitute for the balance which the
ages have established. We may find nature's plan cruel
but we cannot get away from it entirely. The lion and the
lamb will not — they simply cannot — he down together, but
they are essential to one another nonetheless. And the les-
son to be learned is applicable far outside the field of
conservation. It is that though the laws of nature may be
mitigated, though their mitigation constitutes civilization,
they cannot be abolished altogether.

So far as the problem is only that of the Kaibab deer,
one common solution is the "open season" when man
himself is encouraged to turn predator and hunters are
permitted, as some conservationists put it, to "harvest the
crop." To some this seems a repellent procedure and even

]99 conservation is not enough

as a practical solution it is far from ideal. Other beasts of
prey destroy first the senile and the weaklings; man, if he
selects at all, selects the mature and the vigorous for
slaughter. The objection to this method is much the same
as it would be to a proposal that we should attack the
problem of human population by declaring an annual
open season on all between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-five. That is, of course, precisely what we do when
a war is declared, and there are those who believe that the
ultimate cause of wars is actually, though we are not
aware of the fact, the overgrazing of our own range and
the competition for what remains.

What is commonly called "conservation" will not work
in the long run because it is not really conservation at all
but rather, disguised by its elaborate scheming, only a
more knowledgeable variation of the old idea of a world
for man s use only. That idea is unrealizable. But how
can man be persuaded to cherish any other ideal unless he
can learn to take some interest and some delight in the
beauty and variety of the world for its own sake, unless he
can see a "value" in a flower blooming or an animal at
play, unless he can see some "use" in things not useful?

In our society we pride ourselves upon having reached
a point where we condemn an individual whose whole
aim in life is to acquire material wealth for himself. But
his vulgarity is only one step removed from that of a so-
ciety which takes no thought for anything except increas-
ing the material wealth of the community itself. In his
usual extravagant way Thoreau once said: "This curious

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

200

^^1

world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is con-
venient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be
admired than it is to be used." Perhaps that "more" is
beyond what most people could or perhaps ought to be
convinced of. But without some realization that "this curi-
ous world" is at least beautiful as well as useful, "conser-
vation" is doomed. We must live for something besides
making a living. If we do not permit the earth to produce
beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food either.
Here practical considerations and those which are com-
monly called "moral," "aesthetic" and even "sentimen-
tal" join hands. Yet even the enlightened Department of
Agriculture is so far from being fully enlightened that it
encourages the farmer to forget that his land can ever pro-
duce anything except crops and is fanatical to the point of
advising him how to build fences so that a field may be
plowed to the last inch without leaving even that narrow
margin in which one of the wild flowers — many of which
agriculture has nearly rendered extinct — may continue to
remind him that the world is beautiful as well as useful.
And that brings us around. to another of Aldo Leopold's
seminal ideas:

Conservation still proceeds at a snaiTs pace; . . .
the usual answer . . , is 'more conservation.' . .- ,
But is it certain that only the volume of education
needs stepping up? Is something lacking in content as
well? . . . It is inconceivable to me that an ethical
relation to land can exist without love, respect and
admiration for land, and a high regard for its value.
By value, I of course mean something far broader
than mere economic value; I mean value in the phi-
losophical sense.

201 conservation is not enough

Here in the West, as in the country at large, a war more
or less concealed under the guise of a "conflict of interests"
rages between the "practical" conservationist and the de-
fenders of national parks and other public lands; between
cattlemen and lumberers on the one hand, and "sentimen-
talists" on the other. The pressure to allow the hunter,
the rancher or the woodcutter to invade the public domain
is constant and the plea is always that we should "use"
what is assumed to be useless unless it is adding to mate-
rial welfare. But unless somebody teaches love, there can
be no ultimate protection to what is lusted after. Without
some "love of nature" for itself there is no possibility of
solving "the problem of conservation."

