The Basket Woman Part 9

His old companion, in four pieces, was swinging down the other side of the mountain, and as he went, he saw high peaks and soddy meadows, long winding canons with white glancing waters; and heard the chorus of the falls. When it was night the miners lit a fire and loosened up the packs, and after dark, when the wind began to move among the trees and the fire burned low, one of the men threw a piece of the white-barked pine on it.

"Oh! Oh!" cried the pine as the flames caught hold of it, "and is this really the end of all my travels?"

"How that green wood sputters!" said the man; "it is not fit even for firewood."

The next day the wind took up the ash and carried it back over the pa.s.s, and dropped it where the chopped boughs lay fainting on the ground.

"Ah, is that you?" they said; "now you can tell us what it is like on the other side."

"How ignorant you are," said the ash of the white-barked pine, "one would know you have never traveled. It is exactly like this side." But he could not hear what they had to say to that, for the wind whirled him away.

NA'[:Y]ANG-WIT'E, THE FIRST RABBIT DRIVE

The Basket Woman was walking over the mesa with the great carrier at her back. Behind her straggled the children and the other women of the campoodie, each with a cone-shaped basket slung between her shoulders.

Alan clapped his hands when he saw them coming, and ran out along the path.

"You come see rabbit drive," she said, twinkling her shrewd black eyes under the border of her basket cap. Alan took hold of a fold of her dress as he walked beside her, for he was still a little afraid of the other Indians, but since the time of his going out to see the buzzards making a merry-go-round, he knew he should never be afraid of the Basket Woman again. The other women laughed a great deal as they looked at him, showing their white teeth and putting back the black coa.r.s.e hair out of their eyes, and Alan felt that the things they said to each other were about him, though they could hardly have been unpleasant with so much smiling. Now he could see the men swarm out of the huts under the hill, all afoot but a dozen of the old men, who rode small kicking ponies at a tremendous pace, digging their heels into the horses' ribs. They pa.s.sed up the mesa in a blur of golden dust; westward they dwindled to a speck, something ran between them from man to man, now thick like a cord, then shaken out and vanis.h.i.+ng in air. Then the riders dropped from their horses and fumbled on the ground. Alan plucked at the Basket Woman's dress.

"Tell me what it is they do," he said.

"It is the net which they set with forked stakes of willow," answered the Basket Woman. Now the young men and the middle-aged began to form a line across the mesa, standing three man's lengths apart in the sage.

Some of them were armed with guns and others had only clubs; all were merry, laughing and calling to one another. They began to move forward evenly with a marching movement, beating the brush as they went.

Presently up popped a rabbit from the sage and ran before them in long flying leaps; far down the line another bounded from a stony wash, his lean flanks turned broadside to the sun.

Then the hunters broke into shouts of laughter and clapping, then one began to sing and the song pa.s.sed from man to man along the line; then the men crouched a little as Indians do in singing, then their bodies swayed and they stamped with each staccato note as they moved forward.

Rabbits sprang up in the scrub and went before them like the wind, and as each one leaped into view and laid back his ears in flight, the cries and laughter grew and the singing rose louder. The wind blew it back to the women and children straggling far behind, who took it up, and the burden of it was this,--

[Ill.u.s.tration: E - ya - ha hi, E - ya, E - ya - hi!]

But every man sang it for himself, beginning when he liked and leaving off, and when a rabbit started up under foot or one over-leaped himself and went sprawling to the sand the refrain broke out again, but the words, when there were any, seemed not to have anything to do with the hunt, and sounded to Alan like a game.

"_He-yah-hi, hi!_ he has it; he has it, he has the white, he has it!"

"_Na'ang-wit'e!_" chuckled the Basket Woman. "_Na'ang-wit'e, na'ang-wit'e!_ It is as it was of old time, look now and you shall see."

Alan looked at the hunters again, and whether it was because of the blown dust of the mesa, or the quiver of heat that rose up from the sand, or because the Basket Woman had laid her hand upon him, he saw that they were not as they had been a moment since. Now they wore no hats and were naked from the waist up, clothed below with deerskin garments. Quivers of the skin of cougars with the tails hanging down were slung between their shoulders, and the arrows in them were pointed with tips of obsidian and winged with eagle feathers. Every man carried his bow or his spear in his hand. Bright beads and bits of many-colored sh.e.l.l hung and glittered in their hair. Rabbits went before them like gra.s.shoppers for number, and the song and the shouting were fierce and wild. "But what is it all about?" asked Alan.

"_Na'ang-wit'e, na'ang-wit'e_," laughed the Basket Woman. "Wait and I will tell you the story of that song, for it is so that every song has its story, without which no one may understand it. It is not well to go too near the guns; sit you here and I will tell."

So Alan bent down the sagebrush to make him a springy seat and the Basket Woman sat upon the ground with her hands clasped about her knees.

