Buffalo

Until the 1870’s five million buffalo roamed from the Concho River to the Pecos River to the Canadian River. Three hundred to five hundred million prairie dogs populated the same range, as well as a million pronghorn. Summer heat urged a northward drift, and winter’s blue northers sent each clan plodding back south.

Two aerial phenomena could direct the daily travel of the buffalo. Smoke and clouds are semaphores of change. On the flat Llano, the horizon is fifteen miles away, but a thunderstorm is visible for a hundred miles or more. Within hours of a rainfall, water swollen plant cells awaken from their dormancy and turn green, having escaped the injury of drought stress. In a week, bunchgrasses grow six inches. Sideoats grama, sand dropseed, cane bluestem, windmill grass, and fall witchgrass are the dominant members of the Southern Llano Estacado grassland ecological community.

Lightening from the irregular spring thunderstorms would catch the prairie on fire, and the insistent southeast and southwest winds herded the fire for days. Flaring up during windy days and slowing to a smolder on calmer nights, the fires burned and burned for miles, until stopped by the rocky country of the breaks, or a draw with lush green grass that snuffed the flames quiet. For a hundred miles, or two hundred, or even three, the fire rode the will of the winds. Afterward, remnants of winter moisture fed quick growth; within two weeks a blackened prairie became green.

The Kwerkenuh (an old name the Nemeneh used for themselves, since “Comanche” means “enemy” in Pawnee) were no fools. Buffalo medicine was soon developed -- the art of knowing the very best time to set a fire to get the grass green quickly, magically drawing the buffalo for a successful spring hunt. Magic!

Knowing that fire means food, buffalo turn and walk towards thunderstorms climbing fifty thousand feet into the sky, or turn into winds laden with the scent of old and traveled grass smoke. Shamans shaking rattles and singing songs, tossing special herbs into the breeze; it was not superstition, but sophisticated ecological understanding dressed up as a pageant.

Buffalo managed the grassland. Ungrazed grass deteriorates, choking itself with litter. The litter provides protective mulch for tall weeds such as Conyza and Sawtooth Daisy. Summertime bloom stalks up to six feet tall shades the grass, weakening it further. Fire and grazing prevent such an alteration of habitat. Or, it could be said that the grassland habitat was created by the acts of fire and grazing.

Buffalo defeated hopeful mesquite seedlings advancing from their refuge. Mesquite has a weak crown and is susceptible to fungus. Buffalo brush hogged the mesquite, stomping it, pulverizing the new growth. Fungus and rot organisms are part of a healthy biotic community, flourishing easily in the microclimate of the grass sea’s floor. And prairie dogs did their part, nibbling germinating seeds. Thousands of hooves broke the hardened soil, tilling grass and forb seeds to planting depth, the litter of old stalks provided subtle niches for the seedling’s nourishment. Understanding of the ecological cycles of grass, forbs, and grazing has only just begun in the last quarter century.

The Sibley Nature Center is occasionally asked to do a plant survey to identify plants that have poisoned livestock. Were buffalo also susceptible to the same poisons as livestock? Did locoweed (Astragalus mollissimus) cause buffalo to hallucinate, wildly leaping over pebbles and shy at the passage of butterflies? Did shin oak’s (Quercus havardii) new leaves constipate them enough to stunt their growth?

Did the young growth of cockleburs (Xanthium stromarium) kill them in an hour? If they ate larkspur (Delphinium carolinum) did they twitch, stagger, and wheeze? Did buffalo drool copiously if purple nightshade (Solanum eleagnifolium) was ingested? Did groundsel (Senecio douglasii) cause them to walk non-stop until dead from exhaustion? Many plants accumulate nitrates, which becomes nitrite in the bloodstream of grazers, turning the blood brown, and stimulating the heart to race alarmingly. Did a buffalo’s heart do so?

Grazers have a problem. Grass is mostly cellulose that is difficult to digest. Many grazers have microorganisms in the digestive tract that chemically split cellulose. Grasshoppers and caterpillars do not have bacterial digestion, so their feces are plentiful and bulky. Ungulates eat dirt as soon as they are weaned, thus acquiring the proper bacteria. Rodents and rabbits eat the maternal feces to become properly inoculated, and most eat their own excrement so as to more thoroughly and properly process their food.