Any fully matured science of ecology will have to grap-
ple with the fact that from the ecological point of view,
man is one of those animals which is in danger from its
too successful participation in the struggle for existence.
He has upset the balance of nature to a point where
he has exterminated hundreds of other animals and ex-
hausted soils. Part of this he calls a demonstration of his
intelligence and of the success which results from his use
of it. But because of that intelligence he has learned how
to exploit resources very thoroughly and he is even begin-
ning to learn how to redress the balance in certain minor
ways. But he cannot keep indefinitely just one step ahead
of overcrowding and starvation. From the standpoint of
nature as a whole, he is both a threat to every other living
thing and, therefore, a threat to himself also. If he were
not so extravagantly successful it would be better for
nearly everything except man and, possibly therefore, bet-
ter, in the longest run, for him also. He has become the
tyrant of the earth, the waster of its resources, the creator

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

202

of the most prodigious imbalance in the natm*al order
which has ever existed.

From a purely homocentric point of viev^ this may seem
entirely proper. To most people it undoubtedly does. Is
it not our proudest boast that v^e have learned how^ to
'control nature"? Does not our dream of the future in-
clude a final emancipation from any dependence upon a
natural balance and the substitution for it of some bal-
ance established by oinrselves and in oin: exclusive inter-
est? Is not that, in fact, v^hat most people have in mind
when they think of the final triumph of humanity?

But what every "practical" ecologist is trying to do is
maintain the balance of nature without facing the fact
that man himself is part of it, that you cannot hope to
keep the balance unless you admit that to some extent the
immediate interest of the human species may sometimes
have to be disregarded. No other single fact is so impor-
tant as man himseH in creating the often disastrous imbal-
ances which continually develop. It is not possible to re-
establish them for long without undertaking to control the
organism which has most obviously entered upon a run-
away phase. Must we not recognize the fact that any real
"management of resources" is impossible imless we are
willing to sacrifice to some extent the immediate interests
not only of certain individual men but also those of the
human species itself? Most of us have reached the point
where we recognize that the immediate interests of the
lumberman or the rancher must sometimes be sacrificed
to "the general good." Ultimately we may have to recog-
nize that there is also a conflict between what is called
the general good and a good still more general — the good,
that is to say, of the whole biological community.

203 conservation is not enough

The more completely we bring nature "under control,"
the more complicated our methods must become, the
more disastrous the chain reaction which is set up by any
failure of wisdom, or watchfulness, or technique. We are
required to know more and more and we are always threat-
ened by the impossibility of achieving adequate knowl-
edge, much less of adequate wisdom and virtue.

Every increase in the complexity of organization has
made the situation more precarious at the same time that
it has increased our comfort and our wealth. Until we
learned to support a population far larger than would have
been beheved possible a century ago, there was no danger
of general starvation, however disastrous and common lo-
cal famines may have been, and though Malthus was ob-
viously wrong in his estimates, it is by no means certain
that he was wrong in his general principle. Until we in-
creased the wealth of nations by linking them one with
another we were not exposed to the danger of world-wide
economic collapse. Until we learned how to "control" the
atom there was no danger that atomic phenomena would
get out of control and hence it is still not clear whether
we are running machines or machines are running us. We
have three tigers — the economic, the physical and the bi-
ological— ^by the tail and three tigers are more than three
times as dangerous as one. We cannot let any of them go.
But it is also not certain that we can hold all of them
indefinitely. Many a despot has discovered that it was just
when his power seemed to have been made absolute at
last that the revolution broke out. And it may be that just
about three hundred years was necessary to expose the fal-
lacy of the ideal born in the seventeenth century.

If one is prepared to admit that there is a limit to the

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

204

extent to whicli we can exercise a biological control ex-
clusively in our own interest, then it is certainly worth-
while to ask how we might know when we are approach-
ing that Hmit.

It will hardly do to say simpily that the limit has been
passed when a society is obviously sick. Too many differ-
ent reasons have been given to explain that sickness, and
several of them can be made to seem more or less con-
vincing— indeed, several of them may be partially correct.
But there is a criterion which it seems to me not wholly
fanciful to apply.

Might it not have something to do with nature's own
great principle, live and let live? Might it not be that
man's success as an organism is genuinely a success so
long, but only so long, as it does not threaten the extinc-
tion of everything not useful to and absolutely controlled
by him; so long as that success is not incompatible with
the success of nature as the varied and free thing which
she is; so long as, to some extent, man is prepared to
share the earth with others?

