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Dallas lore

WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON Illustrated.
THE FACE OF THE FIELDS.
THE LAY OF THE LAND.

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK

WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

CLIMBING THE CLIFF, THREE-ARCH ROCKS (page 19)

WHERE ROLLS THE
OREGON

BY

DALLAS LORE SHARP

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
fitoettfite pre# Cambribgt
1914

COPYRIGHT, 1913 AND 1914, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE GOLDEN RULE COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE CENTURY COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published June IQIJ.

To MY FRIENDS
WILLIAM L. FINLEY

STATE GAME WARDEN OF OREGON
AND

HERMAN T. BOHLMAN

LOVER AND PHOTOGRAPHER
OF WILD LIFE

52154
OCT'2 01914

PREFACE

T was not to write a book that I
visited the Northwest. One need
not go so far from Massachusetts
to do that. The apple trees under
Mullein Hill are as full of books as

. . . the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon.

I spent the summer of 1912 in Oregon, studying
the wild life of the State, the fish and game, and
particularly the work of the Game Warden in its
educational aspects. I took no pencil with me for
fear I might write out my eyes. And Nature hates
an interviewer anyway. So this volume is not a
series of notes, but a group of impressions, deep,
indelible impressions of the vast outdoors of
Oregon.

" Vast " is the right word for Oregon, vast and
varied, — the most alluring land to the naturalist
within the compass of our coasts. From Three-
Arch Rocks in the Pacific to the broad backs
of the Steins we travelled ; from the peaks of the

viii PREFACE

Wallowas to the tule marshes of Klamath Lake
Reservation — a summer far greater than the
pages of this book. For I have not spoken of
the firs of the Coast Range, nor of the pines of
the Cascades, nor of the orchards of the river
valleys, nor of the salmon of the Columbia, nor
of a hundred other things that together give char-
acter and personality to the State. Nor have I
spoken of the hospitality of the people; space
would fail me, for it is the largest thing in the
State.

But here I must thank Mr. William Lovell
Finley, the State Game Warden, to whom I owe
my summer in Oregon; and here express my
keen appreciation of the great work he is doing.
To his friend, and my friend, Herman T. Bohl-
man, I am also deeply indebted ; as well as to the
deputy wardens who were extraordinarily kind
and helpful to me.

Oregon, and the country as a whole, owe
Finley and Bohlman a large debt for what they
have done to preserve wild life. It was largely
due to their efforts that the great Federal reser-
vations of Oregon were set aside.

I wish to thank them arid Mr. George M.

PREFACE ix

Weister of Portland, for the use of their splendid
photographs as illustrations for this book. My
thanks are due also to the Editors of the Atlantic
Monthly, Country Life in America, and St. Nicholas
for privilege to reprint the chapters that appeared
first in their magazines.

DALLAS LORE SHARP.

MULLEIN HILL, May, 1914.

CONTENTS

I. THREE-ARCH ROCKS RESERVATION . i

II. THE RAVEN OF THE DESCHUTES . .27

III. FROM BEND TO BURNS ... 45

IV. THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT . . 69
V. ON THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR . 93

VI. THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD . . .117

VII. THE BUTTERFLIES OF MOUNT HOOD 145

VIII. THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES . . 171

IX. MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS . . .191

X. THE WILD MOTHER . . . . 211

XL MOUNT HOOD FROM COUNCIL CREST . 237

INDEX 247

ILLUSTRATIONS

Photographs by Henry T. Bohlman and William L. Finley

Climbing the Cliff, Three-Arch Rocks . Frontispiece

The Three-Arch Rocks 4

The Two Inner Rocks from Shag Rock ... 4
Colony of California Murres, Three- Arch Rocks . 1 8

Young Murres ....... 22

Sea-Lions ....... 22

The Cafion of the Deschutes * . . . . 30

A Raven ........ 36

In the Sagebrush near Burns . . . . .60

Gulls and White Pelicans at Malheur Lake . . 96

The Rim Rock, Eastern Oregon . . . .130

Wade and Peroxide Jim at a Round-up . . . 142

The Summit of Mount Hood * 156

The Pack-Train in the Wallowa Mountains . . 174
Cony Slide, Wallowa Mountains * . . . .178

Kaeding's Petrel 198

Tufted Puffin 198

Colony of Brandt's Cormorants .... 204
The Author and the Mother Murre . . . .234

* Photographs by George M. Weister

WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

I

THREE-ARCH ROCK RESERVATION

WHERE ROLLS THE
OREGON

i

THREE-ARCH ROCKS RESERVATION

i

,HE fog was lifting. The thick, wet
drift that had threatened us on Tilla-
mook Bar stood clear of the shoul-
dering sea to the westward, and in
toward shore, like an upper sea,
hung at the fir-girt middles of the mountains, as
level and as gray as the sea below. There was now
no breeze. The long, smooth swell of the Pacific
swung under us and in, until it whitened at the
base of three dark rocks that lay in our course,
and which now began to take on form out of the
foggy distance. Gulls were flying over us; lines
of black cormorants and crowds of murres were
winging past toward the rocks; but we were still

4 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

too far away from the looming piles to see that
the gray of their walls was the gray of uncounted
colonies of nesting birds, colonies that covered the
craggy steeps as the green firs clothed the slopes
of the Coast Range mountains, up to the hang-
ing fog.

As we steamed on nearer, the sound of the surf
about the rocks became audible ; the birds in the
air grew more numerous, their cries now faintly
mingling with the sound of the sea. The hole in the
Middle Rock, a mere fleck of foam at first, widened
rapidly into an arching tunnel through which our
boat might have run ; the sea began to break be-
fore us over half-sunken ledges ; and soon upon us
fell the damp shadows of Three-Arch Rocks, for
now we were looking far up at their sides, at the
sea-birds in their guano-gray rookeries, — gulls,
cormorants, guillemots, puffins, murres, — encrust-
ing the ragged walls from tide-line to pinnacle,
as the crowding barnacles encrusted the bases from
the tide-line down.

We were not approaching without protest, for
the birds were coming off to meet us, more and
more the nearer we drew, wheeling and clacking
overhead in a constantly thickening cloud of low-

THE THREE-ARCH ROCKS

THE TWO INNER ROCKS FROM SHAG ROCK

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 5

ering wings and tongues. We rounded the outer,
Shag Rock, and headed slowly in toward the
yawning hole of Middle Rock as into some mighty
cave, so sheer and shadowy rose the walls above
us, so like to cavern thunder was the throbbing of
the surf through the hollow arches, was the flap-
ping and screaming of the birds against the high-
circling walls, was the deep menacing grumble
of the lions, as through the muffle of surf and
sea-fowl, herd after herd lumbered bellowing into
the foam.

It was a strange, wild scene. Hardly a mile
from the Oregon coast, but cut off by breaker and
bar from the abrupt, uninhabited shore, the three
rocks of the Reservation, each pierced with its
resounding arch, heaved their heavy shoulders
from the waves straight up, huge, towering, till
our little steamer coasted their dripping sides
like some puffing pigmy. They were sea rocks,
of no part or lot with the dry land, their beryl
basins wave-scooped, and set with purple star-
fish, with green and pink anemones, and beaded
many deep with mussels of amethyst and jet, a-
glitter in the water's overflow ; and just above the
jeweled basins, like fabled beasts of old, lay

6 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

the sea-lions, lumpish, uncouth forms, flippered,
reversed in shape, with throats like the caves
of ^Eolus, hollow, hoarse, discordant ; and higher
up, on every jutting bench and shelf, in every
weathered rift, over every jog of the ragged
cliffs, to their bladed backs and pointed peaks,
swarmed the sea-birds, web-footed, amphibious,
wave-shaped, with stormy voices given them by
the winds that sweep in from the sea. And their
numbers were the numbers of the sea.

Crude, crowded, weltering, such life could
never have been brought forth and nurtured by
the dry land ; her breasts had withered at the
birth. Only the bowels of the wide, wet sea could
breed these heaps, these cones of life that rose vol-
canic from the waves, their craters clouded by the
smoke of wings, their belted bases rumbling with
a multi-throated thunder. The air was dank with
the must of a closed room, — closed for an seon
past, — no breath of the land, no odor of herb, no
scent of fresh soil ; but the raw, rank smells of
rookery and den, saline, kelpy, fetid; the stench
of fish and bedded guano ; and pools of reeking
ammonia where the lion herds lay sleeping on the
lower rocks in the sun.

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 7

A boat's keel was beneath me, but as I stood
out on the pointed prow, barely above the water,
and found myself thrust forward without will or
effort among the crags and caverns, among the
shadowy walls, the damps, the smells, the sounds;
among the bellowing beasts in the churning wa-
ters about me, and into the storm of wings and
tongues in the whirring air above me, I passed
from the things I had known, and the time and
the earth of man, into a period of the past, ele-
mental, primordial, monstrous.

ii

I had not known what to expect, because,
never having seen Three-Arch Rocks, I could not
know what my friend the State Game Warden
meant when he said to me, " Come out to the
Pacific Coast, and I will take you back to your
cave days ; I will show you life as it was lived at
the beginning of the world." I had left my Hing-
ham garden with its woodchuck, for the coast of
Oregon, a journey that might have been com-
passed by steam, that might have been measured
in mere miles, had it stopped short of Three-Arch
Rocks Reservation, which lay seaward just off the

8 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

shore. Instead of miles, it was zones, ages, worlds
that were traveled as I passed into this haunt of
wild sea-bird and beast. And I found myself say-
ing over to myself, " Thou madest him to have
dominion over the works of thy hands ; thou hast
put all things under his feet " — as if the words
had never before been uttered in human ears, and
could not yet be understood.

For here was no man-dominion; here the
trampling feet of man had never passed. Here
was the primeval world, the fresh and unaffrighted
morning of the Fifth Day. Then, as the brute
in me shook itself and growled back at the brute
about me, something touched my arm, and I turned
to find the Federal Warden of the Rocks at my
side, — God, as it were, seeing again everything
that He had made, everything that man had un-
made, and saying again with a new and a larger
meaning, Have dominion over the fowl of the
air, and over the fish of the sea, and over what-
soever passeth through the paths of the seas.

And here at my side, by act of Congress, stood
that Dominion, the Federal Warden, the collect-
ive, spiritual man, badged and armed to protect
forever against the individual brute man the

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 9

wild life of these three rocks and the waters
adjacent.

But did I fully understand the Why? Did I
wholly comprehend the meaning and the value of
such a sanctuary for wild life? I turned to the
warden with the question. That honest official
paused a moment, then slowly answered that he 'd
be hanged if he knew why. He didn't see any
good in such protection, his salary notwithstand-
ing. He had caught a cormorant (one from the
Rocks) not long since, that had forty-nine young
salmon in its maw ; and as for the sea-lions, they
were an unmitigated nuisance, each one of them
destroying (so it had been reckoned) five hun-
dred pounds of fish every day.

Now the warden's findings are open to ques-
tion, because there are good reasons for the cor-
morant's catch being other than salmon fry ; and
as for the lions it is pretty certain that "during
their stay on the breeding-grounds (Three-Arch
Rocks) they do not feed at all, having come in
from their deep-sea wanderings with fat enough
to worry along with until their family cares are
over. A bull sea-lion with half a dozen wives has
his flippers full. They come in to the Rocks fat;

io WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

they depart lean ; and when afar on the waves the
chances are few that salmon ever become their
prey. Still I have no proof of error in the warden's
figures. I will accept them just now, — the five
hundred pounds of fish a day for the sea-lion, and
the forty-nine salmon fry for the cormorant (they
would easily total, four years later, on their way
up the Columbia to the canneries, a half ton), —
accepting this fearful loss of Chinook salmon then
as real, is there any answer to my question, Why ?
any good and sufficient reason for setting aside
such a reservation as Three-Arch Rocks ? for my-
self protecting the wild life of these barren rocks
against myself?

No, perhaps not, — not if this protection of cor-
morants and sea-lions means the utter loss of the
salmon as an industry and as an article of food.
But there is an adequate and a paying catch of
salmon being taken in the Columbia this year, in
spite of the lions and the cormorants, as there will
be again next year, for the state hatcheries have
liberated over seven million young salmon this
summer and sent them safely down the Columbia
to the sea. No, perhaps not, — no good and suf-
ficient reason for such protection, were I an Astoria

THREE-ARCH ROCKS n

fisherman with the sea-lions pursuing the salmon
into my nets, as the imaginative fishermen say
they occasionally do. Instead of an Astoria fish-
erman, I am a teacher of literature in Boston on
the other side of the world. It is easy at Boston
to believe in the value of Astoria sea-lions. It is
hard anywhere not to believe in canned salmon.
Yet, as sure as the sun shines, and the moon, there
are some things utterly without an equivalent in
canned salmon.

Among these things are Three-Arch Rocks and
Malheur Lake and Klamath Lake Reservations
in Oregon, and the scores of other bird and animal
preserves created by Congress all the way from the
coast of Maine across the States and overseas to
the Hawaiian Islands. They were set aside only
yesterday; the sportsman, the pelt-hunter, the
plume-hunter, the pot-hunter, and in some in-
stances the legitimate fisherman and farmer or-
dered off to make room for the beast and the bird.
Small wonder if there is some grumbling, some
law-breaking, some failure to understand. But
that will pass.

In a recent dispatch from Copenhagen, I
read, —

12 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

" Americans of Danish descent have purchased
a tract of three hundred acres of typical and virgin
Danish heather landscape, which is to be pre-
served for all ages to come as a national park.
The wonderful, picturesque Danish heath, which
for ages has furnished inspiration to national ar-
tists and poets, has been disappearing fast before
the onslaught of the thrifty Danish farmers, who
are bringing every available square inch of Den-
mark's soil under cultivation. One day it dawned
upon the Danish people that soon there would be
nothing left of this typical landscape, and while
the good people of Denmark were discussing
ways and means of preserving this virgin soil,
Americans of Danish descent had already had a
representative on the spot who had bought up
from a number of small landowners the three-
hundred-acre tract known as Rebild Bakkar [Re-
bild Hills], considered the most beautiful part of
the heath, besides having historical associations
dating hundreds of years back."

I am sending the cablegram to the warden of
Three-Arch Rocks and to the Astoria fisherman,
and to myself, underscoring these lines, —

"The wonderful, picturesque Danish heath,

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 13

which for ages has furnished inspiration to na-
tional artists and poets, has been disappearing
fast before the onslaught of the thrifty Danish
farmers, who are bringing every available square
inch of Denmark's soil under cultivation."

Three hundred acres of inspiration to artists
and poets (and to common people, too), or three
hundred acres more of vegetables, — which will
Denmark have ?

Now, I have a field of vegetables. I was born
and brought up in a field of vegetables — in the
sweet-potato and cabbage fields of southern New
Jersey. To this day I love — with my heart and
with my hoe — a row of stone-mason cabbages ;
but there are cabbages on both sides of the road
all the way home, not fewer cabbages this year,
but more, and ever more and more, with less and
ever less and less of the virgin heather in between.

The heather is for inspiration, for pictures and
poems; the cabbages are for cold-slaw and sauer-
kraut. Have any complained of our lack of
cold-slaw and sauerkraut? I paid five cents a
pound for cabbage at the market recently (a
frozen head at that) ; but even so, it is abundant
as compared with poetry.

i-4 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

Cold-slaw and sauerkraut and canned salmon
let us have ; but let us also have the inspiration
of the virgin heath, and the occasional restoration
to our primitive, elemental, animal selves, in a
returning now and then to the clangor and con-
fusion of wild life on Three- Arch Rocks. The
body feeds on cabbage. The spirit is sustained
by heather. Drain for the farmer; irrigate for the
farmer; but save something for the poet and
painter, lest they cry out —

"Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink. ' '

For what will it profit a nation to lose its soul ?
Denmark has fifteen thousand square miles de-
voted to her body, and and has saved three hun-
dred acres for her soul! What besides Three-
Arch Rocks and the other wild patches have we
saved ?

I have not convinced the warden, doubtless;
but if I have encouraged him to perform his
duty, then that is something. And well he knows
the need for his guard. The sea was without a
sail when we steamed in toward the Rocks. We
had scarcely landed, however, when a boat hove

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 15

in sight, and bearing down upon us, dropped
anchor within rifle-range of the lion-herds, the
men on board ready with their guns for an
hour's sport!

"Thou hast put all things under his feet";
and the feet have overrun and trampled down all
the things except in a few scattered spots where
the trespass sign and the warden are keeping them
off. I followed these feet over the last-left miles of
wild Canadian prairie, over a road so new that I
could see where it crossed the faint, grass-grown
trails of the buffalo. I followed the feet over the
Coast Range mountains, through the last-remain-
ing miles of first-growth timber, where the giant
boles, felled for the road, lay untrimmed and
still green beside the way — a straight, steel-
bordered way, for swift, steel-shod feet that shake
the mountain and the prairie in their passing,
and leave behind them, down the trail, the bones
of herds and forests, the ripped sod, the barbed
wire, the shacks that curse the whole horizon,
the heaps of gutted tins, and rags, and scrap -
unburied offal, flung from the shanty doors with
rose-slip and grain of wheat, to blossom later in
the wilderness and make it to rejoice.

16 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

Only it will not be the wilderness then, or the
solitary place; it will not be prairie or forest.
The fir tree will never follow the rose, nor the
buffalo-grass the great gasoline tractor. I have
seen the last of the unploughed prairies, the last
of the virgin forests. It was only a few weeks
ago that I passed through the mountain forest,
and to-day, as I am writing, those age-old trees
are falling as the summer grass falls across the
blade of the mower.

This, I know, must needs be. All of this was
implied, delegated, in the command, "Be fruit-
ful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue it." No, not all of this needs to be; nor
ought to be.

" ' O River/ said Mary,
' Why will you not stay,
And tell me the things
That you see on your way ?

" ' Oh! why must you hurry,
The day is so long;
Pray, rest a short time
And sing me a song. '

«« « My child,' said the River,
' If I stay with you,
Why, what will the grasses
And sweet flowers do ?

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 17

«« « The mills must be turned;
Ships taken to sea;
And the news of the day
Must be carried by me.' '

The river is right, though the child can hardly
understand; and the child, too, is right, — will
the river ever understand? The mills of men
must be turned, their ships must be taken to
sea, but the child, the eternal child, must be told
a story, must be sung a song. For what does a
child know of mills'? It cannot live by wheaten
bread alone.

The river is turning my mill, for I (the mortal
part of me) and my children (the mortal part of
them) need bread; but the heart of me, the soul
of me, the immortal child of me and of my chil-
dren, craves something that the harnessed river
cannot grind for us, something that only the
wild, free river can tell to us as we lie beneath
the fir trees at its far-off head waters, can sing to
us as its clear cascades leap laughing down from
pool to boulder, in its distant mountain home.

The river is turning my mill. I must grind
and the river must help me grind. But I must
play too, and I must be told a story and be sung

i8 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

a song. Am I not a child? and do I not owe
the child something? Must I put the child in
the mill to grind? There are children in our
mills, — little children, yes, and big children;
young children, and old children, — more old chil-
dren than young ; grinding, grinding, grinding as
our dank, dark rivers go turning on, too hurried
now to tell a story, too thick-tongued to sing a
song.

Here were still the story and the song, here on
Three- Arch Rocks ; and here they shall ever re-
main; a story as naked as birth, a song as stark
as death and as savage as the sea, —

Birth, birth and death !
Wing and claw and beak;
Death, death and birth!
From crowded cave to peak.

Ill

These were Isles of Life. Here, in the rocky
caverns, was conceived and brought forth a life
as crude and raw and elemental as the rock it-
self. It covered every crag. I clutched it in
my hands; I crushed it under my feet; it was
thick in the air about me. My narrow path up
the face of the rock was a succession of sea-bird

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 19

rookeries, of crowded eggs, and huddled young,
hairy or naked or wet from the shell. Every time
my fingers felt for a crack overhead, they touched
something warm that rolled or squirmed; every
time my feet moved under me for a hold, they
pushed in among top-shaped eggs that turned on
the shelf or went over far below; and whenever I
hugged the pushing wall I must bear off from a
mass of squealing, struggling, shapeless things,
just hatched. And down upon me, as rookery
after rookery of old birds whirred in fright from
their ledges, fell crashing eggs and unfledged
young, that the greedy gulls devoured ere they
touched the sea.

An alarmed wing-beat, the excited turn of a
webbed foot, and the murre's single egg or its
single young was sent over the edge, so narrow
was the footing for Life, so yawning the pit be-
low. But up out of the churning waters, up from
crag to crag, clambers Life, by beak, by claw,
falling, clinging, climbing, with the odds forever
favoring Death, yet with Life forever finding
wings.

I was midway in my climb, at a bad turn,
edging inch by inch along, my face hard-pressed

20 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

to the face of the cliff, my fingers gripping a
slight seam overhead, my feet feeling blindly at
the brink beneath, when there came up to me,
small and smothered, the wash of the waves, —
the voice of space and nothingness and void, the
call of the chasm out of which I was so hardly
climbing. A cold hand clasped me from behind.

With an impulse as instinctive as the un-
fledged murre's, I flattened against the toppling
rock, fingers and feet, elbows, knees, and chin
clinging desperately to the narrow chance, — a
falling fragment of shale, a gust of wind, the
wing-stroke of a frightened bird, enough to
break my hold and swing me out over the water,
washing faint and far below. A long breath, and
I was climbing again.

Yet in that instant I was born again, not a
human being, but a mere being; stripped of
everything except life and the clinging to life ;
reduced to one of my ancestral animal selves ;
reverting in that moment of time through the
seons of my development back to the bird of me,
back to my murre self, catching by chin, knees,
elbows, feet, and fingers to the rocky seams for
life, naked life. I was reborn a murre, fighting

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 21

against the forces of sea and sky, to live, to cling
to the rock from the wind and waves. And there
was born within me at that moment more life,
more sympathy with life, a new consciousness of
blood brotherhood with all birds and beasts and
things that live.

We were on Shag Rock, our only possible
ascent taking us up the sheer south face. With
the exception of an occasional Western gull's
and pigeon guillemot's nest, these steep sides
were occupied entirely by the California murres,
— penguin-shaped birds about the size of a
wild duck, chocolate-brown above, with white
breasts, which literally covered the sides of the
three great Rocks wherever they could find a
hold. If a million meant anything, I should
say there were a million murres nesting on this
outer Rock ; not nesting either, for the egg is
laid upon the bare ledge, as you might place it
upon a mantel, a single sharp-pointed egg, as
large as a turkey's and just as many of them
on the ledge as there is standing-room for the
birds. The murre broods her egg by standing
straight up over it, her short legs, by dint of
stretching, allowing her to straddle the big egg,

22 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

her short tail propping her securely from be-
hind.

On, up along the narrow back, or blade, of
the Rock, and over the peak, were the well-
spaced nests of the Brandt's cormorants, nests the
size of an ordinary straw hat, made of sea-grass
and the yellow-flowered sulphur-weed that grew
in a dense mat over the north slope of the top,
each nest holding four long, dirty, blue eggs or
as many black, shivering young; and in the low
sulphur-weed, all along the roof-like slope of the
top, were the nests of the gulls and the burrows of
the tufted puffins and the petrels. The cormo-
rants were the most striking figures of the sum-
mit,— all around the rock rim that dropped
sheer to the sea they stood black, silent, stat-
uesque. Everywhere were nests and eggs and
young, and everywhere were flying, crying birds
— above, about, and far below me, a whirling,
whirring vortex of wings that had caught me in
its funnel.

So thick was the air with wings, so clangorous
with harsh tongues, that I had not seen the fog
moving in, or noticed that the gray wind of
Tillamook Bar had begun to growl about the

YOUNG MURRES

SEA-LIONS

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 23

crags. It was late, and the night that I had in-
tended to spend on the summit would be dark
and stormy, would be too wet and wild for watch-
ing, where one must hold on with one's hands so
close to the edge, or slip and go over.

So we got over the rim along the south face of
the cliff, up which we had climbed, and by rope
descended to a small shelf under an overhanging
ledge about forty feet above the waves. Here,
protected from the northwest wind, and from
much of the rain, we rolled up in our blankets,
while night crept down upon us and out over
the sea.

It was a gray, ghostly night of dusk and mist
that swam round and round the crags and through
the wakeful caverns in endless undulations, coil-
ing its laving folds over the sunken ledges, and
warping with slow, sucking sounds its mouthing
tentacles round and through the rocks. Or was
it only the wash of waves ? only the gray of the
mist and the drip of the rain ? Or was it the re-
turn of the waters ? the resolving of firmament
and rock back through the void of night into
the flux of the sea ?

It was a long night of small, distinct, yet mul-

24 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

titudinous sounds. The confusion caused by our
descent among the birds soon subsided ; the large
colony of murres close by our heads returned to
their rookery ; and with the rain and thickening
dark there spread everywhere the quiet of a low
murmurous quacking. Sleep was settling over the
rookeries.

Down in the water below us rose the bulk of a
sea-lion, an old lone bull, whose den we had in-
vaded. He, too, was coming back to his bed for
the night. He rose and sank in the half light,
blinking dully at the cask and other things that
we had left below us on the ledge belonging to
him. Then he slowly clambered out and hitched
up toward his bed. My own bed was just above
his, so close that I could hear him blow, could see
the scars on his small head, and a long open
gash on his side. We were very near.

I drew back from the edge, pulled the blanket
and sail-cloth over me, and turned my face up
to the slanting rain. Two young gulls that had
hidden from us in a cranny came down and
nestled close to my head, their parents, one after
the other, perching an instant on the rock just
out of reach, and all through the night calling to

THREE-ARCH ROCKS 25

them with a soft nasal quack to still their alarm.
In the murre colony overhead there was a con-
stant stir of feet and a soft, low talk ; and over
all the Rock, through all the darkened air, there
was the silent coming and going of wings, shadow-
wings of the petrel, some of them, that came
winnowing in from afar on the sea.

The drizzle thickened ; the night lengthened.
Against my face lay the damp hair of my little
son. He was sleeping soundly, the rhythm and
rise of the tide in his deep, sweet breathing. The
day of danger had brought him very close to me,
so near that now I might almost have been the
mother that bore him. The quiet deepened. I
listened to the wings about me, to the murmur
among the birds above me, to the stir of the sea
beneath me, to the breathing of the sleeping men
beside me, to the pulse of the life enfolding me,
of which I was part and heart; and under my
body I felt a narrow shelf of rock dividing the
waters from the waters.

The drizzle thickened ; the night lengthened ;
and — darkness was upon the face of the deep.

II

THE RAVEN OF THE DESCHUTES

II

THE RAVEN OF THE DESCHUTES

s our train clung to its narrow foot-
ing and crept slowly up the wild
canon of the Deschutes, I followed
from the rear platform the windings
of the milk-white river through its
carved course. We had climbed along some sixty
miles to where the folding walls were sheerest and
the towering treeless buttes rolled, fold upon fold,
behind us on the sky, when, off from one of the
rim-rock ledges, far above, flapped a mere blot
of a bird, black, and strong of wing, flying out
into midair between the cliffs to watch us, and
sailing back upon the ledge as we crawled round
a jutting point in the wall and passed from his
bight of the deep wild gorge.

