this
wilderness of water. We saw evidence of another's passage, in broken
cat-tails and blazed trees. In many places he had pushed into the
thickets. We concluded it must be a trapper. At last, to our surprise,
we saw a telephone equipment, sheltered in a box nailed on a
water-surrounded tree. The line ran directly across the stream. Here
also we could see where a boat had forced a way through, and the water
plants had been cut with a sharp instrument. What could it be? We were
certain no line ran to the only ranch at the Gulf. We had information
of another ranch directly on the border line, but did not think it
came below the levee, and as far as we had learned, there were no
homes but the wickiups of the Cocopah in the jungles. It was like one
of those thrilling stories of Old Sleuth and Dead Shot Dick which we
read, concealed in our schoolbooks, when we were supposed to be
studying the physical geography of Mexico. But the telephone was no
fiction, and had recently been repaired, but for what purpose it was
there we could not imagine. After leaving the lake there was no dry
land. At night our boat, filled with green tules for a bed, was tied
to a willow tree, with its roots submerged in ten feet of water. Never
were there such swarms of mosquitos. In the morning our faces were
corrugated with lumps, not a single exposed spot remaining unbitten.

The loops continued with the next day's travel, but we were gradually
working to the southwest, then they began to straighten out somewhat,
as the diverted streams returned. We thought early in the morning that
we would pass about ten miles to the east of the coast range, but it
was not to be. Directly to the base of the dark, heat-vibrating rocks
we pulled, and landed on the first shore that we had seen for
twenty-four hours.

Here was a recently used trail, and tracks where horses came down to
the water. Here too was the track of a barefooted Cocopah, a tribe
noted for its men of gigantic build, and with great feet out of all
proportion to their size. If that footprint was to be fossilized,
future generations would marvel at the evidence of some gigantic
prehistoric animal, an alligator with a human-shaped foot. These
Indians have lived in these mud bottoms so long, crossing the streams
on rafts made of bundles of tules, and only going to the higher land
when their homes are inundated by the floods, that they have become a
near approach to a web-footed human being.

Ou