over it. The older almost kills the younger, but relents, concedes him
what he wants, but then bewitches him. Omens of doom pile up
effectively. The victim's state of mind may be an example of what a
Mohave feels who believes himself bewitched. The magic operating too
slowly, the younger brother is finally dispatched with the humiliation
of having bones cut out of his body for use and play. The elder goes
off with the non-kinsmen whom the uncle had left when he joined his
blood nephews. This marks him as a traitor and Chemehuevi foreigner,
as well as establishing two inimical groups or parties.
With part E, dealing with the posthumous birth of the hero, the main
narrative begins. The hero evidences prenatal magic power, but this is
a faculty often attributed by the Mohave to shamans, so that the
manifestation is mythically expectable, rather than miraculous in our
sense.
In the next section, F, the baby, grown to boyhood, steals his
father's bone with which his foes are playing--compare the incident in
Nyohaiva, 15--and sends it flying to break the western mountains and
kill their inhabitants. It does not appear that these people are his
foes: rather is he trying out his growing powers; and his real foes
begin to foresee their end.
Then he goes on a long journey which constitutes part G. This travel
is motivated by Mohave song-myth custom rather than by anything in the
boy hero's situation. At the same time, it serves to give a sense of
his growing up, and of having his life filled with experiences as a
hero should. The Mohave narrator is in intent the teller of a
near-epic, or of a novelistic romance, not of a short story which aims
to cut to the essence of an action. From this point of view, the
journey rounds, or properly fills out, the plot, though it contributes
nothing vital. The incidents of the journey--down the Colorado from
northern Mohave land to the mouth of the great river, including
detours, and southeast along the Gulf shore--are characteristic. The
traveler is awakened by birds, frightened by a rattlesnake, sees a
horsefly, hummingbird, wild grapes, badger, jack rabbit, springs,
cane, the surf, a crane, ducks, sea shells, and various other sights
such as might make a boy watch or wonder. There is certainly a sense
of unending interest in nature, of rapport with it, in these Mohave
itineraries--a pre-Wordsworthian attitude, one might almost call it.
The narration is concise in this journey. There are 31 stages or
paragraphs--between a fourth and a third of the whole story--and 54
songs out of 182, or the same proportion; but only about one-seventh
or one-eighth of the length of the tale. Thus the tempo of narration
is doubled during this part; which fact contributes to the fact that
its interruption of the main action does not wear down plot-suspense
unduly. Also, it is easier to devise long strings of simple songs of
five or six words about horseflies darting or hummingbirds on their
nests or cranes in the surf, than about dangers, feats, and dramatic
tensions such as make up the preceding and succeeding sections.
As soon as Ahta-hane leaves the sea to turn inland--part H--the
character of the telling changes. It becomes pure hero-story again,
now of fairy-tale quality. The roster of place names is over with. We
are somewhere in the desert--presumably in the Papaguería--but places
and distances are undesignated. This is perhaps the most interesting
part of the tale, in incidents and affects as well as in glimpses of
unsuspected ethnography. The events comprise:
The hero hides himself from the four women.
Lets himself be found rotten but is restored.
Wins encounter with Meteor.
Wins gambling with Sun.
Through his winning makes himself attractive to his wives.
Complex as the action is here, it is thus nevertheless well tied
together.
This is the longest section of Cane: about a quarter of the total
narration, and this crowded with stirring events. But the songs of the
section constitute only about a sixth, and the song stations or
paragraphs about an eighth, of the total. There is much happening, but
little of the discrete incident that best lends itself to singing
about.