Grazers usually have similar mouthparts. Ungulates and rodents have a diastema - an opening between the incisors and grinding molars. The diastema provides space for the tongue to move the food as needed. Grazing is relatively inefficient way to digest nutrients. Considerable amounts of food must be eaten. Bison (as well as cattle and deer) are ruminants that regurgitate their food for further mastication. When first swallowed the food goes to the first stomach, the rumen, where cellulose digestion begins. After the cell walls of the grass begin to break down, it is regurgitated and chewed very, very thoroughly.

Large grazers are herd animals. Since so much time is needed for grazing and digestion, predators could easily catch lone grazers. Herd grazers develop social structures and sophisticated communication systems. For example, the pronghorn’s white rump hairs represent a physiological development resulting from centuries-long genetic selection. When threatened, the rump hairs are lowered or raised, and the resulting white flash can be seen for a mile or more, instantly communicating to the scattered herd that danger has arrived.

I wish a small herd of buffalo were visible along a local road...

Old-time lingo of West Texas

“You will be heard on the baldies.” People in big cities have to talk loud and fast even to be heard – interrupting at every indrawn breath – giving rise to the arts of jiving and rapping. In Dancer, Texas, Pop. 81, two cowboys howdy at a water tank in the small town. It is a classic true-life scene of west Texas. They briefly talk, but take long seconds (many long seconds) between each utterance. Out here, the naked plains (the bald prairie) can be empty of humans for miles, two people working together won’t have any interruptions, so there is no reason to quickly answer in a conversation. I think the style partly originated in the Indian style of discourse. In council, a person had the right to say whatever they wished, for as long as they wished, and would not be interrupted.  In discourse on the baldies, a person can take time to answer honestly and with heart-felt emotion, or to choose the very best words (and even to make up words that seem to fit just a bit better.)

West Texans like word play – sometimes vocalized in self-deprecation and uttered with a drawl that broadcasts “this is a joke” loud and clear. “Fearsome” is such a made-up word. I looked in several dictionaries for it. It means malovently awe-inspiring – and is mostly used to describe huge thunder-banging storms with hail, high winds, and flashfloods. Lots of west Texas folks use the word “ideal” when folks elsewhere would use the word “idea.” That seems “plumb ignorant,” but I think there is a history to its use. Somebody, when out working, has an idea, and then describes it. The other person mulls the idea over and states their own interpretation, and the first person acknowledges the agreement and its variations, and says – “That would be ideal,” instead of saying, “that’s the idea.” Over time, the regional variant of usage became popularly accepted.

            The lingo of west Texas is not just in English. Spanish adds to the rich culture of our region. Some 6^th graders came all the way from Balmorhea to hang out and attend a lecture of mine,I  created a “bioregional quiz” that focuses on their local landscape. I started off with, “What is the name of biggest mountain due west of Balmorhea?” (Gomez Peak) I followed with,  “What are the names of the springs in the neighborhood?” (Most are Spanish names.) Next, “What is the name of the creek that leads north from Fort Davis?” (Limpia) I followed that with, “There is a unique habitat found in the mountains that the state park at Balmorhea tried to duplicate -- what is it?” (Cienaga) Next I asked, “What are an alamo and a mimbres? What do you make with trompillo? Popotillo?” (cottonwood, willow/desertwillow, purple nightshade – asadero cheese, ephedra – tea)

            History is part of the language of a region as well. With the bioregional quiz for the Balmorhea kids, I asked. “Who was Gomez?” (A Mescalero Apache leader in the Davis Mountains that ran into Robert Neighbors, Rip Ford, Bigfoot Wallace, and Henry Skillman in the years before the Civil War.) Next I asked, “Can you name two other Apache chieftains famous in the area?” (They are Espejo; east of the Davis Mountains in the late 1860’s, and Alsate; in the Davis Mountains and the Chisos Mountains at the same time. Alsate”s ghost “still walks the mountains.”) 

            I continued with, “Who was El Cibolero?” (He was a resident along the Rio Grande in the Big Bend in 1800 who got crossways with the Spanish authorities and ended up becoming a Comanche.) “Who were Mucho Toro and Bajo del Sol?” (They were Comanche chieftains infamous along the Comanche War Trail from Ft. Stockton through Big Bend and well into Mexico in the 1830’s and 1840’s. They were possibly El Cibolero’s sons. Their momma, a big and forceful woman even when old, was the true leader of the raids.)