Except for some small birds in the willows of
the river, this was the first glimpse of life that I
had seen since entering the canon. And I knew,
though this was my first far-off sight of the bird,
that I was watching a raven. Beside him on the

30 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

ledge was a gray blur that I made out to be a
nest — an ancient nest, I should say, from the
stains below it on the face of the rock.

A fleck of black high up against the cliff, he
yet seemed to fill the canon. The shadow of his
wings, as he flew out in the sky to watch us pass,
spread up and down the valley. The smoke of
our engine would quickly disappear, but the
shadow of the raven's authority was the very air
of these cliffs and bluffs and buttes, the spell that
we had felt since the mighty walls had first shut
in about us.

Or did I imagine it all? This is a treeless
country, green with grass, yet, as for animal life,
an almost uninhabited country. When Lewis and
Clark passed here, they could find no sticks for
camp-fires and lived on dog-meat — so utterly
without life were the hills and headlands of the
river. Such lack of wild life had seemed incredi-
ble ; but no longer so after entering the canon of
the Deschutes. A deep, unnatural silence filled the
vast spaces between the beetling walls and smoth-
ered the roar of the rumbling train. The river, one
of the best trout streams in the world, broke white
and loud over a hundred stony shallows, but what

THE DESCHUTES RAVEN 31

wild creature, besides the osprey, was here to
listen? The softly rounded buttes, towering above
the river, and running back beyond the cliffs, were
greenish gold against the sky, with what seemed
clipped grass, like to some golf-links of the gods ;
but no creature of any kind moved over them.
Bend after bend, mile after mile, and still no
life, except a few small birds in the narrow wil-
low edging where the river made about some
sandy cove. That was all — until out from his
eyrie in the overhanging rim-rock flapped the
raven.

The canon was no longer empty, the towering
buttes no longer bare. This was the domain of the
black baron, and he held it all. No lesser land,
no tamer, gentler country would
ber, suspicious, unsociable, ui
the strong black wing ! Jt was
hoped to find him, knowih^^SQ^feifch>'¥e'mote
and rugged regions he had withdrawn to make
his nest and live his life. How his silent flight,
his black body on the shelf or the rock high up
in the canon wall, gave shape and substance to
the spirit of the place ! If the fir trees are a house
for the stork, and the high hills a refuge for the

32 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

wild goats, no less is the steep-walled canon and
the dizzy mountain cliff the home of the raven.

Yet the raven is the head of the tribe of
crows, with all the intelligence and cunning of
the crow, but lacking, it seems, the crow's easy
disposition and sociable ways. Else why is it that
he does not adapt himself, as the crow does, to
human ways ? Are we at fault ? Not wholly, for
we could hardly treat him worse than we have
the crow. Perhaps the crows are becoming fewer ;
I think they are. The wonder is that a single
crow is still alive in the land after all their years
of persecution. But here they are, cawing in my
wood-lot this quiet November day, as I have
heard them since I can remember hearing any-
thing. Here in my pines they nest, too. Could
not the raven nest here, and croak here, with
them?

So far as I am concerned he could. Nay, I
would give him a whole wood-lot for a nest if

he would come. For should I not find him, as I

r , r

have at last found the crow, to be my friend and
ally, instead of my enemy ?

A' new and better day has dawned for the
birds, all birds. The greatest event, surely, that

THE DESCHUTES RAVEN 33

has ever happened for American birds took place
on the 4th day of March, 1913, when President
Taft signed the Weeks-McLean bill placing all
our migratory game and insectivorous birds under
the protection of the Federal Government ; and
perhaps the greatest event that ever happened for
the birds of the world took place on the night
of September 3, 1913, when the United States
Senate passed a measure prohibiting the impor-
tation of the plumage of wild birds into this
country, except for scientific purposes.

Neither of these bills will directly protect the
crow, except as they are sure to help protect all
birds. But the crow will be cared for. The Gov-
ernment's book on the crow shows past all doubt
that he is, in the long run, beneficial; that we are
tremendously in his debt, notwithstanding his toll
of corn ; and that he must not only be allowed to
dwell among us, but encouraged by every means
to make himself free with our fields and wood-
lots.

And he will do it without encouragement.
All he asks is decent neighborly treatment. He
will meet us more than halfway. The light and
the laws have come too late for many of our

34 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

birds — for those that have gone forever from the
earth. The State of Massachusetts has a game
warden on the Island of Martha's Vineyard, who,
as I am writing, is policing the haunt of the few
wild heath hens there, the last survivors of a
noble family of grouse that, hardly a hundred
years ago, was found locally throughout southern
New England and the Middle States. Have the
laws and the light come too late for the heath
hen?

Perhaps with this remnant we can yet save
the race. In 1890 it was estimated that there
were from 120 to 200 birds on the island. A few
years later (1907), they had been so nearly ex-
terminated, that only 21 were found to have
escaped. To-day (1913) some three or four hun-
dred are reported from the island. If the light
and laws have not come too late, the heath hen,
from this mere handful, may be increased until
they have scattered themselves once more over
their former haunts.

But what can we ever do for the raven ? And
for the birds of prey? And for such solitary
creatures as the great California condor, now on
the verge of extinction ?

THE DESCHUTES RAVEN 35

As for the great condor, he is passing from the
peaks of his mountain home because he is being
wantonly shot. His great spread of wing is a
mark for the hunter. He is being shot for the
mark's sake, his carcass left to rot where it falls ;
while from the skies of the Sierra are snatched
forever the most thrilling wings that shall ever
coast the clouds.

It seems certain that the eagles and the greater
hawks must pass, as being unfit for a civilized
scheme of things. But the owls and the lesser
hawks should remain, and along with them the
wilder, shyer, more suspicious birds like the raven.

Shall he need to be educated ? Or is nothing
more necessary than that we show him our good
faith *? It may be that I have misunderstood his
mind toward me. Perhaps I read things into his
character that I found in a book, —

" Once upon a midnight dreary," —

when I was a child. Perhaps I have Poe's raven
and the raven of the Deschutes canon mixed
in my mind. But I watched him in the desert
rim-rock country, and there he seemed to be the
most aloof, the most alien in his attitude, of all

36 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

wild things I have ever seen. In the high rim-
rock ledges of the Blitzen River valley I watched
several flocks of the big, black birds. Two speci-
mens were shot for their skins, and for what we
could learn of their feeding habits from the con-
tents of their gizzards. One of the birds fell at my
feet, his strong, wild spirit gone, and only the
black form left, with its powerful beak and wise,
crafty face. But even this body I took up and
touched with a feeling of wonder and something
akin to awe.

Surely he is too wise a bird to be driven from
his inheritance because of fear of us. The grizzly
bears come and go at will in the Yellowstone
National Park because they know we mean no
harm. The fierce spirit of the beast is led about
by gentleness and by good faith, kept inviolate.
If the bear, why not the raven *?

John Muir, speaking of the Clarke crow of the
high Sierra, a relation of the raven, says : " He
dwells far back on the high stormbeaten margin
of the forest, where the mountain pine, juniper,
and hemlock grow wide apart on glacier pave-
ments and domes and rough crumbling ridges,
and the dwarf pine makes a low crinkled growth

A RAVEN

THE DESCHUTES RAVEN 37

along the flanks of the Summit peaks. In so open
a region, of course, he is well seen. Everybody
notices him, and nobody at first knows what to
make of him. One guesses he must be a wood-
pecker ; another a crow or some sort of jay ;
another a magpie. He seems to be a pretty thor-
oughly mixed and fermented compound of all
these birds, has all their strength, cunning, shyness,
thievishness, and wary, suspicious curiosity com-
bined and condensed."

I took it from this account that if in my moun-
tain climbing I got a long-distance glimpse of
the Clarke crow, I could count myself lucky, for
is n't he the wildest of birds ? On the contrary, I
was amazed to find the wary creature almost
eating out of my hand at Cloud Cap Inn, half-
way up the side of Mount Hood. Here, on the
timber-line, in the haunt of these birds, was a
house, and human visitors in the summer, who fed
the crows, and who had so far tamed them as to
make them almost as familiar as chickens, much
more sociable and trusting than our Eastern blue
jays or our common crows.

If this can be done to the Clarke crow in the
remote summits, it ought to be possible to tame

38 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

the raven till he will accept a ledge from our
hands or a nest-tree in our parks and groves,
and with him tame every other shy, suspicious
spirit that hides from hurt and destruction in the
" holy mountain," when the knowledge and love
of wild life shall cover the earth as the waters
cover the sea.

English human life and wild life have arrived
at a much closer sympathy and understanding
than we, in this country, appreciate. Wild life has
been protected there for centuries, and there even
the raven has held on in solitary pairs, occupying
for generations the same ancient trees. It seems
that gradually they are dying out and may pass
forever. But the English people love their birds;
and how often the raven comes in for his share,
both of reproach and admiration, his historians
without exception endowing him with a great-
ness of spirit that comes close to majesty !

There is no more interesting chapter in the
lives of British birds than that on the raven. I
have never read anything about our American
raven that shows the "careful watching and the
intimate knowledge of the following description
of the English bird.

THE DESCHUTES RAVEN 39

Says the writer: —

" They will tag with one another in midair
and often tumble down a fathom or two, as if
shot, to turn right over on their backs, in sheer
merriment ; when the wind is high, the tempest-
loving birds shoot up in the air like a rocket or
a towering partridge, to an immense height ; and
then, by closing their wings, drop, in a series of
rapid jerks and plunges, which they can check
at pleasure, down to the ground. The male raven,
while his mate is sitting, keeps anxious watch
over her, and croaks savagely when any one
approaches, or sallies forth in eager tournament,
against any rook, or crow, or hawk, or larger
bird of prey which intrudes on his domain.

"If you can manage to evade his watchful
eye, and enter the wood unobserved, you can,
sometimes, lie down quite still, in sight of the
nest and note all that is going on. You will see
him perch upon the very top of an adjoining fir tree,
or whet his beak, as he is fond of doing, against
one of its branches, or fiercely tear off others and
drop them below. You will hear him utter a
low gurgling note of conjugal endearment, which
will, sometimes, lure his mate from her charge,

40 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

and then, after a little coze and talk together,
you will see him, unlike many husbands, relieve
her, for the time, of her responsibilities, and take
his own turn upon the nest."

The raven has but one mate; he pairs for life,
and as he lives to a very great age, the strength
of his affection, his tenderness and fidelity impart
to him a dignity and a quality of character hardly
possessed by any other bird.

All this seems to be based on a superior de-
gree of intelligence, a quality of mind that shows
itself among all the members of the raven family.
It is especially noticeable among the crows.
There are no other birds in my woods that seem
half so intelligent and wise as they. Watch the
ways of your tame crow, study the light in his
eye, especially when he is up to mischief, if you
would see a mind within that is pretty nearly
human. .

Or watch the blue jays or the magpies or the
whiskey-jacks — "camp-robbers," as they are called.
These lovely fluffy birds of the Canadian woods
and wild Western mountains are, I think, the
smallest of the family. I had an excellent chance
to study their doings in the Wallowa Mountains.

THE DESCHUTES RAVEN 41

No other birds of equal curiosity and intelli-
gence have I ever seen. Far off in the most dis-
tant wilderness, where possibly no human foot
had trodden for months, we would camp, and
immediately the robbers would gather, flapping
out of some tall fir-top across a meadow to light
upon the tree-top nearest to us. Here they would
perch and squall, and find their way down to
the sizzling frying-pans, to see what sour-dough
bread was like, and if there might be anything
left in the condensed-milk tins.

Right out of the unbroken forest they came,
straight down to the fire — because they wanted
to know what they didn't understand. (The in-
terest (curiosity, if you choose), the confidence,
the impertinence, indeed, seemed so unnatural,
unbirdlike, here where all was wild, as to be
almost uncanny. No crow or raven would go
to that length, because the years of persecution
have taught them to temper their curiosity with
extreme caution; but both birds, and all the mem-
bers of the family, are at heart friendly, and would
get on well with us, would we show ourselves
neighborly.

And they shall get on with us. For the first

42 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

time since the slaughter of wild life began on
these shores the country as a whole has been
aroused to the need of instant and country-wide
protection. The Federal Government has acted.
As I am writing these lines, the custom-house
officers are snipping off the lovely aigrettes from
the hats brought into our ports from abroad. The
women are weeping and wringing their hands
and doing more violent things at the wicked de-
struction of the costly plumes; but could they
see the white heron rookeries with the heaps of
rotting carcasses, and the nests of piping, starving
young, could they see the plumes stripped from
the brooding mothers' backs, they would under-
stand; and no more would they make themselves
the occasion for such cruel, unspeakable destruc-
tion.

And so it will soon be with us in our feeling
for the new federal laws prohibiting the shooting
of the migratory birds. A few hunters think that
their rights (to kill the wild birds that fly over
and belong to us all, but to no one person) are
being encroached upon. But they will learn bet-
ter soon. And soon we shall all of us learn better
how to live with the birds and other wild things,

THE DESCHUTES RAVEN 43

and let them live with us. We are only begin-
ning to realize our deep dependence upon our
wild neighbors, and the birds especially. As this
knowledge grows, and as our love for wild life
grows, we shall draw closer and closer together,
we shall share and share alike, birds and beasts
and men, all the things we have. We shall even
learn to make all of our aigrettes — of horsehair !
Then in that day (if he can find him a dwelling-
place until that day come) even the raven, the
wild black prince of birds, shall build his nest
without fear of the trains that thunder through
the canon far below him, and without harm from
the shepherds whose flocks feed in the sage back
on the wide plains above.

Ill

FROM BEND TO BURNS

Ill

FROM BEND TO BURNS

HE clutch snapped in with a jump;
forward, backward shot the lever
— we were rounding a corner in a
whirl of dust, Bend behind us, and
the auto-stage like some giant jack
rabbit bounding through the sagebrush for Burns,
one hundred and fifty miles across the desert.

Think of starting from New York for Wilming-
ton, Delaware, or from Boston for New Haven,
Connecticut, with nothing, absolutely nothing but
sagebrush and greasewood and stony lava ridges
and a barely discernible trail in between! with a
homesteader's shack for Providence, another shack
for Norwich, and sage, sage, sage !

It was the size of the West and the spirit of
the West — this combination of sage and auto-
mobile — that struck me as most unlike things
back East, size and spirit commensurate. The
difference was not one of race or blood. The
new Northwest has very largely come out of the

48 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

older East, the same blood there as here; but a
different spirit. Spirit is an elastic thing; and if
we had the spaciousness of that western country,
we should doubtless have the soul to fill it, as the
little town of Burns fills it for a hundred and
fifty miles of sage, whichever way you go.

We were " going in " from Bend, over the High
Desert. We were to speak to the Rod and Gun
Club of Burns. We were to visit the great Mal-
heur Lake Reservation just south of Burns, and
the vast wild lands of the Steins Mountains on
farther south, which the State has since turned
into a wild animal reservation. We were also
bringing in with us a carload of young trout
to stock the Silvies River and the creeks about
Burns.

Our telegram had gone around by Baker City,
Sumpter, and Canon City ; thence had been
relayed by telephone to Burns ; our carload of
fingerling trout was to follow us by auto-truck
from Bend over the desert; and we — the July
morning found us heading over an horizon of
gray sage into the sunrise, the purplish pine stems
of the Deschutes Forest Reservation far to south
and west of us, and over them, in the far north-

FROM BEND TO BURNS 49

west, the snowy peaks of Jefferson and the Three
Sisters.

There was nothing else to be seen ; not at this
point, that is, for we were but just starting, and
were using all our eyes to hang on with.

I had never ridden from Bend to Burns by
auto-stage before, and I did not realize at first that
you could hold yourself down by merely anchor-
ing your feet under the rail and gripping every-
thing in sight. It is a simple matter of using all
your hands and knees and feet. But at the start
I was wasting my strength, as, with eyes fixed
and jaw set, I even held on to my breath in order
to keep up with the car.

The desert was entirely new to me ; so was the
desert automobile. I had been looking forward
eagerly to this first sight of the sage plains ; but
I had not expected the automobile, and could see
nothing whatever of the sagebrush until I had
learned to ride the car. I had ridden an automo-
bile before; I had driven one, a staid and even-
going Eastern car, which I had left at home in the
stable. I thought I knew an automobile; but I
found that I had never been on one of the Western
desert breed. The best bucker at the Pendleton

50 WHERE ROLLS'THE OREGON

Round-up is but a rocking-horse in comparison.
I doubt if you could experience death in any part
of the world more times for twenty dollars than
by auto-stage from Bend to Burns.

The trail takes account of every possible bunch
of sagebrush and greasewood to be met with on
the way. It never goes over a bunch if it can go
around a bunch ; and as there is nothing but
bunches all the way, the road is very devious. It
turns, here and there, every four or five feet (per-
haps the sagebrush clumps average five feet
apart), and it has a habit, too, whenever it sees
the homesteader's wire fences, of dashing for them,
down one side of the claim, then short about the
corner and down the other side of the claim,
steering clear of all the clumps of sage, but rip-
ping along horribly near to the sizzling barbs of
the wire and the untrimmed stubs on the juniper
posts; then darting off into the brush, this way,
that way, every way, which in the end proves to
be the way to Burns, but no one at the beginning
of the trip could believe it — no one from the
East, I mean.

The utter nowhereness of that desert trail ! Of
its very start and finish! I had been used to start-

FROM BEND TO BURNS 51

ing from Hingham and arriving — and I am two
whole miles from the station at that. Here at
Mullein Hill I can see South, East, and North
Weymouth, plain Weymouth, and Weymouth
Heights, with Queen Anne's Corner only a mile
away; Hanover Four Corners, Assinippi, Egypt,
Cohasset, and Nantasket are hardly five miles
off; and Boston itself is but sixty minutes distant
by automobile, Eastern time.

It is not so between Bend and Burns. Time
and space are different concepts there. Here in
Hingham you are never without the impression
of somewhere. If you stop you are in Hingham ;
if you go on you are in Cohasset, perhaps. You
are somewhere always. But between Bend and
Burns you are always in the sagebrush and right
on the distant edge of time and space, which
seems by contrast with Hingham the very mid-
dle of nowhere. Massachusetts time and space, and
doubtless European time and space, as Kant and
Schopenhauer maintained, are not world elements
independent of myself, at all, but only a priori
forms of perceiving. That will not do from Bend
to Burns. They are independent things out there.
You can whittle them and shovel them. They

52 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

are sagebrush and sand, respectively. Nor do they
function there as here in the East, determining,
according to the metaphysicians, the sequence
of conditions, and positions of objects toward each
other; for the desert will not admit of it. The
Vedanta well describes " the-thing-in-itself " be-
tween Bend and Burns in what it says of Brah-
man : that " it is not split by time and space and
is free from all change."

That, however, does not describe the journey;
there was plenty of change in that, at the rate we
went, and according to the exceeding great num-
ber of sagebushes we passed. It was all change ;
though all sage. We never really tarried by the
side of any sagebush. It was impossible to do
that and keep the car shying rhythmically — now
on its two right wheels, now on its two left wheels
— past the sagebush next ahead. Not the journey,
I say ; it is only the concept, the impression of the
journey, that can be likened to Brahman. But that
single, unmitigated impression of sage and sand,
of nowhereness, was so entirely unlike all former
impressions that I am glad I made the journey
from Boston in order to go from Bend to Burns.

You lose no time getting at the impression. It

FROM BEND TO BURNS 53

begins in Bend — long before, indeed, being dis-
tributed generally all over this Oregon country.
At Bend the railroad terminates. The only thing
you can do at Bend is to go back, — unless you
are bound for Burns. The impression does not
begin at Bend, and it does not end at Burns. It
only deepens. For at Burns there is not so much
as a railroad terminus. You cannot go back from
Bums, or "out," as the citizens say, until there are
enough of your mind to charter the auto-stage.
The next railroad terminus to Burns is at Vale,
east-northeast one hundred and thirty-five miles
of sage beyond.

Not split by time and space, and free from all
change, single, deep, indelible, gray is the desert
from Bend to Burns.

It was 7.10 in the morning when we started
from Bend, it was after eight in the evening when
we swung into Burns. At noon we halted for din-
ner at a rude road-house, half of the journey done ;
at one o'clock we started on with a half of it yet
to go — at the same pace, over the same trail,
through the same dust and sun and sage, the
other car of our party, that had followed us so far,
now taking the lead. There were details enough,

54 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

there was variety enough, had one but the time
and the eyes to see. I had neither. This was my
first day in the desert ; and it was the desert that
I wanted to traverse — it was the sage and the
sand, the roll, the reach to the horizon, the gray,
sage gray, that I had come out to see. I must
travel swift and look far off. For you cannot
compass the desert horizon at a glance. Nor can
you see at a glance this desert gray; it is so low
a tone, a color so hard to fix. I must see sage
gray until it should dye the very grain of my
imagination, as the bitter flavor of the sage stains
the blood, and tastes in the very flesh of sage hen.
A day was not long enough ; one hundred and
fifty speeding miles could not carry me fast
enough or far enough to see the desert. And if I
should stop to look for the desert life, for the
parts, I should miss the whole. But I had my
hand instinctively upon the driver's arm when a
sage sparrow darted in front of the car. It was
a new bird to me. Then a sage thrasher flitted
away and alighted as the car sped past — another
new bird! A badger drew into its burrow — I had
never seen the badger at home ; a lizard, a small
horned-toad, a gray-and-yellow-winged grasshop-

FROM BEND TO BURNS 55

per, a picket-pin — two — three of them — all new,
all children of the desert ! A little shrike, a cluster
of squat golden-balled flowers, a patch of purple
things close to the sand giving a drop of color to
the stretch of gray, a slender striped chipmunk,
a small brown owl dangling between the sage-
clumps, and calling like a flicker, another at the
mouth of an old badger's den — the burrowing
owl, to be sure, and the first I have ever seen !
Whir-r-r-r-r — the great sage hen ! and my hand
shot out again — this time at the steering-wheel.
The driver only grunted, and opened the throttle
a little wider if anything. He was not after sage
hens; he was on the road to Burns.

If only he would blow out a tire! He did
break a rear axle later on in the afternoon, and to
my amazement and chagrin pulled a spare one
out of his toolbox, and had it on as if it were part
of the programme. But he gave me a chance to
start my first jack rabbit and send him careening
over the plain. I crept up on a Western night-
hawk, too; I gathered the most glorious of
American primroses, white and as large as a
morning-glory, but an almost stemless flower like
most of the desert plants. I snatched and threw

56 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

into the car eight other new species of desert
flowers ; nibbled a leaf of the sage and some of
the salty shad-scale ; picked up a large fragment
of black obsidian, and beside it a broken Indian
arrowhead of the same lava glass; saw where a
coyote had been digging out picket-pins ; and
was trying to capture a scorpion when the mended
car overtook me — and on through the sage we
rolled.

Another stop like this and my desert would be
lost. One cannot watch a desert. But one can
watch a scorpion ; and to leave the only live scor-
pion I had ever seen was hard. As we whirled past
a camping freighter, his horses outspanned in the
sun, I envied him the ten days he was taking to
cover what I was being hurled across in one. To
freight it across the High Desert! To feel the
beating sun at midday, and at midnight the bite
of the frost ! To waken in the unspeakable fresh-
ness of the cold dawn to the singing of the sage
thrasher; and at twilight, the long desert twilight,
to watch the life of the silent plains awaken, to
hear the quaking call of the burrowing owls, and
far off through the shadows the cry of the prowl-
ing coyotes !

FROM BEND TO BURNS 57

If something else would happen to the car —
something serious — all four axles at once ! But
it was not to be. We were destined to sleep in
Burns — a restless sleep, however. I would much
rather take my chances next time with the occa-
sional scorpion in the sage. We were due in
Burns that night. We were to speak to the Rod
and Gun Club. We were to tell them that the
carload of young fish would be on the road by
midnight, that we had seen the truck at Bend ;
that they could expect the fish surely by evening
of the next day.

On we sped into the sage, on into the length-
ening afternoon ; the scattered juniper trees,
strangely like orchard trees at a distance, becom-
ing more numerous, the level stretches more va-
ried and broken, with here and there a cone-like
peak appearing — Glass Buttes to the south, Buck
Mountain to the north, with Wagon Tire and Iron
Mountains farther off. Early in the forenoon we
had passed several homesteaders' claims, spots
of desolation in the desert, and now, as the after-
noon wore on, the lonely settler's shack and wire
fence began to appear again.

I have seen many sorts of desperation, but none

58 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

like that of the men who attempt to make a home
out of three hundred and twenty acres of High
Desert sage. For this is so much more than they
need. Three feet by six is land enough — and
then there were no need of wire for a fence, or
of a well for water. Going down to the sea in ships
or into mines by a lift, are none too high prices to
pay for life ; but going out on the desert with a
government claim, with the necessary plough, the
necessary fence, the necessary years of residence,
and other things made necessary by law, to say
nothing of those required by nature and marriage,
is to pay all too dearly for death, and to make
of one's funeral a needlessly desolate thing. A man
ploughing the sage — his woman keeping the
shack — a patch of dust against the dust, a
shadow within a shadow — sage and sand and
space !

We were nearing Silver Creek, some forty
miles, perhaps, from Burns, when ahead, and off
to the right of us rose a little cloud of dust. I
watched it with interest, wondering what it might
be, until through the brush I made out a horse-
man galloping hard to intercept us, as I thought.
I could not reach ahead with my eye to the

FROM BEND TO BURNS 59

windings of our narrow road, but unless we made
in his direction we should leave him far in the
rear. He had measured the distance, too, for I saw
him bend in the saddle and the horse sink deeper
into the sage as it lay down to the race. He was go-
ing to miss us surely, for we were driving like the
wind. Then he snatched off his sombrero, waved
it over his head, pulled hard right to take us far-
ther down on a curve, and sent his horse at a
dead run over a ridge of lava stones, a run to
rob the rest of my automobile journey of all its
terrors.

Our car slowed down, as the rider, a cowboy,
lurched into the road.

" I 've a dying man in here — " he began,
jerking his hand toward a shanty off in the sage.
"Will you take him to the doctor in Burns?"

The driver did not open his mouth, but turned
and looked at us. The car was crowded; both
running-boards were piled with traps and lug-
gage.

" He Js dying of appendicitis," said the horse-
man. "An operation to-night might save him."

The gray of the evening had already spread
over the desert, and at the ominous words it dark-

60 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

ened till it touched the sage with a loneliness
that was profound.

One of us would have to get off in the sage
and give the dying man a place, and I, for every
reason, was the one to do it. Must I confess that
something like fear of that far-circling horizon,
of the deep silence, of the pall of gray sage and
shadow took hold upon me ! Dying ? A man —
yonder — alone ?

