The Land Of Little Rain - Mary Hunter Austin
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.
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 Judaea 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 canons.
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
"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 doe's 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.
Thus Seyavi, "As much good as yours of the flowers you strew."
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.
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.
THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS
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, canons 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.
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 canons 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 pinon; Symmes and Shepherd,
pioneers both; Tunawai, probably Shoshone; Oak Creek, Kearsarge,--easy
to fix the date of that christening,--Tinpah, Paiute that; Mist Canon
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.
Every canon 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 canon 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
valley-ward 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 canons 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 canon 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.