If by any chance that criterion is vahd, then either one
of two things is likely to happen. Perhaps outraged nature
will violently reassert herself and some catastrophe, per-
haps the catastrophe brought about when more men are
trying to hve in our limited space than even their most ad-
vanced technology can make possible, will demonstrate
the hollowness of his supposed success. Perhaps, on the
other hand, man himself will learn in time to set a reason-
able limit to his ambitions and accept the necessity of
recognizing his position as the most highly evolved of liv-
ing creatures but not, therefore, entitled to assume that

205 conservation is not enough

no others have a right to hve unless they contribute di-
rectly to his material welfare.

The now popular saying, "No man is an island," means
more than it is commonly taken to mean. Not only men
but all living things stand or fall together. Or rather man
is of all such creatures one of those least able to stand
alone. If we think only in terms of our own welfare we
are likely to find that we are losing it.

But how can man learn to accept such a situation, to be-
lieve that it is right and proper when the whole tendency
of his thought and his interest carries him in a contrary
direction? How can he learn to value and dehght in a nat-
ural order larger than his own order? How can he come to
accept, not sullenly but gladly, the necessity of sharing the
earth?

As long ago as the seventeenth century, as long ago, that
is, as the very time when the ambition to "control nature'*
in any large ambitious way was first coming to be formu-
lated and embraced, a sort of answer to these questions
was being given in theological terms. John Ray, one of the
first great English biologists, formulated them in a book
which was read for a hundred years, and what Ray had to
say cuts two ways because it was directed against the ego-
tism of man as expressed both by the old-fashioned the-
ologians who thought that everything had been mude for
man's use and by the Baconians who assumed that he
could at least turn it to that use.

"It is," Ray wrote, "a general received opinion, that aU
this visible world was created for Man; that Man is the

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

206

End of Creation; as if there were no other end of any
creature, but some way or other to be serviceable to man.
. . . But though tliis be vulgarly received, yet wise men
now-a-days think otherwise. Dr. Moore affirms, that crea-
tures are made to enjoy themselves as well as to serve us."
The greatest profit which we can get from the observation
and study of other living things is, Ray went on to say,
often not that we learn how to use them but that we may
contemplate through them the wonders and the beauties
of God's creation. What Ray was saying is precisely what
Thoreau was restating in secularized form when he in-
sisted that "this curious world which we inhabit ... is
more to be admired and enjoyed than it is to be used."

Since our age is not inclined to be interested in theo-
logical arguments, it is not likely to find Ray's exposi-
tion a sufficient reason for accepting gladly the continued
existence on this earth of "useless" plants and animals oc-
cupying space which man might turn to his own imme-
diate profit. Our generation is more likely to make at least
certain concessions in that direction as the result of
absorbing what the ecologist has to say about the impos-
sibility of maintaining a workable balance without a much
more generous view of what is "useful" and what is not.
But it is not certain that on that basis man will ^ver make
quite enough concessions and it is entirely certain that he
will not make them happily, will not find life pleasanter
just because he makes them, unless he can leam to love
and to delight in the variety of nature.

Perhaps, if we cannot send him as far back as the seven-
teenth century to be taught, we can at least send him back
to the eighteenth. Pope, speaking half for metaphysics and
half for science, could write:

207 conservation is not enough

Has God, thou fool! worked solely for thy good.
Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food?

Know, Nature's children all divide her care;
The fur that warms a monarch, warmed a hear.

This is precisely what most men even two centuries later
do not really xmderstand.

208

THIRTEEN

the mystique of the desert

TO MOST LAYMEN AS WELL AS TO MANY PROFESSIONALS

the word "science" means "a collection of observable facts
about the physical universe." And there are many who
profess to believe that beyond such observable facts we
should never allow our minds to wander.