Just then the second car, which we had passed
some distance back, came up, and a long, lean
man in a linen duster, who had eaten with me at
the road-house, hearing the story, hurried with us
over to the shack.

" 1 5m a doctor," he said, leaving me unstrap-
ping some luggage on the car, as he entered the
door. He was out again in a minute.

" On the wrong side. Bad strain in the groin,
that 's all. He '11 soon be in the saddle," — and
we were racing on toward Burns, the purring of
the engine now a song of distances, of wide
slumbering plains of sage and sand, and, over-
head, of waking stars.

The long desert dusk still lingered, but lights
were twinkling as we slowed through the last

FROM BEND TO BURNS 61

sandy ruts into the main street of Burns. We
were met by the local game wardens and by
some of the citizens of the town. Our talk was
for to-morrow, Saturday, night. There was a
"Booster Meeting" on for to-night. The next
day I picked up on the street a little flyer.

TONIGHT

TONAWAMA THEATRE

The Harney County Rod and Gun Club

Invites their friends to meet with
them at Tonawama Hall tonight at
8.30 to listen to a talk by State
Game Warden W. L. Finley, who
is accompanied here by Prof. Dallas
Lor Sharp. A special invitation is
extended to the ladies.

Watch For Big Balloon Ascension Wednesday

The ladies came ; the children, too. Not all of
the thousand souls of Burns were out, for they had
had the "Booster Meeting" the night before;
but there was a considerable part of them out, to
hear of the fish, the thirty thousand trout fry which

62 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

were coming over the desert at the town's expense
to stock the Silvies River and the creeks about
Burns. I say at the town's expense ; at the ex-
pense, rather, of the Rod and Gun Club. But
everybody belonged to the Rod and Gun Club.
We had telegraphed our coming, and the gift
of the fish, if the town would freight them in.
The citizens got themselves together, raised the
one hundred and twenty-five dollars, sent one of
their men out with a five-ton truck to meet us at
Bend. But the fish train was delayed, and we had
come on ahead, leaving the truck to follow when
the fish should get in. By this time, however,
they should have been in Burns.

Yes, we had seen their man. He had come
through to Bend. And the fish ? They had been
sidetracked at The Dalles, but were on the road —
had arrived at Bend, no doubt, at 9.45 last night,
and must be now nearly in. Yes — they could
certainly expect them by early morning, barring
accidents — a fine lot of fingerlings, rainbows,
silversides, and Eastern brook trout — forty cans
of them !

It was an enthusiastic meeting in spite of the
aired grievances of many of the Club against the

FROM BEND TO BURNS 63

tightening game laws, for which the warden was
largely responsible. Enthusiastic, and decidedly
enlightened too, it seemed to me, by the time it
closed, and the warden had had a chance to ex-
plain the meaning of the relations between the
sportsman, the game, and the State, and to en-
force his points with that great load of young fish
coming yonder over the desert.

"Finley," said I, after the meeting, "it's a long
haul for fish."

"So it is," he replied.

" Suppose they don't arrive in good shape ? "

" I was thinking of that ; the long stop at The
Dalles, to begin with; then this desert! They
were shipped from the hatchery Friday. To-mor-
row 's Sunday. They '11 never make it ! "

We said no more. There was a good deal at
stake for the game warden in this little town of
Burns, the center of influence over a wider and a
richer game country than can be found, I believe,
anywhere else in the United States, fed as it is
by the great Malheur Lake Reservation at the
mouth of the Silvies, a few miles below.

At twelve o'clock that night I looked out into
the sky. The stars were shining in the clear dark,

64 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

and a strong wind was blowing cold from the
desert. The truck had doubtless been on the
road now for twenty-four hours. Where was it
with its living freight, its forty cans of young
fish, its two wardens, dipping, dipping all day, all
night, to aerate the water and keep the fry alive ?
Those men had had no sleep all Friday night,
none all day Saturday; they would get none to-
night— all night. And the driver, the dusty,
shock-headed driver who had met us at Bend !
What did it mean to drive that heavy truck, with
its perishing load, at top speed, without relief or
sleep, over the tortuous trail and pulling sands
of the High Desert clear to Burns! And all for a
few thousand fish ! They had been on the road
for twenty-four hours. Should they arrive before
morning there still could be no rest for the war-
dens, who must go from can to can dipping, dip-
ping, dipping, till the fish were put into the
streams !

It was the dead of night, and away yonder,
miles and miles over the starlit plain they were
coming, a driver and a pounding engine fighting
every dragging foot of the way, and two ex-
hausted wardens fighting every dragging minute

FROM BEND TO BURNS 65

of the time for the freight in their care ! Moving
among the crowded cans in the lurching, plung-
ing car, they were dipping with one hand, hold-
ing hard with the numbed fingers of the other,
the desert wind piercing them and, at midnight,
freezing their fingers to the metal, and coating
them with ice as the water slopped and splashed
upon their clothes. And this in July !

It was a cruel haul. But it is the Western way;
and it is all in the day's work.

At six o'clock the next morning, Sunday, we
scanned the sagebrush to the west for a sign of
the coming car. There was no cloud of dust on
the horizon. None at eight o'clock. None at ten.
Noon came and went. Little groups of men
gathered at the corners of the street or wandered
in to talk with us at the " hotel." Buckboards
and automobiles from distant ranches were wait-
ing at the garage to take a can, or two cans, up
and down the river twenty, thirty, forty miles
away, when the truck should get in. The street
was full of people — picturesque people, pure
Americans all of them — " riders," homesteaders,
ranchers, townspeople, waiting for the fish-car.
The local baseball nines announced a game ; the

66 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

local band came out to escort'them to the grounds,
and, to the tune of " There '11 be a Hot Time in
the Old Town To-night," went down to the field
to play until the car should come.

Four o'clock. I had ceased to look or care.
My one hope now was that the car would not
get in, that it was a total wreck somewhere in the
hopeless sagebrush of Crook County, where the
road, I remembered, was next to impassable. They
had mercifully had a break-down, I was thinking,
when there came a clatter of hoofs, a yelping of
dogs, a shout, a loud chug-chugging* and up to the
hotel steps ground the truck, as grim an outfit as
ever pulled in from a desert.

With the town a-trailing, the car went on to
the garage, where the water was quickly changed
and iced down, the ranchers given their allot-
ments of the young fish, and the unclaimed cans
reloaded and hurried out to the nearest running
stream.

But it was too late. I emptied the first can, and
a little swirl of tiny whitish fish curled into an
eddy and sank slowly to the bottom. One of
them darted away — another keeled, curved out
on its side, gasped, gulped the water, snapped

FROM BEND TO BURNS 67

himself into life at the taste, and swam weakly
off — two out of eight hundred ! It was so with
every can.

We went back to the hotel. The driver of the
truck, his clothes, hair, and skin caked with dust,
his eyes bloodshot, and fearful exhaustion fastened
upon his drawn face, dropped almost through my
arms to a box on the sidewalk.

"Damn it!" he muttered, more to himself
than to me, his arms limp, his head upon his
knees, " they can pay me for the gas, and that 's
all they shall do."

But he got his pay for his time also. The game
warden called the Rod and Gun Club together
that night, and handed them back a hundred dol-
lars, saying the State would foot the bill this time.
"You take the money," said he, "and we will
build some hatching troughs in Gary Garden
Creek with it to-morrow. I've telegraphed for
fifty thousand trout eggs in the eyed stage — you
can ship them in that stage round the world —
and a warden to come with them to show you
how they are hatched and planted. We will stock
Silvies River and every stream about Burns, and
do it now."

68 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

And so they did. In true Western style they
started that hatchery the next day, and before the
week had passed the work was done, the eggs
were on the way, every man in the town inter-
ested, and every man won over to the side of the
State in its fight for game protection and honest
sport.

It is a great country, that Oregon country, as
any one will say who makes the trip from Bend
to Burns.

IV

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT

IV
THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT

SAW the desert on the trip from
Bend to Burns ; I had some chance
to watch it in the days that fol-
lowed, as again by automobile we
pushed far out over the gray wastes.
We were bound for Silver Lake, off about
thirty miles in the sage, where the wardens had
discovered a small colony of American egrets
(Herodias egret to). As we left the signs of trail
and travel behind us and headed straight into the
desert, I saw that we were in a wilder, barrener
section than any we had crossed on coming in
from Bend. We were making the trip for white
herons — egrets — but I began to feel coyotes
about me in the sand and brush. I cannot explain
just what the feeling of coyotes is, but I am sure
you would have it out on the caked and crusty
sand near Silver Lake. Everything said wolf as
we sped silently along through the spaces of the
sage. The lean, wide desert looked wolf. The

72 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

deep silence spelled wolf. The black-tailed jacks
jumped wolf as they flashed from the jaws of
our own stalking car. And they ran as from
wolves, when, over a smooth alkali bottom, we
pushed up the throttle and sent the swift-footed
machine hard at their heels. But it was the air,
the aspect of things, rather, the sense of indescrib-
able remoteness, withdrawal, and secrecy ever re-
treating before us, that seemed to take on form as
something watchful, suspicious, inherently wild,
something wolf-like. This was the wildest stretch
of land, the most alien, that I had ever seen, and
it must be here, if anywhere in the Northwest,
that I should see the coyote, the desert wolf.

And I could see one, if anybody could, for I had
the help of all the imagination necessary. I had
grown up on wolves — book wolves. How many
scores of times have I been treed by them ! How
many more than scores of times have I been
forced to cut loose my lead-horse for the pack to fall
upon, while I galloped ahead through the snowy
forest toward the settlement! The homesteader
and the trapper have had small wolf experience
compared with mine. For night after night I have
heard the curdling cry of the pack, have been

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 73

driven deep down under the covers of the bed,
as the north wind went howling through the stiff
pines outside my window, or some neighbor's
dog sat baying at the moon.

It matters little what happens to a boy after he
has finished " Robinson Crusoe " and closed the
covers of "Bad Lands Bill; or, The Bucket of
Blood." It is too late for wolves after that. After
that he might be eaten alive by wolves without
knowing what was rending him. Years, growth,
knowledge, experience — what is it all but the
soul of childhood being clothed upon with clay ?
— the lolling, panting wolf-pack through the
timbered bottoms of the imagination taking shape
as a slinking coyote in the greasewood of the
desert? Blessed is the man who had packs of
wolves after him as a child, for his coyotes will
never become jackals and foxes, and if there is a
coyote in the desert he shall see a wolf!

But any one might see a coyote here. The crea-
ture's tracks were plain in the sand. He lurked be-
hind every rise we topped, in every gully we cut,
beyond every flat we crossed. By and by we
fled through the caked and cracked bottom of
some evaporated alkali lake, rounded a low rim

74 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

rock into a green meadow, or coulee, and sighted
the dull dead water of Silver Lake with its scalded
shores bare and bleaching in the sun. A low edg-
ing of rock, the broken footings of a wall, ran
around the shallow basin like a rude beading
about some vast pewter salver. The thick water
was rapidly shrinking. OIF in the middle lay
an island about a hundred acres in extent, at
one end of which, on the surface of the lake,
rested a great flock of white pelicans, and gleam-
ing like flecks of snow against the green willow
copse at the opposite end of the island perched
a few white herons. The warden stood speech-
less at the sight of snow-white birds in the wil-
lows — they had been so nearly exterminated by
the plumers, — and his wonder fell upon us all.
We had left the car behind the wall of rock,
allowing, for the first time, the absolute silence
of the desert noon to come upon us. It was a new
kind of silence to me, as utterly unlike any that I
knew as the desert itself was unlike any stretch
of my native landscape. One knows his silences
as well, and listens as often to them, as one
knows the voices of his birds, or the sounding
tongues of stream, or storm, or forest, or shore.

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 75

Take the three familiar silences of winter : the
sudden hush that falls at twilight on the coming
of the first frost; the breathless suspense, full
of foreboding, that awaits the breaking of a winter
storm ; the crystal stillness — that speech of the
stars — pervading earth and sky on a brilliant
frosty night ! These all differ from the summer
silences, as even the drowsy quiet of an August
noon over my Eastern fields differed from this
dearth, this death of sound here in the desert,
where the taut silence seemed drawn like shrunken
skin over the bones of the sand and sage.

As we picked our way across the broken rock
about the shore, a rattlesnake made the silence
shiver; an avocet flew up with a note of woe,
and then all was still again, the bones of cattle
which lay scattered over the shallow valley quite
as capable of stirring as any living thing in sight.
Yet there was something stirring — yonder — a
gray-brown shadow, far off on the alkali crust, a
loping, backward-looking figure which halts at
the edge of the brush, then leaps the rocky rim
and is lost — the coyote !

I stood staring after him when the automobile,
having also climbed the rocks, came up and

76 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

whirled us over the flats to the distant side of
the lake, where we were going to wade across to
the egret colony on the island. I was soon in the
water, stepping in the prints of the coyote which
plainly showed beneath the surface, deep in the
elastic, cement-like mud, and which led straight
for the colony of the egrets. I was about halfway
over, when a pistol shot rang out behind me and
I turned in my tracks to see a coyote scurrying
away from the automobile on three legs.

Doubtless it was the one that only a few min-
utes before I had seen disappearing in the sage
and rabbit-brush a mile away. He had followed
us, had seen us well into the lake, and, thinking
we all were gone, had trotted boldly out to in-
spect the car, the first automobile, I imagine, to
penetrate to this desert haunt of his. But our
driver was lying in the shade beneath the car,
watching, and when the coyote came within easy
range, fired at him, breaking his fore paw evi-
dently, by the way it dangled as the poor beast
spun about and dashed for the rocks.

He was a wolf, to be sure ; but a wolf, if not an
earth-born companion, is at least a fellow-mortal ;
and I turned again to following the clean, sharp

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 77

footprints in the ooze, sorry for the dangling paw.
It made no difference that the tracks led straight
to the precious egret rookery, where they showed
clearly enough what a scourge to the desert bird-
life the creature must be. Lodged in a part of the
willows was the body of a night heron, and un-
derneath a great trampling of tracks. The carcass
hung just out of the wolf's reach. A hundred
times he had leaped for it, as no doubt, a hundred
times he had crouched beneath the flimsy plat-
forms in the matted willows, waiting for a nestling
or an egg to fall. Out in the lupine and marginal
grass we found a Canada goose nest, the nest of a
Wilson's phalarope, and two or three mallards'
nests which he had rifled. All of this was to the
creature's discredit. I might heartily wish him
dead; but I could not see him running maimed
into the desert without pity and without protest
against the careless shot.

You cannot follow the wild trails far without
the conviction that the human hunter is the cruel-
est of all the beasts of prey. You will wonder if,
for every creature killed, one has not got away
wounded to die a dozen deaths in the brush. I
am frequently coming upon the maimed and

78 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

dying. Every woodsman and warden is reporting
them. You cannot follow the sportsman far
without foreseeing still longer closed seasons,
much stricter regulations of all shooting, and even
moral tests, and tests for marksmanship, before men
with guns shall be allowed to go without official
attendance into the woods. More than that, if
you will follow the sportsman far enough, you
will lose much of your taste for blood; you will be
forced to the conviction that the pursuit of wild
things no longer has its legitimate nor its most
thrilling consummation in the kill. By the very
nature of things there must be less killing, while,
at the same time, there is bound to be an ever
increasing. multitude of those who love to hunt,
and who may hunt but who must not kill; for
there is a better way, without the chance of mis-
ery, and without the certain extinction that dogs
the heels of the hunter as sure of his shadow.
We are individually responsible, even while we
put upon the State the burden for this better
mind.

The driver of our car only laughed when I
wondered how long the coyote with the broken
leg might live. " He '11 catch lizards and horned

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 79

toads and picket-pins," said the man; "you
need n't shed any tears over him. But the jacks
will have the laugh on him all right." So they
will, for they are his food, having been made for
the coyote as the shad-scale and the settlers' oats
were made for the jack. But they were made for
four-legged coyotes, not for those with only three
legs. The coyote works for a living, and he goes
hungry many a night with plenty of jacks about
him in the sage. Head as well as heels are neces-
sary to catch the rabbit for a jack-rabbit pie; and
if the coyote is a cunning, long-headed wolf, he
has the even chance of his hard desert life to
thank for it. The pursuer always has an advan-
tage over the pursued, a moral handicap granted
by Nature to offset the physical one allowed the
pace-maker — a narrow margin usually, and so
narrow between these two of the desert that,
while the coyote might pull down the jack in
a straightaway run, life for him at such a pace
would hardly be worth living. It is lean enough
at best.

As I watched the wind scoop and pile the sand
about the butts of the sagebushes, or saw the
white drift scud and curl across the open; as I

8o WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

smelled the alkaloid vapors rising from the lep-
rous lake, and felt the scurvy salt-grass and the
scabby crust crack under my feet, I could only
marvel at life — that the sagebrush and the jack
and the coyote could find a living in the wilds of
this desert death. So far as I could discover, there
was no live thing, not even algae, in the water of
the lake; but here and there the rib of some
starved steer, or a horn, protruding from the sur-
face, as other bones, in whitened heaps, lay scat-
tered about the shore. The white egrets and the
pelicans crossed the desert to Harney and Mal-
heur Lakes for their fishing. To find one's self
with four good feet in a land like this were des-
perate enough ; the odds are too many against the
coyote with only three.

One would know by the head and face of the
coyote that he is among the wisest and most capa-
ble of animals, schooled to privation and hardship,
and able to hold his own, not only with the
desert, but with the homesteader as well. He is
doomed to disappear, utterly perhaps, for he is
just enough larger than the fox and just enough
more of a nuisance in a settled community to
make himself the enemy of the farmer and the

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 81

rancher who might overlook the smaller trespass
of Reynard. Yet his presence seems needed upon
the desert, for though a killer of poultry and
lambs, and even of young calves, he is no such
plague to the farmer as is the jack rabbit, whose
only natural check, besides disease, he seems to
be. The coyotes, a few years ago, were numerous
about the town of Burns. We had gone thirty
miles into the desert before seeing this one at
Silver Lake. Left without their natural enemy,
not only the jacks, but the little ground squirrels,
or picket-pins, also, have so multiplied on the
farms about the town as to become a plague.
These squirrels are to be seen in the roads by
half-dozens; and I inspected one alfalfa meadow
that was literally honeycombed with their tunnels,
the crop so badly cut into that the damage could
be seen at a glance. The farmer can more easily
protect himself against the coyote than against
the rabbit and the picket-pin.

This does not settle the problem of the coyote ;
and he is only one item in the very complicated
and very serious problem of the unbalanced state
of things everywhere in nature due to our taking
over the affairs outdoors. That the sportsmen

82 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

and game wardens hate him is natural. The loss
of bird-life in the ten-mile range of a pair of
hunting coyotes must be fearful, and when the
ranges overlap, as usually they do, with two pairs
or three pairs of the keen, hungry brutes quarter-
ing the territory, nothing but the nests out of
reach in the trees can possibly escape. In the
story of " The Coyote of Pelican Point " I have
given an account of an exceptionally troublesome
creature that preyed upon the bird colonies of
Tule Lake southeast of the Klamath Lake Reser-
vation, threatening the annihilation of the birds
nesting in the grass about the shore and on the
low lava rocks of a point that ran into the lake.
The story is a story, the actual end of the creature
not being as there recorded, but the havoc he
wrought, and the difficulty experienced in trying
to kill him, his cunning and craft when traps were
set for him, and dogs sent after him, are in no
wise colored, the facts having been given me as
there put down. This fellow lay in the lap of
luxury, the abundant wading birds of the lake,
such as stilts and killdeer, and those swimmers,
like the ducks and geese, that build in the mar-
ginal grass, being his easy prey; the gulls and

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 83

other swimmers, such as terns and pelicans and
cormorants, escaping him, in most part, by tread-
ing down the tule islands in the middle of the
lake and on these rearing their young.

But it takes the wide prairie, or the desert, to
bring out the best in the coyote. He is the hunter
of the plains, the rich grass or stunted sage or
scattered rocks hiding him equally well, and
yielding him his meager but sufficient meat.
Fitted for the plains, he lives where almost any
other carnivore would die, combining in himself
the physical and mental characteristics of both
fox and wolf. Sagacity and endurance mark him,
and a peculiar ingenuousness, inquisitiveness per-
haps, that leaves his face without a trace of sav-
agery. He is pretty nearly a dog, and in fact is
the one member of his wild tribe that has a well-
developed bark. And, like the dog, he loves to
bark, the dusk and moonlight filling his soul with
a solemn music that every sojourner on the plains
has listened to. No more weird or haunting note
was ever heard, eerie, wistful, melancholy, as if
the inarticulate tongue would utter things unut-
terable, dim brute desires that our human tongues
long since have clothed with words. I have never

84 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

seen the timber wolf at home, nor ever heard his
" hunting song," but those who have tell me that
it is one of the fearful sounds of the forest, sinister
and savage. The little red fox that trots across my
fields daily, and that frequently "barks" outside
my window, has a voice as wild as the wolf's, a
raucous, raw, uncultivated, untrained yap which I
doubt if even the dogs of the neighboring farms
recognize as belonging to one of their tribe, so
indescribably alien does it sound, breaking in upon
the faint puff, puff of the engine off beyond the
woods, or the muffled passing of an automobile on
the distant highway, or the murmur of church bells
rising and falling over the fields. The coyote is
more wolf than fox, but more dog than wolf, and
his lonesome baying beneath the desert moon, so
strangely touched with sentiment, so filled with
longing, would blend better with the human
sounds of my twilight than it does with the sav-
age silence of the plains. It is a brute voice, but
so nearly human, as it calls to me across the sage
and shadows, that I could answer and, it seems,
be almost understood.

The coyote became a denizen of the desert, no
doubt, by necessity, the larger gray wolf, whose

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 85

tastes and habits were similar, taking the better
stocked timber and bottom lands and forcing the
coyote into the open prairie and the sage plains
to make whatever shift he might. He has been
equal to it, the hardness of his desert life, I like
to think, making a better wolf out of him. I say
wolf, and the better the wolf the more we may
hate him. But one cannot help admiring many of
his ways and traits.

The exigencies of desert life have made mu-
tual help and team-work necessary among the
coyotes, two of them hunting together more suc-
cessfully than one, a fact that perhaps explains
their mating and staying together from year to
year. It is generally supposed that coyotes mate
for life, the pair appropriating an old badger's
burrow, or even digging one of their own, and
then, with squatter's rights, taking for their own
hunting-grounds enough each way from their den
to support them. These haunts, of course, over-
lap, two or three pairs sometimes getting together
in a hunt ; but generally the coyote works alone,
or in single pairs, each pair's own range being
apparently respected by the near neighbors.
• There are few chapters of natural history more

86 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

interesting than those describing the team and
relay hunting of the coyote, especially when ante-
lope are the game. Dr. L. E. Hibbard, of Burns, an
authority on the wild life of the desert, told me
of a hunt of coyotes that he had a hand in, which
illustrates not only the cunning of the hunters,
but the remarkable love and courage of the
mother antelope as well.

Dr. Hibbard was in the desert for young ante-
lope and had been scouring the sage for hours,
when, coming up to the edge of a sharp rim rock
that dropped into a flat, he looked down upon the
thick sage and saw an old doe antelope with three
young ones which she was trying to hide. The kids
seemed to be about two weeks old — old enough
to be able to run with the mother, but for
some reason she was anxiously trying to conceal
them. Then he saw that one of the three was lame
and could not run, that this one was perhaps not
the mother's own at all, but a motherless cripple
that had adopted her or that she had adopted
and was trying to rear. Her own two (if these
two were hers) could have followed her ; it was on
account of the cripple that she was trying to hide
them. But they did not wish to hide. They were

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 87

too old. Speed had already come to their winged
legs, and speed was the very breath of their young
lives. Yet they must hide. She would stop and
nurse them — all three of them — and lie down
with them until they would separate and get out
of sight under the sage, or more generally on a
floe of rock similar in color to themselves ; then,
teetering, peeking, spying behind her, she would
edge quietly away, and steal off just like a poorly
trained human mother tiptoeing out of a room
from her sleeping child. She would not get far
before up would come their little ears, then their
noses, then up they would jump and make after
her.

Again she would lead them on until she found
a good hiding-place, then down they would go, the
whole sleeping-child performance gone through
with again, to be spoiled again by the restless
little kids hopping out of their beds and calling
" Mamma ! " Over and over mamma tried to hide
them, moving off the flat in her efforts, and down
a narrow valley, the watcher on the rim rock fol-
lowing her quite unobserved.

The repeated attempts had taken the antelope
several miles down the valley to where it opened

88 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

out into a wide sage flat. She had led them on for
perhaps a mile, when, coming to a dense patch
of rabbit-brush, she put them to bed again, this
time successfully, for immediately her legs began
to twinkle as, whisking past the hunter, hidden in
a low juniper some distance out in the flat, she
made off up the valley.

Marking the spot where the young were hid-
den, Dr. Hibbard was climbing down toward
them, when he heard a sharp blat and saw the
three young antelope tearing down the trail to-
ward him, the lame one falling a little behind.
At the same time he saw the old antelope, her
hair puffed, racing at top speed back toward him
and the coming young ones and, down a parallel
trail through the sage, running neck and neck
with the mother, three coyotes, who had evidently
been watching the whole affair from the edge of
the rim rock.

It was a race between the mother and the coy-
otes to reach the young ones first, though she kept
just in front of the wolves as if to keep them back
from the kids. But the coyotes were at her heels,
and as they neared the kids, one of the three
brutes, outrunning the others, came up at her

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 89

side and, cutting in ahead, leaped for one of
the little fawns. He seized it by the neck, but as
he did so he received a terrific shoulder stroke
from the mother, who, with a twist in midair,
leaped at him as he leaped at the kid. The blow
broke his hold upon the kid. It rolled over and
over, flashed to its feet without ceasing its for-
ward motion, and was off, while the mother, quick
after the shoulder blow, fetched the coyote a
racking dig in the ribs with all four of her sharp
hoofs that sent him spinning and snapping heels
over head in the sage.

Then the race for life was on again. The doe,
now leaving two of the kids to their wits and
their heels, hung at the side of the crippled one,
which the wolf had attacked. The coyote was
with her, watching for an opening; but her de-
fense was marvelous, she and the kid seemed
one, as hawk and sparrow seem one zigzagging
through the air. She literally covered him as
they darted along. But the little fellow's strength
was failing. Suddenly the wolf whipped under
the flank of the mother and with a long leap
again caught the kid by the throat, only again to
get the terrific shoulder blow and the raking

9o WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

broadside from her knife-like hoofs. She had
forced him to drop his prey the second time, the
kid never losing an instant in getting to his feet
and running on.

But he staggered now. The chase had been
going in a wide circle, bringing the runners
around somewhat near their starting-place, and
near to the two coyotes that had fallen behind,
who, fresh for the fray, started in with their com-
panion to finish the work. Meanwhile the two
other young antelopes had run off and hid — flat
to the ground somewhere, the invisible cap drawn
over them, the odorless wind blowing across
them — where the keen-eyed, keen-nosed coyote
would have to step upon them before he could
discover that they were not stones on the desert
sand.

