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An ashen-colored lizard darts across the trail, a sage rabbit darts behind a yucca bush, and far overhead a tireless buzzard floats in circles. Is he keeping a death watch on the grizzled old "Desert Rat" we pass a little later?
These desert plants do not ordinarily furnish forage for live stock, but in a season of drought when other feed is scarce and cattle are starving they will risk having their mouths pricked by thorns in order to get something to eat and will browse on mescal, yucca and cactus and find some nourishment in the unusual diet, enough, at least, to keep them from dying.
In the upper portion of this district, where the banana no longer flourishes, nutritious plants produce an immense yield with easy cultivation. The yucca which produces cassava, rice, the sweet potato, yams, all flourish here, and maize produces 200 to 300 fold.
Bunches of coreopsis and vermilion-tipped painter's-brush adorned the chimney-piece; tall spikes of yucca rose from an Indian jar in one corner of the room, and a splendid sheaf of yellow columbines from another; fresh kinnikinick was looped and wreathed about the pictures; and on the dining-table stood, most beautiful and fragile of all, a bowlful of Mariposa lilies, their delicate, lilac-streaked bells poised on stems so slender that the fairy shapes seemed to float in air, supported at their own sweet will.
"We may strike both before night, but if not we'll ride on a while anyhow, and maybe we'll find 'em." They went deeper into the great upland which was half a desert and half a plain. Occasionally they saw besides the cactus, mesquite and yucca and some clumps of coarse grass. "Bunch grass," said Obed, "like that which you find further north, and mighty good it is, too, for cattle and horses.
After death, which is slow, the ghostly hollow network of its woody skeleton, with hardly power to rot, makes the moonlight fearful. Before the yucca has come to flower, while yet its bloom is a creamy cone-shaped bud of the size of a small cabbage, full of sugary sap, the Indians twist it deftly out of its fence of daggers and roast it for their own delectation.
You haven't noticed, Ned, that the country is rapidly growing much worse, and that we are now in what is practically a sandy desert. You don't see even a yucca, but you do see something whirling there in the southwest. That's a 'dust devil, and there's a half dozen more whirling in our direction. We're going to have a sand storm." Ned looked with interest.
More coils of clay are then added, and the shaping continues until the vessel is complete. Now it is put out into the sun to dry, and when reasonably solid, it is ready for the painting and decoration. With a rude brush made of horsehair or yucca fibre, and paints gathered and ground by herself, she works out the design that her imagination has already created and pictured upon her piece of work.
We have now spoken enough of roots, so let us come to another kind of bread. The natives have another kind of grain similar to millet, save that the kernels are larger. When there is a shortage of yucca, they grind it into flour by mashing it between stones; the bread made from this is coarser.
They keep their hair clean and shining with frequent mud baths! Black, sticky mud from the bottom of the river is plastered thickly over the scalp and rubbed into the hair, where it is left for several hours. When it is washed away the hair is soft, and gleams like the sheeny wing of the blackbird. Root of the yucca plant is beaten into a pulp and used as a shampoo cream by other tribes.
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