Earth-tongue’s earliest recollection was of the dim, cool house, where he picked bits of charcoal out of the soft sand and crumbled it against his hand. Once a cricket appeared on the wattled wall, suddenly went back in when he thrust at it, and only a stream of dry soil sifted forth. And then there was the terrifying time when voices burst loudly into his sleep, people crowded in but stood helplessly awkward, while his father’s brother shot insults of stolid hate into the ceaseless flood of his wife’s vituperation. As the woman turned to beat a girl lurking in the corner and the man interposed and flung her off, Earth-tongue burst into bawling and clung to his mother. He saw the angry woman stamp on pot after pot, tear open her coils of shredded bark and strew them into the fire, and then, suddenly silent, load her belongings into a carrying-frame and stagger out. The frame caught in the door: as she tore it through, the contents crashed, and a laugh rose in the house; but Earth-tongue sobbed long. He was larger when he paddled with other children at the edge of the slough; but still very small as he first remembered himself seeing the great, stretching river that drew by with mysterious, swirling noises in its red eddies. He and his little brother were put into a huge pot which his father and another man pushed before them across stream: their hair as it coiled high on their heads was just visible over the edge as they swam. And then followed an interminable trudge somewhere through the dust, relieved only by rides on his father’s back, and on his grandmother.
He was older when he shot his first bow; when at dusk he caught a woodpecker in its hole and would not let go though it hacked desperately at his clasped hands, until a half-grown cousin took it from him to imprison under a turned jar for the night. His father wove a cage the next day, and the captive was installed, but remained wild, and one morning was dead. And then came the time when the boys of Mesquite-water challenged those of his settlement on a hot, 190 summer day after the inundation had half dried, and they slung lumps of mud at each other from the ends of long willow poles.
There were other events that must have fallen soon after this period, but which he did not remember: when he rolled his hair into long, slim cylinders, began to measure how nearly it reached his hip, and made his first advances to girls.
Even before this he had dreamed of Mastamho, gigantic on the peak Avikwa’me in the great, dark, round house full of peoples; of the two Ravens singing of dust whirls and war and of the far away clumps of cane waiting to be cut into flutes; and of the river, drawn from its source to wash away the ashes and bones of Matavilya where the pinnacles stand in the gorge at House-post-water. He knew later that he had dreamed these things as a little boy, even while he was still in his mother; he did not yet think about them, except when the old man his grandfather, and his father and uncles, sang of them.
One day a runner came up the valley and shouted pantingly that strangers had appeared from the east at dawn and killed a woman and two children at Sand-back, besides wounding a man and his younger brother. The men leaped for their weapons; the women called in their children, loaded themselves with property, and soon began to track northward in a straggling, excited stream. Earth-tongue pulled down his bow and raked among the roof thatch for such arrows as he could assemble. Then he joined his kinsmen and male neighbors who stood in a group in front of one of the shades, exclaiming and pointing at a smoke that rose down the valley. Bundles of crude, blunt arrows projected behind their hips, shoved under cord belts; and many had clubs dangling from their wrists. Earth-tongue did not own a club: he had never seen battle; and he hung about the outside of the cluster of seasoned men.
Soon, refugees from the nearer settlements began to arrive; and then a body of fighting men from up the valley, bedaubed for war. Earth-tongue’s kinsmen merged with them; and as they proceeded south, growing in numbers, they met ever more women and children, and finally those from the point of attack, until, not far away in the cotton-woods, they came upon the men of Sand-back. The enemy were Halchidhoma from far down-stream, they were now informed, not Walapai as at first conjectured. They had avoided the river, 191 traversing the desert to hide in the Walapai mountains and descend at night upon the nearer tip of the Mohave land. They had long since gone off—sixty they were said to number, as they were seen to file over the rocks far above the stream at Pinnacles. They had looted and burnt only the group of houses at Sand-back, killed the woman, and lightly wounded with an arrow one of the men who fought back from a distance: the other reported casualties turned up safe. But the enemy had carried off the woman’s head, and would dance about its skin. Earth-tongue gazed at the collapsed houses, their charred posts smoking on the mass of sand; and that night he watched the beheaded woman’s cremation. There was much talk of retaliation, but an immediate attack would have found the Halchidhoma prepared or perhaps removed.