The race was almost over, however, for the lit-
tle handicapped one, the mother bravely beating
off the wolf in her desperate fight to save the
bleeding, tottering thing. The coyote was still
afraid of her shoulder and her terrible hoofs, but
now merely dodged her strokes, growing bolder
as the kid came tottering to his knees, when
again he leaped and seized it.

THE SHADOW OF THE DESERT 91

At this point the companion of Dr. Hibbard
came shouting up and prevented the doe from
again attacking the wolf, which, hoping to escape
from the man, held his prey and flattened him-
self to the sand. But the hunter rushed at him
with stones, and the coyote, dropping the kid, ran
into the sage. The other two coyotes now joined
him, circling about the man, who was without a
gun, as they tried to find the little antelope. But
he finally drove them off. The poor little kid,
however, was dead, its throat torn by the fierce
fangs that the mother repeatedly had broken from
their fatal hold.

But the other two kids escaped — only to fall
later, perhaps to the same fangs. It was a close
call — as it will be the next time, as it always is
on the desert and here in my own Eastern wood-
lot, and elsewhere, everywhere. I did not see an
antelope in these deserts, though I traveled hun-
dreds of miles looking for them. I had to content
myself with studying a tame one at the Narrows,
that had been captured in the sage. Yet a few
months after my trip through the plains, the
State's wardens counted several hundred antelope
where I thought they must have become extinct.

92 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

The coyote and they have always dwelt together
on the desert, the hand of Nature giving differ-
ently, but giving evenly, to them both.

There used to be no shadow on the desert.
Death crossed; but only Life dwelt among the
rim rocks and the sage. The gray-brown shadow
that I had seen on the shores of Silver Lake was
no shadow at all ; it was a coyote. But that even-
ing as we left Silver Lake behind us and were
speeding out through the sage, we came upon
a straight, interminable line of squared pine stakes
set low in the sand, the trail of the surveyor
driven into the breast of the desert; and a long,
interminable line of stakes cast a long, intermin-
able shadow — the shadow of a coming railroad
that lay direct and dark across the plain.

V

ON THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR

ON THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR

[HE sedges were full of birds, the
waters were full of birds, the tules
were full of birds, the skies were
full of birds : avocets, stilts, willets,
killdeers, coots, phalaropes, rails, tule
wrens, yellow-headed blackbirds, black terns, Fors-
ter's terns, Caspian terns, pintail, mallard, cinna-
mon teal, canvas-back, redhead and ruddy ducks,
Canada geese, night herons, great blue herons,
Farallon cormorants, great white pelicans, great
glossy ibises, California gulls, eared grebes, West-
ern grebes — clouds of them, acres of them, square
miles — one hundred and forty-three square miles
of them !

I was beside myself at the sight — at the sound
— at the thought that such wild life could still
be anywhere upon the face of the earth, to say
nothing of finding it within the borders of my
own land. Here was a page out of the early his-
tory of our country ; no, an actual area of that

96 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

wild, unspoiled, unslaughtered country as the In-
dian knew it, as Lewis and Clark saw it on that
first trip across the continent.

The accounts of bird-life in early American
writings read to us now like the wildest of wild
tales — the air black with flocks of red-winged
blackbirds, the marshes white with feeding herons,
the woods weighted with roosting pigeons. I have
heard my mother tell of being out in a flock of
passenger pigeons so vast that the sun was dark-
ened, the birds flying so low that men knocked
them down with sticks. As a child I once saw
the Maurice River meadows white with egrets,
and across the skies of the marshes farther down,
unbroken lines of flocking blackbirds that touched
opposite sides of the horizon.

That was years ago. I had seen nothing like it
since ; nor did I ever again expect to see it. I had
heard of Malheur Lake, when, some few years
ago, the naturalist through whose efforts it was
made a Federal reservation visited me and told
me about it. He even brought photographs of its
bird-colonies. But words and pictures gave no
conception of the extent of its uncrowded crowds
of life. For what could a camera do with one

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 97

hundred and forty-three square miles of swim-
ming, winging, crying birds ?

Lake Malheur Reservation is in the southeast-
ern quarter of Oregon, and is only one of several
such wild-life sanctuaries within the borders of
that great commonwealth. Indeed, the work being
done by Oregon for the protection of wild life
seems almost past belief to one used to the small
things of the Eastern States. And the work there
has but just begun! In 1912 the private game
" refuges," where the State Game Warden has en-
tered into contracts with owners of private land,
covered an area of 143,789 acres. In addition to
these small refuges there are six vast state reser-
vations, set aside forever by the Legislature for
game and bird protection, covering 1,698,320
acres, or 2654 square miles, an area more than
twice the size of Rhode Island. Besides these state
reservations are the four great Federal preserves :
Three Arch Rocks Reservation, off the coast; Kla-
math Lake Reservation, lying partly in Oregon
and partly in California; Cold Springs Reservation,
in Umatilla County, in the northeast; and Lake
Malheur Reservation, including the waters and
marshlands of Malheur and Harney Lakes, and

98 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

situated in the midst of protecting sagebrush
plains that stretch from the foothills of the Cas-
cades eastward to the canon of the Snake River at
the foot of the Rockies in Idaho.

Separated thus by the deserts from any close
encroachment, saved to itself by its own vast size
and undrainable, unusable bottoms, and guarded
by its Federal warden and the scattered ranchers
who begin to see its meaning, Lake Malheur
Reservation must supply water-fowl enough to
restock forever the whole Pacific slope.

For here in the marsh of burr reed and tule,
the wild fowl breed as in former times when only
the canoe of the Indian plied the lake's shallow
waters, when only the wolf and the coyote prowled
about its wide, sedgy shores. I saw the coyote still
slinking through the sage and salt grass along its
borders; I picked up the black obsidian arrow-
heads in the crusty sand on the edge of the sage
plain ; and in a canoe I slipped through the green-
walled channels of the Blitzen River out into the
sea of tule islands amid such a flapping, splashing,
clacking, honking multitude as must have risen
from the water when the red man's paddle first
broke its even surface.

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 99

No, not quite such a multitude, for there was
no snowy gleaming of egrets in the throngs over-
head. The plume-hunter had been before us, and
the glory of the lake was gone. That story is one
of the tragedies of bird-life, and vividly told in
William L.Finley's account of "The Trail of the
Plume-Hunter," in the " Atlantic Monthly" for
September, 1910. He says, writing of his and
Bohlman's journey into the Malheur country in
1908: —

"We had hunted where one might think no
human being had ever been, but long before we
had traveled over these apparently unknown re-
gions, plumers had preceded us. We followed in
their trails. We camped where they had camped.
We had traveled hundreds of miles exploring the
haunts where white herons used to live, but up to
the summer of 1908 we had not seen a single one
of these birds.

" This is historic ground for the bird man. In
the early seventies the well-known ornithologist,
the late Captain Charles Bendire, was stationed
at Camp Harney on the southern slope of the
Blue Mountains, straight across the valley from
where we stood. He gave us the first account of

ioo WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

the bird-life in this region. He saw the wonder-
ful sights of the nesting multitudes. He told of
the colonies of white herons that lived in the wil-
lows along the lower Silvies River. There was
the river itself winding across the valley through
sage, rye-grass flats, and tule marshes, its trail
marked by a growth of willow and alder.

" Two days ago we had followed this trail, and
searched out these places to photograph the white
heron. As we approached the trees, said to be
alive with birds, all was silent.

" ' We 're on the wrong trail again,' my com-
panion had suggested ; but pushing through the
willows I saw big nests in the trees on both sides
of the river. Strange to say, not a single bird ! I
clambered up to one of the lower nests, and
found a rough platform of sticks upon which lay
the bleached bones of two herons. I climbed an-
other and another. Each home was a funeral
pyre.

"'Epidemic?' said my companion.

"'Yes, of plume-hunters !' I retorted.

" Here was a great cemetery in the silence of
the marsh. But one nest was inhabited. A long-
eared owl was in possession sitting on five eggs.

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 101

As we approached, she spread her wings, and left
without a sound. Ill-omened creature brooding
eggs and bones!

"Standing here high above the valley, with
my field-glass I picked out the very spot of this
great bird-massacre that we had visited.

" ' I hope we find no more like that,' said my
companion as he tightened the camera-straps
about his shoulders, and started off down the trail
toward the lake.

" We were both confident that somewhere down
in that distant sea of green tules, we could find
at least one place where white herons were nest-
ing.

"We outfitted for a week's trip, and set out
down the spring branch. This time we kept a
straight course to the north until we reached the
main body of the lake. All day long we hunted
and watched the birds, lining them with our field-
glasses as they flew back and forth over the lake.
We saw no signs of white herons.

" That day we found a colony where the great
blue heron nested. White herons were formerly
common here, both species nesting together. Not
a single white bird left !

102 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON:

"We spent the next four days here and there
through the vast extent of tule islands and water,
searching and keeping watch all day, trying to
find white herons. Late one afternoon we came
to a place where another big colony of blue her-
ons was nesting. We had been seeking this place.
Malheur Lake is divided in several parts by the
long lines of tule islands. We were in the north-
ern part. The colony was on two long tule islands
that lined up with Pine Knob and the east end
of Wright's Point. On the north end is a big
canebrake.

"We sat in the boat at the edge of the cane-
brake, and watched the big birds as they sailed
over, dropped in, and departed. We were tired
from the long day's search. I did not then know
the story as I know it now : but hidden in the
end of this canebrake a hunter had had his blind,
ten years before.

" That summer of 1898 was eventful in white-
heron history here on Malheur Lake. Early in the
season two men had arrived at Narrows, bought
lumber, and built a flat-bottom, double-ended
boat. They set out from Narrows with a small
outfit. They fought mosquitoes day and night as

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 103

we had ; they drank the alkali water ; they slept
in the boat or on muskrat houses while they
hunted up and down the waters of the lake and the
tule islands. They saw the great flocks of white
pelicans, cormorants, terns, gulls, grebes, and
other birds. They saw the white herons in slow,
stately flight wherever they went, but it was not
till after several days that they located the big
colony here on the island by the canebrake, the
greatest colony they had ever seen. What a sight
it must have been, thousands of these birds, daz-
zling white in the sun, coming and going from
the feeding-grounds, and hovering over their
homes !

" On all sides were the homes, built up a foot or
two from the surface, each having three or four
frowsy-headed youngsters or as many eggs. At
each end of the colony a plumer sat hidden in his
blind. At the first crack of the gun, a great
snowy bird tumbled headlong near its own nest.
As the shot echoed across the lake, it sounded the
doom of the heron colony. Terror-stricken, on
every side white wings flapped, till the air was
completely filled. Shot followed shot unremit-
tingly as the minutes passed into hours. Still the

104 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

heron mothers came to hover over this scene of
death and destruction. Mother-love was but the
lure to slaughter.

"By two o'clock in the afternoon, the day's
shoot ended. It took the rest of the day for the
hunters to collect the dead and take the plumes.
Stripping the plumes is rapid work. It takes but
the slash of the knife across the middle of the
back, a cut down each side, and a swift jerk.

" Long after dark the plumers heard the steady
quacking clatter of young herons crying to be fed.
Far into the night, hoarse croaks sounded over the
still lake, greetings of those birds that had spent
the day fishing in distant swamps. It argued
good shooting again for the morrow.

" The second day was a repetition of the first.
Heron numbers thinned rapidly. Here on these
two islands, the plumers harvested a crop that
yielded twelve hundred dollars in a day and a
half. They collected a load of plumes worth
their weight in gold. Were the California days of
'49 much better ?

" Malheur has seen many such massacres, but
none so great as that. Little did we know of these
facts as we sat watching the blue herons coming

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 105

and going, expecting to find at least a few white
herons somewhere about the locality.

" After hunting for seven days we returned to
camp for more provisions, and set out to visit
another part of the lake. This time we stayed out
for nine days, and saw — two white herons ! At
the time we thought these must be part of a group
that nested somewhere about the lake; yet more
likely they were a single stray bird that came our
way twice. I am satisfied that of the thousands
of white herons formerly nesting on Malheur, not
a single pair of birds is left."

It may have been two birds that they saw and
not one. For he has not told all of the story
yet; how in the summer of 1912 he received
a telegram saying white herons (the American
egret) had been seen passing over the marshes of
Malheur; nor how we set out from Portland for
Burns; nor how, away off on an island in the
alkali water of Silver Lake, some fifty miles in
the desert from Malheur, we found the birds —
a colony of a dozen pairs, numbering with the
young about twenty-eight birds all told; nor
how —
• But that is for him to tell, if he will. For if the

io6 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

egret is ever again seen flying over the inland
waters of the Pacific coast, it will be due to Wil-
liam L. Finley, to his discovery of the slaughter
on his trip into the Malheur in 1908, and to his
efforts which made Malheur a wild-bird reserva-
tion.

But was it, we wonder, one bird or two that
he saw winging over the lake in 1908 ? If two
birds, were they male and female ? and were they
the last two ? and is this small colony which we
discovered four years later in Silver Lake, the
seed of that last solitary pair? Could it have been
that the race was so nearly cut off in all this part
of the world? and does it mean that slowly now,
with the new protection of these better times, the
egret will come back to the willows along the
Silvies and at Clear Lake, and to the islands in
the canebrake of the Malheur?

I think so. In the willows of Silver Lake, I
counted twenty-eight birds. These are enough if
they are given a chance. The life of the species,
however, does not hang upon this perilously
slender thread. Along the Gulf and Southern
Atlantic States, and in the Middle West, small
colonies are reported as surviving, mere handfuls,

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 107

where the plume-hunter found immense rooker-
ies. Bird-lovers the world over are watching these
remnants with intense concern. Nowhere were
the herons as nearly wiped out, it appears, as in
Oregon ; and nowhere will their escape and ulti-
mate restoration seem more of a miracle.

But desert and marsh and even my little wood-
lot are full of miracles. The ways of Nature are
not past finding out ; she does not move so mys-
teriously as amazingly, her wonders to perform.
She could not restore the American egret without
a pair to work with. She never could use crows
for the purpose. But given the pair of birds,
then the loaves and fishes become snowy, winged
things, gleaming above the marsh by thousands,
and decked in bridal dress of surpassingly lovely
plumes.

While here on Malheur I witnessed a sight
among the grebes, that gave me further reason
for my faith in the resources of Nature, open as
the happening may be to a contrary interpreta-
tion.

On the day of our arrival at the town of
Burns the wardens of Malheur met us with the re-
port of a new grebe colony (these birds had also

io8 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

nearly been exterminated by the plume-hunter),
which they had discovered only the day before
off in the lake. We had ridden across the desert
that afternoon in the teeth of a stiff wind, and the
wardens, anxious to show us the new colony,
were greatly concerned for fear that this wind
might wreck the nests exposed to its sweep across
the wide level of the lake.

For it was nesting-time and the colony had
built far out on the open water in a close, contin-
uous line a mile long and three hundred yards
wide, — a community of twenty-four hundred
floating nests.

The figures are true. The wardens actually
staked off the colony, measured it, and literally
counted the nests. I paddled along its length
myself, and while I did not count, I did believe
their figures.

It was to visit this colony of grebes that we
wound our way through the narrow turnings of
the Blitzen River out into the wider maze of the
vast lake, where there was nothing to be seen but
water and tules — and birds, myriads of birds.
But the wardens had blazed a trail by tying the
tule-tops together into big knots, which we could

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 109

see from island to island ahead of us as we pad-
dled along.

This was on Monday. It was on Thursday the
week before that the wardens had found the col-
ony; and now, as we came out of the mouth of
the Blitzen, we ran straight into a grebe colony
of over a hundred nests that was not there at all
four days before. One of the wardens, who was
in the canoe with us, thought we must be off the
course. But here were his knots in the tules. The
nests had been built, all of them, since Thursday,
and most of them were already with eggs.

There must be some mistake, I thought, and
turned to watching the birds ; for it was not the
nests that interested me half so much as the anx-
iety of the grebes at discovering us. Every one
began hurriedly pulling the wet tule stems and
milfoil of the nest over her eggs to hide them
before we should come up, working against her
fears, and at the risk of her life, to save her
eggs — to protect the seed of the race !

A racial instinct, you say, only a race act, every
bird doing as every other bird did that had eggs.
True, but here, as with the murres on Three-Arch
Rocks, there was plainly individual action, deep

no WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

individual concern, the mother feeling, holding
some of the birds to their duty long after others
had taken wing in fright.

To rob the animals of individuality — to re-
duce them to automata, acting mechanically ac-
cording to inherited race instincts, is to reduce
all life to grass and the grass almost to hay.

" Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,

The periwinkle trailed its wreaths,
And 'tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes."

And 't is my further faith that every bird and ani-
mal and insect enjoys the air it breathes, and loves
and hates and woos and fights and suffers, not in
the same degree, but somewhat after the manner
of humans.

" To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran."

I, too, am an automaton, a wheel in a great race-
machine. I do certain things because the race has
done them and continues to do them. Perhaps I
have never done anything that the race has not
done. Perhaps I am my whole race. Perhaps I
have been in my development, since I was con-
ceived, all the races down to the single-celled

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR in

amoeba. Yet I am; and the race is; but as for
the race, I can say, " Go to ! "

So the individual grebe is. The sight of these
hundred feverishly pulling down the walls of their
nests to cover their eggs was a very human sight,
poignant, personal, and not the mechanics of race
instinct at all.

The grebe builds a floating nest out in the
open water. All over the bottom of the clear
lake, which averaged about four feet in depth,
grew the long, trailing, mosslike water-milfoil, its
whorled leaves and purple stems giving a faint
glow of color to the water as we looked down
into it. The grebes dive to the bottom and drag
up this milfoil into heaps, or cocks, about six feet
across on the bottom. The cocks are barely able
to float their tops above the surface. Upon the very
peak of this cock they hollow out a nest about
the size of a man's hat, building up the walls with
dead tule stems until the eggs rest just out of the
water, though many of them are partly sub-
merged. The nests are usually so close together
that their wide bases touch below, but otherwise
they are entirely unanchored and at the mercy of
wind and wave.

ii2 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

This was the cause of the wardens' anxiety, and,
halting only long enough to count the new nests
and get some photographs at the mouth of the
river, we pushed on up the lake.

I shall try to describe that trip sometime — the
long lines of white water kicked up by the rising
birds; the clapping of wings, the splashing of
feet ; the tule islands trodden flat by the rookeries
of young gulls and pelicans and cormorants ; the
diving of the grebes about us ; the soaring of the
majestic pelicans far above us — but not any of
that now.

We had paddled for an hour or two when on
the water in the distance appeared a wide wash
of pink, as if the clouds of a sunset were reflected
there. It was the purple of the milfoil in the nests
of the great grebe colony. We quickened our
stroke, and as we drew nearer, marveling at the
extent of it, we were struck with the silence at
our coming and the absence of birds in the nests.
A few were on wing; a few were seen covering
their eggs ; that was all. There was no clangor of
the crowd, no diving multitude about us — but
such a sight of destruction as I hope never again
to see !

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 113

Of the twenty-four hundred nests not three
hundred were left. Tossed and torn, the nests had
been driven by the high waves and the strong
wind back upon themselves, in some places sev-
eral deep, their pale white eggs by thousands
scattered through the tangled debris or floating
free in the water.

The rookery was an utter wreck. The birds,
with the exception of a few pairs, had abandoned
it — had gone, some hundred pairs of them, down
to the mouth of the Blitzen and there started the
new colony which we had encountered coming
out.

I don't know which impressed me more — the
fearful loss and waste of life here, or the thought
of that quick recovery at the mouth of the
Blitzen.

The birds had shown no judgment in choosing
this place for their rookery. No more exposed
position could have been found in the entire
lake. The colony had acted blindly, stupidly;
had learned nothing as a colony in their million
ages of nest-building, nor ever shall learn. But
how swift to begin again! How fertile in re-
source ! How absolute to command ! With the

n4 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

nest done, the season's clutch of eggs laid, and
incubation started, to see it all destroyed, and in
less than a week to have built again and to have
summoned the secret forces of life with new eggs
for the new nests !

Can a man be born when he is old *? No, be-
cause there is not a need for such rebirth. But if
there were need, if that were the only way of pre-
serving the race, the thing would be done.

The autumn winds strip my trees of their with-
ered leaves, and the buds swell and leaf out again
in the spring. That is the natural cycle. There is
nothing mysterious about that. The caterpillars
stripped them of their green leaves in July. The
naked things shrank and shuddered in the burn-
ing heat, the sap standing still in their veins.
Then, instantly laying hold with their manifold
fingers on the subtile threads of life, they wove
and fashioned and put on a new mantle, a mira-
cle, that the span of the summer might be crossed,
and the seed carried over for another spring.

It was so with the grebes. It is so with all life
— each living thing a multitude, each individual
its whole race latent — potent if need be.

A bare handful of the former myriads of the

THE MARSHES OF MALHEUR 115

white herons, or egrets, are left on Malheur. I
hope to make the trip again from Bend to Burns,
and from Burns down to Malheur Reservation, in
order to see the gleaming, shimmering flocks of
the snowy creatures that I am sure shall be pass-
ing to and from their island rookeries in the cane
and tules at the head of the marshy lake.

VI

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD

VI
THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD

ko more interesting group of animals
can be found the world over than
those in the zoological garden of
the average farmyard. The history
of their domestication is exceed-
ingly, humanly interesting; but still more inter-
esting is the phenomenon itself — what it has
wrought in the animals, and what it has left un-
changed. For if domestication has not changed
the leopard's spots, it is because the leopard has
never been domesticated. There is little in the
style of spots that domestication cannot change.
Color, size, and shape are as clay; habits and
tempers, even, have been made over. But not
the creature itself, not the wild instinctive thing
within the fur or the feathers : for this has hardly
been touched by domestication.

That some species of animals are more amena-
ble than others, are predisposed to domestication,
is evident. Nothing in wild life is more amazing

120 WHERE ROLUS THE OREGON

than the suddenness and the completeness of the
elephant's yielding to the howdah and the ankus
— as if his slow years had been only a waiting for
some rajah to take him from his jungle. The
zebra, on the other hand, though a true horse, has
never been tamed, or rather, domesticated. He is
irredeemably wild. So is the Asiatic ass, which
stood to the ancient Hebrew writers for the very
symbol of the free and untamable; whereas the
Nubian wild ass (the parent of our deeply do-
mesticated donkey) is readily brought to harness.
For many reasons, we are likely to add new
species from time to time to our domesticated
family. The establishment of fox-farms is pretty
sure, in the end, to yield a domesticated fox ; and
this may yet happen even to the bison, and to
many species of birds now wild. In Oregon the
China pheasant is almost a domesticated fowl,
and waits only to be clucked into the coop.
In a ride from Corvallis to Portland by train
through the Willamette Valley, just as the har-
vesting was done, I counted from my car-window
fifty-one flocks of these magnificent game-birds
feeding in the stubble-fields. They were often so
near the houses, and regularly so much a part of

'

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 121

the farms, as to seem like " tame villatic fowl."
And so, indeed, the farmers do look upon them,
jealously guarding and feeding the flocks in win-
ter and quick to resent any illegal shooting of the
birds. In some parts of the East the China pheas-
ant is as completely naturalized and almost as
much domesticated as in Oregon. Here about
me in Massachusetts the village folk are even
complaining that the birds are raiding their gar-
dens. They are too easily checked ever to be-
come a nuisance here as the rabbit did in Australia
or the mongoose has in Jamaica; but perhaps we
shall need to adopt them, domesticate them in
order to save them and protect ourselves against
them. They are pretty nearly as tame as the
pigeon and as ready for domestication as the
guinea or the turkey must have been.

But the tame turkey is essentially a wild bird,
and none of our farmyard creatures shows more
strikingly than he how hardly feather-deep is the
domestication which he wears. He has learned
nothing new in his hundreds of years in the farm-
yard (he was domesticated by the Indians of
Mexico long before the "discovery" of America) ;
nor has he forgotten one of the old wild things

122 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

he came from the woods knowing. He accepts
the fenced and cluttered farm, turns it into the
tall, timbered river-bottom, and lives his primal
forest life among the corn-cribs and Baldwin ap-
ple trees as of old. He has not turned aside by
one quill's breadth from his original wild ways.
He roosts in the bare tops of the apple trees or
along the ridge-pole of the barn, as if the jaguars
and panthers were still prowling for him; he wakes
in the night, gobbles, ducks, and spreads his round
targe of a tail over him to ward off the swoop of
the imaginary owl. He breaks the hen's egg out
of jealousy, in order to prolong the honeymoon ;
she steals her nest from him and covers her eggs
in leaving the nest, just as she used to; and when
the small bands of any neighborhood are gathered
into a flock to be driven to market, as they still
are in the less settled parts, the old flock-spirit
returns to them, and they fall into the odd migra-
tion habits of their wild forebears, who used to
congregate in vast numbers in the autumn and
follow the course of the river-banks, sometimes
across several States, as they fed on the autumn
mast.

The early accounts of their hesitancy and in-

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 123

decision when stopped in their march by a river
one can see paralleled any winter afternoon on
the farm when the turkeys start for their roost in
the tree-tops. Their absurd efforts to summon the
will to fly — into the trees, on to the fence — oc-
cupied the wild flock for days together when the
flight was to be across a river. On the other hand
the wild turkey was as obstinate and as " set " as
it was indecisive. So is the tame turkey. One of
my neighbors missed a hen turkey for several
days. Suspecting a stolen nest she began a search.
At last she found the hen, as she expected, on the
nest, but with wings and tail hard-pressed to the
earth keeping off a full-grown skunk that was
trying to push under her for the eggs. It was
evident that she had been repeatedly attacked,
perhaps for the several days, but, without food
or sleep, had kept her place, beating back the
spoiler at the risk of her own life. This trait often
takes a peculiarly irritating turn, as the farmer well
knows. Some time ago the newspapers told the
story of a flock of turkeys that were being driven
to market through a Southern town, when they
took fright and flew into the tops of tall trees.
There they stayed, defeating every effort to bring

i24 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

them down. The owner, in despair of reaching
the market in time, appealed to the town and
sold each man his Thanksgiving turkey in the
tree, the purchaser to shoot his particular bird or
otherwise to fetch him down.

In a chapter of " Winter " I have described a
turkey-drive in New Brunswick as it was de-
scribed to me by a friend who saw it, — how the
turkeys, suddenly taking a notion to go to roost,
flew upon a little chapel and, in spite of the driv-
ers, roosted there, literally covering the building,
roof, belfry, window ledges, and portico, as fast
as they were pushed off at one place coming back
at another.

