Once, watching for another flash of color, I had my glass on the hummer as he sat quiet. Suddenly the verdin began sputtering to himself, after his manner, a little way off. Quick as thought the hummer cocked his head, waited an instant as if to make sure he had heard correctly (it seemed impossible, I suppose, after such a drubbing), and then, like a bullet out of a gun, flew at the persistent intruder. His spirit was wonderful, and being roused to his work, he finished by descending at full speed upon a black phœbe that just then blundered innocently along. The big flycatcher, many times bigger than the hummer,—but so is a man many times bigger than a rifle ball,—did not stand upon the order of his going, but went at once. I did not wonder. The fellow might have driven me away, also, had he taken it into his head to try. He was irresistible. Talk of a strenuous life!
At another time he darted from his perch in a quite unwonted direction, and flew on the line to a palo-verde shrub off on the hillside. The verdin was there, it turned out, down at the very bottom of the bush,—though to my senses he had made no sign,—and must be dislodged forthwith.
Why the hummer offered no objection to the kinglet’s presence is beyond my knowledge. Perhaps he took into account the fact that the kinglet was here only for the winter; for it was impossible not to surmise that the hummer had selected this particular spot for his summer home, and as such meant to hold it against all comers, exercising over it all the rights of sovereignty. Let the verdin and the phœbe go elsewhere.
The phœbe pretty certainly would have gone elsewhere, hummer or no hummer. As to what the verdin will conclude to do, things being as they are, my mind is less clearly made up. He is not so swift as his bullet of a rival, but I fancy him to be a pretty dogged fighter, able to be whipped a good many times without finding it out. Still, as between the two, if I were compelled to wager, I think I should risk my money on the hummingbird.
THE DESERT REJOICES
What was foretold in Judea is fulfilled in Arizona—the desert has blossomed like the rose.
I could hardly believe it, a month ago, when a Tucson business man, who in the kindness of his heart had turned the city upside down, almost, seeking to find a home for a man who was not a consumptive and did not wish to live in a hospital or a pest-house—I could hardly believe it, I repeat, when he said: “Oh, you mustn’t go back to Texas yet. You must stay and see the desert in bloom. After these unusual rains and snowfalls it will soon be all like a flower garden.” “So may it turn out,” I thought; “but time will tell.”
He spoke, according to the privilege of prophets, in the language of hyperbole; for, although his prediction has come true, its fulfillment is more than a little straitened and stingy. The desert has blossomed, but it is like a flower garden only in this respect—that there are flowers in it. They are numbered by millions, indeed; or, rather, they are beyond all thought of numeration; but, as far as the appearance of the place is concerned, it is scarcely more like a flower garden than like a billiard table. A careless traveler—and not so very careless, neither—might tread the blossoms under his feet for miles without seeing so much as one of them. They are desert flowers; vegetable Lilliputians; minute, almost microscopic, for the most part, as if moisture had been doled out to them by the drop or the thimbleful, as indeed it has been; and the few that are larger have in the main a weedy aspect, such as blinds the eye of the ordinary non-observer, to whom, rightly or wrongly, a flower is one thing and a weed another. As for the tiny ones, the overwhelming majority, a blossom that you can see in its place only by getting down on your knees to look for it may be a “flower” to a botanist, but hardly to a plain, unlettered, matter-of-fact citizen.
And still, after the prophetic manner, the prediction has come true. The desert has blossomed abundantly. As it now is, I can imagine that it would be a place of unspeakable interest to a philosophic botanist. He would know, presumably, what I do not, whether these starveling races, existers upon nothing, are to be accounted species by themselves, or only stunted representatives of species that under favoring conditions grow to a more considerable size. To his mind numberless problems would be suggested touching the methods by which plants, sturdy and patient beings, adapt themselves to untoward circumstances and keep themselves alive—so perpetuating the race—upon the chariest of encouragement. He would understand the significance of the prevailing hairiness of desert-inhabiting species, as well as of the all but universal light bluish or dusty color of the foliage; for, saving the yellow-green creosote, there is hardly so much as a bright green leaf from one end of the desert to the other.
The state of my own unphilosophic mind is peculiar, like the circumstances in which it finds itself. It is (or perhaps it would be more honest to say, it ought to be) humiliating, but it has something of the charm of novelty.