We had skirted the northern part of the circle, passing a few small streams and then found one of the three large channels which empty the lake.  As it happened we took the one on the outside, and the longest.  The growth grew thicker than ever, the stream choked down to fifty feet.  Now it began to loop backward and forward and back again, as though trying to make the longest and crookedest channel possible in the smallest space.  The water in the channel was stagnant, swift streamlets rushed in from the tules on the north, and rushed out again on the south.  It was not always a simple matter to ascertain which was the main channel.  Others just as large were diverted from the stream.  Twice we attempted to cut across, but the water became shallow, the tules stalled our boats, and we were glad to return, sounding with a pole when in doubt.

Then we began to realize that we were not entirely alone in this wilderness of water.  We saw evidence of another’s passage, in broken cat-tails and blazed trees.  In many places he had pushed into the thickets.  We concluded it must be a trapper.  At last, to our surprise, we saw a telephone equipment, sheltered in a box nailed on a water-surrounded tree.  The line ran directly across the stream.  Here also we could see where a boat had forced a way through, and the water plants had been cut with a sharp instrument.  What could it be?  We were certain no line ran to the only ranch at the Gulf.  We had information of another ranch directly on the border line, but did not think it came below the levee, and as far as we had learned, there were no homes but the wickiups of the Cocopah in the jungles.  It was like one of those thrilling stories of Old Sleuth and Dead Shot Dick which we read, concealed in our schoolbooks, when we were supposed to be studying the physical geography of Mexico.  But the telephone was no fiction, and had recently been repaired, but for what purpose it was there we could not imagine.  After leaving the lake there was no dry land.  At night our boat, filled with green tules for a bed, was tied to a willow tree, with its roots submerged in ten feet of water.  Never were there such swarms of mosquitos.  In the morning our faces were corrugated with lumps, not a single exposed spot remaining unbitten.

The loops continued with the next day’s travel, but we were gradually working to the southwest, then they began to straighten out somewhat, as the diverted streams returned.  We thought early in the morning that we would pass about ten miles to the east of the coast range, but it was not to be.  Directly to the base of the dark, heat-vibrating rocks we pulled, and landed on the first shore that we had seen for twenty-four hours.

Here was a recently used trail, and tracks where horses came down to the water.  Here too was the track of a barefooted Cocopah, a tribe noted for its men of gigantic build, and with great feet out of all proportion to their size.  If that footprint was to be fossilized, future generations would marvel at the evidence of some gigantic prehistoric animal, an alligator with a human-shaped foot.  These Indians have lived in these mud bottoms so long, crossing the streams on rafts made of bundles of tules, and only going to the higher land when their homes are inundated by the floods, that they have become a near approach to a web-footed human being.