Actually, however, no one ever did stop there. No hu-
man being is so completely unspeculative, so totally devoid
of imagination, so incapable of drawing general conclu-
sions, that he does not go on from observable facts to draw
morals, to set up standards of value and to philosophize in

209 ^^® mystique of the desert

one way or another. He does so even at the very moment
when he is assuring; himself that he will do nothing; of the
sort. Even to say that one has no philosophy is to have one.

More than two thousand years ago Aristotle coined the
word "metaphysics" — which means "beyond physics" — in
order to give a name to that whole realm of intellectual
activity which begins where the observation and organiza-
tion of ph\-sical facts leaves off. More recently, Bernard
Shaw, half -jokingly perhaps, has coined on the same model
another word, "metabiology." Time has not tested it so
thoroughly as it has tested Aristotle's "metaphysics" but it
may turn out to be useful by calhng attention to an im-
portant fact.

Both words suggest that such subjects of inquiry as
morals (or the nature of the good) and aesthetics (or the
nature of the beautiful) He beyond the reach of that kind
of positive knowledge with which the phvsical sciences
deal. But there is a difference between what Aristotle's
word seems to imply and what Shaw's word is intended to
suggest. MetSLphysics seems to accept the recent assump-
tion that life itself is reducible to physical and chemical
laws and to imply, therefore, that moral and aesthetic
questions can best be answered by referring them to the
laws of the physical universe. MetaZ? fo/ogy, on the other
hand, suggests that since life itself is not completely ex-
plainable in merely physical terms, moral and aesthetic
questions should be discussed in connection with what we
know about living creatiu'es without any attempt to reduce
such questions to merely physical terms. The difference, in
other words, is the difference between the purely mate-
riahstic, mechanistic approach to such questions, which
is favored by the so-called "positivists," and an approach

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210

which recognizes that living things, being radically dif-
ferent from inanimate objects, are capable of standards of
value v^hich correspond to nothing in the merely physical
world.

If your ethics, your aesthetics, your epistomology even,
are things which lie immediately beyond what you know
or think you know about the phenomena associated with
living creatures; if these seem to you a better taking-off
place than facts about mechanics or even chemistry, then
your metaphysical convictions will take on a color suffi-
ciently distinctive to justify a distinctive name. And if you
attempt, as Shaw did, to formulate these convictions into
a consistent system, then you may quite properly call your-
self not so much a "metaphysician" as a "metabiologist."

Shaw was, of course, thinking especially of what seemed
to him to follow from his own belief that evolution is the
most important of all observable facts and that what evo-
lution reveals is not merely a Darwinian mechanism but
the effectiveness, throughout all time, of the imagination
which can dream of something better and the will which
can make the dream come true. Upon that conviction he
based his philosophy, his metaphysics, or, as he preferred
to call it, his metabiology.

Whether one accepts Shaw's conviction or, not — and
most biologists will, I imagine, shake their heads — the fact
remains that a great many of us are today "metabiologists"
of one sort or another whether we realize it or not. And
by that I mean simply that for us the most important of
all the "collections of observable facts" which the centuries
have accumulated are those which concern the behavior of
Hving creatures. And it is "beyond" these facts that, for us,
the most significant philosophy must lie.

2] ] the mystique of the desert

People nowadays are less interested in theology than
they were in times gone by. They are not interested l)c-
cause they do not believe that they have any facts about
God upon which, or just beyond which, metaphysical con-
victions about Him could be based. Perhaps most people
are, whether they know it or not, simple positivists in the
sense that they believe that even man is a machine wholly
explainable in physical terms. But there is an increasing
number who feel that the attempt to account for life in
purely physical terms has failed. They may continue to
insist that no available evidence suggests the existence of
any God. But they also insist that life is not demonstrably
"merely chemical" and that biology must recognize real-
ities not either physical or chemical.

For them, therefore, philosophy lies "beyond" biology,
not beyond physics. For them the place to start that philos-
ophy is not with physics or with chemistry but with life
itself as a fact no less primary than the facts of physics and
chemistry. Because I myself make that assumption, many
of the speculations in which I have permitted myself to in-
dulge in this book are heretical from the conventional bi-
ologist's point of view. But the heresy seems to me to have
a desirable consequence — it redeems the universe from
that deadness which mechanistic science has increasingly
attributed to it.

