4.
THE POCKET HUNTER
I remember very well when I first met him. Walking in the evening
glow to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I sniffed the
unmistakable odor of burning sage. It is a smell that carries far
and indicates usually the nearness of a campoodie, but on the level
mesa nothing taller showed than Diana's sage. Over the tops of it,
beginning to dusk under a young white moon, trailed a wavering
ghost of smoke, and at the end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter
making a dry camp in the friendly scrub. He sat tailorwise in the
sand, with his coffee-pot on the coals, his supper ready to hand in
the frying-pan, and himself in a mood for talk. His pack burros in
hobbles strayed off to hunt for a wetter mouthful than the sage
afforded, and gave him no concern.
We came upon him often after that, threading the windy passes, or
by water-holes in the desert hills, and got to know much of his
way of life. He was a small, bowed man, with a face and manner
and speech of no character at all, as if he had that faculty of
small hunted things of taking on the protective color of his
surroundings. His clothes were of no fashion that I could
remember, except that they bore liberal markings of pot black, and
he had a curious fashion of going about with his mouth open, which
gave him a vacant look until you came near enough to perceive him
busy about an endless hummed, wordless tune. He traveled far and
took a long time to it, but the simplicity of his kitchen
arrangements was elemental. A pot for beans, a coffee-pot, a
frying-pan, a tin to mix bread in—he fed the burros in this when
there was need—with these he had been half round our western world
and back. He explained to me very early in our acquaintance what
was good to take to the hills for food: nothing sticky, for that
"dirtied the pots;" nothing with "juice" to it, for that would not
pack to advantage; and nothing likely to ferment. He used no gun,
but he would set snares by the water-holes for quail and doves, and
in the trout country he carried a line. Burros he kept, one or two
according to his pack, for this chief excellence, that they would
eat potato parings and firewood. He had owned a horse in the
foothill country, but when he came to the desert with no forage but
mesquite, he found himself under the necessity of picking the beans
from the briers, a labor that drove him to the use of pack animals
to whom thorns were a relish.
I suppose no man becomes a pocket hunter by first intention. He
must be born with the faculty, and along comes the occasion, like
the tap on the test tube that induces crystallization. My friend
had been several things of no moment until he struck a
thousand-dollar pocket in the Lee District and came into his
vocation. A pocket, you must know, is a small body of rich ore
occurring by itself, or in a vein of poorer stuff. Nearly every
mineral ledge contains such, if only one has the luck to hit upon
them without too much labor. The sensible thing for a man to do
who has found a good pocket is to buy himself into business and
keep away from the hills. The logical thing is to set out looking
for another one. My friend the Pocket Hunter had been looking
twenty years. His working outfit was a shovel, a pick, a gold pan
which he kept cleaner than his plate, and a pocket magnifier. When
he came to a watercourse he would pan out the gravel of its bed for
"colors," and under the glass determine if they had come from far
or near, and so spying he would work up the stream until he found
where the drift of the gold-bearing outcrop fanned out into the
creek; then up the side of the canon till he came to the proper
vein. I think he said the best indication of small pockets was an
iron stain, but I could never get the run of miner's talk enough to
feel instructed for pocket hunting. He had another method in the
waterless hills, where he would work in and
out of blind gullies and all windings of the manifold strata that
appeared not to have cooled since they had been heaved up. His
itinerary began with the east slope of the Sierras of the Snows,
where that range swings across to meet the coast hills, and all up
that slope to the Truckee River country, where the long cold
forbade his progress north. Then he worked back down one or
another of the nearly parallel ranges that lie out desertward, and
so down to the sink of the Mojave River, burrowing to oblivion in
the sand,—a big mysterious land, a lonely, inhospitable land,
beautiful, terrible. But he came to no harm in it; the land
tolerated him as it might a gopher or a badger. Of all its
inhabitants it has the least concern for man.
There are many strange sorts of humans bred in a mining country,
each sort despising the queernesses of the other, but of them all
I found the Pocket Hunter most acceptable for his clean,
companionable talk. There was more color to his reminiscences than
the faded sandy old miners "kyoteing," that is, tunneling like a
coyote (kyote in the vernacular) in the core of a lonesome hill.
Such a one has found, perhaps, a body of tolerable ore in a poor
lead,—remember that I can never be depended on to get the terms
right,—and followed it into the heart of country rock to no
profit, hoping, burrowing, and hoping. These men go harmlessly mad
in time, believing themselves
just behind the wall of fortune—most likable and simple men, for
whom it is well to do any kindly thing that occurs to you except
lend them money. I have known "grub stakers" too, those
persuasive sinners to whom you make allowances of flour and pork
and coffee in consideration of the ledges they are about to find;
but none of these proved so much worth while as the Pocket Hunter.