            Each bioregion develops its own terms to describe physical things or certain happenings. “Lake-time” speaks of when the playas fill, for example. Four terms have been used to describe the edge of the Llano Estacado; “the breaks” for the headwater valleys on its eastern edge, “the Cap” meaning the “caprock” edge of the Lllano, “Mescalero Escarpment” for the western edge by oilfield geologists, and la ceja, meaning “the eyebrow” for how the edge looks from far to the west – a dark ridge on the horizon.

            Read the following; “After the greenover, I put out hi-life. I grounded my cayuse near a chittim. Stepping around the prairie coal and brown rounds, I gnawed on some carneseca, noticing all the winter wood under the chittim on the north side of the playa. I lit a cinco as I walked around the dogtown. After I was done, I found a dogie that I had to dope for screwworm. A couple of scissorbills from the next ranch over rode up to augur a while, stepping down. We weren’t far from one of Causey’s chozas, close to the living water at Mescalero Spring, right on la ceja of the yarner. We visited about how some dang-fool mover had let his campfire get away at the edge of the shinnery – dang lints don’t know anything! One had to gotch his potro to get on. How’s that! Talk about a rank broomtail! After they rode on, I opened an air-tight of peaches, and luckily finished it just before an early blue norther rolled in with lots of polvo. The boss’s wife just planted a little orchard at the tank-dump at headquarters, so maybe we’ll get fresh peaches in a few years.”

            The above is a construction drawn from the memoirs of early local cowboys who were trying to tell later-day folks what life was like at the end of the 19^th century. Regional vocabularies once flourished, before the “dumbing down” by the “zombie tube” that makes all us Americans sound the same! We should have lots of names and stories to go with our local surroundings, about our landscape, plants, and animals – it is how we love our “home.” 

It is good to honor the memory of those that have served their people

When Colonel Shafter explored the sanddunes in 1871 his scouts interviewed an old Apache woman at Willow Springs. She told them that his command had just missed a meeting between the Comanche Mow-way and the Lipan Apache Magoosh. Also present had been Mescalero Apaches, but their leader was not named in the official report. It might have been Juan de la Paz, for it is recorded that he did lead buffalo hunting trips away from the Mescalero Reservation in the Sacramento Mountains that year. Juan de la Paz led a group of young men desirous of the prestige offered only to warriors. He had conceived the buffalo-hunting trip as a way to satisfy their restlessness. A Comanchero had also been present, to trade bars of lead to the Comanches. This was surely Jose Piedad Tafoya or one of his most trusted associates.

The old Apache woman had been “left behind to die.” The Apache woman left behind to die may or may not have been the Mescalero Lozen, the namesake of the Ojo Caliente Apache Lozen who rode with Victorio, Nana, and Geronimo. “History” does not record her name.  Shafter’s report expressed disgust at the inhumanity of the “savages,” aghast at the brutal throwing away of a human life.  I have been thinking about her recently. The emotional upheavals that death incurs has struck two people I know within the last week. A mentor of mine died last week (and this essay is in honor of him.)

In the 1700’s Spanish documents refer to a group of Apaches known as Llaneros that lived along the Pecos River and the sanddunes between the river and the western edge of the Llano Estacado. The invasion of Comanches early in the century had disrupted Plains Apache culture. During the 1700’s the Lipans went south, first to Muchaque Peak and the headwaters of the Colorado River, and then on to the San Saba River, and finally to the Nueces River. The Jicarilla went west to the Sandia and Sangre de Christo Mountains first, and then to the Tres Piedras/Chama region and finally even further west. The Llaneros, like the Lipans, wished to remain near their favorite food – the vast herds of buffalo and pronghorn of the grasslands.

The Comanches possessed enough guns through trade from the Pawnee (who received them from French traders) to be almost invincible in battle. The Comanches had also built up substantial horse herds. This allowed them to travel great distances by each man having a “string of ponies.” They would ride one horse at a gallop until it tired, and then switch to another, and then to another. This allowed them to use the tactic of the blitzkrieg lightning attack. They would strike without warning, disrupt the Apache village life, and then be out of reach of pursuit. Faced by such a harrying force, the Apaches slowly left their former homeland of the upper Canadian, Red and Brazos rivers during the first half of the 1700’s.

It is understandable that the Llaneros wished to remain near the buffalo. Plains Apaches were the original partners in the buffalo economy with the Spanish settlers of northern New Mexico. They often came to great trade fairs at the Pecos Pueblo where they offered dried buffalo meat and robes in exchange for metal arrow points, kettles, and blankets. Without buffalo, they would lose their most valuable commodity for trade.

