"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.