Let us suppose that you are "interested in nature" — at
least to the extent that anyone who has willingly read thus
far in this book must be. If that means only that it some-
how pleases you to know that road runners eat snakes,
that Gila monsters are our sole poisonous lizards, or that
the cacti are native to the New World only, then your in-
terest is "scientific" in the most limited possible sense of

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

212

the term. If you go beyond that to the extent of trying to
learn how this scientific knowledge may be useful to man
in his struggle to feed himself well or to preserve his health,
then your interest is both scientific in the limited sense and
also "technological." But as soon as you take the next step
and begin to ask yourself not merely what immediate prac-
tical use can be made of known facts but also what they
suggest to the speculative mind about the potentialities
and limitations of living matter; as soon as you begin to
find yourself thinking of what the human mind cannot
help caUing the "intentions" and "the standards of value"
which nature pursues, then you have entered the realm
of the metabiological.

Any consideration of evolution, for instance, becomes
metabiological as soon as it abandons a mere description
of the evolutionary process to permit itself to refer even
cautiously to "higher" and "lower" forms of life, to cele-
brate "growth" and "change" and "survival value" as moral
concepts; at that point the consideration has gone "be-
yond" the narrow limits of the science of biology and
become metaphysical, or metabiological, no matter what
you may prefer to call it. Similarly; ecology is narrowly
scientific when it merely describes the interrelations of
living things. It is narrowly technological when, it seeks to
learn only how forests can be preserved and farms kept
fertile through the application of our knowledge. And so
long as it is interested in nothing except "land manage-
ment," for instance, it remains just technological and noth-
ing more. But when it begins to develop what Aldo Leo-
pold called a "land ethic," then it is "beyond" either science
or technology because any sort of ethic is metaphysical

2] 3 *'^® mystique of the desert

and an ethic erected upon our knowledge of biology is
specifically "metabiological."

I hope that when in this book I have described some
aspect of desert life it has usually been clear that the meta-
biology of the desert is one of the things which has inter-
ested me most. If it had not interested me, I do not think
that I would ever have concerned myself much with either
science or technology. Moreover, having said that — and I
realize that to say even so much is to condemn myself in the
eyes of a certain class of scientist and technician — I must
confess to something even worse. I must confess that there
are moments when what seems most important of all is
something of which the metabiologist may be almost as
suspicious as the strict biologist is suspicious of the meta-
biological.

Just as the realm of speculative reason lies beyond the
facts of science, so also, beyond the realm of speculative
reason, lies the realm of emotion. To me that realm is no
less important than the realm of fact or the realm of specu-
lative thought, though to discuss what one experiences in
the realm of emotion one must e:*ther depreciate it and ex-
plain it away, as the pure rationalist does, or one must
accept what one can only call the mystique as opposed to
the rational of the human being's intercourse with the uni-
verse around him.

Your Philistine never enters this realm of the mystical.
When he has read the great poem, looked at the great pic-
ture, heard the great music, or even grasped tlie great
theory, he always makes the same comments in words
which lie halfway between exclamation and question: "So

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 214

what?" Since neither music, nor poetry, nor pure theory
has practical usefulness, and since the mystique of all three
eludes him, his comment-question is perfectly proper. And
the only — usually impossible — -answer to him lies in the
mystique itself.

Though in this book I have presented facts and, at mo-
ments, permitted myself metabiological speculations, nei-
ther the one nor the other really says all that I would like
to be able to say. If Dipodomys never drinks; if the moth
desires the candle; if the seed has learned to disregard the
wetness of summer while waiting for the wetness. of spring;
if the cactus has learned to be at home where its ancestors
would have perished; who cares? Why, having learned
these things, did I not say, "So what" and pass on? The
ultimate answer, I think, is to be found only by admitting
the mystical element. The reason for my deepest caring
does not lie within the scope of biology or even meta-
biology. One cannot recognize it without being to that ex-
tent a mystic.

