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.”
[Illustration]
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.
[Illustration]
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 years. They have the wit to win
sustenance from the raw material of life without intervention, but
they have not the sleek look of the women whom the social organization
conspires to nourish. Seyavi had somehow squeezed out of her daily
round a spiritual ichor that kept the skill in her knotted fingers
long after the accustomed time, but that also failed. By all counts
she would have been about sixty years old when it came her turn to sit
in the dust on the sunny side of the wickiup, with little strength
left for anything but looking. And in time she paid the toll of the
smoky huts and became blind. This is a thing so long expected by the
Paiutes that when it comes they find it neither bitter nor sweet, but
tolerable because common. There were three other blind women in the
campoodie, withered fruit on a bough, but they had memory and speech.
By noon of the sun there were never any left in the campoodie but
these or some mother of weanlings, and they sat to keep the ashes warm
upon the hearth. If it were cold, they burrowed in the blankets of the
hut; if it were warm, they followed the shadow of the wickiup around.
Stir much out of their places they hardly dared, since one might not
help another; but they called, in high, old cracked voices, gossip and
reminder across the ash heaps.
Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour to
spare, there are things to be learned of life not set down in any
books, folk tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and desire,
but no whimpering. Now and then one or another of the blind keepers
of the camp will come across to where you sit gossiping, tapping her
way among the kitchen middens, guided by your voice that carries far in
the clearness and stillness of mesa afternoons. But suppose you find
Seyavi retired into the privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing
for that day. There is no other privacy possible in a campoodie. All
the processes of life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin,
twig-woven walls of the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective
for behavior. Very early the Indian learns to possess his countenance
in impassivity, to cover his head with his blanket. Something to wrap
around him is as necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet to pray
in.
So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the unlit
hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her spirit
against the time of the spirit’s need, for she knows in fact quite as
much of these matters as you who have a larger hope, though she has
none but the certainty that having borne herself courageously to this
end she will not be reborn a coyote.
[Illustration]
THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS
[Illustration]
All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow they go
up to the core of the hills. Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip
and cross, sidle and take chances. Rifts of the hills open into each
other, and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys
by courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind,--valleys are
the sunken places of the earth, cañons are scored out by the glacier
ploughs of God. They have a better name in the Rockies for these
hill-fenced open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks. Here and
there in the hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high
stony barriers. These head also for the heart of the mountains; their
distinction is that they never get anywhere.
[Illustration]
All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where
a stream might run. You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted
by singing floods. You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty
and madness and death and God. Many such lie east and north away from
the mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes
not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them
but an intolerable thirst.
The river cañons of the Sierras of the Snows are better worth while
than most Broadways, though the choice of them is like the choice of
streets, not very well determined by their names. There is always an
amount of local history to be read in the names of mountain highways
where one touches the successive waves of occupation or discovery, as
in the old villages where the neighborhoods are not built but grow.
Here you have the Spanish Californian in _Cero Gordo_ and piñon; Symmes
and Shepherd, pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek,
Kearsarge,--easy to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute
that; Mist Cañon and Paddy Jack’s. The streets of the west Sierras
sloping toward the San Joaquin are long and winding, but from the east,
my country, a day’s ride carries one to the lake regions. The next day
reaches the passes of the high divide, but whether one gets passage
depends a little on how many have gone that road before, and much on
one’s own powers. The passes are steep and windy ridges, though not
the highest. By two and three thousand feet the snow-caps overtop them.
It is even possible to win through the Sierras without having passed
above timber-line, but one misses a great exhilaration.
The shape of a new mountain is roughly pyramidal, running out
into long shark-finned ridges that interfere and merge into other
thunder-splintered sierras. You get the saw-tooth effect from a
distance, but the near-by granite bulk glitters with the terrible keen
polish of old glacial ages. I say terrible; so it seems. When those
glossy domes swim into the alpenglow, wet after rain, you conceive how
long and imperturbable are the purposes of God.