So some months elapsed without a move being made; and meanwhile Earth-tongue became married. In the turmoil of the Halchidhoma invasion, as party after party trooped by, he had been attracted by the sight of a girl, barely but definitely passed out of childhood, and only a little younger than himself, who halted, leaning under her laden carrying-frame, behind her mother, as their group paused for an excited colloquy. He saw that the girl noted his eyes on her and glanced away, and he knew, from the people she was with, that her name was Kata. Not long after, he began to find errands or companions that took him to her settlement. Soon a mutual familiarity of each other’s presence was established, the purport of which was manifest even though direct speech between the two young people was infrequent and brief. Both were shy; until one afternoon a blind old man, the girl’s father’s uncle, who knew of Earth-tongue’s repeated presence from the references of the family, addressed him and her directly. “Why do you not marry?” he said. “Persons do not live long. Soon you will be old like myself, unable to please yourselves. It is good that you sleep and play together. You, young man, should stay here the night.” Neither Earth-tongue nor the girl answered. But he remained through the evening meal and after; and when the house was dark, went silently to where she lay. The next day, he stayed on; the day after, returned briefly to his home; and from then on, spent increasing time at his new abode, where, without a word having been spoken, he slipped into a more and more recognized status. He did not work, unless special 192 occasion called, such as assisting with a seine-net; and Kata only occasionally helped her relatives farm. Instead, they spent much time together, lolling under the shade, toying or teasing each other, or listening to their elders. Sometimes he sang softly as he lay by her, or she bent over him searching his head or untangling his clustered locks, or tried to draw the occasional hairs from his face with her teeth; and ever she laughed more freely. So the days followed one another.
When at last the Mohave were ready, it was announced that they would once for all destroy the Halchidhoma. The entire nation was to move and appropriate the enemy land. Soon they started, most of the men in advance, weaponed and unburdened save for gourds of maize meal at their hips; water they did not have to carry since they followed the river. Behind tramped the women, children, and old men, under loads. Foods, blankets of bark and rabbit fur, fish nets, metates, household property, and the most necessary pottery vessels were taken. The remainder of their belongings and stored provisions were buried or hidden away: every house in the valley stood empty.
For five days they walked. Then the men suddenly surrounded a group of settlements. These were the houses of the Kohuana, a far down-stream tribe, wasted by wars with their neighbors, until the pressed remnant had sought refuge half a day’s journey above the Halchidhoma to whom they were united, less by positive friendship than by common foes and parallel fortunes. For the Halchidhoma, too, remembered having once lived populously among the welter of tribes in the broad bottom lands below the mouth of the Gila. With the Kohuana the Mohave had no direct quarrel; and though they arrived armed and overpowering, they proclaimed themselves kinsmen, and announced that they had come as guests. By night the Kohuana houses overflowed with the mob of Mohave families. Kohuana messengers were dispatched to summon the Halchidhoma to battle at White-spread-rock-place, if they were not afraid. Such challenge the outnumbered people could not find it in their manhood to evade. So the next day saw them in line at the appointed field, barely a hundred strong, against perhaps four hundred that the Mohave mustered after setting a guard over their families.
Earth-tongue went into battle with much inward excitement, but 193 little fear, and listened obediently to the admonitions of his seasoned kinsmen. Even before arrows could reach, the shooting began. Before long, arrows flew feebly by, and then it became necessary to twist sharply sidewise to avoid them. At this distance the two lines shot at each other, taunting and leaping, while, in the rear, half-grown boys and a few old men helped to gather up and replenish bundles of arrows. What the Halchidhoma lacked in frequency of shots, they partly made up in greater openness of target; and before long, struck men began to withdraw temporarily on each side. The Mohave could have made short work by charging in a body with their clubs; but they had asked for an open stand-up fight, and besides found pleasure in the game, which fell increasingly to their advantage. For hours they sweated in the sun, gradually and irregularly forcing the Halchidhoma line back, and shouting whenever one of the foe was carried off.
At last the leaders called that it was time to cease, and defied the foe to resume in the same spot on the fourth day. Then they trooped victoriously home, without a fatality, though a few, weakened from bleeding or with parts of shafts broken off in them, were carried on the backs of companions. Earth-tongue had been struck twice. One arrow had grazed the skin of his flank when he became over-confident and failed to bend his body with sudden enough vigor. Then, one of three shafts that came toward him almost at once had imbedded itself a finger-joint’s depth in the front of his thigh, and hung there until he hastily plucked it out. Neither wound bled profusely, especially after a bit of charcoal was reached him to rub in for stanching; and he returned stiff, tired, and proud. The Halchidhoma losses were severer. None of them appeared to have fallen dead on the field; but at least half had been struck, and a number so vitally or often that they would die.
