clear gold, passing into the rusty tone of bigelovia going into a
decline, a succession of color schemes more admirably managed than the
transformation scene at the theatre. Under my window a colony of cleome
made a soft web of bloom that drew me every morning for a long still
time; and one day I discovered that I was looking into a rare fretwork
of fawn and straw colored twigs from which both bloom and leaf had
gone, and I could not say if it had been for a matter of weeks or days.
The time to plant cucumbers and set out cabbages may be set down in the
almanac, but never seed-time nor blossom in Naboth’s field.
[Illustration]
Certain winged and mailed denizens of the field seem to reach their
heyday along with the plants they most affect. In June the leaning
towers of the white milkweed are jeweled over with red and gold
beetles, climbing dizzily. This is that milkweed from whose stems
the Indians flayed fibre to make snares for small game, but what
use the beetles put it to except for a displaying ground for their
gay coats, I could never discover. The white butterfly crop comes
on with the bigelovia bloom, and on warm mornings makes an airy
twinkling all across the field. In September young linnets grow out
of the rabbit-brush in the night. All the nests discoverable in
the neighboring orchards will not account for the numbers of them.
Somewhere, by the same secret process by which the field matures a
million more seeds than it needs, it is maturing red-hooded linnets
for their devouring. All the purlieus of bigelovia and artemisia are
noisy with them for a month. Suddenly as they come as suddenly go the
fly-by-nights, that pitch and toss on dusky barred wings above the
field of summer twilights. Never one of these nighthawks will you see
after linnet time, though the hurtle of their wings makes a pleasant
sound across the dusk in their season.
For two summers a great red-tailed hawk has visited the field every
afternoon between three and four o’clock, swooping and soaring with
the airs of a gentleman adventurer. What he finds there is chiefly
conjectured, so secretive are the little people of Naboth’s field. Only
when leaves fall and the light is low and slant, one sees the long
clean flanks of the jackrabbits, leaping like small deer, and of late
afternoons little cotton-tails scamper in the runways. But the most
one sees of the burrowers, gophers, and mice is the fresh earthwork of
their newly opened doors, or the pitiful small shreds the butcher-bird
hangs on spiny shrubs.
[Illustration]
It is a still field, this of my neighbor’s, though so busy, and
admirably compounded for variety and pleasantness,--a little sand, a
little loam, a grassy plot, a stony rise or two, a full brown stream,
a little touch of humanness, a footpath trodden out by moccasins.
Naboth expects to make town lots of it and his fortune in one and the
same day; but when I take the trail to talk with old Seyavi at the
campoodie, it occurs to me that though the field may serve a good turn
in those days it will hardly be happier. No, certainly not happier.
[Illustration]
THE MESA TRAIL
[Illustration]
The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth’s field,
though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the cañon, or
from any of the cattle paths that go up along the streamside; a clean,
pale, smooth-trodden way between spiny shrubs, comfortably wide for a
horse or an Indian. It begins, I say, at the campoodie, and goes on
toward the twilight hills and the borders of Shoshone Land. It strikes
diagonally across the foot of the hill-slope from the field until
it reaches the larkspur level, and holds south along the front of
Oppapago, having the high ranges to the right and the foothills and the
great Bitter Lake below it on the left. The mesa holds very level here,
cut across at intervals by the deep washes of dwindling streams, and
its treeless spaces uncramp the soul.
[Illustration]
Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback, at the jigging
coyote trot that only western-bred horses learn successfully. A
foot-pace carries one too slowly past the units in a decorative scheme
that is on a scale with the country round for bigness. It takes days’
journeys to give a note of variety to the country of the social
shrubs. These chiefly clothe the benches and eastern foot-slopes of
the Sierras,--great spreads of artemisia, _coleogyne_, and spinosa,
suffering no other woody stemmed thing in their purlieus; this by
election apparently, with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each
their clientèle of flowering herbs. It would be worth knowing how much
the devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants
to the shelter of the prickle bushes. It might have begun earlier, in
the time Seyavi of the campoodie tells of, when antelope ran on the
mesa like sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears
itself except from the midst of some stout twigged shrub; larkspur in
the _coleogyne_, and for every spinosa the purpling coils of phacelia.