Never believe what you are told, that midsummer is the best time to go
up the streets of the mountain--well--perhaps for the merely idle or
sportsmanly or scientific; but for seeing and understanding, the best
time is when you have the longest leave to stay. And here is a hint if
you would attempt the stateliest approaches; travel light, and as much
as possible live off the land. Mulligatawny soup and tinned lobster
will not bring you the favor of the woodlanders.
[Illustration]
Every cañon commends itself for some particular pleasantness; this
for pines, another for trout, one for pure bleak beauty of granite
buttresses, one for its far-flung irised falls; and as I say, though
some are easier going, leads each to the cloud shouldering citadel.
First, near the cañon mouth you get the low-heading full-branched,
one-leaf pines. That is the sort of tree to know at sight, for the
globose, resin-dripping cones have palatable, nourishing kernels, the
main harvest of the Paiutes. That perhaps accounts for their growing
accommodatingly below the limit of deep snows, grouped sombrely on
the valleyward slopes. The real procession of the pines begins in the
rifts with the long-leafed _Pinus Jeffreyi_, sighing its soul away upon
the wind. And it ought not to sigh in such good company. Here begins
the manzanita, adjusting its tortuous stiff stems to the sharp waste
of boulders, its pale olive leaves twisting edgewise to the sleek,
ruddy, chestnut stems; begins also the meadowsweet, burnished laurel,
and the million unregarded trumpets of the coral-red pentstemon. Wild
life is likely to be busiest about the lower pine borders. One looks in
hollow trees and hiving rocks for wild honey. The drone of bees, the
chatter of jays, the hurry and stir of squirrels, is incessant; the
air is odorous and hot. The roar of the stream fills up the morning
and evening intervals, and at night the deer feed in the buckthorn
thickets. It is worth watching the year round in the purlieus of the
long-leafed pines. One month or another you get sight or trail of most
roving mountain dwellers as they follow the limit of forbidding snows,
and more bloom than you can properly appreciate.
Whatever goes up or comes down the streets of the mountains, water
has the right of way; it takes the lowest ground and the shortest
passage. Where the rifts are narrow, and some of the Sierra cañons
are not a stone’s throw from wall to wall, the best trail for foot or
horse winds considerably above the watercourses; but in a country of
cone-bearers there is usually a good strip of swardy sod along the
cañon floor. Pine woods, the short-leafed Balfour and Murryana of the
high Sierras, are sombre, rooted in the litter of a thousand years,
hushed, and corrective to the spirit. The trail passes insensibly into
them from the black pines and a thin belt of firs. You look back as you
rise, and strain for glimpses of the tawny valley, blue glints of the
Bitter Lake, and tender cloud films on the farther ranges. For such
pictures the pine branches make a noble frame. Presently they close in
wholly; they draw mysteriously near, covering your tracks, giving up
the trail indifferently, or with a secret grudge. You get a kind of
impatience with their locked ranks, until you come out lastly on some
high, windy dome and see what they are about. They troop thickly up the
open ways, river banks, and brook borders; up open swales of dribbling
springs; swarm over old moraines; circle the peaty swamps and part
and meet about clean still lakes; scale the stony gullies; tormented,
bowed, persisting to the door of the storm chambers, tall priests to
pray for rain. The spring winds lift clouds of pollen dust, finer than
frankincense, and trail it out over high altars, staining the snow. No
doubt they understand this work better than we; in fact they know no
other. “Come,” say the churches of the valleys, after a season of dry
years, “let us pray for rain.” They would do better to plant more trees.
It is a pity we have let the gift of lyric improvisation die out.
Sitting islanded on some gray peak above the encompassing wood, the
soul is lifted up to sing the Iliad of the pines. They have no voice
but the wind, and no sound of them rises up to the high places. But
the waters, the evidences of their power, that go down the steep and
stony ways, the outlets of ice-bordered pools, the young rivers swaying
with the force of their running, they sing and shout and trumpet at
the falls, and the noise of it far outreaches the forest spires. You
see from these conning towers how they call and find each other in
the slender gorges; how they fumble in the meadows, needing the sheer
nearing walls to give them countenance and show the way; and how the
pine woods are made glad by them.