The cat, again, is as wild a case as the turkey.
Stroke kitty the wrong way and she spits. Yet
she sleeps in the kitchen by the fire. What of it ?
The very lap of her mistress has not counted with
the cat in her. The cat in kitty is wild to the tip
of her twitching tail. Watch her — if she has n't
already scratched you — as, crouched in the grass,
she takes her way toward some unsuspecting bird.
A shiver runs through you. You can feel her
claws — so tiger-like is she, so wild and savage,
so bent on the kill. Or come upon her at dead

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 125

of night in some empty, dimly lighted alley. She
is on the prowl. The light of the narrow, gulch-
like street falls on her jyith a startling largeness
and marks her silent shadow on the flags. She
moves stealthily out to the corner, and, well within
the shadows, stops to glance furtively up and down
the open cross-street. But the people are all within
the shut doors. There is no one lost on the streets
for her to devour.

The other day I stood in the edge of the woods
when a foxhound, hot on the fresh trail, came
baying through the trees toward me, his whole
body working convulsively, in an agony of eager-
ness, so absolute, single, and compelling was his
one wild, masterful desire. He saw nothing, heard
nothing, because he was tasting warm scent. I
spoke to him, but I might as well have spoken
to a tree. Neither hunger nor fear could stop him.
He could not feel hunger or fear or weariness.
He had forgotten utterly — gone wild. I have
not infrequently seen the deep-chested foxhounds
coursing the hills, their baying a wild but meas-
ured and exultant music rolling through the hol-
lows, and, tagging hopelessly along behind them,
but yelping and, "ki-aiying" to split their penny-

126 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

whistles, a little fox-terrier and a — dog, a pa-
thetic bundle of dog that might once, far back,
have been part bull, or something. But the little
terrier, and his companion, the mill-ends mongrel,
the latter domesticated into something hardly dog,
still had enough of the wild in them to join the
pack and run their little domesticated legs almost
off in order to be in at the kill. " Out of unhand-
seled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and
Berserkers, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare,"
says Emerson. Out of the wolf at last has come
this little terrier and the mongrel; but never out
of them will wholly be eradicated the savage and
terrible wolf.

Out of the wild boar, too, have come all the
varieties of our domestic hogs, and just as the wild
boar's progeny are born to-day with longitudinal
stripes on their bodies, reverting to some striped
ancestor of the far past, so a litter of prize Chester
Whites, with pink spots on their cultivated faces
where the wild boar's snout used to extend, hark
back to the grizzled, tusked old sire of the forest
in so many of their pig ways as quite to bridge
the gap of their sojourn in parlor and pen.

None of our domestic animals is milder-eyed

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 127

or of a meeker mien than the cow. She is never
abject like the donkey; but centuries of gentling
and giving down have made her cowlike, until
she is in danger of forever losing her horns. She
is not in any danger of forgetting how to use
horns, however. More than once have I been
chased in the evening by the cow I had driven
peacefully to pasture in the morning. On one
occasion I narrowly escaped with my life from
the kindest of old cows, one which I had been
driving to the meadows all summer. Her new-
born calf was the trouble. She had hidden it
among the mallows, stationed herself near by
and waited for me, as a thousand years before
she had waited for the wolf or the bear. Her
swift and unexpected lunge was the very fury
of wildness.

Little as domestication has changed the indi-
vidual animal, it has changed still less the animal
group — the herd, the flock, the pack. The spirit
of the pack and herd spring from deep and primal
needs — common fear, or hunger, or the call of
kind to kind. The gregarious animal must be
separated from its clan to be domesticated. Al-
lowed to return to the herd or pack, it lapses

128 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

promptly into the wild state ; for the spirit of the
herd is essentially wild.

Our Western cattle are none of them native.
There is no wild native stock except the bison.
Our cattle are all European, and represent centu-
ries of careful breeding. I have never tried to
trace their several lines back to the aurochs, the
European bison, — if they can be traced, — but
the wild blood of that anarch old must have
ceased running in their veins long, long ago. Not
so his spirit in them. A herd of heavy, bald-faced
Herefords, just beneath their corn-fed coats, may
be found as wild and dangerous as a herd of
these wild buffalo.

We were trailing the "riders" of P Ranch
across the plains to a hollow in the hills called
the " Troughs," where they were to round up a
lot of cattle for a branding. On the way we fell
in behind a bunch of some fifty cows and year-
lings which one of the riders had picked up, and,
while he dashed off across the desert for a "stray,"
we tenderfeet drove on the herd. It was hot, and
the cattle lagged, so we urged them on. All at
once I noticed that the whole herd was moving
with a swinging, warping gate, with switching

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 129

tails, and heads thrown round from side to side
as if every one of them were watching us. We
were not near enough to see their eyes, but the
rider, far across the desert, saw the movement
and came cutting through the sage, shouting and
waving his arms to stop us. We had pushed the
driving too hard. Mutiny was spreading among
the cattle, already manifest in a sullen, ugly temper
that would have brought the herd charging us in
another minute, had not the cowboy galloped
in between us just as he did — so untamed, un-
afraid, and instinctively savage is the spirit of
the herd.

It is this herd-spirit that the cowboy on his
long cross-desert drives to the railroads most
fears. The herd is like a crowd, easily led, easily
excited, easily stampeded, — when it becomes a
mob of frenzied beasts, past all control, like the
spirit of the city " gang " at riot in the streets.

If one would know how thin is the coat of do-
mestication worn by the tamest of animals, let
him ride with the cattle across the rim-rock coun-
try of southeastern Oregon. No better chance to
study the spirit of the herd could possibly be
had. And in contrast to the herd, how intelligent,

i3o WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

controlled, almost human seems the plainsman's
horse !

I share all the tenderfoot's admiration for the
cowboy and his " pony." Both of them are neces-
sary in bringing a herd of four thousand cattle
through from P Ranch to Winnemucca ; and of
both is required a degree of daring and endur-
ance, as well as a knowledge of the wild animal
mind, that lifts their hard work into the heroic,
and makes of every drive a sagebrush epic — so
wonderful is the working together of man and
horse, the centaur come back ! So free and effect-
ive the body directed by the human intelligence
that fills and rules it like a soul.

From P Ranch to Winnemucca is a seventeen-
day drive through a desert of rim rock and grease-
wood and sage, that, under the most favorable of
conditions, is beset with difficulty, but which in
the dry season, and with a herd even approach-
ing four thousand, becomes an unbroken hazard.
More than anything else on such a drive is feared
the wild herd-spirit, the quick, black temper of
the cattle, that, by one sign or another, ever
threatens to break the spell of the riders' power
and sweep the maddened or terrorized beasts to

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 131

destruction. The handling of the herd to keep
this spirit sleeping is an anxious, and it may be
a thrilling, experience.

Some time before my visit to P Ranch in the
summer of 1912, the riders had taken out a herd
of four thousand steers on what proved to be one
of the most difficult drives ever made to Winne-
mucca. For the first two days on the trail the
cattle were strange to each other, having been
gathered from widely different grazing grounds,
— from Double O and the Home Ranch, — and
were somewhat clannish and restive under the
driving. At the beginning of the third day signs
of real trouble appeared. A shortage of water
and the hot weather together began to tell on the
temper of the herd.

It is early in the drive that the wild spirit
seems most liable to break out, before the drive
has settled to its pace and the cattle grown ac-
customed to the continuous and insistent author-
ity of the riders. If they can be carried safely
through the first three days, say the cattlemen,
there is comparatively little danger after that.

The drive from the P Ranch was started under
ill conditions. The first two days were safely

WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

passed, but the third day began ominously. The
line started forward at dawn, a hot early dawn,
and all day long kept moving, with the sun cook-
ing the bitter smell of the sage into the air, and
with sixteen thousand hoofs kicking up a still
bitterer cloud of alkali dust which inflamed eyes
and nostrils and coated the very lungs of the
cattle. The fierce desert thirst was upon the
herd long before it reached the creek where it
was to bed for the night. The heat and the dust
made slow work of the driving, and it was already
late when they reached the watering place, only
to find it dry.

This was bad. The men were tired, but the
cattle were thirsty, and Wade, the boss of the
" buckaroos," pushed the herd on toward the next
rim rock, hoping to get down to the plain below
before the end of the slow desert twilight. Any-
thing for the night but a dry camp !

They had hardly started on when a whole flank
of the herd, suddenly breaking away as if by pre-
arrangement, tore off through the brush. The
horses were as tired as the men, and, before the
chase was over, the twilight was gray in the sage,
making it necessary to halt at once and camp

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 133

where they were. They would have to go with-
out water.

The runaways were brought up and the herd
closed in till it formed a circle nearly a mile
around. This was as close as it could be drawn,
for the cattle would not bed down. They wanted
water more than they wanted rest. Their eyes
were red, their tongues raspy with thirst. The
situation was serious.

But camp was made. Two of the riders were
sent back along the trail to bring up the " drags,"
while Wade, with his other men, circled the un-
easy cattle, closing them in, quieting them, and
doing everything possible to induce them to bed
down.

They were thirsty; and, instead of bedding,
the herd began to " growl " — a kind of stifled
mutter in the throats of the cattle, low, rumbling,
ominous, as when faint thunder rolls behind the
hills. Every plainsman fears the growl, for it usu-
ally is a prelude to the " milling," as it proved to
be now, when the whole vast herd began to stir
— slowly, singly at first and without direction,
till at length it moved together, round and round,
a great compact circle, the multitude of clicking

134 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

hoofs, of clashing horns and chafing sides sound-
ing not unlike the rushing of rain across a field
of corn.

Nothing could be worse for them, for it would
only add to their heat and thirst. The cooler twi-
light was falling, but, mingling with it, rose and
thickened and spread the choking dust that soon
covered the cattle and shut out all but the dark
wall of the herd from sight.

Slowly, evenly, swung the wall, round and
round, without a break. I have never seen a mill-
ing herd and I can scarcely imagine its suppressed
excitement, the waking, the stirring of four thou-
sand wild spirits ! To keep this excitement in
check was the problem of Wade and his men.
And the night had not yet begun.

When the two riders had brought in the drags,
and the chuck-wagon had lumbered up with sup-
per, Wade set the first watch.

Along with the wagon had come the fresh
horses — one of them being Peroxide Jim, a sup-
ple, powerful, clean-limbed buckskin, a horse, I
think, that had as fine and intelligent an animal-
face as any creature I ever saw. Wade had been
saving this horse for emergency work. And why

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 135

should he not have been saved fresh for just such
a need as this? Are there not superior horses as
well as superior men — a Peroxide Jim to com-
plement a Wade *?

The horse knew the cattle business and knew
his rider perfectly ; and though there was nothing
like sentiment about the boss of the P Ranch
riders, his faith in Peroxide Jim was complete.

The other night-horses were saddled and tied
to the wheels of the wagon. It was Wade's cus-
tom to take his turn with the second watch; but,
shifting his saddle to Peroxide Jim when supper
was over, he rode out with the four of the first
watch, who, more or less evenly spaced, were
quietly circling the herd.

The night, for this part of the high desert, was
unusually warm. It was close, still, and without
a sky. The near, thick darkness blotted out the
stars. There is usually a breeze at night over these
highest rim-rock plains, that, no matter how hot
the day, crowds the cattle together for warmth.
To-night not a breath stirred the sage as Wade
wound in and out among the bushes, the hot
dust stinging his eyes and caking rough on his
skin.

136 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

Round and round rode the riders ; round and
round moved the weaving, shifting forms of the
cattle, out of the dark and into the dark, a gray
spectral line like a procession of ghosts, or some
morris dance of the desert's sheeted dead. But it
was not a line, it was a sea of forms; not a proces-
sion, but the even surging of a maelstrom of hoofs
a mile around.

Wade galloped out on the plain for a breath
of air and a look at the sky. If it would only
rain ! A quick, cold rain would quiet them ; but
there was no feel of rain in the darkness, no smell
of it on the air ; only the powdery taste of the
bitter sage.

The desert, where the herd was camped, was
one of the highest of a series of tablelands, or
benches; it lay as level as a floor, rimmed by
sheer rock, from which there was a drop to the
bench of sage below. The herd when overtaken
by the dusk had been headed for a pass descend-
ing to the next lower bench, but was now halted
within a mile of the rim rock on the east, where
there was a perpendicular fall of about three hun-
dred feet.

It was the last place an experienced plainsman

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 137

would have chosen for a camp ; and every time
Wade circled the herd, and came in between the
cattle and the rim, he felt the nearness of the
precipice. The darkness helped to bring it near.
The height of his horse brought it near — he
seemed to look down from his saddle over it,
into its dark depths. The herd in its milling was
surely warping slowly in the direction of the rim.
But this must be all fancy — the trick of the dark
and of nerves, if a plainsman has nerves.

At twelve o'clock the first guard came in and
woke the second squad. Wade had been in the
saddle since dawn, but as this second was his reg-
ular watch he stayed in the saddle. More than
that, his trained ear had timed the milling hoofs.
The movement of the herd had quickened.

If now he could keep them going, and could
prevent their taking any sudden fright! They
must not stop until they stopped from utter
weariness. Safety lay in their continued motion.
So the fresh riders flanked them closely, paced
them, and urged them quietly on. They must be
kept milling and they must be kept from fright.

In the taut silence of the stirless desert night,
with the tension of the herd at the snapping-point,

138 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

any quick, unwonted sight or sound would stam-
pede them. The sneezing of a horse, the flare of
a match, would be enough to send the whole four
thousand headlong — blind, frenzied, trampling
— till spent and scattered over the plain.

And so, as he rode, Wade began to sing. The
rider ahead of him took up the air and passed it
on until, above the stepping stir of the hoofs rose
the faint voices of the men, and all the herd was
bound about by the slow plaintive measures of
some old song. It was not to soothe their savage
breasts that the riders sang to the cattle, but rather
to preempt the dreaded silence, to relieve the
tension, and so to prevent the shock of any sud-
den startling noise.

So they sang and rode and the night wore on
to one o'clock, when Wade, coming up on the
rim-rock side, felt a cool breeze fan his face, and
caught a breath of fresh, moist wind with the
taste of water in it.

He checked his horse instantly, listening as the
wind swept past him over the cattle. But they
must already have smelled it, for they had ceased
their milling, the whole herd standing motionless,
the indistinct forms close to him in the dark show-

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 139

ing their bald faces lifted to drink the sweet wet
breath that came over the rim. Then they started
on again, but faster, and with a rumbling now
from their hoarse throats that tightened Wade's
grip on the reins.

The sound seemed to come out of the earth, a
low, rumbling mumble, as dark as the night and
as wide as the plain, a thick, inarticulate bellow
that stood every rider stiff in his stirrups.

But how dark was the night, and how thick
the smother of dust ! Nothing could be seen; and
the hoarse, choking bellow of the herd, as thick
as the dark and the dust, made all other sounds
impossible to hear.

Then the breeze caught the dust and carried
it back from the gray-coated, ghostly shapes, and
Wade saw that the animals were still moving in
a circle. He must keep them going. He touched
his horse to ride on with them, when across the
black sky flashed a vivid streak of lightning.

There was a snort from the steers, a quick clap
of horns and hoofs from far within the herd, a
tremor of the plain, a roar, a surging mass — and
Wade was riding the flank of a wild stampede.
Before him, behind him, beside him, pressing hard

140 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

upon his horse, galloped the frenzied steers, and
beyond them a multitude borne on, and bearing
him on, by the heave of the galloping herd.

Wade was riding for his life. He knew it. His
horse knew it. He was riding to turn the herd,
too, back from the rim, as the horse also knew.
The cattle were after water — water-mad — ready
to go over the precipice to get it, carrying horse
and rider with them. Wade was the only rider
between the herd and the rim. It was black as
death. He could see nothing in the sage, could
scarcely discern the pounding, panting shadows
at his side. He knew that he was being borne to-
ward the rim, how fast he could not tell, but he
knew by the swish of the brush against his tapa-
deros and the plunging of the horse that the
ground was growing stonier, that they were near-
ing the rocks.

To outrun the herd was his only chance for
life. If he could come up with the leaders he
might not only escape, but even stand a chance
of heading them off upon the plain and saving
the herd. There were cattle still ahead of him ;
how many, what part of them all, he could not
make out in the dark. But the horse knew. The

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 141

reins hung on his straight neck, where his rider
had dropped them, as, yelling and firing over the
wild herd, he had given this horse the race to win,
to lose.

They were riding the rim. Close on their left
bore down the flank of the herd, and on their
right, under their very feet, was a precipice, so
close that they felt its blackness — its three hun-
dred feet of fall !

Suddenly they veered and went high in the
air, as a steer plunged headlong into a draw al-
most beneath their feet. They cleared the narrow
ravine, landed on bare rock and reeled on.

A piercing, half-human bawl of terror told
where one of the animals had been crowded over.
Would the next leap carry them after him? Then
Wade found himself racing neck and neck with
a big white steer, which the horse, with marvelous
instinct, seemed to pick out from a bunch, and to
cling to, forcing him gradually ahead, till, cutting
him free from the bunch entirely, he bore him off
into the swishing sage.

The steers coming on close behind followed
their leader, and in, after them, swung others.
The tide was turning from the rim. More and

142 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

more were veering, and within a short time the
whole herd, bearing off from the cliffs, was pound-
ing over the open plains.

Whose race was it? It was Peroxide Jim's,
according to Wade, for not by word or by touch
of hand or knee had the horse been directed in
the run. From the flash of the lightning the horse
had taken the bit, had covered an indescribably
perilous path at top speed, had outrun the herd
and turned it from the edge of the rim rock, with-
out a false step or a tremor of fear.

Bred on the desert, broken at the round-up,
trained to think steer as his rider thinks it, the
horse knew as swiftly, as clearly as his rider, the
work before him. And he knew how to do it, or
could see in the dark how to do it, far better than
his rider. But that he kept himself from fright,
that none of the wild herd-madness passed into
him, is a thing for great wonder. He was as thirsty
as any of the herd ; he knew his own peril, per-
haps, as none of the herd had ever known any-
thing; and yet, such coolness, courage, wisdom,
and power !

Or was it only training *? More intimate asso-
ciation with the man on his back, and so, a further

THE SPIRIT OF THE HERD 143

remove from the wild thing which domestication
does not seem to touch ? Or was it all sugges-
tion, the superior intelligence above riding, not
the flesh, but the spirit ?

VII

THE BUTTERFLIES OF MOUNT HOOD

VII
THE BUTTERFLIES OF MOUNT HOOD

fow often one becomes the victim of
one's special interests ! I climbed to
the peak of Hood, looked down
upon Oregon and into her neighbor
States, saw Shasta far off to the
south, and Rainier far off to the north, and then
descended, thinking and wondering more about
a flock of little butterflies that were wavering
about the summit than about the overpower-
ing panorama of river and plain and mountain-
range that had been spread so far beneath me.
Or was I the victim, rather, of my inheritance ?
Was it because I happened to be born, not on a
mountain-peak eleven thousand two hundred and
twenty-five feet above the sea, but in a sandy
field at sea-level *? I was born in a field bordering
a meadow whose grasses ran soon into sedges and
then into the reeds of a river that flowed into the
bay; and I found myself on the summit of Hood

148 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

dazed and almost incapable of great emotion. So
I watched the butterflies.

Or was it that I lacked training? Might one
not need to climb Hood many times for the eyes
to grow used to seeing and the soul to feeling
such unwonted vastness of expanse, such unac-
customed and overwhelming depths *? I have
tried a hundred times to recall the emotion of my
first moment on the summit, and either I had
none, or what I had was an utter weariness of
body and a depression of spirit due to a sense
of my inability to meet the moment emotionally.
I felt in spirit as I felt in body, the body perhaps
having much to do with the spirit.

We started before seven o'clock from Cloud Cap
Inn and reached the summit a little past noon, a
steady half-day of climb, climb, climb, the last four
thousand feet zigzagging across the steep flank
of a glacier, the last eighteen hundred feet by the
help of a rope from the summit up the sheer ice
wall to the peak. I reached the rim of the crater
exhausted. Two other strong men of the party
came over the rim sick. We had a professional
mountain-climber with us who was fresh from
the Canadian Rockies and who had come to the

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 149

Rockies directly from the Swiss Alps. He and
the guide arrived at the top physically capable
of looking at the scene; but the guide did not
care to look, climbing Hood being a business
with him; and the professional climber (whose
business was breaking records) was too disgusted
at the wretched time he had made, tied up to us,
to look at anything, and was for starting down
at once, alone if the guide would let him, to try
yet for a record round-trip. So here we were un-
done, indifferent, disgusted, while the kingdoms
of this world and the glory of them lay spread out
beneath us — and flitting round about us a host
of little butterflies.

The day was clear and cool, with a stiff wind
blowing across the summit that made our teeth
chatter and sent us skulking behind the lumps
of slag to get out of its way. Long before we
reached the top heavy gaseous fumes began to
pour down upon us as the draft drew over the
rim of the crater. The wind seemed to clear them
from the immediate top, but, looking down into
the great pit, we could see a rising cloud of steam
that must have carried them in its vaporous folds
up out of the heated depths where the ancient

150 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

fires were still smouldering. Hood is a burned-out
volcano, as is every cone in the Cascade Range,
whose fires were blazing throughout the middle
epochs of the Tertiary Period, whose lava-flows
now spread as sage plains all over eastern Oregon
where the stratified ash and tuff lie three to four
thousand feet deep. The Oligocene epochs of
those flaming fires passed into the Miocene, the
Miocene into the Pliocene, when the Tertiary
Period gave place to the Quaternary with its
Pleistocene epoch of Glacial and Interglacial
stages, which, in turn, passed into our present
epoch; and still the walls of Hood retain their
heat; and still the vapors rise and pour through
the rifted rim of the crater down over those glacial
snows that lie unmelted on the summit.

The topmost point of Hood is a jagged piece
of yellow igneous rock or slag, soft, sulphurous,
with the smell of the volcanic fires still strong
upon it. Originally a part of the crater wall, it is
now but a weathered fragment poised on a pin-
nacle left by the caving of the rest of the rim into
the cavity of the crater. The summit is thus a
point, an apex, one of the few high peaks of the
world upon which you can stand, and, without

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 151

moving from your position, box the compass
with the landscape, the whole world lying di-
rectly beneath you and rounding out to an
unbroken horizon that girdles the globe.

And away up here above the world, here over
the eternal snows, here in the fumes of old vol-
canic fires, hovered a host of black and red
butterflies. It was an amazing sight. I was pre-
pared for hailstones and coals of fire, for seismic
shocks and slides and booming avalanches, but
not for butterflies.

Cloud Cap Inn, our starting-point that morn-
ing, is on the edge of the tree-line. We passed
immediately into the Alpine zone on leaving the
Inn, a few flattened, twisted pines accompanying
us for a distance, a few Alpine-Arctic flowers
going on with us almost to the stony shoulder
of Barrett's Spur, some four thousand feet from
the summit. But here all life seemed to stop.
The Spur rises between the two great glaciers of
this side of the mountain/separating them at right
angles. It is a high pile of broken rock, so utterly
devoid of soil that life could scarcely find a foot-
ing here, were it able to climb so high ; but the
white lupine, the flat pussypaws, the low purple

152 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

heather, and the purple matted beard-tongue could
not reach the crest of the Spur. The beard-tongue
outclimbed the others. It was the last living thing
that we saw until we reached the summit, except
some flies that were sunning themselves at Tie-
up Rock, nearly a thousand feet above the Spur.
The rapid dwarfing of the beard-tongue as we
ascended was eloquent of the reach and grip of
life. When the little clusters or colonies could
no longer hold on in the open, they took to hiding
behind the pieces of rock, the last of them seeking
the shelter of the north sides, where, huddled back
from the blight of the noonday sun and the sweep
of the blasting winds, they found a slightly moister
soil and a temperature a few degrees more equa-
ble, the meager means of a last desperate effort
for a highest-up. Then the small shadows failed,
and we climbed on alone.

It is an impressive thing to leave all life be-
neath you, to pass from zone to zone witnessing
the changes in the forms and the modes of living
things as you ascend, but still with life about you,
until you find yourself in the presence of an all-
pervading death. The very sun has changed. You
have come within the veil, up through the screen

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 153

that breaks the fierce light into the prismatic
colors of life, and the white rays now blind your
eyes and blister the skin of your face and hands.
The air is lighter in your lungs; the cold is keen
and constant; the look of all things strange and
unfriendly.

This leaving of life is so real an experience, as
the climber watches the shapeless, diminishing
trees, the vanishing ground squirrels, and the last
flattened flowers, dwarfed to nothing but root and
blossom before they are blotted out, that he can
scarcely get up to Barrett's Spur without feeling
the presence of death, a consciousness deepened
from here on by the extreme narrowness of the
footing and the utter withdrawal of space from
about him, space that in the crowded valleys of
life he had been used to leaning upon.

From the" Spur to Tie-up Rock our path was a
narrow back that divided the two glaciers. At Tie-
up Rock we were belted and fastened together
and roped to the guide, who now led us out upon
the steep snows that reached up and up to the
summit, towering, as it seemed, almost straight
overhead.

The climb was without accident, and as moun-

154 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

taineering goes, according to the professional
climber, who was last in the string, beautiful
enough, but rather tame.

For all of that there was one place in the climb
that gave me a shudder, and one moment of
thrill, when even the professional climber turned
pale. We had ascended perhaps a thousand feet
above Tie-up Rock when we came to a crevasse
across the glacier. It was a yawning gap, as clean
as some awful knife-wound through the blue ice,
and, illumined by the sunlight, which at that
moment shot straight down its unearthly walls,
revealed, as not even the heights above us could,
the grip of the cold, the depth of the death that
lies upon the world. And ten or twelve feet down,
taut from solid wall to wall across the crevasse,
stretched a stout hemp rope — a human thing
frozen into this eternal pit! The sight of it, so
unexpected, mysterious, and horribly significant,
was shocking. But it proved to be only the rope
which the guides had left hanging from the sum-
mit the summer before. It had been buried to this
depth during the winter, and with slack enough at
this place to stretch without snapping when the ice
split and the crevasse opened across the glacier.

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 155

Working round the crevasse, we kept on till
we reached the new rope dropped down to us
eighteen hundred feet from the peak. Here we
stuck our pikes into the snow, breathed ourselves
for a minute, and laid hold on the rope. As we
did so, a piece of rock, about the size of a large
waterpail, was dislodged from the summit and
started down the sheer slope straight at us. It was
dropping down the steps cut by the last climbers
to reach the peak, a path as straight to us as the
rope could fall. Gripping the rope we swung to
one side, watching the wild thing as it came
plunging, bounding at us with incredible speed,
ready to dodge should it fly at our heads. It was
a fearful quarter-minute. Down it came, straight
at its mark, leaping faster, farther, higher with
every spring from the snow. Down straight at us
it tore, struck just in front of us, ripped past with
a wicked whiz, hit a hundred feet below us,
sprang madly into the air, and, like a bolt, was
gone.

