and
harmless, of the color of the soil; and the curio dealer will give you
two bits for it, to stuff.

Men have their season on the mesa as much as plants and four-footed
things, and one is not like to meet them out of their time. For example,
at the time of _rodeos_, which is perhaps April, one meets free riding
vaqueros who need no trails and can find cattle where to the layman no
cattle exist. As early as February bands of sheep work up from the south
to the high Sierra pastures. It appears that shepherds have not changed
more than sheep in the process of time. The shy hairy 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, hol