Lozen had been born at Willow Springs in the late 1700’s. She had often visited there as a child, and also as a young married woman. The place held many happy memories for her. Her knowledge of the landscape there had served her well when she took her legendary revenge ride. Comanches had killed her husband in camp, and Lozen had pursued the Comanches alone. After trailing them for weeks she finally snuck into one of their camps and killed her husband’s murderer and stole his best horses. The Comanches pursuit was thwarted by her purposefully disappearing into the “trackless” dune region on a windy day. Her parents and grandparents had been Llanero Apaches, but a few years after her revenge ride, the Llaneros abandoned the buffalo hunting as a way of life, and had decided that the different family groups would join Mescalero groups (related by marriage) scattered throughout the Guadalupe, Davis, and Sacramento Mountains.

Lozen knew she was about to die, and she wished to die where she had been born. Magoosh and Juan de la Paz understood her wishes. Magoosh was headed back to Nascimiento, Mexico, returning to his family. Juan de la Paz and fifteen others were headed to hunt buffalo, if they could find any before being discovered by Comanches. From the Sacramento Mountains they had watched huge spring thunderheads build up along the western edge of the Llano Estacado. With the filling of the playas of the shortgrass country of the western Llano, buffalo might be present. If the rains had fallen on the eastern side of the Llano, then the Comanches would focus their attention on the cattle drives and wagon trains on the southern Llano. There, just east of Castle Gap and Horsehead Crossing, these would be at their weakest at the dry end of the three-day’s distance between the Concho River and Horsehead. 

The arrival of first the Comanchero and then of Mow-way’s thirty Comanches had been a surprise. Magoosh had convinced Mow-way not to attack the Mescaleros by virtue of a trade (but the nature of that trade is a whole different story.) 

Lozen had lived a good life. Her bravery had inspired others. She had served all of her people as a respected and beloved healer and advisor, and had never remarried. As the Apaches had sat in council with the Comanches and the Comanchero, a scout had reported the approach of the black Seminole scouts riding in advance of Colonel Shafter. She volunteered to serve her people one last time. While everyone made their escape, she would tell the soldiers that Apaches and Comanches (historically mortal enemies) had agreed to fight together to preserve the buffalo hunting grounds.  Upon leaving, every Apache present rode his horse slowly by her and saluted her, with tears in their eyes. 

Connecting to the natural world means more than learning names

               For people in hunting cultures, a plant, an animal, or a rock is more than the literal real object. The name of the object more than identifies it, but also signifies all of the ideas and meanings the object symbolizes. This  way of thinking is a thinking oriented to essence, not form. Meaning comes when in contemplation -- listening, watching, and waiting. It is "seeing with the eyes shut"-- it is the connections that the mind makes as the physical object is seen (and after.) Some names are possessive, (like Wilson's Warbler) but the best are referent. Referent names comes from its appearance,  relationship to another organism, or  community of organisms (black-tailed gnatcatcher.) This way of thinking promotes a mutual courtesy between human and other members of the ecosystem that surrounds us

               The corporeality of what is visible is only the beginning. The hunter's eye seeks to understand, so identification is only the beginning. Observation is the key.  Appearance and behavior can be more than cause and effect. The human mind adds metaphysics in the search for understanding.

               For example, quail are secretive, their calls when unstressed quiet, soft, and gentle. Such calls become symbolic -- when a hunter knows that he/she is moving through a habitat as a part of the surroundings, not as an intruder. The calls are a symbol of the balance a hunter must find to be in tune with the surroundings. Successful hunters in a hunting culture say, "I felt as one with what surrounded me."

               Turkey need water to survive. A turkey feather becomes a remembrance of water. A turkey feather was often used by American Indians as an offering to a spring, a prayer that the spring will always be there, and a prayer of thanks for the water. The mind takes another step -- a turkey feather becomes an offering for the hope of rain. Rain brings the germination of seeds, so turkey feathers become symbols of germination.

               Swallows are symbols of water as well. They drink on the wing, swooping over a waterhole. They personify rain, for their graceful swoops are like light rain in gusty winds. Swallows are like the cool breezes after a rain, soft and gentle. their voice is a soft twittering -- the gentleness and articulate voices are like the murmurings of happy babies. Babies thrive in established secure lives. Swallows live in villages - clusters of mud nests on cliffs (and now highway overpasses and buildings.) The mud nests are like Southwestern adobe houses, so swallows become guardians of house and village, a symbol of civilized life.

