[Idah Meacham Strobridge, The Quail's Cañon, from The Land of Purple Shadows (1909)]

 

THE QUAIL'S CAÑON.

          BRISTLING with rocky cliffs and deep ravines—its face is furrowed and scarred where cloudbursts have warred their way; but all softly beautiful in its blending of violet-blues and shadowy purples as you view it from afar, is this rugged mountain where—in the long ago—miners and prospectors burrowed its sides full of holes, as the badgers burrow the plains away down below, making their tunnels and inclines and shafts in the quest for silver. For these things of which I tell you, happened in the days when silver, not gold, was the metal men went a-seeking.

          Ledges were there in every cliff; and in a sunny cañon lying to the west they built their cabins, setting them in two long rows at the sides of the creek that came down in rowdy fashion (making much noise, and taking up much room) after it left the sky-line where it was born under the melting edges of the snow-banks.

          The mining camp nestled happily between two uneven ridges; and there it grew lustily, and the miners called it a "city," and great things were expected of it. A busy, hopeful little community it was which had gathered there in those old days of honest endeavor and steadfast work; and all signs pointed (they would

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tell you) to the time that it would become a great silver camp. But "all signs fail in dry weather"; and although it was indeed a dry land, and although there came seasons of unprecedented wet, and snow, and cold, as in other lands, one could not tell if it was in spite of the signs, or because of them, that none of the good things prophesied and hoped-for ever came true.

          The mountain was a network of ledges, and in them silver was found in abundance. Willing hands were ready to do the work—the hands of men who were young and brave and strong as they must be who go to blaze the way through a new country. But a score of unforeseen difficulties leagued against them, and as they saw their chances for success diminish, their numbers decreased—they drifted away, one after another, going back to the old homes in the cities from whence they came.

          First one cabin, then another, became tenantless—each owner taking with him all that was possible for him to carry. Down along the home road to the sea, they would find purchasers for all which they had no use for; so windows, and doors, and roofing were taken away, to be sold to other miners in other cañons farther toward the West. Lumber was priceless in a land which had neither railways nor water transportation.

          Far away, across a continent, a civil war was rending our country, but the meager news which came to the miners in the isolated cañon seemed but as a story. Letters and newspapers must journey many a week ere ships, and ponies could bring them to their destination. "The world forgetting, and by the world forgot," the few who were left there numbered but two score when the Winter of the Great Snow descended on them.

          Their supplies—cached in abandoned tunnels—had

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been growing less and less, with no immediate means of being renewed. Each man was looking forward to the Spring when he, too, would return to the Coast. There would be enough to carry them through the Winter months, if the season were short, and nothing unforeseen occurred. They had ammunition in camp—not much, but what seemed to be enough for their needs; and rabbits were to be had for the shooting, while powder and shot lasted. Other fresh meat, there was none. They now saw, only too well, how great a mistake it had been for them to remain behind the others. It was too late in the season for them to start back on the long trail toward the sea. They must wait for Spring to open. Winter would be upon them soon.

          Winter came—came cruelly, that year. What man among them ever forgot it while he lived!

          The sun went out of the sky, and darker and darker grew the heavens. There was no wind. Nothing but a leaden stillness. Then the heavy skies began to sift soft flakes of snow earthward. At first, they came fine as the grains of alkali dust that had been whirled up by the Summer winds down on the dreary plains. Larger, and larger they grew as they hurried onward toward the little colony in the cañon. From big flakes, they grew into great snow-feathers; and these came so fast and so thick, that the sky which had been darkened was now white from the flakes, and shut out the leaden-colored roof of their little world.

          Under the snow-drifts, where the wild rose-bushes and willows made a shelter for the stream, the creek shouted and laughed at their dismay and dread, and went babbling on down to the desert where the road was snowed under, and where no living thing moved across the shoreless, silent, ghostly sea.

