in that neighborhood, and
it is popularly supposed to be the devil, it changes means and direction
without time or season. It creeps up whole hillsides with insidious
heat, unguessed until one notes the pine woods dying at the top, and
having scorched out a good block of timber returns to steam and spout in
caked, forgotten crevices of years before. It will break up sometimes
blue-hot and bubbling, in the midst of a clear creek, or make a sucking,
scalding quicksand at the ford. These outbreaks had the kind of morbid
interest for the Pocket Hunter that a house of unsavory reputation has
in a respectable neighborhood, but I always found the accounts he
brought me more interesting than his explanations, which were compounded
of fag ends of miner's talk and superstition. He was a perfect gossip of
the woods, this Pocket Hunter, and when I could get him away from
"leads" and "strikes" and "contacts," full of fascinating small talk
about the ebb and flood of creeks, the pinon crop on Black Mountain, and
the wolves of Mesquite Valley. I suppose he never knew how much he
depended for the necessary sense of home and companionship on the beasts
and trees, meeting and finding them in their wonted places,--the bear
that used to come down Pine Creek in the spring, pawing out trout from
the shelters of sod banks, the juniper at Lone Tree Spring, and the
quail at Paddy Jack's.

There is a place on Waban, south of White Mountain, where flat,
wind-tilted cedars make low tents and coves of shade and shelter, where
the wild sheep winter in the snow. Woodcutters and prospectors had
brought me word of that, but the Pocket Hunter was accessory to the
fact. About the opening of winter, when one looks for sudden big storms,
he had attempted a crossing by the nearest path, beginning the ascent at
noon. It grew cold, the snow came on thick and blinding, and wiped out
the trail in a white smudge; the storm drift blew in and cut off
landmarks, the early dark obscured the rising drifts. According to the
Pocket Hunter's account, he knew where he was, but couldn't exactly say.
Three days before he had been in the west arm of Death Valley on a short
water allowance, ankle-deep in shifty sand; now he was on the rise of
Waban, knee-deep in sodden snow, and in both cases he did the only
allowable thing--he walked on. That is the only thing to do in a
snowstorm in any case. It might have been the creature instinct, which
in his way of life had room to g