Then the real work of the climb began, and to
it was added this new alarm of rolling rocks. I
had grown by this time quite familiar with the
fear of falling, and had ceased to mind it ; but I

156 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

had had no practice in dodging rocks. To be
sandbagged on the level is a risk that I have been
indifferent to these many years ; to be knocked on
the head by a ricochetting rock, however, with
ten thousand feet to fall, disturbed me consider-
ably. But the guide thought nothing of it. The
incident apparently left no impression upon him.
He was used to flying" rocks. He was used to
this particular climb, too. How easily, surely he
moved ! If I had my life to live over again, I
thought, I would be a climber of mountain-peaks
— so superior did he seem ! So admirable is any
sort of mastery ! And how carefully he moved !
kicking the niche for his toe, or cutting the step
into the ice with alt deliberateness, giving me
time to jack my feet up and fix them where his
had been. Still the rope that fastened me to him
was continually taut; I was loaded with lead.
Then the man behind me groaned and stopped.
I reached back, took his camera — and it was
lead, solid lead. Then the man behind him groaned
and stopped, seized with nausea. But the line
crawled on up, up, up, through a gateway of
snow to the bare rock of the summit.
, The experience was worth while; and the view,

'

Photograph by George M. Weiiter

THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT HOOD

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 157

though too vast, too complete, too sublime for
the heart to hold, was worth the climb, and more.
I doubt if a few thousand extra feet — the height
of Mont Blanc or Denali — could add anything
to the prospect from Hood. The consciousness
of such heights might deepen one's sense of awe
and terror, but could only blur the earth below
and leave one cut off as a thing of clay among
the clouds.

So I felt even on the top of Hood until I saw
the butterflies. And what a relief what a surprise
to see Vanessa California* flitting about the peak of
Hood ! I could have fallen off for astonishment !
I had not seen the butterflies at first. Not until the
keen, cutting wind drove us to shelter behind the
rocks did I notice the tiny creatures winging past.

We were sitting where we could look into the
crater on the one side, and where, directly beneath
us, we could see clear down the wall with the rope,
to the glacier and the trail over which we had
come. At our feet was a small gully, a kind of
flue in the crater-wall. The draft pulled hard in
every direction among the gaps and cuts of the
rocks, but hardest up this flue or chimney. The
butterflies seemed to be ascending the mountain,

158 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

coming over the summit by way of the flue, using
the draft, as we had used the rope.

But they were not ascending the mountain;
they were merely flitting about over the sum-
mit, as if the height were home to them. When
they had come — how long they had been there —
how long they stayed — I should like to know.
Why they had come and what they were doing,
however, I think I do know, though it may seem
quite past belief at such a height, amid the eter-
nal snows, with noxious fumes filling the air, and
a wind blowing across the peak that, as soon as
the sun was set, would stop the beat of a stouter
heart than a butterfly's. The fragile creatures had
sailed to the summit of Hood to play ; and here
they were at their sport as truly as children may
be seen at theirs in the school-yard.

It was their regular passing at a certain dis-
tance from me, and their disappearance in a cer-
tain direction, that aroused my curiosity. And
the number of them ! and that all were coming
up, none going down ! — all of them appearing to
shoot up through the little gully or cut be-
tween the rocks and to bear off to the right over
the crater ! What did it mean ?

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 159

Scrambling to the top of the rock behind
which I was resting, and where I could get a sur-
vey all around, I saw that the peak was alive
with butterflies ; that they were flying past my
head, and off over the point out of sight around
the walls, to reappear far down in the crater,
across which they were cutting to my side where,
caught in the draft, they were pulled up the flue,
up and past my head again, off over the point
out of sight to reappear again, far down below,
for another turn with their toboggan on the slide
of the draft that drew up past us over the
summit.

Not all of them were in the game; I caught
two as they sunned themselves on the rocks;
but that all had played, or would join the fun,
and that all had come up for that purpose, I
have no doubt.

Yet my reader may have doubts. Then let him
explain the case. We are quite likely to over-
look the extent and seriousness of wild animal
play ; not so much overlook it, perhaps, as fail to
see it, so self-conscious and on guard is all wild
life in the presence of a human watcher. Self-aban-
donment is a necessary condition of real play, and

160 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

among the wild animals unconsciousness even of
observation seems a necessity, which accounts
largely for our fleeting and infrequent glimpses
of this side of wild life, so seldom can we get
close enough to watch the play of a wild creature
without exciting alarm. But wild life is not all
watchfulness and fear ; there is a time for play
in the soberest, somberest of wild lives. The ani-
mals play joyously, keenly, seriously, desperately
even, as college boys play desperately at foot-
ball, and old men seriously at solitaire ; for kill-
ing time is a serious business, and killing your
rival in football is certainly desperate enough.

I have watched a great ungainly hippopotamus
solemnly trying to kill time by cuffing a croquet
ball back and forth from one end of his cage to
the other. His keeper told me, that, without
the plaything, the caged giant would fret and
worry himself to death. It was his game of soli-
taire. This play of the butterflies was nothing if
not joyous, yet there was something fearful and
desperate in the choice of the peak for the game.

In all their games of rivalry, which seem to be
mimic warfare, the animals are as serious as hu-
mans, and, forgetting the fun, often fall to fighting.

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 161

Only this morning, the whole flock of chickens
in the hen- yard started suddenly on the wild flap
to see which would beat to the back fence, and
wound up at the "tape " in a free fight, two of
the cockerels tearing the feathers from each other
in a desperate set-to.

You have seen puppies fall out in the same
human fashion, and kittens also, and other folk
as well. I have seen a game of wood tag among
friendly gray squirrels come to a finish in a free
fight. As the crows pass over during the winter
afternoon you will notice their play, — racing
each other through the air, diving, swooping,
cawing in their fun, when, suddenly, some one's
temper snaps, and there is a general mix-up in
the air. T watched the butterflies for such evi-
dences of temper and individuality, but saw no-
thing like recognition of each other among them,
no communication of any sort, no initiative ex-
cept as one would turn aside from his play to
light for a sip of snow or a moment of rest in
the sun. Yet I have seen angry butterflies, one
mourning-cloak (Vanessa antiopa) putting a whole
stumpful to flight by dashing in among them.
Here on the peak there must have been some

162 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

flock-consciousness, sight or scent or other kind
of communication. Certain butterflies flock and
migrate together with as evident a plan and
agreement as the flocking birds have ; but for the
most part they are solitary creatures. Did they
come singly to the summit of Hood, without
agreement and without purpose, each one flying
up and up, in a blind attempt to scale the op-
posing wall and so reaching the top *? Then why
did they not pass over and down? Why did
they stay ? Whatever be the right guess, it was
surely not for food that they congregated here.

I think they came to play, and that they came,
perhaps, "byforewardandbycomposicioun." For
the love of play is much more compelling in
animal life than we imagine. The lack of laughter
alone distinguishes animal play from ours. We
climbed the peak for play — the guide alone for
money ; and I don't remember that one of us so
much as smiled during the time we spent on the
summit. How did we differ from the butterflies "?
The animals have no sense of humor. From the
highest to the lowest they show the keenest joy
in sport; but they cannot laugh; theirs is mirth-
less play. I once saw, however, what I took

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 163

for a twinkle of merriment in an elephant's eye.
It was at Barnum's Circus several years] ago.
I remember the scene well. The keeper had just
set down for one of the elephants a bucket of
water, which a perspiring and important youth
had brought in. The big beast sucked the water
quietly up — the whole of it — swung gently
around to thank the perspiring boy, then soused
him, the whole bucketful ! Everybody roared, and
one of the elephants joined in with trumpetings,
so high and jolly was the joke.

The elephant that played the trick looked
solemn enough, except for a twitch at the lips
and a glint in the eye. There is something of a
smile about every elephant's lips, to be sure, and
fun is so contagious that one should hesitate
to say that he saw the elephant laugh. But if
that elephant did not laugh, it was not his
fault.

From the elephant to the infusorian, the mi-
croscopic animal of a single cell, is a far call — to
the extreme opposite end of the animal king-
dom, worlds apart. Yet I have seen Paramoscium
caudatum at play, in a drop of water under a
compound microscope, as I have seen elephants

1 64 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

at play in their big bathtub at the Zoological
Gardens.

Place a drop of stagnant water under your
lens and watch these atoms of life for yourself.
Invisible to the naked eye, they are easily fol-
lowed on the slide as they skate and whirl and
chase each other to the boundaries of their play-
ground and back again, first one of them " it,"
then another. They stop to eat; they slow up to
divide their single-celled bodies into two cells,
the two cells now two living creatures, where, a
moment before, there was but one, each swimming
off immediately to feed and play and multiply.

Play seems to be as natural and as necessary
to the wild animals as it is to the human. Like
us, the animals play hardest while young, but as
some human children never outgrow their youth
and love of sport, so there are old animals that
never grow too fat, nor too stiff, nor too stupid
to play.

The condition of the body has a great deal to
do with the state of the spirit. The sleek, lithe
otter could not possibly grow fat. He keeps in
trim because he cannot help it, perhaps; but,
however that may be, he is a very boy for play,

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 165

and even goes so far as to build himself a slide,
or chute, for the fun of diving down it into the
water.

That is as much as we children used to do,
and more, for we had, ready-made for us, Grand-
father's two big slanting cellar-doors, down
which we slid, and slid, and slid, till the wood
was scoured all white and slippery with the slid-
ing. The otter loves to slide. Up he climbs on
the bank, then down he goes splash into the
stream. Up he climbs, down he goes — time
after time, day after day. A writer in one of our
recent magazines tells of an otter in the New
York Zoological Park that dived about his tank
balancing a stone on the top of his head.

How much of a necessity to the otter is his play,
one would like to know — what he would give
up for it, and how he would fare, deprived of it.
In the case of Pups, my neighbor's beautiful
young collie, play seems more needful than food.
There are no children, no one, to play with him
there, so that the sight of my small boys sets
him almost frantic.

His efforts to induce a hen or rooster to play
with him are pathetic. The hen cannot under-

166 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

stand. She has n't a particle of play in her any-
how; but Pups cannot get that through his
head. He runs rapidly round her, drops flat on
all fours, swings his tail, cocks his ears, looks
appealingly and barks a few little cackle-barks,
as nearly hen-like as he can make them, then
dashes off and whirls back — while the hen picks
up another bug. She never sees Pups. The old
white coon cat is better; but she is usually up
the miff-tree. Pups steps on her, knocks her
over, or otherwise offends, especially when he
tags her out into the fields and spoils her hunt-
ing. Won't the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals send out some child or
puppy to play with Pups of a Saturday ? — lest
Pups follow his predecessor Rex to an early
grave from gout, induced by all food and no
play.

I doubt if among the lower animals play
holds any such prominent place as with the dog
and the keen-witted, intelligent otter. To catch
any of them at play is a rare experience, and to
have a chance to play with them is infinitely
rarer. The other day I was told by a friend of a
fox on one of the golf-links of Boston that tried

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 167

to play golf, or rather, tag. The golfer and his
small son were knocking the ball back and forth
about the green, it being too near dusk to play,
when the boy called his father's attention to
some creature watching them from the edge of a
grove. It was a fox. Just then the ball was sent
in the direction of Reynard, who ran out on the
green, caught it up, and cut for the woods with
the golfers after him. He dropped the ball, ran
on, and stopped to watch the players again.
Again they knocked the ball toward him, when
he ran after it and scampered with it for the
trees, the two golfers yelling at him and chasing
him till he dropped it. Then they took an old
ball, drove it far before them across the path of
the fox, who once more seized it, and with the
human playmates at his heels got away success-
fully, the ball in his teeth, amidst the trees. He
was perhaps a young fox who, like Pups, was
dying for a little play.

One of our naturalists describes the game of
"follow my leader" as he watched it played by
a school of minnows — a most unusual record,
but not at all hard to believe, for I saw only
recently, from the bridge in the Boston Public

i68 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

Garden, a school of goldfish playing at something
very much like it.

This observer was lying stretched out upon an
old bridge watching the minnows through a
crack between the planks, when he saw one leap
out of the water over a small twig floating at the
surface. Instantly another minnow broke the
water, followed by another and another, the whole
school, as so many sheep, or so many children,
following the leader over the twig.

The love of play seems to spring from one of
the elemental needs of animal life, and the games
of us human children seem to have been played
before the dry land was, when there were only
water-babies in the world, for certainly the fish
never learned " follow my leader " from us. Nor
did my young bees their game of "prisoners'
base," which they play almost every summer
noontime in front of the hives. And what is the
game the flies play about the cord of the drop-
light in the center of the kitchen ceiling ?

And what was the game the butterflies were
playing over the peak of Hood? And how
came they there ? And whither went they when
the sun sank that night, and the wind swung

BUTTERFLIES OF MT. HOOD 169

hard to the north, and the gods of the storms
met on the summit?

We saw the clouds gathering below us as we
started down. On the glacier walls we met the
cold winds climbing up and heard their talk
of storm until we came within the shelter of the
trees about the Inn. During the night I woke to
listen for the sound of feet on the mountain, but
none bent the pines outside my window, nor
swayed the wide wooded slopes that stretched
away to the orchards and the valleys below.
Near morning a slow rain began to fall. Was
this the talk that we had heard along the heights?
This the meeting of those forces flying past us
toward the summit? Then through the small
stepping of the rain I caught far off a mightier
tread, a faint concord of crash and roar — or felt
it in the very frame of things, as when an organ
fills the deep dim places of the church with trem-
bling, and no note is heard. Hurrying out, I saw
the rain slanting down the canon, the dull sky
darkening behind the peak, while all about the
summit smoked the gray smother of storm. Sud-
denly the smoke lifted, filled, poured over and
down till, caught in some mighty draft, the cloud

1 7o WHERE ROLLS/THE OREGON

broke and swept swirling back to the pinnacle
in a million flying shreds, where, rounding again
into billows, it was torn into streaming sheets
that whipped far down the precipitous walls,
winding the summit instantly in another shroud
of snow.

Gale and snow-cloud this morning, where, yes-
terday, it was butterflies that were playing over
the lofty crater of Mount Hood.

VIII

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES

VIII
THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES

E were hunting for mountain sheep
in the wildest peaks of the Wal-
lowa range, and incidentally had
tried the fishing in the Imnaha.
Such trout ! But it is so in all the
Oregon rivers. We were after mountain sheep,
not trout, and we came off with a cony. It was
not the first time. Many an expedition has so
turned out; many of mine, I mean, conies for
sheep, the feeble folk for the strong rangers of
the high hills.

Life is not a matter of size, except, perhaps, to
the hunter. To the naturalist and lover of nature,
life is a matter of kind, the cony after his kind
being as interesting as the wild goat after his
kind, or the stork after her kind. I doubt, indeed,
if ever the mystery and wonder of animal life
impressed me more than while I sat by the cony
slide on a peak above the clouds asking the little

174 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

creature why and why ! The geographical distri-
bution of land animals, their successive migra-
tions back and forth between the continents during
the geological ages, is a story to stir the slowest
imagination ; yet no single record of these fossiled
wanderings to be read in the rocks ever stirred
me more than did the sight of the live cony mak-
ing a home for himself in the narrow limits of his
rock-slide in the rifts of the rent and blasted peaks
of the Wallowas.

From the gorge of the wild Imnaha we had
climbed up and up to the blade-like divide that
runs between the head waters of the Big Sheep
and Little Sheep Creeks on one side, and the
windings of the Imnaha on the other, when our
guide and our mammal-collector left us and rode
on ahead. They soon struck an old mining-trail
around the flank of a peak, and, winding about
into this, they shortly disappeared. It was near
the end of a hard day's travel, and as our inde-
fatigable collector often took such sudden turns,
I thought little of it. But that night the two came
straggling late into camp with a cony, or " pika,"
the "little chief," or "crying," hare. This was
what they had gone off in such haste for, making

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 175

a long detour to a certain rock-slide on the pass
known to our young guide.

The cony is not an animal familiar to many
persons. Except naturalists, few climbers who
have eyes or ears for so shy, so tiny and rare a
creature, and one so difficult to see, ever get into
the high altitudes of the cony country. But our
guide, who had been a sheep-herder and camp-
tender in the mountains, was an exceptionally
keen observer. In crossing this part of the pass
the summer before he had heard and seen a pecu-
liar little animal about the size and shape of a
guinea-pig among the broken rocks of one of the
slides. To this rock-slide he had taken the col-
lector, and they had come off with one of the
conies, while I, meantime, was trying to keep up
with Maud and Barney, the pack-mules, descend-
ing the other side of the pass, and missing with
them an experience that only a few mountain-
peaks in the world could give me.

I was undone when the two men with the cony
came into camp. To have been so near and then,
in the company of those clownish mules, to have
passed stupidly by ! We had descended to Aner-
oid Lake for camp. Our course from here led

176 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

down a plunging stairway to Wallowa Lake with
never a hope for another cony slide on the trail.
We were below the peaks. It was necessary, too,
that we push forward. Not another day was to
be had ! Our time was up ; and besides, there was
nothing left to eat but sour-dough bread and con.
densed milk. This was too true. And my com-
panions imagined that the thought of an extra
day on sour-dough bread would cure me of my
conies. A few days more of it would have cured
me of everything. A particularly good fellow was
our cook, one of the State's best game wardens ;
all of which applies only remotely to his bread.
It was not necessary for me to live. It is not ne-
cessary for anybody to live. But it was necessary
for me to see a live cony, though I ate more of
Leffel's sour-dough bread to pay for it. One may
pay too dearly for life. The price on conies, how-
ever, is never marked down.

I said nothing that night. Early the next morn-
ing one of the men reported the hobbled horses
away off in the meadows at the head of the lake ;
and while they were being rounded up and the kit
packed, I left camp unobserved, struck the upward
trail and made for the peak of the cony slide.

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 177

The sun was high when I found myself slip-
ping and sliding along the sharp slopes in sight
of the great rock-heap. It was ten o'clock. No
wind was moving, no sound or cry of any kind
about the slide, no sign of life anywhere.

This must be the place, however. I had passed
it at some distance the night before ; and here were
footprints leading down the bare slope up which I
was scrambling. This was the slide, but who would
ever have paused here before this heap of broken
rock, expecting to see any living thing in it?

The slide was of cracked and splintered chunks
that had broken off of the peak above and filled
a wash or gully on the side, just as bricks might
fall from a chimney and fill the length of a valley
on the roof. Stunted trees grew at the base of
the slide, and up the side some scraggly grass
and a few snow-line flowers, squat alpine sorts,
blooming bravely along the edges of the melting
snow-banks.

This was new hunting for me. I crept round
the crumbling slope and down to the border of
the slide, where I stood trying to make myself
believe that animal life of any kind, larger than
some of the boreal mice, could climb to this

178 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

height and here make a home. It was impossible
that this barren, blasted pile from the peak could
furnish shelter and food enough to keep the fires
of any warm-blooded life burning throughout a
winter ! This was the ridge-pole of the world. A
wilder, barrener, more desolate land of crags and
peaks could hardly be found.

But here it was they told me they had shot
the cony, and had seen at least one other besides
it. So I sat down to watch, without faith; for if
any creature could live here, what possible reason
might there be for his electing so to do.

I was on the roof of creation, looking out and
down, the sense of space tingling strangely in my
finger-tips, the pull of the swinging world as real
in my feet as the thrill of the thin air in my lungs.
How such altitudes quicken and exaggerate the
senses, the nerves and skin, even one's very hairs !
I could feel the individual hairs on the back of
my hands catch and transmit the messages of
space, as the wires on the Cape Race Station catch
theirs out of the spaces above the sea. As I sat
looking out over the wild scene, a great dark
hawk wheeled into distant sight toward Eagle
Cap Mountain; far below me flapped a band

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 179

of ravens ; and down, down, immeasurably far
down beneath the ravens, glistened the small
winding waters of the Imnaha. But it was the
peaks, the scarped, sheer-shouldered peaks, stark,
black, desolate, standing so close about me, that
smote me with awe and a kind of lonely terror. I
could stay while the sun was high. How could
anything alive stay longer — through a night —
through a long winter of nights in this slide on
the summit?

For several feet each side of the broken rock
grew spears of wiry grass about six inches high,
together with a few stunted flowers, — pussy's-
paws, alpine phlox, beard-tongue, saxifrage, and
a low single daisy. Farther down the sides of the
ravine crept low, twisted pines — mere mats of
trees, prostrate, distorted forms that had clam-
bered and clung in narrow, ascending tongues up
and up until they could get no higher hold on
the blasted slopes.

And here above the reach of these grim, per-
sistent pines, here in the slide rock where only a
few stunted growths and arctic-alpine flowers come
into brief bloom through the snow, they had told
me lived the cony.

180 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

I sat down on the edge of the slide to rest,
feeling that I had had my labor for my pains —
infinitely more than that, the fierce and fearful
glory of the heights — but not a cony. There
could be no excuse for life up here. There are
living forms in the uttermost depths of the sea,
as if thrust down by the weight of water; men in
their senses dwell far in the Arctic ice, and even
go out into the sagebrush desert to make a home,
impelled by I know not what. Strange, unac-
countable shifts these, yet not so unaccountable
as the choice of such a rock-slide as this for a
dwelling. For this is the deliberate choice of
a race. Only at these heights do the conies dwell,
only in such slides of broken rock. As for the
stork, the fir trees are her house. The high hills
are a refuge for the wild goats ; and the rocks for
the conies. But this particular slide, while not so
lofty as some among the Colorado peaks, was un-
usually bleak and barren, I am sure. There was
almost no fodder in sight, nothing upon which
a cony could live long, to say nothing of a
colony of conies.

Could this be the place? I must make sure
before settling down to the watch, for when in

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 181

all my days would this chance come again? And
how soon would they put a posse on my trail to
fetch me back to camp ?

Out in the middle of the slide was a pointed
pile of rocks with a certain ordered look about
them, as if they had been heaped up there by
other hands than those that hurled them down
from the peak. Going out, I examined them
closely and found the bloody print of a little
bare paw on the face of one of them. On another
rock was the bluish spit of a lead shot. The right
place surely. Here they had killed the specimen
brought into camp. I went back to my seat con-
tent now to watch until they sent for me. The
camp must wait on this cony.

I had been watching for perhaps half an hour,
when from somewhere, in the rock-slide I hoped,
though I could not tell, there sounded a shrill,
bleating whistle, not unlike that of the moun-
tain ground squirrel's, or the marmot's, yet more
tremulous and not so piercing, a trembling, ven-
triloquial, uncentered sound that I had never
heard before.

I held my breath, the better to catch the cry.
Again it sounded — up or down, this side or that

182 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

of the slide, I could not tell. Again and again,
plaintive, whimpering, but pure and clear ! I gave
over my ears and, looking hard at the slide, my
eyes fixed nowhere, I watched for motion. Pres-
ently, straight in front of me, a little gray form
crept over a slab, stopped on all fours, and whis-
tled, waited for a moment listening, then disap-
peared. The cony !

Gone *? I did n't know. I did n't care. I had
seen him ; and that was almost more than I could
believe. The moment was full, and in it the thing
was done. What thing, you ask *? Why, my be-
coming a cony, and with him now a dweller in
the rock-slides of the black and bitter peaks. I
have widened my range by that experience, added
to my habitat ; become one of the Boreal animal
forms that push southward on these heights far
into my Sonoran zone.

But he had not gone. Keeping as still as the
stones, I waited. Presently the plaintive, bleating
whistle sounded again from anywhere in the slide.
I tried to find the hole into which the cony had
disappeared ; but the moment my eyes were taken
from any spot, it was impossible to pick it out
again. The rocks were rough, rusty chunks, two

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 183

or three feet long, piled helter-skelter without
form or order, but with such perfect and confus-
ing repetition of the pattern, that fixed attention
at any one crack or slab seemed to set the whole
slide in motion. It was like trying to fasten the
eye at some fixed spot on the surface of waving
water. Add to this the absolute color-harmony of
the rocks and the cony, together with the crea-
ture's polyphonous cry, and you have a case of
well-nigh perfect protection. On his slide, even
when in motion, he must be almost invisible to
the sharpest-eyed eagle.

If you will think of a half-grown rabbit, the
cottontail, only without a cotton tail, turned into
a guinea-pig with large, round ears, you will get
a pretty fair notion of the size, color, and shape
of the cony, perhaps better called "pika," or
" whistling hare," or " little chief hare." His legs
are all of a length, so that he runs and walks in-
stead of hops ; and the soles of his feet are bare.
He gets his name " cony " from the cony of the
Bible (a very different animal) because, like the
Old World cony, he lives among the rocks. The
little cony of the Bible is Hyrax, who belongs to
the elephant family, a curious remnant of an older

1 84 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

time, whose very holding on to life among the
rocks speaks well for the protection they offer,
scanty as may be the picking about their barren
edges.

All the while the tremulous call kept coming
from the slide. It was not the cry of several voices,
not a colony whistling, as at first I thought, for,
however gregarious they may be in a more favor-
able environment, here I am sure there were very
few pairs, if not, indeed, a single pair only. There
was but one small haycock curing in the stones,
and not enough uncut grass in the neighborhood
to feed more than a pair of conies for a winter, or
so it seemed to me.

As I watched the slide, I finally made out the
little whistler, and, with eyes sharpened to their
work, was now able to follow him from rock to
rock as he moved restlessly about. He called
constantly, and as constantly stopped to listen.
Plainly it was an answer that he expected. He
was calling for some one, and the echo of his own
voice disturbed him.

Now he would stop short on a slab and whistle,
would lift his head to listen, and, hearing nothing,
would dive into some long passage under the

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 185

rocks to reappear several feet or several yards
away. Here he would pause again to listen, then
to call, waiting a moment for the answer, before
darting into the crack for another search through
the tunnels.

Under and over the stones, up and down the
slide, now close to me, now on the extreme op-
posite edge of the pile, he traveled, nervously,
anxiously looking for something — for some one,
I truly think ; and my heart smote me when I
thought that it might be for the dead mate whose
little bare foot-pad had left the bloody print upon
the rocks.

Up and down, in and out, he ran, calling, call-
ing, but getting no answer back. This was the
only cony that showed itself, the only live one I
have ever seen ; but I followed this one with my
eye and with the field-glasses as it went searching
and crying over the steep rock-slide until long
past noon — with the whole camp down the
canon looking for me.

They might have known where to look: out
of the canon, back to the roof of the world, to
the cony slide — if they could not wait for me.

Higher up than the mountain sheep or the

186 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

goat can live, where only the burrowing pocket
gopher and rare field mice are ever found, dwells
the cony. This particular slide was on one of the
minor peaks, loftier ones towering all about. Just
how much above sea-level this one was, I do not
know, but far up in the arctic-alpine cold in a
world of perpetual snow. The conies of Colorado
live from ten to fourteen thousand feet above the
sea.

By perpetual snow, I mean that the snow-banks
never melt in the shadowed ravines and on the
bare north slopes of the peaks. Here, where I was
watching, the rock-slide lay open to the sun, the
scanty grass was green beyond the gully, and the
squat alpine flowers were in bloom, the saxifrage
and a solitary aster — April and September to-
gether — blossoming in the edges of the snow just
as fast as the melting banks allowed them to lift
their heads. But any day the wind might come
down from the north, keen and thick and white
about the summits, and leave the flowers and the
cony slide covered deep beneath a drift.