For four days the Mohave treated their wounds, talked of the next battle, and ate their hosts’ provisions. Then they set out. But the Halchidhoma had sent their families down-stream and taken up a new stand farther back. Here they joined once more, and the fight went on as before but with ever more preponderance to the Mohave, until these, wearied by the noon sun, contemptuously drew off to the river to drink. The Halchidhoma seized the occasion to run to their children and women, set these across the river, and strike east 194 over the desert. When the victors reappeared, the fugitives were far. The Mohave thereupon decided to occupy their fields and houses until the dispossessed might come to drive them out; which the latter, by this time safely received among the Maricopa far across the desert on the Gila, had no intention of doing. However, the Mohave lived nearly a year in the land of the Halchidhoma, adjusting themselves as they could; and returned only as the next flood and planting time approached, taking the Kohuana along to settle among themselves, where these enforced visitors remained for some years.
Before the stay in the Halchidhoma country was over, Earth-tongue and Kata had drifted apart. The derangement of accustomed residence, enforced with others, Earth-tongue’s pride as an incipient warrior, the fact that no child was born, all contributed to separate them increasingly. Each formed new interests while vaguely jealous of the other’s; and in the end Earth-tongue brought not Kata but another girl to his parents’ house.
Soon after his first child was born,—a daughter, called Owich like the sisters of himself, his father, and his father’s father,—Earth-tongue grew restless for adventure, and, the time being one of peace, joined himself to those that would travel. Ten or twenty in number, they would go out: too few to excite apprehension of treacherous intent, too many to be made away with safely. Each carried maize, water, his weapons, and whatever he might wish to trade. On shorter journeys they prided themselves on being able to travel at a trot four days without food, and with only such drink as the desert might afford, chewing perhaps a bit of willow as a relief for the dryness of their mouths. But these hardships they underwent mostly in emulation, or toward the last of a return with Mohave land before them. Again and again Earth-tongue went down the river, through Yuma, Kamia, Halyikwamai, and Cocopa settlements, to the flat shores of the salt sea; east into the Walapai mountains and down into the chasm of the Havasupai, where he saw strange-speaking and strangely dressed Hopi and Navaho, heard of their stone towns, and brought home their belts and, once, a blanket of white cotton.
To the northwest he visited the Chemehuevi and other Paiutes about their scattered springs, and ate their foods of seeds and wild fruits, some familiar, some strange; and mescal and sometimes deer. 195 Theirs was a strange language too, but he had heard a little from the few Chemehuevi who lived at the northern extreme of Mohave valley and beyond it on Cotton-wood island; and many of his companions could speak more. They went from Paiute band to band, to where the river no longer flows from the north but from the east, beyond the Muddy, and found each group like the last in customs, but of new foods. They listened to the stories of the Paiute, who dreamed of the mountain Nüvant as the Mohave do of Avikwa’me, and to whom they sang their songs, which the Paiute wished to hear.
To the west were many tribes, all different tongued, but mostly easy to understand a little when one knew Chemehuevi. There were the Vanyume on their river that dried into nothing and left them always half-starved; the Hanyuvecha in the range of great pines beyond; northward, about Three-Mountains, the Kuvahye, adjoined by other mountaineers, little tribes, unwarlike, friendly to the visitors, some of whom they hailed as old friends. They offered no smoke, but gave tobacco crushed in a mortar with shells; which Earth-tongue and his companions ate in courtesy, and were nearly all made to sweat and vomit violently thereby. From a crest near here they looked over a vast plain beyond, in which shimmered what one of his companions said were large lakes. He had been there and seen the people, who lived in long houses of rushes,—a hundred fires in line within one house,—and ate rush roots, and slept on rushes, and at night worms came up and troubled the sleepers. And in the tumbled range on which they stood, but beyond them, were the Like-Mohave, a very little like them in speech, but naked, unkempt, and poor. Them Earth-tongue saw, but not in their own houses.
And going out again, he traversed the land of the tribes to the southwest, unfriendly, half-sullen, and dangerous to small parties. The Hakwicha dug wells and ate mesquite; beyond them were people in the mountains, about hot springs, who sang to turtle shells instead of gourds; and............