          There were nights when the storm roused itself to a fury that brought winds down from the heights roar-

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ing like wild beasts roaming through the cañon. The storm in its frenzy would beat against the rocks as though to rend them from their very foundations; and then would go shrieking over the ridge, and away. Morning would come, and the storm-fury would have spent itself; but not the snow. Always, and always it snowed. Each day dawned upon down-drifting flakes which fell upon a world of unearthly silence. There was no work done among the men. Who could climb the mountain-sides to the tunnels and inclines? For more than three weeks they had been without tea, or coffee, or flour, bacon, or beans, or any of the things they most needed to ward off starvation. For a man may starve, even with food to eat, if it be not the right sort. There were yet a few articles of food—though little else than sugar and dried "jerky." Not many of the men had ever been without wholesome food before—most of them were from the East, from the cities. The hard life began to tell on them. They grew thin; grew weak—very weak. Some among them sickened, and lay down too ill to care what the end might be.

          Then the first one died. Not much more than a boy, and unused to hardships—unable to stand the rough fare, he died for the lack of nourishing food. It was two hundred and fifty miles to Virginia City, where there were both food and medicine to be had; but who could make the trip in the face of the relentless storm which daily piled higher and higher the white barriers between them and that distant help!

          So Gilbert Bend died—died just as the storm, wearied of its weeks of warring, ceased. The flakes at last stopped floating earthward—stopped suddenly one day; and there was the sun! But oh! what a world it showed. A vast, trackless waste of dazzling white,

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unrelieved by even a solitary touch of any color or shading. Snowed in.

          In the center of the town, among the deserted stores, was a saloon, also deserted. It was the one building there having a floor. This, they tore up; and making a rude box from the boards thus obtained, they laid in it the body of their dead comrade. Then, taking it on their shoulders, the six strongest men among them bore it down to the top of the mesa where others—ere the storm had fallen—had been buried before. Plowing their way through the soft drifts of blinding whiteness, under the warmth of the dazzling noon-day sun, they came at last to the rocky point amid the foothills. Two, who had broken a trail there before them, had the shallow grave ready; and there they laid him away—one of the unknown Trail-Makers of the West—while, together, they sang a hymn that most of them knew, and had sung in the old days "back home." Then one—his partner—tried to speak of the dead, but sobbing turned away; and so they slowly tramped back through the heavy drifts to their cabins.

          When the first rider made his way into the cañon, after the suns of many days had made the roads passable, the men whom he found were very near to starvation; and some who had been among the number when the first flakes of the great snow had fallen, were no longer there. Again—and again had the old saloon-floor gone to the making of the rough boxes, which the few who were left had carried down to the lonely mesa where they left their dead comrades to sleep in an unkind land. So the trail grew wider, and the drifts were beaten down by the feet that passed on the way.

          Years came and went; yet never again did the snow fall as it fell that year; the year that (far away) Lee had marched "horse and foot into Fredericktown." To the East, they counted time by the great battles;

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here—in the West—events were dated from the "Winter of the Great Snow." Now, time dulls the sharp edges of history, and finally there were those (they were new-comers in the country) who said it was but a fanciful story—that no such heavy snows had ever fallen. But the old men of the old days, shook their gray heads, knowing better.

          Colonists had come into the country since that time, and had made their homes. A railroad cut across the flat valley. Other cañons now held other camps; but this one still remained deserted. The last man had gone, long before. Not a roof was left; only the melting adobe walls showed where the houses had been, or the fallen stones marked the site of a miner's cabin.

          The last to go was the first to build in the valley. Down there, in the midst of green fields and orchards which he planted, was the home of one of the pioneers. He plowed and planted; and he prospered. And he was content in the home he had made; and was happy. A grove grew up of trees that were his planting; and birds came to the trees, as birds come whenever and wherever trees are made to grow in desert-land. Birds in numbers came, and of many kinds. Yet what the man wanted to see were quail—the mountain and valley quail he had known long before, in his life among the poppies and pines of California. Try as he would, he could never quite forget those days when he had carried a gun across his shoulder along the Contra Costa foothills. He was lonely for quail!

          Back in the old days they had been the oftenest-seen birds about him—those speckled black and steel fellows of the field, trig and trim; with cousins on the uplands, that flash a ruddy-brown wing past your sight as they take flight. There were larks, and robins, and doves here in the cañons; and on the heights were great flocks of sage-chickens; and water-fowl of many kinds

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were down on the river, but he longed for the sound of the quail-call, and the sight of their whirring flight—the quail of the valleys and mountains of California!

          Persistent were the recollections that haunted him of old hunting days; and he spent many hours thinking, and thinking. Finally he said to himself, that there was but one thing to be done—to fetch them over the Sierras, from the fields and foothills beyond, and then wait until their numbers multiplied.