               Hummingbirds display in an arc, like the arc of a rainbow. Their iridescent colors flash briefly, like the colors of a rainbow. They feed on flowers, the result of rain, so they become symbols of the glories of rain and its life-giving force.  Metaphysical thought is fleeting, quick glimpses at understanding what is too large to comprehend. Hummingbirds, by their fleet flight are symbols of metaphysical thoughts. Metaphysical thoughts are ephemeral, incorporeal, of the spirit world, therefore hummingbirds are messengers of the spirit world.

               Birds (and other organisms) are food, as well as symbols. Ritual connects the two paths. Ritual is more than human. In animal behavior it is phylogenetically adapted motor patterns of communication. It is displacement, the discharge of aggression, or bond formation. When a redwing blackbird bows and lifts its epaulets, and another points his beak to the sky, the cattails resound with ritual. The wild is full of ritual.

                Science is a ritual. The act of gathering information has a purpose of its own. There needs to be no goal or reason for research, no overlying economic necessity. Science helps us understand corporeality. We can never know all  of how organisms are interrelated. We can never know enough to control and direct life.  Science can help us be less ignorant and arrogant, although science has proven in the past to make us arrogant and hurtful. Our hurtful acts, however, have come from ignorance of the interrelationships that surround us.

               For millennia humans said to the earth "we are yours," not having the history or technology to see more than our immediate surroundings, like babies. For the last century we have been adolescent, learning the tools of knowledge and telling the earth "You are mine!" Now, with the expanding science of ecology, and the development of ecopsychology, ecopedagogy,  and ecocriticism, we are beginning to say with the earth, "We are one!"

Sometimes the birds come to watch the birdwatchers

A sparkling creek led the way under huge cottonwoods, then under sheer cliffs.  The way became difficult.  A boulder field dammed the narrows where another canyon joined.    For a number of years the compilers of the Audubon Christmas Bird Count assigned me to walk this wild stretch of canyon on a private ranch.  I walked the canyon with my mother, alone, with friends and with strangers.  Varying conditions of snow, strong winds or beautiful and perfect 70^o days have enlivened the hikes.

           One year my companions were a recently retired New York couple, just transplanted to Alpine.  The man dominated the first thirty minutes of the walk with interminable bragging about the many exotic places where the couple had birded.  His storytelling was trumped by a covey of Fools Quail and the encounter was the first true birding we experienced of the morning.

           The clown kachina mask of the quail gave the species another oft-used name, Harlequin. Their erratic behavior led to their colloquial name. Our group of three had reached the rock clamber of the boulder field, which lay in a cold shadowy narrows. My companions (in their 60’s, and I in my early 30’s) voted to rest before tackling the strenuous path ahead. Sun hit a grouping of boulders nearby suitable for seating. Warmed by the morning sun, we drank water and nibbled snacks from our small packs.

           We had seen few birds – mostly because the chill of the morning still penetrated the landscape. On a cold morning birds take their time before moving to feed, remaining warmly ensconced in brushpiles and dense thickets. We had also not become “attuned” to the landscape. The ecology of a landscape is “revealed” to “naturalists.” Our perceptions were still dominated by our attention to the rugged beauty and the cold. We had not begun to pay attention to detail.

           Our rest was interrupted by whistles that none of us could identify. The hollow whistles whispery notes came from several directions, or so it seemed. We fingered our binoculars, peering this way and that. “Whatever they are, they are coming to the sun, and maybe the water.” My companions shushed me with a finger wagging before their lips.

           A lone Fool Quail stepped into the sunlight from behind a boulder at the edge of the cold shadows. We admired his goofy mask through our binoculars. With voiceless consensus, we remained motionless. The quail whistled in quick succession, and was answered by an excited chattering of sibilant notes. Ten more quail filed into a patch of bermuda grass. Bermuda grass can be found even in a wild canyon brought by wind, a hiker’s cuff, or washed from an upstream cattle-feeding location.    

           For three or four minutes, the quail fluffed their feathers, grooming and preening, blinking against the light. One quail nuzzled another in affection. Their black and white faces bobbed back and forth, then up and down. Harlequin quail are meek creatures in the wild.

