65 



discovered while feeding, the animals do not always run away 

 at sight. They may instead, if unused to men, stand and 

 watch with curiosity, or they may even come forward to 

 investigate at close range. The last is what happened at our 

 second meeting. I saw a troop of seven or eight bucks and 

 does in the distance, and while we were stalking them, a 

 beautiful buck, taking us perchance for a new kind of prong- 

 horn, came cantering towards us, stiff-legged and proud. He 

 stopped eighty or ninety yards away from Captain Funcke, 

 who, on bended knee, was watching him along the barrel 

 of Pancho's ancient Winchester. To this day the Captain 

 cannot explain how he missed that shot, except by blaming it 

 on the untried rifle. 



After this disappointing incident, we wandered on through 

 the oppressive, rapidly increasing heat, our lips caking and 

 turning black from thirst, and our cottony tongues cleaving 

 to the back of our mouths. We had two gallons of water in 

 our three canteens, but it was the horrible slimy stuff from the 

 Tres Pozos. One had not the will power to drink enough of 

 it to quench thirst; indeed it was necessary to think of 

 things far away before swallowing a single gulp. 



Before the middle of the forenoon we began to work back 

 towards camp, now and then climbing into large mesquites 

 or ironwoods in order to look over the ground for roving prong- 

 horns. In camp, we lay through the heat of the day almost 

 stripped of clothes, moving round our big mesquite so as to 

 keep in the shade, and seeking further relief by perpetually 

 changing the attitude of our bodies.^ Desert flies buzzed 

 about us, but this annoyance was not to be compared with the 

 heat and the blinding glare. When the sunbeams had grown 

 slanting, we went hunting again, this time in the direction of 

 the Tinajas, well up into the passes. We found no trace of 



1 120° F., in the shade, is by no means an unusual temperature in parts 

 of the Colorado Desert. The average daily maximum temperature at 

 Calexico, during the month of July, 1906, was 105° F. On August 10,. 

 1913, at Greenland Ranch in the Imperial Valley, the thermometer reached 

 134° F., the highest shade temperature ever recorded by the United States 

 Weather Bureau. In the San Felipe Desert, Baja California, just south 

 of Pattie Basin, 114° F. has been recorded at seven o'clock in the morning. 