          So crate after crate of trapped birds came over in that first season when the trans-continental railroad was an established fact. Valley quail, and mountain quail, both. Crate after crate, and still more and more. And all were taken up to the cañons where there was plenty of water, and the wild grasses which yielded seeds ; and there they were turned loose—scattering over the ridges or scurrying into the brush. There in the old deserted "city" they were freed; and among the tall, blossoming weeds, and the spicy junipers on the hillsides.

          The little emigrants took very kindly to the change; and another year saw several flocks far from the range where they had been given their freedom.

          Most Indians have as great a sense of honor as have some white men in respecting the rights of others when not protected by law, and the Paiutes—when they came to understand the purpose of bringing the stranger birds—were as zealous as the white man in their joint guardianship of the new bird-colony. No one seemed to have any thought of hunting them—they had become a sort of public charge. They multiplied amazingly. On the hills they were as numerous as were the jackrabbits down along the valley. Away off in other ranges—in cañons miles and miles away —across the valleys that lay between, and where on the mountain-sides green spots marked springs and

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shade, one could always find flocks coming in to water. They were everywhere!

          At last they were plentiful enough that the sportsman might be allowed to hunt them; and for one short, sport-full season (when everyone went gunning) did the hunters have their will. Only one. Then, with no foreshadowing of that which was to come, there fell upon the land a Winter more terrible in its bitter chill than that other one, more than five and-twenty years before, when the little handful of early prospectors in the snowbound cañon waited through the long, white silence for the coming of the Spring. Earlier—much earlier than had ever been its wont, did the storms begin. Nor was it rain that came, as in the other years. Rains softened the brush, and swelled the seeds among the dried grasses and weeds on the mesas where the sheep and cattle grazed. Rain was good. Here, too, had the quail thrived, even as they had in their home on the other side of the high Sierras. But with deep snows overlying the land—! What were the little emigrants to do in their struggle to live if the wild elements waged battle against them? How were their small hearts to keep on beating throughout the chill Winter, and until the warmth of the Spring suns should set all the little creeks and rills running down the rugged old mountain's cañons and crevasses, to bring the grasses again? On mountain and plain were the wild things—helpless furred and feathered creatures, who would find death in the storms if they were many or long.

          So the days went by; and on the plains the snow fell so deep that the chill layers of ghostly white hid the brush and sage as completely as though they had been sucked down and swallowed by these quicksands of the Winter.

          Along the foothills where the valley quail had loved

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to run, the drifts filled the shallow ravines; on the higher elevations—where among the rocks and stunted junipers the mountain quail had lived and found life good—now the sharp outlines were smoothed out under the rounded whiteness. Farther down, in the valley, the river ranches were blotted out. Snowflakes—like grains of icy sand—fell thickly, steadily, gently; with that soft insistence which is harder to do battle against than fire or flood. Then winds—cruelly cold, and dealing death where they touched animal life—would come and whirl the sharp grains (fine and dry as sand) into high drifts which—in turn—were buried under the stinging flakes that were ever falling—falling—falling, until it was once again a vast, unsounded level.

          From the high lands where they grazed, the storm drove the stock into the valleys where it followed them, and where they died. Sheep dropped by the thousands at its icy touch; cattle weakened—staggered —fell. The birds and the four-footed wild things came down out of the mountains, no longer afraid, and too weak to flee. They, too, like the sheep and the cattle, died as though a pestilence had swept over the land. So they died everywhere, and each day the number grew.

          There were times when a sickly sun tried to shine from out the sky, only to be beaten back by the storm. Colder and colder grew the days; lower and lower fell the mercury. Five below zero. Ten. Then eighteen—twenty—thirty—thirty-six! The stoves were kept (nine of them) choked with the hardwood crowded in; and all day the fires roared up the chimneys, and red-hot patches glowed on their iron sides. More than half the night the fires burned; but by and by they would die down, and in those early hours of the new day, one could hear the crack and creak of the timbers as the house grew colder.