           Nowadays a birder seeking to add the species to his or her lifelist knows to visit a feeding station for them in the Davis Mountains State Park, but 25 years ago the sighting of the species was strictly serendipitous for visiting birders. The family of Pansy Espy, the compiler of the count, owned a ranch in the mountains, but did not have a “home covey” of the Fool Quail as did her co-compiler and fellow rancher Jody Miller from the Sierra Vieja. Pansy’s home, on a grassy hilltop, is in the wrong habitat.

           Early scientists gave the species other names; Montezuma Quail, and Mearn’s Quail. In the United States it is only found in Trans-Pecos Texas and the corners of southeast Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.  Mearn’s Quail need oak trees and tall grass and have special dietary needs. Unlike other quail they do not feed on forb and grass seeds. Instead, they scratch at the ground, digging up bulbs, corms, and fleshy rots of plants such as nutgrass, onion, and oxalis. These plants usually need clay soils that retain moisture, or shady humus in oak and hackberry groves, or in wet soil. Until the 1890’s Harlequin Quail were found in isolated regions of the western Texas Hill Country.

           The covey crossed the bermuda grass patch, walking directly at us. We remained motionless. The birds stopped ten feet from us and began scratching along a bare cattle trail, still whispering a cheerful conversation.  One entered my shadow. It stared up at me. It seemed to realize my shadow was something new intruding into its morning landscape. Still puzzled, it walked closer, peering up in each direction so each eye could examine me. The bird whistled – a longer tone of a different pitch. The other birds froze. The bird at my feet seemed to stretch his neck abnormally far, myopically inspecting me. In unison all eleven birds exploded into the air, scattering in every direction.

           Their departure disturbed other birds. A spotted towhee fussed from the litter under a grove of gnarled hackberries. A flock of bushtits ascended the hackberries to look for the source of the disturbance. A rock wren bounced up on a rock still in shadow, fussing as it twitched. More and more birds revealed themselves. A pair of robins burbled and chuckled from their roosting site in the middle of the hackberries. A flock of white-crowned sparrows popped up from the ground to perch at the top of a small thicket of wispy beebrush.

           The combined chatter of all the species brought a scrub jay. Jays are sentinel birds. Several jay species come to disturbances in different southwestern montane forests. If the disturbance is a predator, a jay will announce the predator’s presence. If the predator is an owl or hawk other birds will come to mob it (fussing until it leaves in discomfort.) If the predator is a mammal, the jay will follow it, giving traffic reports until it leaves the communal territory of the winter resident birds’ multi-species flocks.

           For five minutes more, dozens of birds appeared. The towhee ended it, when it attempted to land on the rock I was on and panicked when it decided I was a threat.

           “The birds came to us – so many species, so many individuals. They presented themselves to us. Totally amazing.” The man shook himself, as if waking up. His wife spread her arms wide, palms upward. “This is incredible -- it is magical!”

Indians of the Jornada-Mogollon culture on the Llano Estacado – 1100-1300 A.D.

Water Wolf had just endured another long painful night, unable to sleep soundly because of his aching shoulder.  During the wee hours he had risen from his bed, being careful to not disturb his wife of thirty years. He went out of the door of the pithouse and sat down, facing the east, waiting for sunrise. A half-dozen other pithouses were nearby, dimly visible in the starlight. Two of them belong to the families of his daughters – his sons had married girls in other communities along the salty river to the west, on the other side of the sanddunes.  The other houses belonged to his wife’s sisters and their families. One structure was reserved for storing ceremonial equipment and attire, and the last structure was a community storehouse.

Thirty years before, he had convinced his wife and her sisters to move closer to the plains where pronghorn were plentiful, and buffalo sometimes roamed in the rainiest years. He and his brother’s-in-law hunted in the fall, harvesting far more meat than they could use. They took the excess to the settlements on the salty river for trade, their dogs dragging travois laden with the dried meat and hides. Their community also served as a waystation for traveling traders.

Sometimes a trader would go no further than the community – especially the traders from the grass house peoples far to the east. Once a year a trading party from far to the southwest, from a great city known as Paquime, stopped overnight on their way to visit the grass house people far to the east. They returned to their home via a different route. These traders told incredible stories, stories that stuck in the mind. Water Wolf had painted two giant horned serpents in the ceremonial house as a mnemonic device to remember some of their stories. Horned serpents guarded water – especially springs.

