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Page 22
The most frequent vedette of these miniature lakes is the
heron,--usually the blue, sometimes the larger white, the latter a most
beautiful bird. Yet neither is common. Still rarer in such situations is
the bittern, the Timon of birds, the rushes being seldom high enough to
afford him the strict concealment he likes. The mallard has to be his
own sentinel, as a rule. He does not depend on these ponds for food,
and, like other wild creatures, he reserves his chief vigilance for
feeding-time. They are places of repose, at mid-day and at night, for
the ducks of this and two or three other species, notably the blue- and
green-winged teal, which at other times haunt the clumps of oak and
pecan that skirt the sparse streams and their summer-dry affluents,
where nuts and acorns in great variety, those of the live-oak being very
sweet, supply unfailing winter provision. The thickets of ilex that
shade off these wooded reaches into the treeless prairie are the resort
of many partridges. You are led back into the open ground by another
game-bird, the pinnated grouse, the widest ranger of its genus, but at
the North disappearing only less rapidly than the buffalo. As yet his
most destructive foe in this region is perhaps the hawk, although he is
raided from the timber by the opossum, raccoon, and three species of
cat, while on the open his nest has marked attractions for the skunk and
probably the coyote. He has survived these dumb discouragers so long,
and the heat at his proper season is so trying to his human foe, that he
may long find a refuge here and proudly lead forth his young Texans for
scores of Augusts. He and his family will often quietly walk off while
the panting pointer seeks the shade of the wagon and the gunner cools
off under the heavy felt sombrero that is here found to be the best
headgear for summer. A very moderate game-law, well executed, would
sustain this fine bird indefinitely in the struggle for existence. But
law of any kind seems a foreign idea on these sea-like primeval plains.
It is like thinking of a parliament in the Pleiocene, or of a
court-house on the Grand Banks.
Any transcendentalist who wishes to furbish up his philosophic furniture
will find this a good workshop for the purpose. There is ample room for
any school, positive or negative,--plenty of cloud-land for all
conceits. Kant could have picked up pure reason among the crowds of
simply reasoning creatures who have possessed the scene since long
before the brain of man was created. Covies of immemorial Thoreaus
bivouac under those hazy woods, and pre-glacial Emersons are circling
overhead. The problem of successfully living they have all solved. What
more have any of us done? The greatest good of the greatest number they
unpresumingly display as a practically triumphant principle; and the
greatest number is not by any means with them, any more than with us,
number one. Had it been, they would all have been extinct long ago.
Nature may be "red with tooth and claw," but not suicidally so. It is to
quite a peaceable, if not wholly loving, world that she invites us. And
just here we can see so much of it; we can study it so broadly and so
freely. Concord and Walden dwindle into the microscopic. It was under
precisely such a sun as this, in a warm, dry atmosphere, on a nearly
treeless soil, that the Stagyrite did all the thinking of sixty
generations. Could he have done it in an overcoat and muffler, with a
chronic catarrh?
If, impatient of a host of inarticulate instructors, we prefer communing
with our kind and falling back on human story, some of that, too, is at
hand. Half a century ago, to a year, a short string of forlorn and
forlorn-looking people crossed the prairie close by, from west to east,
from the Colorado to the Brazos. The head of it was Sam Houston's
"army," three or four hundred strong, with all its _mat�riel_ in one
wagon. The rest consisted of the d�bris of all the Anglo-American
settlements, women, children, cows, and what poor household stuff could
be moved. Slowly ferrying the Brazos, and as slowly making its way down
the left bank, picking up as it went the rest of the homesteads and some
more fighting-men, it turned to the right at the head of the estuary.
Then the little column, strengthened with some sea-borne supplies and
relieved of its wards, turned to face its pursuers. These were twice its
numbers, with four or five thousand reserves some days behind.
Generalship was given the go-by on both sides, the _cul-de-sac_ of San
Jacinto being closed at both ends. Thirty minutes of noise and smoke,
and the empire of Cortez and Montezuma was split in two. Clio nibbed
another quill, steel pens not having then been invented. The gray geese
who might have supplied it recomposed themselves on the prairie, and all
the rest of their feathered friends followed their example, as the
military interlude melted away and left them their ancient solitary
reign.
Of the feathered spectators of the scene we have episodically glanced
at, the most interested were those constant supervisors, the vultures.
Of these there are three species, one of which--the Mexican vulture--is
but an occasional visitor. The other two--the black vulture and the
turkey-buzzard--are monopolists in their peculiar line. They constitute
here, as generally throughout the warmer parts of the continent and its
islands, the recognized sanitary police. No law protects them, but they
do not need it. They are too useful not to command that popular sympathy
which is the higher law. The flocks and herds upon a thousand plains are
theirs. Every norther that freezes and every drought that starves some
of the wandering cattle and sheep brings to them provision. The
railroads also, not less than the winds of heaven, are their friends,
the fatal cow-catcher being an ever-busy caterer. The buzzards are, of
course, under such circumstances, warm advocates of internal improvement
and welcome the opening of every new railway. Their ardor in this
respect, however, has of late years been damped by the building of wire
fences along the track, an interference with vested rights and an
assault upon the hoary claims of infant industries against which in
their solemn assemblies they doubtless often condole with each other.
Unfortunately for their cause, they cannot lobby.
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