Of the oflBcial mystical v^iters I am no great reader. The
clarity of their visions, the overwhelming certainty of their
conviction that ultimate truth has been revealed to them,
is foreign to my own experience. At most I have "intima-
tions," not assurances, and I doubt that I could ever go
further in recommendation of the complete mystics than
William James goes when he bids the ordinary mortal rec-
ognize the reality, in some realm, of the phenomena to
which the mystics testify, no matter what interpretation
we ordinary mortals put upon them. Yet I, and many whose
temperaments are no more mystical than mine, do know
moments when we draw courage and joy from experiences

2] 5 *^® mystique of the desert

which he outside the getting and spending of everyday
hfe.

The occasions of such experiences are many. The com-
monest and perhaps the least obviously related are these:
reading a poem and contemplating a child — human or ani-
mal. But the experiences come to different men in many
different ways. Some are most likely to be aware of them
in solitude, others in crowds; some while looking at the
stars, some while watching the waves roll in upon a beach.
And whether you call the experience infrarational or super-
rational, it involves the momentary acceptance of values
not definable in terms of that common sense to which we
ordinarily accord our first loyalty. And to all such experi-
ences one thing is common. There is a sense of satisfaction
which is not personal but impersonal. One no longer asks,
"What's in it for me?" because one is no longer a separate
selfish individual but part of the welfare and joy of the
whole.

Those to whom such mystical experiences are habitual
and hence more ordinary than what most people call or-
dinary life, can often call upon them at will as the reHgious
mystics do by the repetition of a prayer. But to the ma-
jority there is no certain formula or ritual — not even a
private, much less a communicable, one. At most we can
only, for example, plunge into the crowd or retire into a
solitude, knowing that sometimes in the one situation or
the other we will glimpse out of the corner of our eyes
what, if one may believe the true mystics, is usually at the
very center of the true mystic's vision.

I happen to be one of those, and we are not a few, to
whom the acute awareness of a natural phenomenon, es-
pecially of a phenomenon of the living world, is the thing

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

216

most likely to open the door to that joy we cannot analyze.
X have experienced it sometimes when a rabbit appeared
suddenly from a bush to dash away to the safety which he
values so much, or when, at night, a rustle in the leaves
reminds me how many busy lives surround my own. It has
also come almost as vividly when I suddenly saw a flower
opening or a stem pushing out of the ground.

But what is the content of the experience? What is it
that at such moments I seem to realize? Of what is my hap-
piness compounded?

First of all, perhaps, there is the vivid assurance that
these things, that the universe itself, really do exist, that
life is not a dream; second, that the reality is pervasive and,
it seems, unconquerable. The future of mankind is dubious.
Perhaps the future of the whole earth is only somewhat
less dubious. But one knows that all does not depend upon
man, that possibly, even, it does not depend upon this
earth. Should man disappear, rabbits may well still run
and flowers may still open. If this globe itself should per-
ish, then it seems not unreasonable to suppose that what
inspires the stem and the flower may exist somewhere else.
And I, it seems, am at least part of all this.

God looked upon the world and found that it was good.
How great is the happiness of being able, even for a mo-
ment, to agree with Him! And how much easier that is if
one is not committed to considering only some one section
of the world or of the universe.

Long before I ever saw the desert I was aware of the
mystical overtones which the observation of nature made
audible to me. But I have never been more frequently or
more vividly aware of them than in connection with the
desert phenomena. And I have often wondered why.

217 ^^^ mystique of the desert

Were I to believe what certain psychologists have been
trying to tell me, the thing which I call a "mystique" and
especially what I call "the mystique of the desert" is only
the vague aura left behind by certain experiences of in-
fancy and childhood. Should I search my memory of the
latter I should certainly find there what nearly every other
American or European would: a Christmas card showing
Wise Men crossing the desert and also, in some school
geography, another picture of rolling dunes, a camel and
the caption, "Sahara Desert." Both seemed then to be
things I should never see; both were remote from the scene
of my sorrows — whatever at the moment I found my sor-
rows to be. "Poof!" say those psychologists. The "mystique"
is mysterious no longer. To adjust yourself to your environ-
ment would have been a simple matter. Had you been so
adjusted you would never have gone to live in the Ameri-
can Southwest. And you would not give a damn whether
Dipodomys drinks or not.

