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Show 164 BY PATH AND TRAIL. ert animals had long ago consumed all that could be reached. In " Wild West" books, and even in profes sedly historical novels, one reads occasionally of this and that family or clan of Indians perishing of hunger or thirst. It is impossible for a normally healthy savage to die of hunger or perish from thirst on the Arizona des erts. The white man? Yes, and often, the Indian never. It is a case of God tempering the wind to the shorn lamb, or fitting the back to the burden. Under the thorns of every variety of cactus there is refreshing, nourishing and indeed, palatable food. The desert and mountain tribes knew this from immemorial times, and until they were confined to the reservations, cactus food formed a large part of their ordinary diet. They had a way of their own of stripping the needles from the plant, reach ing the pulp and eating it cooked or uncooked. There are many fruit and berry bearing cacti, and these fruits and berries were gathered in season, eaten raw or boiled, and from which a delicious syrup or juice was extracted, and an intoxicating drink, called ' ' chaca, ' ' distilled. The pitayha and suaharo cacti grow to the height of twenty and thirty feet, and yield, when prop erly tapped, from ten to twenty- gallons of pure drinking water. All desert plants contain a large amount of mois ture, and the professors of the Carnegie desert labora tory are now trying to find out how these desert plants, especially the cacti, extract water from a parched and sandy soil, and moisture from hot air. There is a cac tus, christened by the early Spaniards, the " barrel," which is 75 per cent water, and, strange to say, thrives best in hopelessly barren lands in which no water is found within hundreds of miles, and on which no rain ever falls. |
