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 coarse 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 passed
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 vanishing 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 passed 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,--
[Illustration: 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'yang-wit'e!_" chuckled the Basket Woman. "_Na'yang-wit'e,
na'yang-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
shell hung and glittered in their hair. Rabbits went before them like
grasshoppers for number, and the song and the shouting were fierce and
wild. "But what is it all about?" asked Alan.
"_Na'yang-wit'e, na'yang-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'yang-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 pass 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 shell, 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 grass.
"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'yang-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 passed
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 butt 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'yang-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.
[Illustration: From photograph by A. A. Forbes
A "WICKIUP," OR INDIAN HUT]