i26 Recreations of a Sportsman 



that, living on the country, we would take every- 

 thing that fell to the guns or spear. As the 

 sun rose the dugout of the single turtle hunter 

 of Tobari passed along the isle of Ciari, and 

 an occasional shot told that we were coming 

 into our own in this land of Epicurus. 



Seilor Pedro Alvarado once left his mine in 

 the Sierra Madre and came down to Guaymas 

 in his diligence. It was a distance of one hun- 

 dred and fifty miles. There was no room inside 

 for the guard, so the four men ran alongside of 

 the coach the whole distance, wore out several 

 sets of horses, and displayed no fatigue. Our 

 Yaqui runner was a descendant of this stock, 

 and he thought nothing of running thirty miles 

 to near Lobos Bay, coming back in a few hours 

 with word from our party that they had been 

 obliged to return. So we entered the giant 

 cactus forest again and bore away to the east, 

 flying by groups of great pitahayas, bored with 

 the nest-holes of woodpeckers; now in the elu- 

 sive heart of a palo verde forest, or lost in the 

 spires of a great hecho beyond Muchobampo. We 

 passed the quaint native villages of Bayatori 

 and Tesopoco, and at Ajiabampo, which might 

 have been in the heart of Asia Minor, we stopped 

 to ask the way, in a maze of most picturesque 

 houses of adobe and bamboo. In the centre of 

 the town, the adobes appeared to have bunched 

 together, looking not unlike the piles of Acoma, 



