of climbing vines.

Just as the mesa twilights have their vocal note in the love call of
the burrowing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by the mourning doves.
Welcome and sweet they sound in the smoky mornings before breeding time,
and where they frequent in any great numbers water is confidently looked
for. Still by the springs one finds the cunning brush shelters from
which the Shoshones shot arrows at them when the doves came to drink.

Now as to these same Shoshones there are some who claim that they have
no right to the name, which belongs to a more northerly tribe; but that
is the word they will be called by, and there is no greater offense than
to call an Indian out of his name. According to their traditions and all
proper evidence, they were a great people occupying far north and east
of their present bounds, driven thence by the Paiutes. Between the two
tribes is the residuum of old hostilities.

Winnenap', whose memory ran to the time when the boundary of the Paiute
country was a dead-line to Shoshones, told me once how himself and
another lad, in an unforgotten spring, discovered a nesting place of
buzzards a bit of a way beyond the borders. And they two burned to
rob those nests. Oh, for no purpose at all except as boys rob nests
immemorially, for the fun of it, to have and handle and show to other
lads as an exceeding treasure, and afterwards discard. So, not quite
meaning to, but breathless with daring, they crept up a gully, across
a sage brush flat and through a waste of boulders, to the rugged pines
where their sharp eyes had made out the buzzards settling.

The medicine-man told me, always with a quaking relish at this point,
that while they, grown bold by success, were still in the tree, they
sighted a Paiute hunting party crossing between them and their own land.
That was mid-morning, and all day on into the dark the boys crept and
crawled and slid, from boulder to bush, and bush to boulder, in cactus
scrub and on naked sand, always in a sweat of fear, until the dust caked
in the nostrils and the breath sobbed in the body, around and away
many a mile until they came to their own land again. And all the time
Winnenap' carried those buzzard's eggs in the slack of his single
buckskin garment! Young Shoshones are like young quail, knowing without
teaching about feeding and hiding, and learning what civilized children
never learn, to be still and to keep on being still, at the first hint
of danger o