Spring, summer, and autumn are all one sea-
son, all crowded together — a kind of seasonal
peak piercing for a few short weeks the long,

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 187

bleak, unbroken land of winter here above the
world.

But during this brief period the grass grows,
and the conies cut and cure it, enough of it to
last them from the falling of the September snows
until the drifts are once more melted and their
rock-slide warms in another summer's sun. For
the conies do not hibernate. They stay awake
down in their catacombs ; buried alive in pitch-
black night with snow twenty-five feet deep above
them for nine out of twelve months of the year !
Here they are away up on the sides of the wild-
est summits, living their lives, keeping their
houses, rearing their children, visiting back and
forth through their subways for all their long
winter night, protected by the drifts which lie so
deep that they keep out the cold.

Right near me was one of their little haycocks,
nearly cured and ready for storing in their barns
beneath the rocks ; but this would not last long.
It was already early August and what haying
they had to do must be done quickly or winter
would catch them hungry.

They cut and cock the grass about the slide
until it is cured; then they carry it all below

i88 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

against the coming of the cold. Naturalists who
have observed them describe with what hurry and
excitement the colony falls to taking in the hay
when bad weather threatens to spoil it.

Hardy little farmers ! Feeble little folk, why do
you climb for a home with your tiny, bare-soled
feet up, up, even above the eyrie of the eagle*?
Why, bold little people, why not descend to the
warm valleys where winter comes indeed, but
does not stay ? Or farther down, where the grass
is green the year around, with never a need to cut
and cure a winter's fodder?

I do not know why — nor why upon the toss-
ing waves the little petrel makes her bed ; nor
why, beneath the waves, " down to the dark, the
utter dark," on " the great gray level plains of
ooze " the " blind white sea snakes " make their
homes, nor why at the north, in the fearful, far-
off, frozen north, the little lemmings dwell; nor
why, nor why, —

But as I sat there above the clouds listening to
the plaintive, trembling whistle of the little cony,
and hoping his mate was not dead, and wonder-
ing why he stayed here in the barren peaks
and how he fared in the long black winter, I

THE ROCKS FOR THE CONIES 189

said over and over to myself the lines of Kip-
ling—

"And God who clears the grounding berg
And steers the grinding floe,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox
And the lemming on the snow."

IX

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS

IX
MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS

«' Up and down! Up and down!
From the base of the wave to the billow's crown,
And midst the flashing and feathery foam,
The stormy petrel finds a home."

•AND had been lost since early morn-
ing. I don't remember how many
miles we had made, but we had
climbed far up the hill of the sea to-
ward the second night, when across
our bows cut a little band of small, dark birds
with white rumps, which, veering, glancing down
the ragged waves, seemed to settle in the wake
of the ship. No one need be told that they were
petrels — Mother Carey's chickens ; but what I
could hardly believe was that they were birds —
with webbed feet, to be sure — but birds with
wings, adrift here in the vast of the ocean, and
with nests and mates waiting for them along some
far-off rocky shore. They must have circled the
ship, for soon again they came keeling across our

i94 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

bows into a curling wave-crest, and, riding down
the trough, were on the wing and gone.

They went straight into the night and as if to
meet the coming storm. For a keen wet wind
was blowing. The decks were cleared and empty
except for myself and the officer who leaned hard
against the wind as he paced his watch. It was
an inscrutable, fearful night into which I was far-
ing. My feet were strange to the pitching deck ;
my spirit was not at home on the sea. But the
birds — it was their path I was following — where
in this wild night of waves and coming storm
had they gone?

Down in the black water the porpoises were
leaping. Off on the sea there was nothing, noth-
ing but the closing circle of storm, and I was
turning from the rail with a shiver, when, far out
on the gray chop, I caught sight of the petrels,
rising and falling with the heave and sag of the
sea.

Did they sleep on the sea, I wonder? Not
that night, perhaps, as this was the nesting-sea-
son, but here night and day they pass the larger
part of their lives. All through that long night I
dreamed of them rising and falling on the chop.

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 195

And often since, when the wind has been high,
when the woods have roared and heaved, and the
house has rocked in the might of the gale, I have
seen that little brood of Mother Carey's chickens
swirl through the breaking crest of some ghost
wave, ride past my ship asleep, and vanish in the
dream.

It is awesome enough to hear the creak of
frozen branches, and the hiss of driving snow and
rushing winds past your chamber, when you think
that out in it all are the winter birds sleeping.
They have a hundred shelters, however, a hun-
dred hidings from the force of the storm. But on
the unsheltered ocean there are only the yawning
troughs that dip for a moment from the lash of
the winds, only the tossing tumult of the waves.
Who could fail to ask, seeing this troop of birds
far out on the ocean, Whence do they hail?
And whither are they bound? Not much larger
than swallows, they have dared all the great
liner dares, and more. They have cleared from
some shore, but the ocean is their home. They
love the waves; they revel in the storm. If seen
on the North Atlantic in the summer they may
be our Leach's petrel that nests on the islands in

196 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

the mouth of the Penobscot Bay and northward ;
or Wilson's petrel, a migrant from the south ; or
near the European coast, the little " stormy " petrel
that breeds from the Shetland Islands to the
Mediterranean.

There are certain birds that since my childhood
have had a strong hold upon my imagination.
One of these is the stormy petrel — all petrels
being " stormy " to me. I cannot remember when
his wide-flung flight did not seem to me the very
soul of the ocean, nor when I did not wish to fol-
low him over the waves to his rookery on the
cliffs. Yet I was a man before I saw my first flock
of the birds skimming the waves of the Atlantic
— a man in years, but still a child haunted by
the lines of some poem called " The Stormy
PetreL" read, or read to me, from some old
McGuffey Reader, I imagine, before I ever started
to school. A bird in a poem is worth almost as
much to a child as a bird in a bush; perhaps
more. I have learned many facts in the fields, but
how many of my feelings have come to me out
of books ! I felt my stormy petrel long before I
knew him. He was a poem long before he was
a bird, and the beat of his wings must ever be —

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 197

" Up and down! Up and down!

From the base of the wave to the billow's crown."

I have not only seen him now, I have also fol-
lowed him to his sea-cliff and pulled him out of
his tame little hole of a burrow. Here was his
nest, where I might make mine. His nest, but
this was not his home, for back come the lines —

" And midst the flashing and feathery foam,
The stormy petrel finds a home."

The poetry got in ahead of the ornithology. I
am glad it did; for that is the happier order, I
think ; just as I am glad that we have our youth
before our old age. One who is young first stands
an excellent chance of never growing entirely old.
And so with poems and facts. There are many
kinds of petrels, I am reminded by my ornithol-
ogist critic. In deference to him I have changed
"stormy" several times so as to conform to the
facts — Kaeding's for instance, is the petrel on
Three- Arch Rocks in the Pacific, the stormy
("storm" alas! by the latest A.O.U. Check-List)
petrel being an Atlantic bird nesting on the Euro-
pean side and only a rare wanderer to our shores.
"Kaeding's" is the petrel of this chapter ; accord-

198 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

ing to the book ; it may be, but not according to
the poem, and when I read this chapter I shall
read " stormy," whatever the unimaginative type
says.

In an earlier chapter I have given a general
description of Three- Arch Rocks Reservation and
its multitudes of wild sea-life, a description that
falls hopelessly short of the scene. I had looked
at pictures of the Rocks, had listened to stories
of their rookeries, but the only account that had
greatly interested me was of the small colony of
petrels nesting on the steep north slope of the
summit of Shag Rock, the outermost of the
three. It was the petrels above all else that I de-
sired to see ; it was this patch of marl or earthy
guano on the top of the rock that I wished to
climb to ; for this little patch of earth was some-
thing that I could share with the birds, a point
upon which we could meet, a place that their
wave-wandering wings and my clod-heavy feet
could have in common. The thought of it greatly
moved me.

I must be somewhat of a mariner. My forbears,
back for three hundred years, have all been doc-
tors, farmers, and the like ; and Quakers of Lon-

KAEDING'S PETREL

TUFTED PUFFIN

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 199

don before that. But the sea is in me, though I
go back beyond the Vikings for it. And there is
something of the stormy petrel in us all, I think,
for who can meet the little mariner on the waves
and not follow him up and down, up and down,
till the wonderful wings bring him to Shag
Rock?

Shag is an immense pile ; not a pile of rocks,
but a single rude block of weathered basalt, longer
than a city "block" and more than three hundred
feet high. Wherever birds can find a foothold,
and shelf enough for an egg, there they breed,
a single pair, a rookery of thousands. The pet-
rels nested on the top, coming and going only in
the dark; and a night on the summit to see them
come in to their burrows was to crown our trip
to the Reservation.

Just to sleep in such a bed would be enough.
To wrap one's self in one's blanket as the sun
sinks behind the round of the Pacific, to see the
night settle down upon the Rocks, to feel the
large sea-wind sweep over the summit, to hear
the swash on the ledges, the boom in the hollow
caverns far below, and, close to one's head, the
strange, wild clangor of the sea-birds — it would

200 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

be enough to turn one's face to the mist in such
a spot, and to know that one was part of this
primordial life, cast up here, as the first life of
the land had been cast, by the lift of the sea !

But how much more to lie here listening for
the chitter of a small voice and for the fanning
of small wings that know no dread, that have
spanned the sweep of oceans, and outridden the
wildest gales ! I wanted to witness their coming
home, to see, if possible, in the thick twilight of
the summit, their shadows hovering over the slope,
to hear their chittering at the mouth of the bur-
rows, telling their mates that they had returned
from their day and night upon the sea.

This petrel of Three- Arch Rocks digs its nest-
ing-burrow in the earth and lays one egg. The
burrow might hold both birds together, but only
one bird is ever found in the nest-hole. While
one is brooding, the other is off on its tireless
wings — away off in the wake of your steamer,
miles and miles from shore. All night it has been
a-wing, and all day, but, as darkness begins to
fall again, it remembers its mate and its nest on
the rocks and speeds with the wing of the twi-
light to its own, to take its place in the little

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 201

black burrow, while the mate comes forth and
spreads her wings out over the darkening waters,
not to return, it may be, until the day and the
night have passed and dusk comes creeping once
more over the sea.

But why waste words to make those who can-
not understand know why we were willing to risk
limb and life on the Rocks, not to mention the
crossing of Tillamook Bar, in order to watch the
coming and going of birds no larger than my
hand ? To them I speak in parables. And to you
with hearts that understand I need not speak at
all, for you know why we took the tug at Tilla-
mook, why we fought for hours the three great
breakers on the narrow, dangerous bar, why we
steamed miles down the coast to the big rocks,
where we landed amid the din of screaming gulls
and bellowing sea-lions — why, in short, we never
dreamed of counting the cost of watching for
the petrels to come home on Shag Rock.

It is cheapest and safest, and, perhaps sanest,
not to have any loves or enthusiasms. But it is
also very stupid. A person so lacking might
cross the ocean a hundred times and never see a
stormy petrel. More than that, such a person

202 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

might be too dull and mean and afraid ever to
cross the ocean at all.

After steaming in around Shag Rock we landed
from a yawl on a half-submerged ledge, driving
off a bull sea-lion, an immense, disgruntled old
fellow, who evidently could not live with the
herd and his wretched temper, so had come out
here where he could have his fill of soured silence
and enjoy the solitary friendship of his precious
ugly soul.

The rise and fall of the waves about the rocks
was fully six feet, so we backed the yawl up as
close as we dared, a man steadying it at the
oars, another standing ready in the stern to leap
when the sea should bring him up level with
the ledge. Having landed him, we tossed him
our cameras, provisions, a piece on every high
wave, and even my eleven-year-old son, who
scaled the rocks with us.

Everything safely cached, we drew the yawl
upon the shelf of rock, ordered the tug to lie off
and anchor, then got ourselves in shape for the
climb.

It was now nearly noon. Since early morning
an ugly fog had hung about us, but we had barely

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 203

landed when the sun shot through the banks,
promising us bright weather for our cameras, dry,
safe footing on the cliffs, and a good night for
watching on the peak.

It was hard to keep our heads on the way up
with the birds driving at us, as it was hard to keep
our feet on the rotten crumbling shelves and jut-
ting corners that offered us their treacherous sup-
port. But my head was kept busy and out of
mischief for most of the time with anxiety for
my son, who showed no anxiety or ordinary hu-
man responsibility at all. We were mounting by
ledge stages, each ledge the home of a colony of
birds, and so thick with exciting eggs and young
that the eleven-year-old boy was being forced to
let go of one or was being held back from the
other all the way. He climbed as if he had
been hatched on the peak of Shag Rock. The
rope about him was not necessary. Height and
depth and the awful space about us held no
terrors for him — such stuff is a live boy made
of!

But all these things had terror enough for me,
and I was glad to get over the rim, in reach of
the top, although that gladness was troubled with

204 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

the thought of how I was to get down. I had
been brought up in the flat and gentle fields of
New Jersey. I had climbed sand-dunes along the
Jersey coast, and fences and trees, but never slip-
pery, slimy bird rocks like these here in the
Pacific.

Nothing I had ever seen on my native coast
equaled this for wildness and strangeness and
abundance of life. The very sea seemed vaster,
no doubt because of the height of the rock, the
mountains shoreward, and the bewildering, almost
threatening, tumult of the alarmed birds spread-
ing far out over the water.

While the cameras were being unslung and
the moving-picture machine set up, I went after
the petrels' nests. It was now about three o'clock ;
the sun was hot and the young birds, especially
the young cormorants, suffered from their expo-
sure when our presence frightened their parents
off the nests.

Never, from the time a cormorant egg is laid
till the young fly from the nest, are the shelter-
ing wings of the parents taken from them for fear
of the greedy gulls. Our appearance had upset
the even balance of things and was causing great

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 205

disturbance and loss of life, though we moved
without so much as breaking an egg.

Just below the rocky backbone of the top lay
the green sloping deck or roof in which burrowed
the puffins and the petrels. While digging out
a snapping, fighting old puffin, who left the lasting
mark of her powerful bill on the game warden's
hand, I came upon a small side hall or gallery
running at right angles to the gallery of the puf-
fin's and starting just within her front door. At the
bottom of this I found my first petrel and drew
her out with her one round white egg, which was
about the size of a turtle-dove's.

She lays only one egg, and rears only one
young at a time. So it is with the puffin, and the
murre ; but just why, with food so abundant, I
cannot tell. She tried to escape, but finding that
impossible, she ejected from her beak, or nostrils
rather, a very strong offensive oil, the most rancid
oil I ever smelled. If her burrow were filled with
this reeking, choking odor, I could imagine her
perfectly safe from almost any attack.

I stroked her gently until she grew quiet. Then
I stretched out her wonderful wings, placed her
small webbed feet upon my hand, felt her beat-

206 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

ing heart between my thumb and finger, looked
into her mild eyes, and tried to think that at last
I held captive, in my hand, one of Mother Carey's
chickens, " little Peter," the walker of the waves,
the rider of curling crests, the lover of stormy
seas.

But I could not think it. This was not the
stormy petrel. This was only a small bunch of
throbbing feathers — the least of all the web-footed
birds. For so much greater is the power of the
bird, so much mightier its spirit than its heart-
beat and spread of wing, and with so much more
had my imagination endowed her than with mere
feathers and webbed feet, that I had to open my
hand and free her in order to know that I had
had her — the bird of evil omen to the sailor,
harbinger of foul weather, spirit of the sea wind
and the wave.

She darted from my hand with a quick zigzag
motion, as if dazzled with the sunshine, dipped
over the rim of the top and with a flap was
gone.

There was not a ray of sunshine, as a matter
of fact, when I turned from following the bird to
look at the sky. The afternoon was still young,

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 207

yet the sun had disappeared, and the air, so
thick with wings, was thickening now with fog
that again was rolling in from seaward, blotting
out the skyline and shutting darkly down about
the gray, wild rocks.

The men packed their cameras, and, slipping
into their coats, crept to shelter behind the peak,
for a wind had come up with the fog, a raw, rak-
ing wind that drove the gulls careening far to
leeward of the summit and forced them close to
the sea for a landing.

The captain had warned us that a storm from
this quarter might continue for a week, and it
did look as if the whole wide Pacific were bear-
ing down upon us. The fog soon changed to a
drizzle, and this in turn to a driving slant, that
forced me to crawl from point to point about the
peak.

It was not a pleasant prospect for the night.
Besides, it would be quite impossible either to
see or to hear the petrels' return in the pitch dark
that was falling, and in the wind that was already
drowning the lesser sounds — the screaming birds
overhead, the wash of the waves, and the hollow
boom of the caverns from below. No one could

208 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

tell with what violence it might sweep this un-
sheltered top of Shag Rock, to the peril even of
our lives.

There was nothing to do but climb down. It
would surely clear by tomorrow, and, consoling
ourselves, and particularly the eleven-year-old
boy, with this hope, we backed over the edge of
the peak for the descent.

The rocks were wet by this time, and the foot-
ing treacherous. The birds, as we worked slowly
along, seemed to fear us less than earlier in the
day, flying closer to our heads, their harsh cries
and flapping wings in the gathering dusk adding
not a little to the strain of the work.

Yet worse than the birds over me, was the
emptiness behind me, the void and space be-
neath, which plucked and pulled at me, and which
I 'could not turn upon and face. I could only
reach down into it with a foot, feel out through
it for an edge, a point, a seam of firm rock, any-
thing to touch and stay me on.

Over the hanging places I was lowered with a
rope, and down to me, bumping serenely along,
his free hand patting all the little murres by the
way, came Eleven Years. He wished to stay on the

MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS 209

summit because it was storming ; and would n't
they tie him so fast that while dangling from the
face of the cliffs he could use both hands freely to
handle and examine eggs and young birds ?

About forty feet from the water was a weathered
niche partly roofed with rock, and with a floor
large enough to give us a sleeping-place. Here
we stopped to wait for the morning.

This was not the wild summit, nor were the
rookeries of murres and the gulls whistling and
quacking near us the stormy petrels we had hoped
to see, but it was the wildest spot that I had ever
tried to go to sleep in. For a time the lantern of
the tug showed off on the sea, but this, too, was
soon snuffed out by the fog, and we were alone
in the midst of the waters with only the sea-lions
and the sea-fowl and the pounding waves in the
arches to lull us into slumber. But I could not
sleep. I was afraid I might miss something of it
all. For wings were heard passing in the dark-
ness, and now and then a form was seen hurtling
past. Might they not be petrels, I wondered. But
they passed too swiftly through the shadows to
be made out. I would wait for to-morrow.

I am still waiting.

210 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

The next day brought more wet and wind and
chill. There might be a week of it, our prophet
had said ; and there was a week of it, as it turned
out. The captain steamed in that afternoon and
took us off, amid the din of a million screaming,
bellowing voices.

The next time I climb Shag Rock I shall go
storm-proof; for I yet intend to hear the winnow-
ing wings of Mother Carey's chickens as they
come in from the sea to take their turn on the
nest.

X

THE WILD MOTHER

THE WILD MOTHER

HEAR the bawling of my neighbor's
cow. Her calf was carried off yes-
terday, and since then, during the
long night, and all day long, her
insistent woe has made our hillside
melancholy. But I shall not hear her to-night, not
from this distance. She will lie down to-night
with the others of the herd, and munch her cud.
Yet, when the rattling stanchions grow quiet and
sleep steals along the stalls, she will turn her ears
at every small stirring ; she will raise her head to
listen and utter a low tender moo. Her full udder
hurts ; but her cud is sweet. She is only a cow.

Had she been a wild cow, or had she been out
with her calf in a wild pasture, the mother in her
had lived for six months. Here in the stable it
will be forced to forget in a few hours, and by
morning will have died.

There is a mother-principle alive in all nature

214 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

which never dies. This is different from the
mother-instinct, the mother-passion. The oak and
the amoeba respond to the mother-principle. It is
a law of life; it is one of the constants of being.
The mother-instinct or passion, on the other hand,
occurs only among the higher animals; occurs
not sporadically quite, for it is common enough ;
yet while generally found, and while one of the
strongest, most interesting, most beautiful of ani-
mal traits, it is at the same time the most indi-
vidual and the least constant.

This cow of my neighbor's that I hear lowing
is an entirely gentle creature ordinarily, but with
a calf at her side she will pitch at any one who
approaches her. And there is no other cow of
the herd that mourns so long when her calf is
taken away. The mother in her is stronger, more
enduring, than in any of the other nineteen in the
barn. In my own cow it is hardly more than blind
principle, hardly advanced beyond the oak tree's
feeling for its acorns, or the amoeba's for its
divided self.

Out of the mother-principle there develops, far
down the animal scale, the sexless, neuter, mother-
less mother, — the parent. It is out of this mere

THE WILD MOTHER 215

parent, as we ascend the scale, that we find the
mother growing.

The female crab, attaching her eggs to her swim-
merets, carries them about with her for their pro-
tection as the most devoted of mothers ; yet she
has no more concern for them, is no more con-
scious of them, feels no more for them, than the
fruiting frond of a cinnamon fern feels for its
spores. Here in the crab is the form, but not the
substance, of the mother.

In the spider, however, just one remove up the
scale from the crab, you find the mother-passion.
Crossing a field the other day, I came upon a
large female spider of the hunter family, carry-
ing a round white sack of eggs, half the size of
a cherry, attached to her spinnerets. Plucking a
long stem of herd's-grass, I detached the sack
of eggs without bruising it. Instantly the spider
turned and sprang at the grass-stem, fighting and
biting until she got to the sack, which she seized
in her strong jaws and made off with as fast as her
rapid legs would carry her.

I laid the stem across her back and again took
the sack away. She came on for it again, fight-
ing more fiercely than before. Once more she

216 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

seized it ; once more I forced it from her jaws,
while she sprang and bit at the grass-stem to
annihilate it. The fight must have been on for
two minutes when, by a regrettable move on
my part, one of her legs was injured. She did
not falter in her fight. On she rushed for the sack
as fast as I pulled it away. The mother in her
was rampant. She would have fought for that
sack, I believe, until she had not one of her eight
legs to stands on, had I been cruel enough to
compel her. It did not come to this, for suddenly
the sack burst, and out poured a myriad of tiny
brown spiderlings. Before I could think, that mo-
ther had rushed among them and caused them to
swarm upon her, covering her, many deep, even
to the outer joints of her long legs, — so deep
that I could not now have touched her with a
needle except at the risk of crushing the young.
I stood by and watched her slowly move off with
her encrusting family to a place of safety.

I had seen these spiders try hard to escape with
their egg-sacks before, but had never tested the
strength of their purpose. I was interested to
know how common this mother-instinct might
be in them, and for a time made a point of tak-

THE WILD MOTHER 217

ing the sacks away from every one I found. Great
differences appeared among them, the majority
scurrying off with no other purpose than their
own safety, one of them dropping the sack of its
own accord, some of them showing a decided
reluctance to leave it, a few of them a disposi-
tion to fight, but none of them the fierce consum-
ing fire of the one that lost her leg.

It seems scarcely possible that in the same
family and among the same species so great
variation of instinct should exist; and no less re-
markable that in so humble a form as the spider
should be found, even occasionally, the fully de-
veloped mother, as against the mere parent, espe-
cially when among the fishes, higher forms and
far removed from these invertebrate arachnids, we
find the part of the mother (not the function of
maternity) being largely assumed by the males.

It is the male stickleback that builds the nest ;
then goes out and drives the female in to lay
her eggs ; then straightway drives her out to pre-
vent her eating them ; then puts himself on guard
to protect them from their other enemies, until
the young shall hatch and be able to swim away
by themselves.

2i8 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

It is the male toadfish (Batrachus tau) that
crawls into the nest-hole and takes charge of the
numerous family. He may dig the hole, too, as
the male stickleback builds the nest. I do not
know as to that. But I do know that I once
raised a stone in the edge of the tide along the
shore of Naushon Island in Buzzards Bay, to find
its under surface covered with round, drop-like,
amber eggs, and, in the shallow cavity beneath,
an old male toadfish, slimy and croaking, and
with a countenance ugly enough to tie a prowl-
ing egg-eating eel into a hard knot. I have done
this a score of times. The female deposits the
eggs, glues them fast with much nicety to the
under surface of the rock, as a female might, and
finishes her work. Departing at once, she leaves
the coming brood to the care of the male, who,
from this time, without relief or even food in all
probability, assumes the role and the responsibili-
ties of mother.

Something like this is true of the common
hornpout or catfish, I believe, though I have
never seen it recorded, and lack the chance at
present of proving my earlier observations. I
think it is father catfish who takes charge of the

THE WILD MOTHER 219

brood, of the swarm, of kitten catfish, from the
time the spawn is laid.

Instead of digging a hole under a stone after
the fashion of the toadfish, or scooping out a shal-
low nest in the marginal sand of the pond, as
does the sunfish, the "catty" or hornpout seeks
out an abandoned muskrat burrow that runs into
the bank from the edge of the water, and here
deposits her eggs. As a boy I never questioned
but that it was the mother fish on guard. I be-
lieve now, however, that it is the father fish in
charge. I am hoping to get down to Lupton's
Pond this spring to make sure of the matter; for
all around the shores of that pond, in every musk-
rat hole and runway, I can scare out an old cat-
fish by stamping hard on the tussocks or roots
above the holes. Out he will come with a flop,
and with a dart will make for the bottom of the
pond ; and out with him will spread the family
of little catfish in a fine black cloud.

The old fish disappears almost at once, but in
a moment you can see him coming back to the
scattered family, to the little black things that
look like small tadpoles, who soon cluster about
him, as bees about their queen, and wiggle

220 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

away with him into the deep dark waters of the
pond.

We find the undeveloped mother in groups
still higher up the scale — among the toads and
reptiles, and even among the birds and mam-
mals ; but the higher we ascend the more pro-
nounced and constant becomes the mother-pas-
sion in the female, and the more variable, weak,
and intermittent its manifestation among the
males.

A curious sharing of mother-qualities by male
and female is shown in the Surinam toads of
South America, where the male, taking the newly
deposited eggs, places them with his own hands
upon the back of the female. Here, glued fast by
their adhesive jelly, they are soon surrounded by
fresh-formed cells, each cell capped by a lid. In
these cells the eggs hatch and the young go
through their metamorphoses, apparently absorb-
ing some nourishment through the skin of their
mother, until they break through the lids of their
cells finally and hop away. They might as well
be toadstools on a dead stump, so far as motherly
care or concern goes, for, aside from allowing the
male to spread the eggs upon her back, she is no

THE WILD MOTHER 221

more a mother to them than the dead stump is
to the toadstools. She is host only to the little
parasites.

I do not know of a single mother among our
reptiles, or a single father-mother. The mother-
passion, so far as my observation goes, plays no
part whatever in reptilian life. Whereas, passing
on to the birds, the next order in the line, the
mother-passion becomes, by all odds, the most
interesting item, the most determining single fac-
tor in bird life. More than the song or the color
or the courting of the male is the mother-love of
the female in every ornithologist's records.

