The Land of Little Rain | Page 3

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The Land of Little Rain by MARY AUSTIN

TO EVE "The Comfortress of Unsuccess"

CONTENTS
Preface The Land of Little Rain Water Trails of the Ceriso The
Scavengers The Pocket Hunter Shoshone Land Jimville--A Bret Harte
Town My Neighbor's Field The Mesa Trail The Basket Maker The
Streets of the Mountains Water Borders Other Water Borders Nurslings
of the Sky The Little Town of the Grape Vines

PREFACE
I confess to a great liking for the Indian fashion of name-giving: every
man known by that phrase which best expresses him to whoso names
him. Thus he may be Mighty-Hunter, or Man-Afraid-of-a-Bear,
according as he is called by friend or enemy, and Scar-Face to those
who knew him by the eye's grasp only. No other fashion, I think, sets

so well with the various natures that inhabit in us, and if you agree with
me you will understand why so few names are written here as they
appear in the geography. For if I love a lake known by the name of the
man who discovered it, which endears itself by reason of the
close-locked pines it nourishes about its borders, you may look in my
account to find it so described. But if the Indians have been there
before me, you shall have their name, which is always beautifully fit
and does not originate in the poor human desire for perpetuity.
Nevertheless there are certain peaks, canons, and clear meadow spaces
which are above all compassing of words, and have a certain fame as of
the nobly great to whom we give no familiar names. Guided by these
you may reach my country and find or not find, according as it lieth in
you, much that is set down here. And more. The earth is no wanton to
give up all her best to every comer, but keeps a sweet, separate
intimacy for each. But if you do not find it all as I write, think me not
less dependable nor yourself less clever. There is a sort of pretense
allowed in matters of the heart, as one should say by way of illustration,
"I know a man who . . . " and so give up his dearest experience without
betrayal. And I am in no mind to direct you to delectable places toward
which you will hold yourself less tenderly than I. So by this fashion of
naming I keep faith with the land and annex to my own estate a very
great territory to which none has a surer title.
The country where you may have sight and touch of that which is
written lies between the high Sierras south from Yosemite--east and
south over a very great assemblage of broken ranges beyond Death
Valley, and on illimitably into the Mojave Desert. You may come into
the borders of it from the south by a stage journey that has the effect of
involving a great lapse of time, or from the north by rail, dropping out
of the overland route at Reno. The best of all ways is over the Sierra
passes by pack and trail, seeing and believing. But the real heart and
core of the country are not to be come at in a month's vacation. One
must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions. Pine
woods that take two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots
that lie by in the sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs that
grow fifty years before flowering,--these do not scrape acquaintance.

But if ever you come beyond the borders as far as the town that lies in a
hill dimple at the foot of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have
knocked at the door of the brown house under the willow-tree at the
end of the village street, and there you shall have such news of the land,
of its trails and what is astir in them, as one lover of it can give to
another.

THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN
East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east
and south many an uncounted mile,