In the shrub shelter, in the season, flock the little stemless things
whose blossom time is as short as a marriage song. The larkspurs make
the best showing, being tall and sweet, swaying a little above the
shrubbery, scattering pollen dust which Navajo brides gather to fill
their marriage baskets. This were an easier task than to find two of
them of a shade. Larkspurs in the botany are blue, but if you were to
slip rein to the stub of some black sage and set about proving it
you would be still at it by the hour when the white gilias set their
pale disks to the westering sun. This is the gilia the children call
“evening snow,” and it is no use trying to improve on children’s names
for wild flowers.
[Illustration]
From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a shifty
yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then as soon as
ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the sidelong ranges, come
little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the edge of the sand. By dusk
there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped
corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa wind as if they were real
flakes shaken out of a cloud, not sprung from the ground on wiry
three-inch stems. They keep awake all night, and all the air is heavy
and musky sweet because of them.
Farther south on the trail there will be poppies meeting ankle deep,
and singly, peacock-painted bubbles of calochortus blown out at the
tops of tall stems. But before the season is in tune for the gayer
blossoms the best display of color is in the lupin wash. There is
always a lupin wash somewhere on a mesa trail,--a broad, shallow,
cobble-paved sink of vanished waters, where the hummocks of _Lupinus
ornatus_ run a delicate gamut from silvery green of spring to silvery
white of winter foliage. They look in fullest leaf, except for color,
most like the huddled huts of the campoodie, and the largest of them
might be a man’s length in diameter. In their season, which is after
the gilias are at their best, and before the larkspurs are ripe for
pollen gathering, every terminal whorl of the lupin sends up its
blossom stalk, not holding any constant blue, but paling and purpling
to guide the friendly bee to virginal honey sips, or away from the
perfected and depleted flower. The length of the blossom stalk conforms
to the rounded contour of the plant, and of these there will be a
million moving indescribably in the airy current that flows down the
swale of the wash.
[Illustration]
There is always a little wind on the mesa, a sliding current of cooler
air going down the face of the mountain of its own momentum, but not to
disturb the silence of great space. Passing the wide mouths of cañons,
one gets the effect of whatever is doing in them, openly or behind a
screen of cloud,--thunder of falls, wind in the pine leaves, or rush
and roar of rain. The rumor of tumult grows and dies in passing, as
from open doors gaping on a village street, but does not impinge on the
effect of solitariness. In quiet weather mesa days have no parallel for
stillness, but the night silence breaks into certain mellow or poignant
notes. Late afternoons the burrowing owls may be seen blinking at the
doors of their hummocks with perhaps four or five elfish nestlings
arow, and by twilight begin a soft _whoo-oo-ing_, rounder, sweeter,
more incessant in mating time. It is not possible to disassociate
the call of the burrowing owl from the late slant light of the mesa.
If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of spring
twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that mellow
double note breaking along the blossom-tops. While the glow holds one
sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings after prey, and on into
the dark hears their soft _pus-ssh!_ clearing out of the trail ahead.
Maybe the pin-point shriek of field mouse or kangaroo rat that pricks
the wakeful pauses of the night is extorted by these mellow-voiced
plunderers, though it is just as like to be the work of the red fox on
his twenty-mile constitutional.
[Illustration]
Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours, and both
killers for the pure love of slaughter. The fox is no great talker, but
the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once,
gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light treaders, the split-feet,
so that the solitary camper sees their eyes about him in the dark
sometimes, and hears the soft intake of breath when no leaf has
stirred and no twig snapped underfoot. The coyote is your real lord
of the mesa, and so he makes sure you are armed with no long black
instrument to spit your teeth into his vitals at a thousand yards, is
both bold and curious. Not so bold, however, as the badger and not so
much of a curmudgeon. This shortlegged meat-eater loves half lights and
lowering days, has no friends, no enemies, and disowns his offspring.
Very likely if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would
resent it. But the badger is not very well contrived for looking up
or far to either side. Dull afternoons he may be met nosing a trail
hot-foot to the home of ground rat or squirrel, and is with difficulty
persuaded to give the right of way. The badger is a pot-hunter and no
sportsman. Once at the hill, he dives for the central chamber, his
sharp-clawed, splayey feet splashing up the sand like a bather in the
surf. He is a swift trailer, but not so swift or secretive but some
small sailing hawk or lazy crow, perhaps one or two of each, has spied
upon him and come drifting down the wind to the killing.
