Yes, there is animal and bird life here though it is not always apparent unless you look for it. Wrens and linnets are building nests in the cholla, and finches are singing from the top of the sahuaro.[2] There are plenty of reptiles, rabbits and ground squirrels quietly slipping out of your way; and now that the sun is up you can see a long sun-burned slant-of-hair trotting up yonder divide and casting an apprehensive head from side to side as he moves off. It is not often that the old gray wolf shows himself to the traveller. He is usually up in the mountains before sunrise. And seldom now does one see the desert antelope along the mesas, and yet off to the south you can see patches of white that come and go almost like flashing mirrors in the sun. They are stragglers from some band that have drifted up from central Sonora. No; they are not far away. A little mirage is already forming over that portion of the mesa and makes them look more distant than they are in reality. You can be deceived on the desert by the nearness of things quite as often as by their remoteness.
The Lost Mountains.
Mountain walls.
These desert mountains have a fashion of appearing distant until you are almost up to them. Then they seem to give up the game of deception and come out of their hiding-places. It is just so with the mountains toward which I am riding. After several hours they seem to rise up suddenly in front of me and I am at their base. They are not high—perhaps fifteen hundred feet. The side near me is precipitous rock, weather-stained to a reddish-black. A ride around the bases discloses an almost complete perpendicular wall, slanting off half way down the sides into sloping beds of bowlders that have been shaken loose from the upper strata. A huge cleft in the western side—half barranca half canyon—seems to suggest a way to the summit.
The ascent.
Deer trails.
Footprints.
The walking up the mountain is not the best in the world. It is over splintered rock, stepping from stone to stone, creeping along the backbone of bowlders, and worrying over rows of granite blocks. Presently the course seems to slip into a diagonal—a winding up and around the mountain—and ahead of me the stones begin to look peculiar, almost familiar. There seems to be a trail over the ledges and through the broken blocks; but what should make a trail up that deserted mountain? Mule-deer travelling toward the summit to lie down in the heat of the day? It is possible. The track of a band of deer soon becomes a beaten path, and animals are just as fond of a good path as humanity. By a strange coincidence at this very moment the sharp-toed print of a deer’s hoof appears in the ground before me. But it looks a little odd. The impression is so clear cut that I stoop to examine it. It is with no little astonishment that I find it sunk in stone instead of earth—petrified in rock and overrun with silica. The bare suggestion gives one pause. How many thousands of years ago was that impression stamped upon the stone? By what strange chance has it survived destruction? And while it remains quite perfect to-day—the vagrant hoof-mark of a desert deer—what has become of the once carefully guarded footprints of the Sargons, the Pharaohs and the Cæsars? With what contempt Nature sometimes plans the survival of the least fit, and breaks the conqueror on his shield!
The stone path.
Following the trail.