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fortunate the trail-weary traveler who falls in with him. When
the fire kindles and savory meat seethes in the pot, when there is

a drowsy blether from the flock, and far down the mesa the twilight
twinkle of shepherd fires, when there is a hint of blossom

underfoot and a heavenly whiteness on the hills, one harks back
without effort to Judaea and the Nativity. But one feels by day

anything but good will to note the shorn shrubs and cropped
blossom-tops. So many seasons' effort, so many suns and rains to

make a pound of wool! And then there is the loss of
ground-inhabiting birds that must fail from the mesa when few herbs

ripen seed.
Out West, the west of the mesas and the unpatented hills,

there is more sky than any place in the world. It does not sit
flatly on the rim of earth, but begins somewhere out in the space

in which the earth is poised, hollows more, and is full of clean
winey winds. There are some odors, too, that get into the blood.

There is the spring smell of sage that is the warning that sap is
beginning to work in a soil that looks to have none of the juices

of life in it; it is the sort of smell that sets one thinking what
a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the sort of smell that

is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the plant's best, and
leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There is the smell

of sage at sundown, burning sage from campoodies and sheep camps,
that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell

that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon
long acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it

indubitably. There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that
comes up from the alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and

the smell of rain from the wide-mouthed canons. And last the smell
of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of other things

that are the end of the mesa trail.
THE BASKET MAKER

"A man," says Seyavi of the campoodie, "must have a woman, but a
woman who has a child will do very well."

That was perhaps why, when she lost her mate in the dying
struggle of his race, she never took another, but set her wit to

fend for herself and her young son. No doubt she was often put to
it in the beginning to find food for them both. The Paiutes had

made their last stand at the border of the Bitter Lake;
battle-driven they died in its waters, and the land filled with

cattle-men and adventurers for gold: this while Seyavi and the boy
lay up in the caverns of the Black Rock and ate tule roots and

fresh-water clams that they dug out of the slough bottoms with
their toes. In the interim, while the tribes swallowed their

defeat, and before the rumor of war died out, they must have come
very near to the bare core of things. That was the time Seyavi

learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more
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.

There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or
outcast, that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and

foraged for them, slinking savage and afraid, remembering and
mistrusting humankind, wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.

I have thought Seyavi might have had days like that, and have had
perfect leave to think, since she will not talk of it. Paiutes

have the art of reducing life to its lowest ebb and yet saving it
alive on grasshoppers, lizards, and strange herbs; and that time

must have left no shift untried. It lasted long enough for Seyavi
to have evolved the philosophy of life which I have set down at the

beginning. She had gone beyond learning to do for her son, and
learned to believe it worth while.

In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the
fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of

her experience. If she goes on crimping and uncrimping with the
changing mode, it is safe to suppose she has never come up against

anything too big for her. The Indian woman gets nearly the same
personal note in the pattern of her baskets. Not that she does not

make all kinds, carriers, water-bottles, and cradles,--these
are kitchen ware,--but her works of art are all of the same piece.

Seyavi made flaring, flat-bottomed bowls, cooking pots really, when
cooking was done by dropping hot stones into water-tight food

baskets, and for decoration a design in colored bark of the
procession of plumed crests of the valley quail. In this pattern

she had made cooking pots in the golden spring of her wedding year,
when the quail went up two and two to their resting places about

the foot of Oppapago. In this fashion she made them when, after
pillage, it was possible to reinstate the housewifely crafts.

Quail ran then in the Black Rock by hundreds,--so you will still
find them in fortunate years,--and in the famine time the women cut

their long hair to make snares when the flocks came morning and
evening to the springs.

Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money, in a
generation that preferred iron pots for utility. Every Indian

woman is an artist,--sees, feels, creates, but does not
philosophize about her processes. Seyavi's bowls are wonders of

technical precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with
them, but the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of

humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl.
There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck

trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate
the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket

without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you
might own one a year without thinking how it was done;

but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness. The weaver and
the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same

elements. Twice a year, in the time of white butterflies and again
when young quail ran neck and neck in the chaparral, Seyavi cut

willows for basketry by the creek where it wound toward the river
against the sun and sucking winds. It never quite reached the

river except in far-between times of summer flood, but it always
tried, and the willows encouraged it as much as they could. You

nearly always found them a little farther down than the trickle of
eager water. The Paiute fashion of counting time appeals to me

more than any other calendar. They have no stamp of heathen gods
nor great ones, nor any succession of moons as have red men of the

East and North, but count forward and back by the progress of the
season; the time of taboose, before the trout begin to leap, the

end of the pinon harvest, about the beginning of deep snows. So
they get nearer the sense of the season, which runs early or late

according as the rains are forward or delayed. But whenever Seyavi
cut willows for baskets was always a golden time, and the soul of

the weather went into the wood. If you had ever owned one of
Seyavi's golden russet cooking bowls with the pattern of plumed

quail, you would understand all this without saying anything.
Before Seyavi made baskets for the satisfaction of

desire,--for that is a house-bred theory of art that makes anything
more of it,--she danced and dressed her hair. In those days, when

the spring was at flood and the blood pricked to the mating fever,
the maids chose their flowers, wreathed themselves, and danced in

the twilights, young desire crying out to young desire. They sang
what the heart prompted, what the flower expressed, what boded in

the mating weather.
"And what flower did you wear, Seyavi?"

"I, ah,--the white flower of twining (clematis), on my body
and my hair, and so I sang:--

"I am the white flower of twining,
Little white flower by the river,

Oh, flower that twines close by the river;
Oh, trembling flower!

So trembles the maiden heart."
So sang Seyavi of the campoodie before she made baskets, and in her

later days laid her arms upon her knees and laughed in them at the
recollection. But it was not often she would say so much, never

understanding the keen hunger I had for bits of lore and the "fool
talk" of her people. She had fed her young son with meadowlarks'

tongues, to make him quick of speech; but in late years was
loath to admit it, though she had come through the period of

unfaith in the lore of the clan with a fine appreciation of its
beauty and significance.

"What good will your dead get, Seyavi, of the baskets you
burn?" said I, coveting them for my own collection.

Thus Seyavi, "As much good as yours of the flowers you strew."
Oppapago looks on Waban, and Waban on Coso and the Bitter

Lake, and the campoodie looks on these three; and more, it sees the
beginning of winds along the foot of Coso, the gathering of clouds

behind the high ridges, the spring flush, the soft spread of wild
almond bloom on the mesa. These first, you understand, are the

Paiute's walls, the other his furnishings. Not the wattled hut is
his home, but the land, the winds, the hill front, the stream.

These he cannot duplicate at any furbisher's shop as you who live
within doors, who, if your purse allows, may have the same home at

Sitka and Samarcand. So you see how it is that the homesickness of
an Indian is often unto death, since he gets no relief from it;

neither wind nor weed nor sky-line, nor any aspect of the hills of
a strange land sufficiently like his own. So it was when the

government reached out for the Paiutes, they gathered into the
Northern Reservation only such poor tribes as could devise no other

end of their affairs. Here, all along the river, and south to
Shoshone Land, live the clans who owned the earth, fallen

into the deplorable condition of hangers-on. Yet you hear them
laughing at the hour when they draw in to the campoodie after

labor, when there is a smell of meat and the steam of the cooking
pots goes up against the sun. Then the children lie with their

toes in the ashes to hear tales; then they are merry, and have the
joys of repletion and the nearness of their kind. They have their

hills, and though jostled are sufficiently free to get some
fortitude for what will come. For now you shall hear of the end of

the basket maker.
In her best days Seyavi was most like Deborah, deep bosomed,

broad in the hips, quick in counsel, slow of speech, esteemed of
her people. This was that Seyavi who reared a man by her own hand,

her own wit, and none other. When the townspeople began to take
note of her--and it was some years after the war before there began

to be any towns--she was then in the quick maturity of primitive
women; but when I knew her she seemed already old. Indian women do

not often live to great age, though they look incredibly steeped in


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