I remember very well when I first met him. Walking in the evening glow
to spy the marriages of the white gilias, I sniffed the unmistakable
odor of burning sage. It is a smell that carries far and indicates
usually the nearness of a campoodie, but on the level mesa nothing
taller showed than Diana's sage. Over the tops of it, beginning to dusk
under a young white moon, trailed a wavering ghost of smoke, and at the
end of it I came upon the Pocket Hunter making a dry camp in the
friendly scrub. He sat tailorwise in the sand, with his coffee-pot on
the coals, his supper ready to hand in the frying pan, and himself in a
mood for talk. His pack burros in hobbles strayed off to hunt for a
wetter mouthful than the sage afforded, and gave him no concern.

We came upon him often after that, threading the windy passes, or by
water-holes in the desert hills, and got to know much of his way of
life. He was a small, bowed man, with a face and manner and speech of no
character at all, as if he had that faculty of small hunted things of
taking on the protective color of his surroundings. His clothes were of
no fashion that I could remember, except that they bore liberal markings
of pot black, and he had a curious fashion of going about with his mouth
open, which gave him a vacant look until you came near enough to
perceive him busy about an endless hummed, wordless tune. He traveled
far and took a long time to it, but the simplicity of his kitchen
arrangements was elemental. A pot for beans, a coffee-pot, a frying-pan,
a tin to mix bread in--he fed the burros in this when there was
need--with these he had been half round our western world and back. He
explained to me very early in our acquaintance what was good to take to
the hills for food: nothing sticky, for that "dirtied the pots;" nothing
with "juice" to it, for that would not pack to advantage; and nothing
likely to ferment. He used no gun, but he would set snares by the
water-holes for quail and doves, and in the trout country he carried a