ill show you a use for everything that grows in these
borders.

The manner of the country makes the usage of life there, and the land
will not be lived in except in its own fashion. The Shoshones live
like their trees, with great spaces between, and in pairs and in family
groups they set up wattled huts by the infrequent springs. More wickiups
than two make a very great number. Their shelters are lightly built, for
they travel much and far, following where deer feed and seeds ripen, but
they are not more lonely than other creatures that inhabit there.

The year's round is somewhat in this fashion. After the pinon harvest
the clans foregather on a warm southward slope for the annual adjustment
of tribal difficulties and the medicine dance, for marriage and mourning
and vengeance, and the exchange of serviceable information; if, for
example, the deer have shifted their feeding ground, if the wild sheep
have come back to Waban, or certain springs run full or dry. Here the
Shoshones winter flockwise, weaving baskets and hunting big game driven
down from the country of the deep snow. And this brief intercourse is
all the use they have of their kind, for now there are no wars, and many
of their ancient crafts have fallen into disuse. The solitariness of the
life breeds in the men, as in the plants, a certain well-roundedness
and sufficiency to its own ends. Any Shoshone family has in itself the
man-seed, power to multiply and replenish, potentialities for food and
clothing and shelter, for healing and beautifying.

When the rain is over and gone they are stirred by the instinct of those
that journeyed eastward from Eden, and go up each with his mate and
young brood, like birds to old nesting places. The beginning of spring
in Shoshone Land--oh the soft wonder of it!--is a mistiness as of
incense smoke, a veil of greenness over the whitish stubby shrubs, a web
of color on the silver sanded soil. No counting covers the multitude of
rayed blossoms that break suddenly underfoot in the brief season of the
winter rains, with silky furred or prickly viscid foliage, or no foliage
at all. They are morning and evening bloomers chiefly, and strong
seeders. Years of scant rains they lie shut and safe in the winnowed
sands, so that some species appear to be extinct. Years of long storms
they break so thickly into bloom that no horse treads without crushing
them. These years the gullies of the hills are rank with fern and a
great tangle