easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.

To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land
it is lived in and the procession of the year. This valley is a
narrow one, a mere trough between hills, a draught for storms,
hardly a crow's flight from the sharp Sierras of the Snows to the
curled, red and ochre, uncomforted, bare ribs of Waban. Midway of
the groove runs a burrowing, dull river, nearly a hundred miles
from where it cuts the lava flats of the north to its widening in
a thick, tideless pool of a lake. Hereabouts the ranges have no
foothills, but rise up steeply from the bench lands above the
river. Down from the Sierras, for the east ranges have almost no
rain, pour glancing white floods toward the lowest land, and all
beside them lie the campoodies, brown wattled brush heaps, looking
east.

In the river are mussels, and reeds that have edible white
roots, and in the soddy meadows tubers of joint grass; all these at
their best in the spring. On the slope the summer growth affords
seeds; up the steep the one-leafed pines, an oily nut. That was
really all they could depend upon, and that only at the mercy of
the little gods of frost and rain. For the rest it was cunning
against cunning, caution against skill, against quacking hordes of
wild-fowl in the tulares, against pronghorn and bighorn and deer.
You can guess, however, that all this warring of rifles and
bowstrings, this influx of overlording whites, had made game
wilder and hunters fearful of being hunted. You can surmise also,
for it was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became
in turn the game of the conquerors.