202 East and West 
palo verde at mid-day, looking over the 
varnished green tops of the creosote bushes 
towards the distant Bradshaws, which seemed 
somehow to have turned themselves around, 
I heard behind me what appeared to be the 
barking of a puppy and peering cautiously 
around a rock was surprised to find it was not 
a quadruped at all but aroad-runner. As the 
strange uncouth bird hunted for his favourite 
diet of scorpions and snakes, he paused now 
and again and gave vent to his feelings in this 
fashion. Presently something whizzed over 
my head in the hot sunshine with a ting like 
a rifle bullet. This was repeated at intervals 
and if I had not already learned that it was 
an antic of the black-chinned humming-bird, 
who thus disports himself before the female, 
it might have caused me as much surprise as 
the barking of the road-runner. So rapid is 
the flight in these manceuvres that the bird is 
virtually invisible and one is aware of him 
merely by the sound he makes, as of a passing 
bullet. My only other encounter was with a 
horned toad, a patient, inoffensive little lizard 
of a mauve hue, like the desert ranges, and 
with a crown of tubercles upon his head which 
in outline suggest the lava peaks of these same 
mountains. He looks like the country he 
