Often I turned and gazed anxiously over the plain, expecting I should see the drayman, his daughter Caroline, and a priest in hot pursuit; and there and then, on the Shasta plains, I should be, nolens volens, linked to my fair-haired partner, for a life’s cotillon!
Such was my first, and such was my last, my only night in Yreka! ‘All’s well that ends well,’ and I trust the fair Caroline has as pleasant a remembrance of the Cap’en as he has of her!
I found my camp all right, saddled up, and am off on my perilous journey through the wilds of Oregon. The Shasta plains are vast sandy flats, half prairie, half desert, sparsely covered with withered grass, and not a bush or tree or shrub, as far as the eye could wander, had struggled into life. ’Tis true a stunted artemisia, or wild-sage bush, had fought its way inch by inch in its struggle for existence, and looked so old, dry, and parched, that your idea was, if you laid a finger on it, it would powder up like dried herbs; but whatever had been in shape of grass, or herb, or shrub, was gone, cleared bodily and entirely away by the field-crickets.
Never shall I forget this insect array. On getting well upon the plains, I found every inch of ground covered with field-crickets; they were as thick on the ground as ants on a hill; the mules could not tread without stepping on them; not an atom or vestige of vegetation remained, the ground as clear as a planed floor. It was about twenty good long miles to the next water, and straight across the sand-plains, and, for that entire distance, the crickets were as thick as ever. It is impossible to estimate the quantity; but when you suppose a space of ground twenty-seven miles long, and how wide I know not, but at least twice that, covered with crickets as thick as they could be packed, you can roughly imagine what they would have looked like if swept into a heap.
It was long after sundown when we reached the water, tired, thirsty, and utterly worn-out; but the stream being wide and swift, the crickets had not crossed it, so our tired animals had a good supper, and we a comfortable camp. I rode off to some farm-enclosures I saw, in search of milk and eggs; and, to my great surprise, I noticed every field had a little tin-fence inside the snake or rail fence, about six or eight inches wide, nailed along on a piece of lumber, placed edgeways in the ground, so that a good wide ledge of tin projected towards the prairie.
‘What,’ I said to the first farmer I met, ‘induces you to put this tin affair round your field?’
‘Why, stranger, I guess you ain’t a-travelled this way much, or you’d be pretty tall sure that them darned blackshirts out on the prairie would eat a hoss and chase the rider. But for that bit of a tin-fixin’ thar, they’d mighty soon make tracks for my field, and just leave her clean as an axe-blade. These critters come about once in four years, and a mighty tall time they have when they do come!’
It was a most effectual and capital contrivance to keep them out, for if they came underneath the tin they jumped up against it, and it was too wide to leap over. These field-crickets (Acheta nigra) are black, and very much larger than the ordinary house-cricket. They eat seeds, grass, fruit, and, when they can get nothing else, they devour each other. I frequently got off my horse to see what a large mob of crickets were about. They had dragged down, perhaps, two or three others, and were one and all deliberately tearing them to pieces. If they meet head to head, they rush at each other and butt like rams, but, backing against each other, they lash out their hind-legs and kick like horses. What becomes of them when they die I cannot imagine; the entire atmosphere for miles must become pestilential. I suppose, from their coming in such vast numbers every fourth year, that the larvæ must take that time ere they assume the perfect shape.
May 16th.—The Californian quail, which I found most plentiful along the course of the Sacramento, ceases at the edge of this great sandy desert; it appears to be the limit to its northern range. I note a singular instance, how curiously and readily birds alter their usual habits under difficulties, in the nesting of Bullock’s Oriole. A solitary oak stood by the little patch of water, a spring that oozed, rather than bubbled, through the sandy soil where my camp stood; it was the only water within many miles, and the only tree too; every available branch and spray had one of the woven nests of this brilliant bird hanging from it. I have never seen them colonise elsewhere. The nests are usually some distance from each other, and concealed amidst thick foliage.