No burrower is so unwise as not to have several exits from his dwelling
under protecting shrubs. When the badger goes down, as many of the
furry people as are not caught napping come up by the back doors, and
the hawks make short work of them. I suspect that the crows get nothing
but the gratification of curiosity and the pickings of some secret
store of seeds unearthed by the badger. Once the excavation begins they
walk about expectantly, but the little gray hawks beat slow circles
about the doors of exit, and are wiser in their generation, though they
do not look it.
There are always solitary hawks sailing above the mesa, and where some
blue tower of silence lifts out of the neighboring range, an eagle
hanging dizzily, and always buzzards high up in the thin, translucent
air making a merry-go-round. Between the coyote and the birds of
carrion the mesa is kept clear of miserable dead.
The wind, too, is a besom over the treeless spaces, whisking new sand
over the litter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little doorways
of the burrowers are as trim as city fronts. It takes man to leave
unsightly scars on the face of the earth. Here on the mesa the
abandoned campoodies of the Paiutes are spots of desolation long after
the wattles of the huts have warped in the brush heaps. The campoodies
are near the watercourses, but never in the swale of the stream. The
Paiute seeks rising ground, depending on air and sun for purification
of his dwelling, and when it becomes wholly untenable, moves.
A campoodie at noontime, when there is no smoke rising and no stir of
life, resembles nothing so much as a collection of prodigious wasps’
nests. The huts are squat and brown and chimneyless, facing east, and
the inhabitants have the faculty of quail for making themselves scarce
in the underbrush at the approach of strangers. But they are really
not often at home during midday, only the blind and incompetent left
to keep the camp. These are working hours, and all across the mesa
one sees the women whisking seeds of _chia_ into their spoon-shaped
baskets, these emptied again into the huge conical carriers, supported
on the shoulders by a leather band about the forehead.
Mornings and late afternoons one meets the men singly and afoot on
unguessable errands, or riding shaggy, browbeaten ponies, with game
slung across the saddle-bows. This might be deer or even antelope,
rabbits, or, very far south towards Shoshone Land, lizards.
There are myriads of lizards on the mesa, little gray darts, or larger
salmon-sided ones that may be found swallowing their skins in the
safety of a prickle-bush in early spring. Now and then a palm’s breadth
of the trail gathers itself together and scurries off with a little
rustle under the brush, to resolve itself into sand again. This is pure
witchcraft. If you succeed in catching it in transit, it loses its
power and becomes a flat, horned, toad-like creature, horrid looking
and harmless, of the color of the soil; and the curio dealer will give
you two bits for it, to stuff.
[Illustration]
Men have their season on the mesa as much as plants and four-footed
things, and one is not like to meet them out of their time. For
example, at the time of _rodeos_, which is perhaps April, one meets
free riding vaqueros who need no trails and can find cattle where to
the layman no cattle exist. As early as February bands of sheep work up
from the south to the high Sierra pastures. It appears that shepherds
have not changed more than sheep in the process of time. The shy hairy
men who herd the tractile flocks might be, except for some added
clothing, the very brethren of David. Of necessity they are hardy,
simple livers, superstitious, fearful, given to seeing visions, and
almost without speech. It needs the bustle of shearings and copious
libations of sour, weak wine to restore the human faculty. Petite Pete,
who works a circuit up from the Ceriso to Red Butte and around by way
of Salt Flats, passes year by year on the mesa trail, his thick hairy
chest thrown open to all weathers, twirling his long staff, and dealing
brotherly with his dogs, who are possibly as intelligent, certainly
handsomer.
A flock’s journey is seven miles, ten if pasture fails, in a windless
blur of dust, feeding as it goes, and resting at noons. Such hours Pete
weaves a little screen of twigs between his head and the sun--the rest
of him is as impervious as one of his own sheep--and sleeps while his
dogs have the flocks upon their consciences. At night, wherever he may
be, there Pete camps, and 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 Judæa 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 cañons. 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
[Illustration]
“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.
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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 piñon 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.”