He wanted nothing of you and maintained a cheerful preference for
his own way of life. It was an excellent way if you had the
constitution for it. The Pocket Hunter had gotten to that point
where he knew no bad weather, and all places were equally happy so
long as they were out of doors. I do not know just how long it
takes to become saturated with the elements so that one takes no
account of them. Myself can neve get past the glow and
exhilaration of a storm, the wrestle of long dust-heavy winds, the
play of live thunder on the rocks, nor past the keen fret of
fatigue when the storm outlasts physical endurance. But
prospectors and Indians get a kind of a weather shell that remains
on the body until death.
The Pocket Hunter had seen destruction by the violence of nature
and the violence of men, and felt himself in the grip of an
All-wisdom that killed men or spared them as seemed for their good;
but of death by sickness he knew nothing except that he believed he
should never suffer it. He had been in Grape-vine Canon the year
of
storms that changed the whole front of the mountain. All day he
had come down under the wing of the storm, hoping to win past it,
but finding it traveling with him until night. It kept on after
that, he supposed, a steady downpour, but could not with certainty
say, being securely deep in sleep. But the weather instinct does
not sleep. In the night the heavens behind the hill dissolved in
rain, and the roar of the storm was borne in and mixed with his
dreaming, so that it moved him, still asleep, to get up and out of
the path of it. What finally woke him was the crash of pine logs
as they went down before the unbridled flood, and the swirl of
foam that lashed him where he clung in the tangle of scrub while
the wall of water went by. It went on against the cabin of Bill
Gerry and laid Bill stripped and broken on a sand bar at the mouth
of the Grape-vine, seven miles away. There, when the sun was up
and the wrath of the rain spent, the Pocket Hunter found and
buried him; but he never laid his own escape at any door but the
unintelligible favor of the Powers.
The journeyings of the Pocket Hunter led him often into that
mysterious country beyond Hot Creek where a hidden force works
mischief, mole-like, under the crust of the earth. Whatever agency
is at work 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 grow, that
led him to the cedar shelter; at any rate he found it about four
hours after dark, and heard the heavy breathing of the flock. He
said that if he thought at all at this juncture he must have
thought that he had stumbled on a storm-belated shepherd with his
silly sheep; but in fact he took no note of anything but the
warmth of packed fleeces, and snuggled in between them dead with
sleep. If the flock stirred in the night he stirred drowsily to
keep close and let the storm go by. That was all until morning
woke him shining on a white world. Then the
very soul of him shook to see the wild sheep of God stand up
about him, nodding their great horns beneath the cedar roof,
looking out on the wonder of the snow. They had moved a little
away from him with the coming of the light, but paid him no more
heed. The light broadened and the white pavilions of the snow
swam in the heavenly blueness of the sea from which they rose.
The cloud drift scattered and broke billowing in the canons. The
leader stamped lightly on the litter to put the flock in motion,
suddenly they took the drifts in those long light leaps that are
nearest to flight, down and away on the slopes of Waban. Think of
that to happen to a Pocket Hunter! But though he had fallen on
many a wished-for hap, he was curiously inapt at getting the truth
about beasts in general. He believed in the venom of toads, and
charms for snake bites, and—for this I could never forgive
him—had all the miner's prejudices against my friend the coyote.
Thief, sneak, and son of a thief were the friendliest words he had
for this little gray dog of the wilderness.
Of course with so much seeking he came occasionally upon pockets
of more or less value, otherwise he could not have kept up his way
of life; but he had as much luck in missing great ledges as in
finding small ones. He had been all over the Tonopah country, and
brought away float without happening upon anything that gave
promise of what that district was to become in a few years.
He claimed to have chipped bits off the very outcrop of the
California Rand, without finding it worth while to bring away, but
none of these things put him out of countenance.
It was once in roving weather, when we found him shifting pack on
a steep trail, that I observed certain of his belongings done up
in green canvas bags, the veritable "green bag" of English novels.
It seemed so incongruous a reminder in this untenanted West that
I dropped down beside the trail overlooking the vast dim valley,
to hear about the green canvas. He had gotten it, he said, in
London years before, and that was the first I had known of his
having been abroad. It was after one of his "big strikes" that he
had made the Grand Tour, and had brought nothing away from it but
the green canvas bags, which he conceived would fit his needs, and
an ambition. This last was nothing less than to strike it rich
and set himself up among the eminently bourgeois of London. It
seemed that the situation of the wealthy English middle class,
with just enough gentility above to aspire to, and sufficient
smaller fry to bully and patronize, appealed to his imagination,
though of course he did not put it so crudely as that.
It was no news to me then, two or three years after, to learn that
he had taken ten thousand dollars from an abandoned claim, just
the sort of luck to have pleased him, and gone to London to spend
it. The land seemed not to miss him any
more than it had minded him, but I missed him and could not
forget the trick of expecting him in least likely situations.
Therefore it was with a pricking sense of the familiar that I
followed a twilight trail of smoke, a year or two later, to the
swale of a dripping spring, and came upon a man by the fire with
a coffee-pot and frying-pan. I was not surprised to find it was
the Pocket Hunter. No man can be stronger than his destiny.