"Long and long ago," said the Basket Woman, "when men and beasts talked together, there were none so friendly and none so much about the wickiups as the rabbit people, and some of our fathers have told that it was they who taught my people the game of _na'ang-wit'e_. I know not if that be true, but there were none so cunning as they to play it.

And this is the manner of the game: there should be two sticks, or better, two bits of bone of the fore leg of a deer, made smooth and small to fit the palm. One of them is all white and the other has sinew of deer stained black and wound about it. These the players pa.s.s from hand to hand, and another will guess where is the place of the white, and he who guesses best shall win all the other's goods. It is good sport playing, and between man and man it comes even in the end, for sometimes one has the goods and sometimes another, but when my people played with the rabbit people it was not good, for the rabbits won every time. Then my people drew together, all the Indians of every sort, and made a great game against the rabbit people. There were two long rows across the mesa, and between them were all the goods piled high, all the beads and ornaments of sh.e.l.l, all the feather work and fine dressed deerskin, all the worked moccasins, the quivers, the bows, all the blankets, the baskets, and the woven mats. So they played at sunrise, so at noon, so when it was night and the fires were lit. So on into the night, and when it was morning the game was done, for the Indians had no more goods. _Ay-aiy!_" said the Basket Woman, "long will the rabbit people sorrow for that day, for it was then that the Indians first contrived together how they might be rid of them. Then they gathered up the milkweed," and she reached out and plucked a tall stem of it growing beside her, white flowered and slender, with fine leaves like gra.s.s.

"Then they broke it so," and she laid it across a stone and beat it lightly with a stick, "then they drew out the threads soft and white, and so they rolled it into string."

She stretched the fibre with one hand and rolled it on her knee with the other, twisting and twining it. "Thus was the string made and afterward woven into nets. The mesh of the net was just enough to let a rabbit's head through, but not his body, and the net was a little wider than a rabbit's jump when he goes fast and fleeing, and long enough to stretch half across the world. So on a day the net was set and the drive was begun as you have seen it, and as the Indians went they remembered their anger and taunted the rabbit people. So the song of _Na'ang-wit'e_ was made. Now let us go and see how it fares with the rabbit people, for as it was of old so will it be to-day."

All this time the line of men moved steadily across the mesa toward the net. Now and then a rabbit turned, made bold by fright, and pa.s.sed between the men as they marched. Then the nearest turned to shoot him as he ran, but it was left to the women to pick up the game. Already the foremost rabbits were at the net, turned back by it, leaping toward the hunters and fleeing again to the net. The old men closed in the ends of the lane where the rabbits ran about distractedly with shrill squeals of anguished fear. Some got their heads through the mesh but never their bodies, and as it is not the nature of rabbits to go backward they struggled and cried, getting themselves the more entangled; some blind with their haste came against it in mid-leap, and were thrown back stunned upon the sand. The men sang no more, for they had work to do, serious work, for on the dried flesh of the rabbits and the blankets made of their skins the campoodie must largely count for food and warmth in the winter season. They closed in to the killing and made short work of it with clubs and the b.u.t.t ends of their guns. Then the women came up with the children and heaped up the great carriers with the game while the men wrung the sweat from their foreheads and counted up the kill.

Most of the rabbits were the kind Alan had learned to call jack rabbits, but the Basket Woman picked up a fat little cotton-tail.

"This is little Tavwots," said she, "and you shall have him for your supper." Alan's mind still ran on the story of the first drive. "But is it true?" he asked her, before he had given thanks for the gift.

"Now this is the sign I shall give you that the tale is true," said the Basket Woman. "Ever since that day if one of the rabbit people meets an Indian in the trail he flees before him as you saw them flee to-day, and that is because of _na'ang-wit'e_ and the first rabbit drive." Then she laughed, but Alan took his share of the kill on his shoulder and went back across the mesa slowly, wondering.

[Ill.u.s.tration: From photograph by A. A. Forbes A "WICKIUP," OR INDIAN HUT]

MAHALA JOE

I

In the campoodie of Three Pines, which you probably know better by its Spanish name of Tres Pinos, there is an Indian, well thought of among his own people, who goes about wearing a woman's dress, and is known as Mahala Joe. He should be about fifty years old by this time, and has a quiet, kindly face. Sometimes he tucks up the skirt of his woman's dress over a pair of blue overalls when he has a man's work to do, but at feasts and dances he wears a ribbon around his waist and a handkerchief on his head as the other mahalas do. He is much looked to because of his knowledge of white people and their ways, and if it were not for the lines of deep sadness that fall in his face when at rest, one might forget that the woman's gear is the badge of an all but intolerable shame. At least it was so used by the Paiutes, but when you have read this full and true account of how it was first put on, you may not think it so.

