s no special preponderance of self-fertilized or wind-fertilized
plants, but everywhere the demand for and evidence of insect life. Now
where there are seeds and insects there will be birds and small mammals
and where these are, will come the slinking, sharp-toothed kind that
prey on them. Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you
cannot go so far that life and death are not before you. Painted lizards
slip in and out of rock crevices, and pant on the white hot sands.
Birds, hummingbirds even, nest in the cactus scrub; woodpeckers befriend
the demoniac yuccas; out of the stark, treeless waste rings the music
of the night-singing mockingbird. If it be summer and the sun well down,
there will be a burrowing owl to call. Strange, furry, tricksy things
dart across the open places, or sit motionless in the conning towers of
the creosote. The poet may have "named all the birds without a gun,"
but not the fairy-footed, ground-inhabiting, furtive, small folk of the
rainless regions. They are too many and too swift; how many you would
not believe without seeing the footprint tracings in the sand. They
are nearly all night workers, finding the days too hot and white. In
mid-desert where there are no cattle, there are no birds of carrion,
but if you go far in that direction the chances are that you will find
yourself shadowed by their tilted wings. Nothing so large as a man can
move unspied upon in that country, and they know well how the land deals
with strangers. There are hints to be had here of the way in which a
land forces new habits on its dwellers. The quick increase of suns at
the end of spring sometimes overtakes birds in their nesting and effects
a reversal of the ordinary manner of incubation. It becomes necessary to
keep eggs cool rather than warm. One hot, stifling spring in the Little
Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair
of meadowlarks, located unhappily in the shelter of a very slender
weed. I never caught them sitting except near night, but at mid-day they
stood, or drooped above it, half fainting with pitifully parted bills,
between their treasure and the sun. Sometimes both of them together with
wings spread and half lifted continued a spot of shade in a temperature
that constrained me at last in a fellow feeling to spare them a bit of
canvas for permanent shelter. There was a fence in that country shutting
in a cattle range, and along its fifteen miles of posts on