If those psychologists are right, then I am glad that I,
at least, was not "adjusted" to everything and hence in-
capable of giving a damn about anything whatsoever. But
I am not sure that they are right. Curiosity is not always
the result of conditioning and there are words at which
most imaginations kindle. Among them are all those words
which suggest the untamed extravagances or the ultimate
limits of nature in any one of her moods. We may prefer
to live amid hills and meadows, fields and woodlots, or
even, for that matter, surrounded by steel and concrete.
But "wilderness," "jungle," and "desert" are still stirring
words, as even movie-makers know. And it is just possible
that they will continue to be such after the last Christmas
card having anything to do with Christmas has disappeared

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

218

from the shops and after school geographies have con-
sented to confine themselves exclusively to "things relevant
to the child's daily life." Perhaps the mind is not merely a
blank slate upon w^hich anything may be v^ritten. Perhaps
it reaches out spontaneously tow^ard v^hat can nourish
either intelligence or imagination. Perhaps it is part of
nature and, w^ithout being taught, shares nature's inten-
tions.

Most of the phrases we use glibly to exorcise or explain
away the realities of our intimate experience are of quite
recent origin — ^phrases Kke ''emotional conditioning,"
"complex," "fixation," and even "reflex." But one of the
most inclusive, and the most relevant here, is older. It w^as
Ruskin, of all people, who invented the term "pathetic
fallacy" to stigmatize as in some sense unjustified our
tendency to perceive a smiling landscape as "happy," a
somber one as "sad." But is it really a fallacy? Are we so
separate from nature that our states are actually discon-
tinuous with it? Is there nothing outside ourselves which
is somehow glad or sad? Is it really a fallacy when we at-
tribute to nature feelings analogous to our own?

Out of the very heart of the romantic feeHng for nature
the question arose. And it was Coleridge, again of all peo-
ple, who gave the answer upon which the post-romantic
"scientific" attitude rests: "Only in ourselves does nature
live." But Wordsworth, who recorded Coleridge's dictum,
was not himself 'always sure. When he was most himseK it
seemed to him that, on the contrary, the joy of nature was
older than the joy of man and that what was transitory in
the individual was permanent somewhere else. When the

219 *^® mystique of the desert

moment of happiness passed, it was not because the glory
had faded but only because his own sight had grown dim.

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream.
The earth, and every common sight.

To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light.
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Oh joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live.
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!

Something hke this is what, in clumsy prose, I am try-
ing to suggest. "Wilderness," "jungle," "desert," are not
magic words because we have been "conditioned" to find
them such but because they stand for things which only
conditioning can make seem indifferent or alien. How
could the part be greater than the whole? How can na-
trn'e's meaning come wholly from man when he is only part
of that meaning? "Only in ourselves does natm*e live" is
less true than its opposite: "Only in nature do we have a
being."

The most materialistic of historians do not deny the in-
fluence upon a people of the land on which they live.
When they say, for instance, that the existence of a frontier
was a dominant factor in shaping the character of the
American people, they are not thinking only of a physical
fact. They mean also that the idea of a frontier, the reali-
zation that space to be occupied lay beyond it, took its

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

220

place in the American imagination and sparked the sense
that there was "somewhere else to go" rather than that the
solution of every problem, practical or spiritual, had to be
found within the limits to which the man \yho faced them
was confined.

In the history of many other peoples the character of
their land, even the very look of the landscape itself, has
powerfully influenced how they felt and what they thought
about. They were woodsmen or plainsmen or mountaineers
not only economically but spiritually also. And nothing,
not even the sea, has seemed to affect men more pro-
foundly than the desert, or seemed to incline them so
powerfully toward great thoughts^ perhaps because the
desert itself seems to brood and to encourage brooding.
To the Hebrews the desert spoke of God, and one of the
most powerful of all religions was born. To the Arabs it
spoke of the stars, and astronomy came into being.

