or large timber; that is in the southerly, sandy exposures. Higher on
the table-topped ranges low trees of juniper and pinon stand each apart,
rounded and spreading heaps of greenness. Between them, but each to
itself in smooth clear spaces, tufts of tall feathered grass.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and
time enough. Trees grow to consummate domes; every plant has its perfect
work. Noxious weeds such as come up thickly in crowded fields do not
flourish in the free spaces. Live long enough with an Indian, and he or
the wild things will 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