Nothing else in the streets of the mountains gives such a sense of
pageantry as the conifers; other trees, if there are any, are home
dwellers, like the tender fluttered, sisterhood of quaking asp. They
grow in clumps by spring borders, and all their stems have a permanent
curve toward the down slope, as you may also see in hillside pines,
where they have borne the weight of sagging drifts.
Well up from the valley, at the confluence of cañons, are delectable
summer meadows. Fireweed flames about them against the gray boulders;
streams are open, go smoothly about the glacier slips and make
deep bluish pools for trout. Pines raise statelier shafts and give
themselves room to grow,--gentians, shinleaf, and little grass of
Parnassus in their golden checkered shadows; the meadow is white with
violets and all outdoors keeps the clock. For example, when the ripples
at the ford of the creek raise a clear half tone,--sign that the snow
water has come down from the heated high ridges,--it is time to light
the evening fire. When it drops off a note--but you will not know it
except the Douglas squirrel tells you with his high, fluty chirrup from
the pines’ aerial gloom--sign that some star watcher has caught the
first far glint of the nearing sun. Whitney cries it from his vantage
tower; it flashes from Oppapago to the front of Williamson; LeConte
speeds it to the westering peaks. The high rills wake and run, the
birds begin. But down three thousand feet in the cañon, where you stir
the fire under the cooking pot, it will not be day for an hour. It goes
on, the play of light across the high places, rosy, purpling, tender,
glint and glow, thunder and windy flood, like the grave, exulting talk
of elders above a merry game.
Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the
streets of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of
the silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine. Around
the amphitheatres of the lake regions and above them to the limit of
perennial drifts they gather flock-wise in splintered rock wastes. The
crowds of them, the airy spread of sepals, the pale purity of the petal
spurs, the quivering swing of bloom, obsesses the sense. One must learn
to spare a little of the pang of inexpressible beauty, not to spend all
one’s purse in one shop. There is always another year, and another.
Lingering on in the alpine regions until the first full snow, which is
often before the cessation of bloom, one goes down in good company.
First snows are soft and clogging and make laborious paths. Then it
is the roving inhabitants range down to the edge of the wood, below
the limit of early storms. Early winter and early spring one may have
sight or track of deer and bear and bighorn, cougar and bobcat, about
the thickets of buckthorn on open slopes between the black pines. But
when the ice crust is firm above the twenty foot drifts, they range far
and forage where they will. Often in midwinter will come, now and then,
a long fall of soft snow piling three or four feet above the ice crust,
and work a real hardship for the dwellers of these streets. When such
a storm portends the weather-wise black-tail will go down across the
valley and up to the pastures of Waban where no more snow falls than
suffices to nourish the sparsely growing pines. But the bighorn, the
wild sheep, able to bear the bitterest storms with no signs of stress,
cannot cope with the loose shifty snow. Never such a storm goes over
the mountains that the Indians do not catch them floundering belly
deep among the lower rifts. I have a pair of horns, inconceivably
heavy, that were borne as late as a year ago by a very monarch of the
flock whom death overtook at the mouth of Oak Creek after a week of wet
snow. He met it as a king should, with no vain effort or trembling, and
it was wholly kind to take him so with four of his following rather
than that the night prowlers should find him.
[Illustration]
There is always more life abroad in the winter hills than one looks to
find, and much more in evidence than in summer weather. Light feet of
hare that make no print on the forest litter leave a wondrously plain
track in the snow. We used to look and look at the beginning of winter
for the birds to come down from the pine lands; looked in the orchard
and stubble; looked north and south on the mesa for their migratory
passing, and wondered that they never came. Busy little grosbeaks
picked about the kitchen doors, and woodpeckers tapped the eves of
the farm buildings, but we saw hardly any other of the frequenters of
the summer cañons. After a while when we grew bold to tempt the snow
borders we found them in the street of the mountains. In the thick
pine woods where the overlapping boughs hung with snow-wreaths make
wind-proof shelter tents, in a very community of dwelling, winter the
bird-folk who get their living from the persisting cones and the larvæ
harboring bark. Ground inhabiting species seek the dim snow chambers
of the chaparral. Consider how it must be in a hill-slope overgrown
with stout-twigged, partly evergreen shrubs, more than man high, and
as thick as a hedge. Not all the cañon’s sifting of snow can fill the
intricate spaces of the hill tangles. Here and there an overhanging
rock, or a stiff arch of buckthorn, makes an opening to communicating
rooms and runways deep under the snow.