Water Wolf had received his name for roaming the sand dune country and finding water in many places. He discovered that water could be found by digging near certain plants, and then waiting overnight – and he found where animals maintained “wells” in the dunes. Until he had, few of the people in the communities along the salty river ever ventured into the dune country. He had disproved some of the stories told about the “bad spirits” of the dunes.

Some of the settlers along the salty river believed that the people that left the giant spearpoints among the bones of giant buffalo in the region of his community would someday return. They believed that Water Wolf’s community would be destroyed. Water Wolf decided that the relicts were very old – he had found the artifacts deep in the soil along one of the draws that led to one of the salt lakes of the region. If the artifacts had been buried that deep, it would have had to happen many lifetimes ago.

Water Wolf’s shoulder and arm hurt all the time, and would make the rest of his life miserable. Once he had been known for feats of strength. He could chop wood day with a stone axe to shape the timbers for the pithouses from the junipers along the edge of the plains. His bow was strung tighter than bows of most other men. He used a bow made from the orange-wood tree of the grass-hut people, and the bow was famous among the people of the salty river. It hung in his house, unusable, now. He hated not being able to use his arm – to raise his arm above his head would bring pain to him that sent him to his knees.

This fall he would not be going with his sons and their cousins on the fall hunt. One of his brother-in-laws would not be going either, due to a knee that no longer allowed him to run. On the fall hunt, the group would run for a full day to the east, to a large playa with a spring. A small herd of buffalo was always there, even if the lake basin did not have standing water. They had found the bones of the giant buffalo there, too, along with the curved tusks of some giant animal, tusks longer than a man. Other old bones were there, too – a giant cat with huge fangs, along with other bones that belonged to no animal that existed today.  

The one elder that would be going on the hunt was not a good leader. He told his oldest son-in-law to go along with the elder, but to realize that he may have to convince his cousins to disobey their father if the elder made a bad decision. The group would be leaving not long after daybreak – so Water Wolf began praying for their success when the morning star cleared the horizon.

 Water Wolf did not worry about the village being attacked while the hunters were gone. The plains to the east were a formidable barrier. It was a featureless expanse of grass that took a five-day walk to cross, where travelers went with out water, if not guided by someone who knew about the hidden waters.  In the draws of the plains, there were places a person could dig and let water seep into a hole, and some of the playas had small springs at their edge.

To the west were people of his culture. Water Wolf had heard stories from the traders that some of the farming people in the big towns far to the northwest were in the middle of a war fueled by religious differences. A new religion, the kachina religion, had begun, influenced by the Paquime traders. He did not think that his little village would matter, even though they had begun worshiping in the manner of the kachina religion. The traders from the northern towns did not pass through his village. They went to visit the grass house people by going along the river that bisected the plains in a canyon far to the north.    

********** This story is set in the 1200’s. Water Wolf’s people were the eastern Jornada-Mogollon Indians. When pottery shards are found on West Texas ranches, it is evidence that the Jornada-Mogollon people may have utilized the landscape. By the 1300’s the pithouse villages along the Pecos and Hondo River were abandoned. (One village, west of present day Roswell, was destroyed by warfare.) Some of the people became Jumano Indians, following a similar lifestyle, and others became people that followed the buffalo that became more plentiful in the region at that time. Remains of small pithouse settlements have been found along the western edge of the Llano Estacado, and even near some of the playas on top of the Llano.

A fairy bouquet can teach about runny noses, slime, limestone, and caliche

I went outside the other day in a cold wind looking for fairy bouquets. As I walked around, I found one – the wildflower filaree. But the cold wind caused my nose to run. When I came back in, I became curious about why this happened, so I spent some time on the Internet. What I found, amazed me.

Slime is the glue that holds the biosphere together. An immense variety of long molecules are collectively called “slime.” Slime molecules are carbohydrates with a negative charge. Those carbohydrates join together to form chains which tie molecules together. The more numerous the links, the more syrupy the slime. The molecules in the chains of slime are mostly water, so a little bit of the carbohydrates goes a long way.

In us slime forms a veneer covering the surface of the digestive, respiratory, urinary, and other tracts. It harbors antibodies and presents a barrier to infectious microbes. If the stomach were not lined with slime, the acid within would eat away the stomach wall. Slime is indispensable, even to a single cell. Each cell is covered with slime. In a zygote, slime triggers cell diversification – the biochemical machinery of a cell changes when its slime touches the slime of another cell.

