The desert

by John C. Van Dyke

Coyotes and wild-cats living without water.

Lean, gaunt life.

All the desert animals know the meaning of a water famine, and even those that are pronounced water drinkers know how to get on with the minimum supply. The mule-deer whose cousin in the Adirondacks goes down to water every night, lives in the desert mountains, month in and month out with nothing more watery to quench thirst than a lobe of the prickly pear or a joint of cholla. But he is naturally fond of green vegetation, and in the early morning he usually leaves the valley and climbs the mountains where with goats and mountain sheep he browses on the twigs of shrub and tree. The coyote likes water, too, but he puts up with sucking a nest of quail eggs, eating some mesquite beans, or at best absorbing the blood from some rabbit. The wild cat will go for weeks without more moisture than the blood of birds or lizards, and then perhaps, after long thirst, he will come to a water pocket in the rocks to lap only a handful, doing it with an angry snarling snap as though he disliked it and was drinking under compulsion. The gray wolf is too much of a traveler to depend upon any one locality. He will run fifty miles in a night and be back before morning. Whether he gets water or not is not possible to ascertain. The badger, the coon, and the bear are very seldom seen in the more arid regions. They are not strictly speaking desert animals because unfitted to endure desert hardships. They are naturally great eaters and sleepers, loving cool weather and their own fatness; and to that the desert is sharply opposed. There is nothing fat in the land of sand and cactus. Animal life is lean and gaunt; if it sleeps at all it is with one eye open; and as for heat it cares very little about it. For the first law of the desert to which animal life of every kind pays allegiance is the law of endurance and abstinence. After that requirement is fulfilled special needs produce the peculiar qualities and habits of the individual.

Fierceness of the animals.

Fitness for attack and escape.

Yet there is one quality more general than special since almost everything possesses it, and that is ferocity—fierceness. The strife is desperate; the supply of food and moisture is small, the animal is very hungry and thirsty. What wonder then that there is the determination of the starving in all desert life! Everything pursues or is pursued. Every muscle is strung to the highest tension. The bounding deer must get away; the swift-following wolf must not let him. The gray lizard dashes for a ledge of rock like a flash of light; but the bayonet bill of the road runner must catch him before he gets there. Neither can afford to miss his mark. And that is perhaps the reason why there is so much development in special directions, so much fitness for a particular purpose, so much equipment for the doing or the avoiding of death. Because the wild-cat cannot afford to miss his quarry, therefore is he made a something that seldom does miss.

The wild-cat.

The spring of the cat.

The description of the lion as “a jaw on four paws” will fit the wild-cat very well—only he is a jaw on two paws. The hind legs are insignificant compared with the front ones, and the body back of the shoulders is lean, lank, slight, but withal muscular and sinewy. The head is bushy, heavy, and square, the neck and shoulders are massive, the forelegs and paws so large that they look to belong to some other animal. The ears are small yet sensitive enough to catch the least noise, the nose is acute, the eyes are like great mirrors, the teeth like points of steel. In fact the whole animal is little more than a machine for dragging down and devouring prey. That and the protection of his breed are his only missions on earth. He is the same creeping, snarling beast that one finds in the mountains of California, but the desert animal is larger and stronger. He sneaks upon a band of quail or a rabbit with greater caution, and when he springs and strikes it is with greater certainty. The enormous paws pin the game to the earth, and the sharp teeth cut through like knives. It is not more than once in two or three days that a meal comes within reach and he has no notion of allowing it to get away.

The mountain lion.