Few birds are seen in the desert after one has left the border-lands behind, but there is one inhabitant of the air which is never absent. Hovering ever over the region of death is the vulture, ready to settle down to his grewsome feast the moment thirst and heat shall have robbed his victim of life. One may scan the heavens with never a sight of one of these birds while all goes well with himself and his beast, but let one of his horses or burros fall by the way, and lo! from the heavens descend numbers of the birds, and, should a traveler pass that way a few hours later, he would find but the whitening bones of the animal and a few fragments of the hide. And were he to look aloft, he, too, would discern not a speck against the blue canopy above him.
[CHAPTER V]
HUMANITY IN THE DESERT
Why human beings should have chosen such a place as the desert for their habitation is a mystery without a solution. Possibly the forefathers of the present dwellers of the region fled thither to escape the oppression of tribes more powerful and war-like than their own. Be that as it may, there dwell in the Great Mojave and in the Colorado deserts several tribes of men who, according to their traditions, have made their home there many centuries.
Up in the Death Valley region is a tribe known as the Panamint Indians. They live in rude huts built of sticks and mud, and they subsist upon the most disgusting of foods. At a certain season of the year Owen's Lake and several smaller saline lakes in that region abound with a white grub—the larva of a two-winged fly, ephydra Californica—called by the Indians "Koochabee." The Indians visit the lakes at the season of the year when the grub is most plentiful, and from the shores of the lakes they gather them where the waves throw them up in windrows several inches deep. The grubs are dried and are then pulverized in rude stone mortars. The powder is used in making a sort of bread which is highly prized as an article of food.
A CHEMEHUEVI INDIAN AND COYOTE
From photograph by C. C. Pierce & Co.