People are revolted by slime. A person that is “a slimy &%#*” is a lowdown good for nothing. Slime is a good thing. Fish and amphibians are slimy, but the slime protects them. Snot is slimy. (Someone that is bratty and talks back to others is labeled snotty.) Snot more often than not protects us from disease, washing out airborne bacterial diseases unless an infection sets in, and then the slime in snot breeds the bacteria.  

 Mollusks farm their slime. The trail of slime left- behind as they move grows microbes that photosynthesize into a luxuriant garden that the animal harvests as it returns. Since cryptogamic soil is an important feature in arid landscapes, this poses the question about what role our tiny native snails (that live in ant nests) play in creating the cryptogamic soils. (Go to our website and type in cryptogamic soils in the website search engine to learn more about cryptogamic soils.)

Slime unites bacteria. Bacteria never work alone --- they collaborate. Bacteria are not restricted to passing their DNA only to their offspring. They can give it to their neighbors, and often do so in slime. Some scientists say that the entire bacterial community can be considered one earth-embracing organism, continuously reorganizing itself, adapting to the ever-changing conditions of the biosphere. Bacteria cleanse the biosphere and keep it fit for life, transforming carbon dioxide, oxygen, methane, hydrogen sulfide, and even heavy metals and petroleum.

Bacteria are everywhere. They pervade our soils and mudflats, cover deserts and dunes, helping capture and retain water. When soils are examined with an electron microscope, the soil is revealed to be connected by microbial mats of bacteria, unified by slime.

Some minerals (processed by bacteria) make it to the ocean where they become either necessities for organisms or collect in sediment. One organism in the sea is Emiliana, a single cell algae that biochemically envelops itself with calcite crystals (not normal rectangular calcite crystals, but glittering wheels of calcite.) Guess what holds the calcite wheels together – Slime!

What rock is mostly calcite? Limestone. Was limestone present on the earth when it formed? No! Limestone is a rock created by life. Emiliana can reproduce every two hours. The hotter it is, the faster it reproduces. Sometimes there are blooms of Emiliana. Satellite photographs sometimes reveal thousands of square miles of ocean slowly becoming whitish. Emiliana also die quickly, so tons of calcium carbonate go filtering down to the ocean floor.

Through plate tectonics this calcium carbonate is sucked into the earth’s interior. The calcium-enriched lava, when ejected in eruptions, blows the carbon dioxide into the air. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. In the Cretaceous period carbon dioxide built up until there was ten times as much in the atmosphere as there is now. Forests grew in Antarctica and there were no glaciers anywhere in the world.

But remember the Emiliana blooms covering large areas of the ocean? It is theorized that those patches grew and grew until they began reflecting solar radiation back through the surface water, increasing evaporation and producing glaring white clouds (shielding, cooling clouds) tempering the temperatures of the Cretaceous period. Maybe Emiliana will temper man-caused global warming (providing slime does its work!) 

Caliche is another rock that is continually being created. When rain percolates through arid soils, the calcium carbonates in the soil are collected together and unified by slime, and slowly harden over time when the soils dry out again. The “Cap” of the Caprock of the Llano Estacado was created by slime, too.

As my nose dried up in the warm building, I remembered that several years ago I had decided to research filaree. In programs on wildflowers I tell folks that it came with the churro sheep brought by Don Juan de Onate in 1598 when the Spanish colonized New Northern New Mexico. It may have come to the Llano Estacado even earlier, for Francisco Coronado had sheep with him as he looked for the Seven Cities of Cibola. The little curly haired seeds were trapped in the fleece of the sheep. As I checked my notes, I found I had forgotten that earlier I had learned that the name originated in Morocco. The Moors that conquered Spain gave it the name al feria, and alferillo is the Spanish name. The plant came to Spain with the Moors, probably in the hair of sheep, too. Filaree is the English twist to the common name.

Filaree is just one of the fairy bouquets of spring. I doubt that I will find Draba this year, a native “belly flower” only two to four inches tall that appears after wet winters with plenty of snow. A person has to lie on their belly to truly admire the fairy bouquets!  I probably will find some “quail pea,” another tiny native fairy bouquet of spring. A little bit later, I should also find dwarf verbena in clay soils, such as that in the playa here at Sibley. This spring, I have already seen another fairy bouquet in the yards in town – the “weed” henbit, which is another European introduction that probably did come in hay to the New World.

A search for a fairy bouquet led to learning something new about slime, snot, limestone, and caliche!