Perhaps no fact about the American people is more im-
portant than the fact that the continent upon which they
live is large enough and varied enough to speak with many
different voices — of the mountains, of the plains, of the
valleys and of the seashore — all clear voices that are dis-
tinct and strong. Because Americans listened to all these
voices, the national character has had many aspects and
developed in many different directions. But the voice of
the desert is the one which has been least often heard. We
came to it last, and when we did come, we came prin-
cipally to exploit rather than to hsten.

To those who do listen, the desert speaks of things with
an emphasis quite different from that of the shore, the
mountains, the valleys or the plains. Whereas they invite
action and suggest limitless opportunity, exliaustless re-

221 ^^^ mystique of the desert

sources, the implications and the mood of the desert are
something different. For one thing the desert is conserva-
tive, not radical. It is more likely to provoke aw^e than to
invite conquest. It does not, like the plains, say, "Only
turn the sod and uncountable riches v^ill spring up." The
heroism which it encourages is the heroism of endurance,
not that of conquest.

Precisely v^hat other things it says depends in part upon
the person listening. To the biologist it speaks first of the
remarkable flexibility of living things, of the processes of
adaptation v^hich are nowhere more remarkable than in
the strange devices by which plants and animals have
learned to conquer heat and dryness. To the practical-
minded conservationist it speaks sternly of other things,
because in the desert the problems created by erosion and
overexploitation are plainer and more acute than anywhere
else. But to the merely contemplative it speaks of courage
and endurance of a special kind.

Here the thought of the contemplative crosses the
thought of the conservationist, because- the contemplative
realizes that the desert is "the last frontier" in more senses
than one. It is the last because it was the latest reached, but
it is the last also because it is, in many ways, a frontier
which cannot be crossed. It brings man up against his
limitations, turns him in upon himself and suggests values
which more indulgent regions minimize. Sometimes it in-
clines to contemplation men who have never contemplated
before. And of all answers to the question "What is a desert
good for?" "Contemplation" is perhaps the best.

The eighteenth century invented a useful distinction
which we have almost lost, the distinction between the
beautiful and the sublime. The first, even when it escapes

THE VOICE OF THE DESERT

222

being merely the pretty, is easy and reassuring. The sub-
lime, on the other hand, is touched with something which
inspires awe. It is large and powerful; it carries with it the
suggestion that it might overwhelm us if it would. By these
definitions there is no doubt which is the right word for the
desert. In intimate details, as when its floor is covered after
a spring rain with the delicate little ephemeral plants, it is
pretty. But such embodiments of prettiness seem to be only
tolerated with affectionate contempt by the region as a
whole. As a whole the desert is, in the original sense of the
word, "awful." Perhaps one feels a certain boldness in un-
dertaking to live with it and a certain pride when one dis-
covers that one can.

I am not suggesting that everyone should listen to the
voice of the desert and listen to no other. For a nation
which believes, perhaps rightly enough, that it has many
more conquests yet to make, that voice preaches a doctrine
too close to quietism. But I am suggesting that the voice
of the desert might well be heard occasionally among the
others. To go "up to the mountain" or "into the desert" has
become part of the symbolical language. If it is good to
make occasionally what the religious call a "retreat," there
is no better place than the desert to make it. Here if any-
where the most familiar realities recede and others come
into the foreground of the mind.

A world traveler once said that every man owed it to
himself to see the tropics at least once in his life. Only
there can he possibly realize how completely nature can
fulfill certain potentialities and moods which the temper-
ate regions only suggest. I have no doubt that he was right.
Though I have never got beyond the outer fringe of the
tropical lands, I hope that some day I shall get into their

223 ^^^ mystique of the desert

heart. But I am sure that they are no more necessary than
the desert to an adequate imagmative grasp of the world
we hve in. Those who_have never known it are to be pitied,
like a man who has never read Hamlet or heard the Jupiter
Symphony. He has missed something which is unique. And
there is nothing else which cangive him more than a hint
of what he has missed. To have experienced it is to be
prepared to see other landscapes with new eyes and to par-
ticipate with a fresh understanding in the Me of other
natural communities.

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