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          Morning brought increased labors to keep alive the suffering animals that turned to man in their extremity. Life resolved itself into a monotonous repetition of those duties that were most necessary for the present hour. No one looked ahead; no one dared. It would be time enough for the cattle-owner to count the fearful cost when Spring should come, and he rode the range and reckoned up his losses. Now he must see that his men hauled feed to the cattle that were too weak to get on their feet; that the ice was cut in the river so that horses and cattle might drink; that snow enough was melted for household needs (for the water-pipes had long ago frozen and burst) ; that the wood-boxes were heaped high with split logs; that the bread, and meat, and milk was thawed—freed from the flakes of ice that they gathered.

          Up the valley where the railroad ran, the tracks were under the snow. Over them had no wheel passed for seventeen long days. Blockaded. The great, monstrous machinery of man's making, with its noise and its grime, was silenced—its strength and power crushed out by this soft, white, silent thing that never missed one day out of the twenty-seven in falling.

          When the frost, and the cold, and the drifting snow were gone, and the sun came back, it shone on a crystal world. We looked out over a wide, trackless, shipless, chartless sea of eye-tiring snow-fields. But it stormed no more.

          And the quail?

          Poor little emigrants into an unkind country! For more than five years thereafter no one ever saw any quail. We looked for them whenever we rode through cañons, or over the mesas. It was always the same—never a one did we see. And we mourned for them, as we do for things that have eaten out of our hand;

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for had we not guarded them as something that was our very own? They had all perished, we said, the cold had been too severe for the strangers-to-snow.

          Then, one day riding up through a wash all filled with tall rabbit-brush, and wild plum-bushes, I saw a touch of red-brown on a wing that flashed across my sight, and my heart gave a great bound. A quail! Then a long time went by before I saw another. Then others saw them, too. Sometimes a pair; then a small flock. Then another—a larger one; and another one —and another.

          And now? The quail have come again! We say "come again" because we hate to think of those that met the chill of that awful Winter, and with the horses and cattle, and sheep on the ranges, died by the hundreds—thousands. Hunters, we, and we have no compunction in going forth with dog and gun, and filling the game-bag. But one would be less than human to think unmovedly of the slow death by starvation and cold that came to so many birds and beasts that Winter of 'eighty-eight and 'nine. So we would rather persuade ourselves that the quail which are now in the mountains, are the same bonny little feathered friends that took up their habitation there so long ago. Once again they are everywhere. Once again the flocks have increased sufficiently to permit one shooting them without fear of extermination. Once again they are on every mountain, and on the low-lying foothills. There are fewer of the valley quail, however, than there are of their little relatives.

          Yes; they have "come back again." But the greatest numbers have gone to that cañon where the miners lived the Winter of the first great snow. It was the quail's first home; for there it was that they were loosed in the year they were brought from beyond the snow mountains.

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          Chinese placer miners working in the creek found gold—much gold; but the silver ledges still lie on the hillsides undisturbed, the tunnel entrances choked with thistles and briar bushes. No longer do men go a-search for silver. Only gold—in the ledges up above, or down on the bed-rock of the water course—lures them in their quests. The little yellow-skinned men of the Orient came, and went, and came again. They made their dug-outs in the banks back from the gray and crumbling walls which were built by miners of old. Up and down the creek bed they move so noiselessly, working with pick and pan, that one can very easily fancy them but gray ghosts haunting the quiet cañons, even as the shadowy wraiths of the dead years linger about the unroofed walls and weed-grown trails. Silently they go about their work, leaving the quail to go their ways.

          If you go among the old adobes and fallen stone walls in the ruined town, you will see them scurrying by twos and threes out of the tumble-down, crumbling cabins, to find hiding places in the tall rabbit-wood or sage-brush; or—flushing by flocks—to sail straight away to the hillsides. It is the quail's cañon. Once again they claim the solitude of the place as their own. Before they went away they were less shy than now; for they are beginning to know the fear of man. A while back, in the peace of the tumbling walls, there came no more disturbing sound to the cañon than the rumble of the train down on the desert, or the faraway shriek of its whistle. But they have learned a new sound, and with it has come fear.

          The sunlight lies warm on the hillsides ; and the soft West winds come to rattle the pods of dried weeds, shaking the seeds in showers to the ground. The quail run hither and thither, undisturbed by the seasons or the little yellow men working among the gravel

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and boulders in the bottom of the creek; but away up on the slope where the brush and bunch-grass does not grow so thick, you hear the crack of a breechloader where some hunter has gone hunting. It is the sound the quail have learned to fear.