Fifty years ago the valley about Tres Pinos was all one sea of moving gra.s.s and dusky, greenish sage, cropped over by deer and antelope, north as far as Togobah, and south to the Bitter Lake. Beside every considerable stream which flowed into It from the Sierras was a Paiute campoodie, and all they knew of white people was by hearsay from the tribes across the mountains. But soon enough cattlemen began to push their herds through the Sierra pa.s.ses to the Paiutes' feeding-ground.

The Indians saw them come, and though they were not very well pleased, they held still by the counsel of their old men; night and day they made medicine and prayed that the white men might go away.

Among the first of the cattlemen in the valley about Tres Pinos was Joe Baker, who brought a young wife, and built his house not far from the campoodie. The Indian women watched her curiously from afar because of a whisper that ran among the wattled huts. When the year was far gone, and the sun-cured gra.s.ses curled whitish brown, a doctor came riding hard from the fort at Edswick, forty miles to the south, and though they watched, they did not see him ride away. It was the third day at evening when Joe Baker came walking towards the campoodie, and his face was set and sad. He carried something rolled in a blanket, and looked anxiously at the women as he went between the huts. It was about the hour of the evening meal, and the mahalas sat about the fires watching the cooking-pots. He came at last opposite a young woman who sat nursing her child. She had a bright, pleasant face, and her little one seemed about six months old. Her husband stood near and watched them with great pride. Joe Baker knelt down in front of the mahala, and opened the roll of blankets. He showed her a day-old baby that wrinkled up its small face and cried.

"Its mother is dead," said the cattleman. The young Indian mother did not know English, but she did not need speech to know what had happened.

She looked pitifully at the child, and at her husband timidly. Joe Baker went and laid his rifle and cartridge belt at the Paiute's feet. The Indian picked up the gun and fingered it; his wife smiled. She put down her own child, and lifted the little white stranger to her breast. It nozzled against her and hushed its crying; the young mother laughed.

"See how greedy it is," she said; "it is truly white." She drew up the blanket around the child and comforted it.

The cattleman called to him one of the Indians who could speak a little English.

"Tell her," he said, "that I wish her to care for the child. His name is Walter. Tell her that she is to come to my house for everything he needs, and for every month that he keeps fat and well she shall have a fat steer from my herd." So it was agreed.

As soon as Walter was old enough he came to sleep at his father's house, but the Indian woman, whom he called _Ebia_, came every day to tend him. Her son was his brother, and Walter learned to speak Paiute before he learned English. The two boys were always together, but as yet the little Indian had no name. It is not the custom among Paiutes to give names to those who have not done anything worth naming.

"But I have a name," said Walter, "and so shall he. I will call him Joe.

That is my father's name, and it is a good name, too."

When Mr. Baker was away with the cattle Walter slept at the campoodie, and Joe's mother made him a buckskin s.h.i.+rt. At that time he was so brown with the sun and the wind that only by his eyes could you tell that he was white; he was also very happy. But as this is to be the story of how Joe came to the wearing of a woman's dress, I cannot tell you all the plays they had, how they went on their first hunting, nor what they found in the creek of Tres Pinos.

The beginning of the whole affair of Mahala Joe must be laid to the arrow-maker. The arrow-maker had a stiff knee from a wound in a long-gone battle, and for that reason he sat in the shade of his wickiup, and chipped arrow points from flakes of obsidian that the young men brought him from Togobah, fitting them to shafts of reeds from the river marsh. He used to coax the boys to wade in the brown water and cut the reeds, for the dampness made his knee ache. They drove bargains with him for arrows for their own hunting, or for the sake of the stories he could tell. For an armful of reeds he would make three arrows, and for a double armful he would tell tales. These were mostly of great huntings and old wars, but when it was winter, and no snakes in the long gra.s.s to overhear, he would tell Wonder-stories. The boys would lie with their toes in the warm ashes, and the arrow-maker would begin.

"You can see," said the arrow-maker, "on the top of Waban the tall boulder looking on the valleys east and west. That is the very boundary between the Paiute country and Shoshone land. The boulder is a hundred times taller than the tallest man, and thicker through than six horses standing nose to tail; the shadow of it falls all down the slope. At mornings it falls toward the Paiute peoples, and evenings it falls on Shoshone land. Now on this side of the valley, beginning at the campoodie, you will see a row of pine trees standing all upstream one behind another. See, the long branches grow on the side toward the hill; and some may tell you it is because of the way the wind blows, but I say it is because they reach out in a hurry to get up the mountain. Now I will tell you how these things came about.

"Very long ago all the Paiutes of this valley were ruled by two brothers, a chief and a medicine man, Winnedumah and Tinnemaha. They were both very wise, and one of them never did anything without the other. They taught the tribes not to war upon each other, but to stand fast as brothers, and so they brought peace into the land. At that time there were no white people heard of, and game was plenty. The young honored the old, and nothing was as it is now."