The light filtering through the snow walls is blue and ghostly,
but serves to show seeds of shrubs and grass, and berries, and the
wind-built walls are warm against the wind. It seems that live plants,
especially if they are evergreen and growing, give off heat; the snow
wall melts earliest from within and hollows to thinness before there is
a hint of spring in the air. But you think of these things afterward.
Up in the street it has the effect of being done consciously; the
buckthorns lean to each other and the drift to them, the little birds
run in and out of their appointed ways with the greatest cheerfulness.
They give almost no tokens of distress, and even if the winter tries
them too much you are not to pity them. You of the house habit can
hardly understand the sense of the hills. No doubt the labor of
being comfortable gives you an exaggerated opinion of yourself, an
exaggerated pain to be set aside. Whether the wild things understand it
or not they adapt themselves to its processes with the greater ease.
The business that goes on in the street of the mountain is tremendous,
world-formative. Here go birds, squirrels, and red deer, children
crying small wares and playing in the street, but they do not obstruct
its affairs. Summer is their holiday; “Come now,” says the lord of the
street, “I have need of a great work and no more playing.”
But they are left borders and breathing-space out of pure kindness.
They are not pushed out except by the exigencies of the nobler plan
which they accept with a dignity the rest of us have not yet learned.
[Illustration]
WATER BORDERS
[Illustration]
I like that name the Indians give to the mountain of Lone Pine, and
find it pertinent to my subject,--Oppapago, The Weeper. It sits
eastward and solitary from the lordliest ranks of the Sierras, and
above a range of little, old, blunt hills, and has a bowed, grave
aspect as of some woman you might have known, looking out across the
grassy barrows of her dead. From twin gray lakes under its noble brow
stream down incessant white and tumbling waters. “Mahala all time cry,”
said Winnenap´, drawing furrows in his rugged, wrinkled cheeks.
The origin of mountain streams is like the origin of tears, patent to
the understanding but mysterious to the sense. They are always at it,
but one so seldom catches them in the act. Here in the valley there is
no cessation of waters even in the season when the niggard frost gives
them scant leave to run. They make the most of their midday hour, and
tinkle all night thinly under the ice. An ear laid to the snow catches
a muffled hint of their eternal busyness fifteen or twenty feet under
the cañon drifts, and long before any appreciable spring thaw, the
sagging edges of the snow bridges mark out the place of their running.
One who ventures to look for it finds the immediate source of the
spring freshets--all the hill fronts furrowed with the reek of melting
drifts, all the gravelly flats in a swirl of waters. But later, in June
or July, when the camping season begins, there runs the stream away
full and singing, with no visible reinforcement other than an icy
trickle from some high, belated clot of snow. Oftenest the stream drops
bodily from the bleak bowl of some alpine lake; sometimes breaks out of
a hillside as a spring where the ear can trace it under the rubble of
loose stones to the neighborhood of some blind pool. But that leaves
the lakes to be accounted for.
The lake is the eye of the mountain, jade green, placid, unwinking,
also unfathomable. Whatever goes on under the high and stony brows is
guessed at. It is always a favorite local tradition that one or another
of the blind lakes is bottomless. Often they lie in such deep cairns of
broken boulders that one never gets quite to them, or gets away unhurt.
One such drops below the plunging slope that the Kearsarge trail winds
over, perilously, nearing the pass. It lies still and wickedly green in
its sharplipped cup, and the guides of that region love to tell of the
packs and pack animals it has swallowed up.
[Illustration]