36S PAPAGUERIA 



sometimes the hut of the temporal e is pitched and its field laid 

 out alongside a temporary water hole, cut out by a single storm 

 or during one wet season, far out on the plain. When the tempo- 

 rale is by a valley water hole, the husbandmen share the pre- 

 cious liquid with their herds of stock, that daily trample through 

 it and fight to the death on its brink, and with the myriads of 

 insects, great and small, that swarm about and within the water 

 to revel in its liquidity or consume its filth, while the pool seethes 

 in the sun and festers and putrifies into foul-odored mud. When 

 the subsurface sands are water-bearing, sometimes wells are sunk ; 

 and again the temporales are without water save as it is carried 

 perhaps for a dozen or score of miles in ollas swung over the 

 backs of burros or carried on the heads of withered crones. 



Usually the temporale of each family is occupied only by a 

 young or middle-aged couple, sometimes by a sire and two or 

 three boys, again by most of the family.. While the women grind 

 meal on the metate or scour the valley for fruits and material for 

 baskets, the men plow or fence their field and plant their seeds 

 and harvest their crops in season, the produce, except such as 

 is consumed on the ground, being transported to the ranch erias. 

 But the season is a variable one; the season for planting is the 

 time of storm or freshet, come when it may; and the season of 

 harvest is the time of maturing or ripening of the produce, be it 

 May or September, for advantage is taken of the summer freshet 

 as well as of the winter one. If the temporale is used but a sea- 

 son or two, the domicile may be little more than a bower of mes- 

 quite bushes; and when the temporale is long and numerously 

 occupied and the fields are grown to 5 or 10 acres in extent, such 

 bowers are occasionally erected here and there in the fields or 

 about the fences, in order that the watchers may find shelter, or 

 the harvesters may repose in their shadow. In some cases the 

 rancherias and the temporales approach and even merge; and 

 some groups have no temporales or other fields except the mea- 

 ger patches scattered about the rancheria, while other groups 

 have fresh temporales and no permanent rancherias, their win- 

 ters and autumns being spent in Mexico or in neighboring ran- 

 cherias among which the individuals scatter when not engaged 

 in agriculture. 



Somewhere in the vicinity of nearly every town and village in 

 northern Sonora,and of many of those in the central and southern 

 part of the state, there is a Papago pueblo which is commonly 

 occupied during the winter and abandoned or left in charge of one 



