The Happy Hunting-Grounds

by Kermit Roosevelt

I got Dominguez and the horses and brought in the sheep, which took several hours. That afternoon we were back at Tinah’alta, with a long evening’s work ahead of me skinning out the heads and feet by starlight. Utting, who was always ready to do anything at any time, and did everything well, turned to with a will and took the ewe off my hands.

The next day I was hard at work on the skins. One of the tanks, about four hundred yards from camp, was a great favorite with the sheep, and more than once during our stay the men in camp saw sheep come down to drink at it. This had generally happened when I was off hunting; but on the morning when I was busy with the skins two rams came down to drink. It was an hour before noon; for at this place the sheep finished feeding before they drank. The wind was blowing directly up the gulch to them, but although they stopped several times to stare at the camp, they eventually came to the water-hole and drank. Of course we didn’t disturb these sheep, for not only were they in the United States, but they were drinking at a water-hole in a desert country; and a man who has travelled the deserts, and is any sort of a sportsman, would not shoot game at a water-hole unless he were in straits for food.

I had been hunting on the extreme end of the Gila Range and near a range called El Viejo Hombre (The Old Man). After I shot my ram, in the confusion that followed, two of the young rams broke back, came down the mountain, passing quite close to Win, and crossed the plain to the Viejo Hombre Range, some mile and a half away. The bands of sheep out of which I shot my specimens had been feeding chiefly on the twigs of a small symmetrical bush, called by the Mexicans El Yervo del Baso, the same, I believe, that Professor Hornaday in his Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava calls the white Brittle bush. They had also been eating such galleta-grass as they could find; it was on this grass that we depended for food for our horses and mules. Apparently the sheep of these bands had not been going to the water-hole; there were numerous places where they had been breaking down cactus and eating the pulp. In this country Win said that the rams and the ewes began to run together in October, and that in February the young were born. When the rams left the ewes, they took with them the yearling rams, and they didn’t join the ewes again until the next October.

On the following day I left Utting and Proebstel and took the trail to the Tule tank. The two Mexicans were with me and we had two horses and three mules. We were travelling very light, for we were bound for a country where water-holes were not only few and far between but most uncertain. My personal baggage consisted of my washing kit, an extra pair of shoes, a change of socks, and a couple of books. Besides our bedding we had some coffee, tea, sugar, rice, flour (with a little bacon to take the place of lard in making bread), and a good supply of frijoles, or Mexican beans. It was on these last that we really lived. As soon as we got to a camp we always put some frijoles in a kettle and started a little fire to boil them. If we were to be there for a couple of days we put in enough beans to last us the whole time, and then all that was necessary in getting a meal ready was to warm up the beans.

It was between four and five in the afternoon when we left Tinah’alta, and though the moon did not rise until late, the stars were bright and the trail was clear. The desert we were riding through was covered with mesquite and creosote and innumerable choya cactus; there were also two kinds of prickly-pear cactus, and ocatillas were plentiful. The last are curious plants; they are formed somewhat on the principle of an umbrella, with a very short central stem from which sometimes as many as twenty spokes radiate umbrella-wise. These spokes are generally about six feet long and are covered with thorns which are partially concealed by tiny leaves. The flower of the ocatilla is scarlet, and although most of them had stopped flowering by August, there were a few still in bloom. After about six hours’ silent riding we reached Tule. The word means a marsh, but, needless to say, all that we found was a rock-basin with a fair supply of water and a very generous supply of tadpoles and water-lice.

Next morning when we came to get breakfast ready we found we had lost, through a hole in a pack-sack, all of our eating utensils except a knife and two spoons; but we were thankful at having got off so easily. By three in the afternoon we were ready for what was to be our hardest march. We wished to get into the Pinacate country; and our next water was to be the Papago tank, which Casares said was about forty-five miles south of us. He said that in this tank we were always sure to find water.

For the first fifteen miles our route lay over the Camino del Diablo, a trail running through the Tule desert—and it has proved indeed a “road of the devil” for many an unfortunate. Then we left the trail, the sun sank, twilight passed, and in spite of the brilliancy of the stars, the going became difficult. In many places where the ground was free from boulders the kangaroo-rats had made a network of tunnels, and into these our animals fell, often sinking shoulder-deep. Casares was leading, riding a hardy little white mule. While he rode he rolled cigarette after cigarette, and as he bent forward in his saddle to light them, for a moment his face would be brought into relief by the burning match and a trail of sparks would light up the succeeding darkness. Once his mule shied violently, and we heard the angry rattling of a side-winder, a sound which once heard is never forgotten.

At about eight o’clock, what with rocks and kangaroo-rat burrows, the going became so bad that we decided to offsaddle and wait till the moon should rise. We stretched out with our heads on our saddles and dozed until about midnight, when it was time to start on again. Soon the desert changed and we were free of the hills among which we had been travelling, and were riding over endless rolling dunes of white sand. As dawn broke, the twin peaks of Pinacate appeared ahead of us, and the sand gave place to a waste of red and black lava, broken by steep arroyos. We had been hearing coyotes during the night, and now a couple jumped up from some rocks, a hundred yards away, and made off amongst the lava.

By eight o’clock the sun was fiercely hot, but we were in among the foot-hills of Pinacate. I asked Casares where the tanks were, and he seemed rather vague, but said they were beyond the next hills. They were not; but several times more he felt sure they were “just around the next hill.” I realized that we were lost and resolved to give him one more try, and then if I found that he was totally at sea as to the whereabouts of the tank, I intended to find some shelter for the heat of the day, and, when it got cooler, to throw the packs off our animals and strike back to Tule. It is difficult to realize how quickly that fierce sun dries up man and beast. I doubt if in that country a really good walker could have covered ten miles in the noonday heat without water and without stopping. We could have made Tule all right, but the return trip would have been a very unpleasant one, and we would probably have lost some of our animals.

However, just before we reached Casares’s last location of the Papago tanks, we came upon an unknown water-hole, in the bed of an arroyo. The rains there are very local, and although the rest of the country was as dry as tinder, some fairly recent downpour had filled up this little rocky basin. There were two trees near it, a mesquite and a palo verde, and though neither would fit exactly into the category of shade-trees, we were most grateful to them for being there at all. The palo verde is very deceptive. When seen from a distance, its greenness gives it a false air of being a lovely, restful screen from the sun, but when one tries to avail oneself of its shade, the fallacy is soon evident. It is only when there is some parasitical mistletoe growing on it that the palo verde offers any real shade. The horses were very thirsty, and it was a revelation to see how they lowered the water in the pool.