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.
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