This is strikingly true also of the mammals. It
is as if the watcher in the woods went out to see
the mother animal only. It is her going and com-
ing that he follows; her faring, foraging, and
watch-care that let him deepest into the secrets
of wild animal life.

On one of the large estates here in Hingham,
a few weeks ago, a fox was found to be destroy-
ing poultry. The time of the raids, and their bold-
ness, were proof enough that the fox must be a
female with young. Poisoned meat was prepared
for her, and at once the raids ceased. A few days

222 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

later one of the workmen of the estate came upon
the den of a fox, at the mouth of which lay dead
a whole litter of young ones. They had been
poisoned. The mother had not eaten the doc-
tored food herself, but had carried it home to her
family. They must have died in the burrow, for
it was evident from the signs that she had dragged
them out into the fresh air, to revive them, and
deposited them gently on the sand by the hole.
Then in her perplexity she had brought various
tidbits of mouse and bird and rabbit and placed
at their noses to tempt them to wake up out of
their strange sleep and eat as hungry children
ought to eat. Who knows how long she watched
beside the still forms, and what her emotions were *?
She must have left the neighborhood soon after,
however, for no one has seen her since about the
estate.

I have elsewhere told of the cat, Calico, and
her strange family ; the thwarted cat mother mak-
ing good the loss of her kittens by adopting a
nest of young gray squirrels. A similar story
comes to me from a reader in New York State.
I will quote my correspondent's letter verbatim,
not because there is an item in her account, re-

THE WILD MOTHER 223

markable as it is, that the most careful and expe-
rienced of observers would find hard to credit,
but because it reads so much like a page out of
the " Natural History of Selborne."

She writes : —

" Our Tootsy became a mother of several little
kittens ; as she was not in the best of health we
thought best not to let her raise any of them. For
a day or two she mourned for her little ones. As
she was the pet of the family, we consoled her as
best we could. This day I had her out on the
lawn. I looked down to the bridge, saw a little
squirrel up on one of the bridge-posts. I picked
Tootsy up and let her climb the post and catch
the squirrel, thinking it would take her mind off
from her grief for a while.

" She brought it up on the lawn, and in place
of playing with it and finally eating it, as is the
nature of cats, she wanted to mother it. We then
left her, and soon we discovered she had taken it
upstairs in mother's bed and hid it. She staid with
it all night, and we saw the little squirrel could
take nourishment.

" The next day she found two more squirrels
and brought them home, so we had a family of

224 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

three. She brought them up until they were able
to eat, meanwhile giving loads of pleasure; when
they became so large and frisky we could do
nothing with them, they would get into every-
thing. We kept one, which disappeared shortly
after. We think it had gotten with other squir-
rels, for sometimes when it did get out on the
trees the cat would sit under the tree for hours at
a time coaxing it back."

I have known a hen, too, deprived of her
chickens, to adopt a litter of tiny kittens, brood-
ing them and guarding them as her own.

The birds are structurally lower than the most
primitive of the mammals ; they are close kin to
the cold-hearted reptiles, yet it is the bird, the
mother bird, rather, that has touched our imagin-
ations as perhaps the most nearly human of all
wild things.

" O Jerusalem, Jerusalem^ . . . how often would
I have gathered thy children together, even as a
hen gather 'eth her chickens under her wings, and ye
would not!"

And an earlier Hebrew prophet, likening God's
harsh providences to the rending of a lion, hast-
ened on with the assurance that in his heart God

THE WILD MOTHER 225

hovers over Jerusalem as little mother birds hover
over their nests.

Hovering He will deliver it,
And passing back and forth
He will preserve it.1

The bird mother is the bravest, tenderest, most
solicitous, most appealing thing one ever comes
upon in the fields ; the problem of her presence
or absence, the degree or intensity of her being,
and her behavior under stress, add more than
anything else to the interest and charm of bird-
study. It is the rare exception, but we sometimes
find the mother-instinct wholly lacking among
the birds, as in the case of our notorious cowbird,
who sneaks about, watching her chance when
some smaller bird is gone, to drop her egg into
its nest. The egg must be laid; the burden of the
race has been put upon the cowbird, but not
the precious burden of the child. Hers are only
the functions of maternity. She is not a mother.
She is body only, not a soul.

The same is true of the European cuckoo, but
not quite true of our American cuckoos, in spite
of popular belief. For our birds (both species)
build rude, elementary nests as a rule, and brood

1 Author's translation from the Hebrew, Isa., chap. xxxi.

226 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

their eggs. Occasionally they may steal a robin's
or a catbird's nest, may even destroy the owner's
eggs (though never to my knowledge), in order
to save labor — the unimaginative labor of laying
one stick across another when one does not know
how. But here is a plain case of knowledge wait-
ing on desire. So undeveloped is the mother in
the cuckoo that if you touch her eggs she will
leave them — abandon her rude nest and eggs, as
if any excuse were excuse enough for an escape
from the cares of motherhood. How should a bird
with so little mother- love ever learn to build a
firm- walled, safe, and love-lined nest*?

The great California condor, according to the
records of the only one ever studied, is a most
faithful and anxious mother, the dumb affection
of both parents indeed, for their single offspring,
being at times pathetically human. On the other
hand, the mother in the turkey-buzzard is so
evenly balanced against the vulture in her that
I have known a brooding bird to be entirely un-
done by the sudden approach of a man and to
rise from off her eggs and devour them instantly,
greedily, and then make off on her serenely soar-
ing wings into the clouds.

THE WILD MOTHER 227

Such bird mothers, however, are not the rule.
The buzzard, the cuckoo, and the cowbird are
striking exceptions. The flicker will keep on lay-
ing eggs as fast as you take them from the nest
hole, until she has no more eggs to lay. The
quail, like the cuckoo, will sometimes desert her
nest if even an egg is so much as touched, but
only because she knows that her nest has been
discovered and must be started anew, in some
more hidden place, for safety. She is a wise and
devoted mother, keeping her brood with her as a
" covey " all winter long.

Gilbert White tells the following story of the
raven's mother-love : —

" In the center of this grove there stood an
oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole,
bulged out into a large excrescence about the
middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had
fixed their residence for such a series of years
that the oak was distinguished by the title of the
Raven Tree. Many were the attempts of the
neighboring youths to get at this eyry : the diffi-
culty whetted their inclinations, and each was
ambitious of surmounting the arduous task. But
when they arrived at the swelling, it jutted out

228 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

so in their way, and was so far beyond their grasp,
that the most daring lads were awed, and acknowl-
edged the undertaking to be too hazardous : so
the ravens built on, nest upon nest, in perfect
security, till the fatal day arrived in which the
wood was to be leveled. It was in the month of
February, when these birds usually sit. The saw
was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted
into the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy
blow of the beetle or mall or mallet, the tree
nodded to its fall ; but still the dam sat on. At
last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from
her nest, and, though her parental affection de-
served a better fate, was whipped down by the
twigs, which brought her dead to the ground."

One of the most interesting instances of varia-
tion of the mother-instinct in the same species of
birds, which has ever come under my observa-
tion, occurred in the rookeries of the Three-Arch
Rocks Reservation off the coast of Oregon.

We had gone out to the Reservation, as I said
in the opening chapter, in order to study and
photograph its wild life, and were making our
slow way toward the top of the outer rock. Up
the sheer south face of the cliff we had climbed,

THE WILD MOTHER 229

through rookery after rookery of nesting birds,
until we reached the edge of the blade-like back,
or top, that ran up to the peak. Scrambling over
this edge, we found ourselves in the midst of a
great colony of nesting murres — hundreds of
them — covering the steep, rocky part of the
top.

As our heads appeared above the rim, many
of the colony took wing and whirred over us out
to sea, but most of them sat close, each bird upon
her egg or over her chick, loath to leave, and so
expose to us her hidden treasure.

The top of the rock was somewhat cone-shaped,
and in order to reach the peak, and the colonies
on the west side, we had to make our way through
this rookery of the murres. The first step among
them, and the whole colony was gone, with a rush
of wings and feet that sent several of the top-
shaped eggs rolling, and several of the young
birds toppling, over the cliff to the pounding
waves and the ledges far below.

We stopped instantly. We had not come to
frighten and kill. Our climb up had been very
disturbing to the birds, and had been attended
with some loss of both eggs and young. This we

230 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

could not help ; and we had been too much con-
cerned for our own lives really to notice what
was happening. But here on the top, with the
climb beneath us, the sight of a young murre
going over the rim, clawing and clinging with
beak and nails and unfledged wings, down from
jutting point to shel£ to ledge, down, down —
the sight of it made one dizzy and sick.

We stopped, but the colony had bolted, leav-
ing scores of eggs and scores of downy young
squealing and running together for shelter, like
so many beetles under a lifted board.

But the birds had not every one bolted, for
here sat two of the colony among the broken
rocks. These two had not been frightened off.
That both of them were greatly alarmed, any one
could see from their open beaks, their rolling
eyes, their tense bodies on tiptoe for flight. Yet
here they sat, their wings out like props, or more
like gripping hands, as if they were trying to hold
themselves down to the rocks against their wild
desire to fly.

And so they were in truth, for under their ex-
tended wings I saw little black feet moving.
Those two mother murres were not going to for-

THE WILD MOTHER 231

sake their babies — no, not even for fear of these
approaching monsters, which had never been seen
clambering over their rocks before !

One of the monsters stood stock still a moment
for the other one, the photographer, to come up.
Then both of them took a step nearer. It was
very interesting. I had often come slowly up to
quail on their nests, and to other birds. Once I
crept upon a killdeer in a bare field until my
fingers were almost touching her. She did not
move because she thought I did not see her, it
being her trick thus to hide within her own feath-
ers, colored as they are to blend with the pebbly
fields where she lays her eggs. So the brown quail
also blends with its brown grass nest. But those
murres, though colored in harmony with the rocks,
were still, not because they hoped I did not see
them. I did see them. They knew it. Every bird
in the great colony had known it, and had gone
— with the exception of these two.

What was different about these two? They
had their young ones to protect. But so had every
bird in the great colony its young one, or its egg,
to protect ; yet all the others had gone. Did these
two have more love than the others, and with

232 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

it, or because of it, more courage, more intelli-
gence ?

We took another step towards them, and one
of the two birds sprang into the air, knocking her
baby over and over with the stroke of her wing,
coming within an inch of hurling it across the
rim to be battered on the ledges below. The other
bird raised her wings to follow, then clapped them
back over her baby. Fear is the most contagious
thing in the world ; and that flap of fear by the
other bird thrilled her too, but as she had with-
stood the stampede of the colony, so she caught
herself again and held on.

She was now alone on the bare top of the rock,
with ten thousand circling birds screaming to her
in the air above, and with two men creeping up
to her with a big black camera which clicked
ominously. She let the multitude scream, and
with threatening beak watched the two men come
on. A motherless baby, spying her, ran down the
rock squealing for his life. She spread her wing,
put her bill behind him, and shoved him quickly
in out of sight with her own baby. The man
with the camera saw the act, for I heard his ma-
chine click, and I heard him say something under

THE WILD MOTHER 233

his breath that you would hardly expect a mere
man and a game warden to say. But most men
have a good deal of the mother in them ; and the
old bird had acted with such decision, such cour-
age, such swift, compelling instinct, that any man,
short of the wildest savage, would have felt his
heart quicken at the sight.

Just how compelling might that mother-instinct
be? I wondered. Just how much would that
mother-love stand?

I had dropped to my knees, and on all fours
had crept up within about three feet of the bird.
She still had a chance for flight. Would she allow
us to crawl any nearer ? Slowly, very slowly, I
stretched forward on my hands, like a measuring
worm, until my body lay flat on the rocks, and
my fingers were within three inches of her. But
her wings were twitching; a wild light danced in
her eyes; and her head turned itself toward the
sea.

For a whole minute I did not stir. Then the
wings again began to tighten about the babies ;
the wild light in the eyes died down; the long,
sharp beak turned once more toward me. Then
slowly, very slowly, I raised my hand, and gently

234 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

touched her feathers with the .tip of -one finger —
with two fingers — with my whole hand, while the
loud camera click-clacked, click-clacked hardly
four feet away !

It was a thrilling moment. I was not killing
anything. I had no high-powered rifle in my .
hands, coming up against the wind toward an
unsuspecting creature hundreds of yards away.
This was no wounded leopard charging me ; no
mother bear defending with her giant might a
captured cub. It was only a mother bird, the size
of a wild duck, with swift wings at her command,
hiding under those wings her own and another's
young, and her own boundless fear !

For the second time in my life I had taken
captive with my bare hands a free wild bird. No,
I had not taken her captive. She had made her-
self a captive ; she had taken herself in the strong
net of her mother-love.

And now her terror seemed quite gone. At the
first touch of my hand she felt, I think, the love
restraining it, and without fear or fret allowed me
to push my hand under her and pull out the two
downy babies. But she reached after them with
her bill to tuck them back out of sight, and when

THE MOTHER MURRE

THE WILD MOTHER 235

I did not let them go, she sidled toward me, quack-
ing softly, — a language that I perfectly under-
stood, and was quick to answer.

I gave them back, fuzzy, and black and white.
She got them under her, stood up over them,
pushed her wings down hard around them, her
stout tail down hard behind them, and together
with them pushed in an abandoned egg which
was close at hand. Her own baby, some one else's
baby, and some one else's forsaken egg ! She could
cover no more ; she had not feathers enough. But
she had heart enough; and into her mother's
heart she had already tucked every motherless
egg and nestling of the thousands of frightened
birds that were screaming and wheeling in the
air high over her head.

XI

MOUNT HOOD FROM COUNCIL CREST

XI

MOUNT HOOD FROM COUNCIL
CREST

INHERE is one glory of Rainier, and
another glory of St. Helen's, and
another glory of Mount Adams, for
these majestic peaks differ from one
another in glory, and they all differ
in turn from Mount Hood, as Hood, in its dif-
ference only, exceeds them all in glory. For pure
spirituality, for earth raised incorruptible and
clothed upon with the holiness of beauty, Mount
Hood, as seen in the heavens from the heights of
Portland, is incomparable. Hood is not "The
Mountain that was God," but as its snow-crowned
summit, touched with the warmth of closing day,
was first unveiled before me, my soul did mag-
nify the Lord, for the vision, to my unaccustomed
eyes, was all divine.

Portland is a city beautiful for situation; Ore-
gon is a State of vast magnificence ; and the glory
of city and State is Mount Hood. There are loftier

240 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

mountains — Rainier and Shasta are loftier; there
are peaks that fill with awe and that strike with
terror, while Hood only fills the soul with exulta-
tion, with the joy of beauty, of completeness, and
perfection. Hood is but little over eleven thou-
sand feet high, and easily climbed. Its greatness
is not physical, not height nor power ; but form
rather, and spirit, and position. It stands sixty
miles from Portland, dominating, but not over-
whelming, the landscape, earth and all the sky a
frame for it. From Council Crest the city seems
a mere spectator looking off at the picture of a
mountain rising in majestic symmetry, wrapped
with a cold and indescribable purity, yet touched
with an aspiration that were fervent were it less
profound. Mount Hood from Portland is one of
the perfect things of the world.

What will be the influence of this unearthly
glory, I wonder, shining down forever upon the
city? If there be any virtue, if there be any praise
in thinking upon things that are true and pure
and lovely, should not the presence of Hood,
though acting slowly, act powerfully upon the
spirit of the city ? Shall Portland be the mother
of one great poet, or of one great painter, or one

MOUNT HOOD 241

great prophet because, high and lifted up above
her streets, stands this holy mountain whose very
shape is prophecy, whose radiance is the in-
dwelling light of all true art, and the very soul
of song?

Portland is a beautiful city, but born of the
river. Young, strong, thriving, she is concerned
with sawmills and salmon now, not with the tints
on the snows of Hood, though they are often the
color of salmon and of richer gold than the heart
of pine. Young, eager, adventurous, she is bent
on prosperity. Nor does prosperity wait to be
won ; it comes pouring in upon her,

From river and forest and orchard and ranch.

It is hard to think of Portland without feeling
the singleness and intensity of her purpose to
grow great and rich, as it is hard to write of her
without changing from slow-footing prose to the
gallop of verse. The cities along the Atlantic are
full of rich men; but Portland is full of men
growing rich. One can sit on Council Crest and
see the process, as one can see nothing else, not
even Hood, so often is the mountain shrouded in
clouds and hid in the rain and mist. But where

242 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

are Portland's poets, her painters and prophets ?
Asleep in the crater of Hood, I suppose, waiting
for the mountain to give them birth.

Portland feels small need of poets now ; they
are not the stuff of pioneers ! How many poets
came over the Oregon trail? It seems incredible
that the founders of this great city should still
walk its streets, should gather in reunion to retell
the story of those " early " days of the plains and
the Indians, as I saw them gather. The very
stumps would still be standing in the streets of
Portland had they not been used for paving-
blocks. Poets are poor hands at pulling stumps
and paving streets. And what use has she for
painters while her temple walls are rising ? or for
prophets when the salmon run their courses up the
Columbia as the stars their courses in the skies?

None yet, but the time shall come. The people
of Portland are proud of Hood ; they are more
concerned, however, with their corner lots. The
marvel of Portland, according to those who have
been there longest, is the rise in land values.
There is not a lot in the city but has climbed far
higher than the top of Hood. There is magic in
Oregon land. The harder you hold it the higher

MOUNT HOOD 243

it goes. I should say that the chief activity of
the State is holding on to corner lots, a sort
of husbandry singularly without virtue here in
Massachusetts, but which in Oregon yields thirty,
sixty, and a thousand fold. Towns are being laid
out, roads built, farms cleared, orchards planted,
and apples, the fairest apples in the world, are be-
ing picked, while the tent-pins of the population
are still unpulled, the people of city and country
guarding their land with guns, as it were, or watch-
ing their chance to jump some neighbor's claim.
The most astonishing thing to me in all of Oregon
was the price of land. But then, it is astonishing
land. I stopped to watch the plowing of a great
field of stubble in Joseph, where, as the plows
were turning the black soil around the boundaries,
the machines were threshing the yellow grain in the
center. The crop had just been cut — sixty bushels
to the acre, — the stubble being turned in for the
next sowing, no manure, no dressing with it to
feed the land. And this was the thirty-sixth con-
secutive year that wheat had been sown in this
field, and that wheat had been threshed — sixty
bushels to the acre — without a pound of fertili-
zer given back to the soil.

244 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON

It is not astonishing that in the middle of such
fields the farmers of Oregon are pulling down
their barns and building greater in their zeal to
make Oregon the biggest-barned State of the
Union. The heart of the Oregon farmer is in his
bam; he has not even tried yet to build for his
heart a house.

But this is still true of farmers East as well as
West ; of merchants East as well as West ; as
Portland is true of cities East and West. Portland
is a typical American city, younger, that is all,
and ravishingly fair. Daughter of the river on
whose banks she stands, she is the destined bride
of the mountain that watches yonder and waits.
Hood is in no hurry.

I look down from Council Crest upon the
growing city and see the present moment of my
country hurried, crowded, headlong — a time of
deeds and large and daring conquests, but with-
out sign of " that over-faint quiet which should
prepare the house for poets." Then I lift my eyes
to Hood, serene and soaring in the far-off Heaven,
and lo ! a vision of the future ! not the Mountain
that was God, but a summit that is song.

Drink, O City of Roses, of the pure cold waters

MOUNT HOOD 245

from the snowy heights of Hood. Drink and thirst
again. There are other springs in the summit than
those which feed Bull Run — fountains higher
up of living water such as flowed in Helicon.

THE END

INDEX

INDEX

Aigrettes, 42, 43.

Aneroid Lake, 175.

Animals, wildness persistent in

domesticated, 119-128; the

play of, 159-168; mother-love

in, 213-235.
Antelope, a mother and young,

86-91.

Automobile, a desert, 49.
Avocet, 75.

Badger, 54.

Beard-tongue, 152, 179.

Bend, Ore., 45, 53.

Birds, of Three-Arch Rocks, 3-7,
9-11, 18-25, 197-210; protec-
tion of, 32-38, 42, 43; at Silver
Lake, Ore., 74-77, 82; of Mal-
heur Lake Reservation, 94-
115; Oregon sanctuaries for,
97, 98; mother-love in, 109,
no, 221, 224-235.

Blitzen River, 108, 109, 113.

Blitzen River valley, 36.

Boar, wild, 126.

Bob-white, or quail, 227, 231.

Burns, Ore., 47, 48, 53, 61-68.

Butterflies, on Mt. Hood, 157-159,
162; angry, 161; flocking, 162.

Buzzard, turkey, 226.

Catfish, 218, 219.

Cats, wildness, 124, 125; as foster-
mothers, 222-224.

Cattle, ancestry, 128; the herd-
spirit among, 128-131; a stam-
pede, 131-143. See also Cow.

Chickens, play and fighting, 161.
Condor, California, 34, 35, 226.
Cony, 173-190.
Cormorant, Brandt's, 3, 4, 9, 10,

22, 204.

Council Crest, 239-241.

Cow, the, 126, 127; mother-love

in, 213, 214. See also Cattle.
Cowbird, 225.
Coyotes, 56, 71-73, 75-85, 92;

the coyote of Pelican Point, 82;

bark, 83, 84; team hunting,

86-91.
Crab, 215.

Crow, 32, 33, 40, 161.
Crow, Clarke's, 36, 37.
Cuckoos, 225, 226.

Danish heath, 12-14.
Deschutes Forest Reservation,

48.
Deschutes River, canon of, 29-

31-
Desert, an automobile ride over

the, 47-60; the wolf of the, 71-

92.
Dogs, 125, 126; Pups's play, 165,

166.

Egret, American, 42, 71, 74, 80,
96; at Malheur Lake, 99-107.

Elephant, 163.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quoted,
126.

Farms and farmers, Oregon, 243,
244.

250

INDEX

Fear, contagion of, 232.

Finley, William L., 7, 61, 63, 96,
97, 231-233; his story of the
egrets, 99-105.

Fishes, at play, 167, 168; mother-
love in, 217-219.

Flicker, 227.

Flowers, on Mt. Hood, 151-153;
of the Wallowa Mountains,
179, 186.

Fox, red, 84; playing with a golf-
ball, 166, 167; an instance of
mother-love, 221, 222.

Foxhounds, 125.

Glacier, on Mt. Hood, 154.
Goose, Canada, 77.
Grebe, eared, 107-114.
Guillemot, pigeon, 4, 21.
Gull, Western, 21, 24.
Gulls, 3, 4-

Hare, little chief, 173-190.

Heath hen, 34.

Hen, adopting kittens, 224.

Heron, night, 77.

Heron, white. See Egret.

Hibbard, Dr. L. E., his coyote

and antelope story, 86-91.
Hippopotamus, 160.
Hogs, 126.
Hornpout, 218, 219.
Horse, Peroxide Jim, 134-143.
Hunter, the, cruelty of, 77, 78.
Hyrax, 183.

Imnaha River, 173, 174, 179.
Infusorian, 163, 164.

Jay, Oregon, or whiskey-jack, 40,

41.
Joseph, Ore., 243.

Killdeer, 231.

Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 189.

Lake Malheur Reservation. See

Malheur Lake Reservation.
Land, in Oregon, 242-244.
Lupton's Pond, N j., 219.

Malheur Lake, among the birds

of, 95-115-
Malheur Lake Reservation, 48,

63, 97, 98.
Mallard, 77.
Mammals, mother-love in, 221-

224.

Minnows, 167, 168.
Mother Carey's Chickens, 193-

197. See also Petrel, Kaeding's.
Mother-love, 109, no, 213-235.
Mt. Hood, 37; the ascent of, 147-

159; storm on, 169, 170; and

Portland, 239-245.
Muir, John, quoted, 36, 37.
Mules, 175.
Murre, California, 3, 4, 19-21, 24,

205, 229; a mother murre, 230-

235-

Nighthawk, Western, 55.
Nutcracker, Clarke's, or Clarke's
Crow, 36, 37.

Oregon, the land of, 242-244.

Otter, 164, 165.

Owl, burrowing, 55, 56.

Paramcecium caudatum, 163, 164.
Pelican, white, 74, 80, 112.
Peroxide Jim, 134-143.
Petrel, Kaeding's, 25, 197-210.
Petrel, Leach's, 195.
Petrel, stormy, 196, 197.

INDEX

251

Petrel, Wilson's, 196.
Petrels, 193-197.
Phalarope, Wilson's, 77.
Pheasant, China, 120, 121.
Picket-pin (ground squirrel), 55,

56, 81.

Pigeon, passenger, 96.
Pika, 173-190.
Play, in animals and in men,

159-168.

Plumage, importation of, 33, 42.
Plume-hunters, 99-107.
Portland, Ore., 239-245.
Primrose, American, 55.
Pronghorn. See Antelope.
Puffin, tufted, 205.
Pups, the dog, 165, 166.

Quail, 227, 231.

Rabbit, jack, 55, 72, 79, 81.

Rattlesnake, 75.

Raven, 29-32, 34-36, 38-41, 43;

Gilbert White's story, 227, 228.
Reservations, bird and game, 7-

18.

Sage hen, 54, 55.

Sagebrush, 47-60.

Scorpion, 56.

Sea-lions, 5, 6, 9-11, 24, 202.

Shag Rock, 5, 18-25, 198-210,

228-235.
Shrike, 55.
Silences, 74, 75.
Silver Creek, 58.

Silver Lake, 71, 74-82, 92, 105.
Silvies River, 48, 62, 67, 100.
Sparrow, sage, 54.
Spiders, mother-love in, 215-217.
Squirrel, gray, 161, 222.
Squirrel, ground. See Picket-pin.
Squirrels, young, adopted by cats,

222-224.

Steins Mountains, 48.
Stickleback, 217.

Thrasher, sage, 54.

Three-Arch Rocks, 3-25, 197-

210, 228-235.
Tillamook Bar, 3, 201.
Toad, Surinam, 220, 221.
Toadfish, 218.
Trout, 173.
Trout fry, 61-67.
Tule Lake, 82.
Turkey, the, 121-124.
Turkey-buzzard, 226.

Vulture, turkey, 226.

Wade, the boss of the "bucka-

roos," 132-143.
Wallowa Lake, 176.
Wallowa Mountains, 40, 41;

finding the pika in, 173-190.
Weeks-McLean bill, 33.
Whiskey-jack, 40, 41.
White, Gilbert, quoted, 227, 228.
Wild, preservation of the, 7-18.
Wolf, timber, 84.
Wolves, 71-73.

CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

o - i

52154 818

S53wh

Sharp
Where rolls

The Library is free to all for reading and reference
use.

Books will not be issued or discharged except on
presentation of reader's card.

Books for home use, unless otherwise marked, may
be kept one month, and renewed for two weeks.
Seven day books may not be renewed. '.'.

The fine on each over-due book is two-cents a day.