y men who herd the tractile flocks might be, except for some
added clothing, the very brethren of David. Of necessity they are hardy,
simple livers, superstitious, fearful, given to seeing visions, and
almost without speech. It needs the bustle of shearings and copious
libations of sour, weak wine to restore the human faculty. Petite Pete,
who works a circuit up from the Ceriso to Red Butte and around by way of
Salt Flats, passes year by year on the mesa trail, his thick hairy chest
thrown open to all weathers, twirling his long staff, and dealing
brotherly with his dogs, who are possibly as intelligent, certainly
handsomer.

A flock's journey is seven miles, ten if pasture fails, in a windless
blur of dust, feeding as it goes, and resting at noons. Such hours Pete
weaves a little screen of twigs between his head and the sun--the rest
of him is as impervious as one of his own sheep--and sleeps while his
dogs have the flocks upon their consciences. At night, wherever he may
be, there Pete camps, and fortunate the trail-weary traveler who falls
in with him. When the fire kindles and savory meat seethes in the pot,
when there is a drowsy blether from the flock, and far down the mesa
the twilight twinkle of shepherd fires, when there is a hint of blossom
underfoot and a heavenly whiteness on the hills, one harks back without
effort to Judaea and the Nativity. But one feels by day anything but
good will to note the shorn shrubs and cropped blossom-tops. So many
seasons' effort, so many suns and rains to make a pound of wool! And
then there is the loss of ground-inhabiting birds that must fail from
the mesa when few herbs ripen seed.

Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills, there is more
sky than any place in the world. It does not sit flatly on the rim
of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space in which the earth is
poised, hollows more, and is full of clean winey winds. There are some
odors, too, that get into the blood. There is the spring smell of sage
that is the warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks
to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that
sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here,
the sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the
plant's best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There
is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from campoodies and sheep
camps, that travels on the thi