The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

Well, there was water in this river; but after the placer-mining began, in the month of May, and Moore’s Creek brought down the “tailings” from the mines and mingled them with the current of the river, its waters became as yellow as those of the famous Tiber as it “rolls by the towers of Rome,”—yellow with silt, which is not injurious; but it is not pleasant to drink essence of granite rock, nor yet to wash one’s face in it. They made a filter and filtered it; but every pailful had to be “packed,” as they say in the West, by the Chinese cook and the cook’s assistant. Economy in the use of water became no more than a matter of common consideration for human flesh.

In addition to the river there was a stream that came down the gulch close beside the camp. This little stream was a spendthrift in the spring and wasted its small patrimony of water; by the middle of summer it had begun to economize, and by September it was a niggard,—letting only a small dribble come down for those at its mouth to cherish in pools or pots or pails, or in whatever it could be gathered. This water of the gulch was frequently fouled by the range cattle that came crowding down to drink, mornings and evenings. Dead leaves and vegetation lay soaking in it, as summer waned. It was therefore condemned for drinking, but served for bathing or for washing the camp clothing, and was exceedingly precious by reason of its small and steadily decreasing quantity.

One morning, late in July, Jack was fast asleep and dreaming. The sun was hot on the great hills toward the east,—hills that had been faintly green for a few weeks in the spring, but were now given up to the mingled colors of the gray-green sagebrush and the dun-yellow soil.

They would have been hills of paradise, could rain have fallen upon them as often as it falls upon the cedar-crowned knolls of the Hudson; for these hills are noble in form and of great size,—a family of giants as they march skyward, arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder,—and the sky above them is the sky we call “Italian.” The “down-cañon wind,” that all night long had swept the gulch from its source in the hills to its mouth in the river, had fainted dead away in the heat of the sun. Presently the counter wind from the great hot plains would begin to blow, but this was the breathless pause between.

The flies were tickling Jack’s bare legs and creeping into the neck of his nightgown, where the button was off, as usually it is from a seven-year-old’s nightgown. He was restless, “like a dog that hunts in dreams,” for he was taking the old paths again that once he had known so well.

From the eastern hills came the mingled, far-off bleating, the ululation of a multitude of driven sheep. The sound had reached Jack’s dreaming ear. Suddenly his dream took shape, and for an instant he was a happy boy.

He was “at home” in the East. It was sheep-washing time, the last week in May; the apple orchards were a mass of bloom and the deep, old, winding lanes were sweet with their perfume. Jack was hurrying up the lane by the Long Pond to the sheep-washing place, where the water came down from the pond in a dark, old, leaky, wooden flume, and was held in a pool into which the sheep were plunged by twos and by threes, squeezed and tumbled about and lifted out to stagger away under the apple trees and dry their heavy fleeces in the sun. Jack was kicking in his sleep, when his name was called by a voice outside the window and he woke. Nothing was left of the dream, with all its sweets of sight and sound and smell, but the noise of the river’s continuous wrestle with the rocks of the upper bend, and that far-off multitudinous clamor from over the sun-baked hills.

“Jack, come out!” said the voice of Jack’s big cousin. “They are going to ‘sheep’ us. There’s a band of eight thousand coming!”

There was a great scattering of flies and of bedclothes, as Jack leaped out. He wasted no regrets upon the past,—one isn’t so foolish as that at seven years old,—but was ready for the joys of the present. Eight thousand sheep, or half that number (allowing for a big cousin’s liberal computation), were a sight worth seeing. As to being “sheeped,” what was there in an engineer’s camp to “sheep,” unless the eight thousand woolly range-trotters should trot over tents and house roofs and stovepipes and all, like Santa Claus’s team of reindeer!

Jack was out of bed and into his clothes in a hurry, and off over the hill with his cousin, buttoning the buttons of his “star” shirt waist on the way.