ON THE BEACH  
“Here’s another! Here’s another! Here’s another!”
It is the excited voice of a naked, gesticulating youngster, little more than three years old, who is pointing to a tiny hole in the smooth surface of the tide beach at his feet.
“Yes, yes, child, I am coming,” is the reply, in soft, affectionate tones, by a woman a few steps away.
“But I am hungry, I am hungry,” comes the insistent, half-petulant voice.
“Well, you can’t have any clams now, you know. Mark the one you have and run along to find some more. Soon we shall go home.”
At this the child stoops unsteadily and with a rough, pointed splinter of bone draws a circle around the hole, then patters away along the wet beach.
Presently his mother comes forward, with a rough basket in one hand and a short, stout, pointed stick in the other. She is barefooted and bareheaded. Her only garment is a sort of skirt made of loose bark strands, reaching from the waist to the knees. Her heavy, glistening, black hair is fastened in two locks hanging down in front, partially covering her breasts. Her complexion, a shade darker than that of the child, is the color of a smoked, reddish brick or of a certain shade of Oriental bronze. Scarcely more than twenty years old, she has a fine, comely figure.
Having reached the spot indicated by the child, the young woman sets the basket down. Then, grasping the stick with both hands, she drives it into the firm beach mud and with a single, deft, prying motion brings to the surface a good-sized clam. She picks it up, throws it into the partly filled basket, and proceeds a few steps to where the child is calling her anew.
Similar scenes are being enacted on every hand. Women and children, numbering close to one hundred in all, are scattered along the beach for nearly half a mile; a hundred yards or so beyond there 274 is another, somewhat smaller group. In both groups the women and older children are busy with the digging-stick, while the younger children run about over the beach locating the clams. Presently there is a curious splash near the edge of the receding waters. The splash is repeated once or twice and with it a chorus of voices rings out.
“Wixi! Wixi!” (Stingaree! Stingaree!)
A dozen or so half-grown children come running from different directions, all shouting vehemently, “He’s mine! He’s mine! I saw him first! I saw him first!”
There is nothing actually to be seen, except perhaps a small area immediately off shore where the water is unusually muddy. Into the water the children rush, keeping clear of the roiled spot, and when ranged partly around it on the sea side, they begin to poke into it with their sticks. Very soon there is another violent splash and a large, monstrous looking creature is seen to lift itself almost bodily out of the shallow water.
“Wixi! Wixi! We’ve got you!” shouts the chorus. “We’ve got you!”
The steadily receding water soon reveals the cause of the excitement—an extra large eagle ray, a kind of flat-fish, in outline something like an immense butterfly, plus a long whip-like tail, near the root of which appears a sharply-pronged, bony excrescence which can inflict a severe wound. Wixi is an ugly fellow, and as he lies there in two or three inches of water, flopping spasmodically, lashing his tail viciously from side to side, the children plant their sticks firmly in the ground, making a sort of fence around him, while they stand back out of reach. But, the moment the monster subsides, all pound and punch with their sticks, screaming and carrying on like a pack of fighting dogs. Finally, the oldest of the children, a girl of ten or eleven, manages to insert her digging-stick in the creature’s eye. A few violent lashings, and the ray lies still.
The girl remains leaning on the stick, holding the great fish firmly transfixed. The other children fall over each other in a scramble to get near it. All seek to pierce the dead body with their sticks and to pull it away. But their implements are too weak and dull. Some grasp with their fingers at the slimy thing, but to no avail. The girl stands unmoved.
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In their rage some of the children suddenly turn upon her. In an effort to defend herself, she lets go her stick, and at the same moment the big ray is pulled away, but not by any of the original claimants. During the tumult a boy of thirteen or fourteen had approached unnoticed from the larger group of clam gatherers, and had wound the tail of the ray two or three times around his hand. Now when the girl’s hold on the stick is released, he jerks the ray away and starts to run as fast as his legs can carry him toward his own people, the body of the big fish dragging behind him over the slippery mud.
There is a tremendous uproar. Some of the children attempt to follow, but they are soon outdistanced. The girl who killed the ray, finally realizing what has happened, bursts out: “You took my wixi! You took my wixi! You—wixi! You—!” Her voice chokes with sobs. But her epithet is taken up by a chorus of voices in both groups of clam diggers, those of Kawina and those of Akalan: “You wixi! You wixi!”
But the boy pays no heed. When he reaches the shore proper, he winds the ray’s tail a few more times around his hand, swings the immense body over his shoulders, and disappears among the marsh weeds in the direction of his home.
Wixi! Wixi! Thus the boy is nicknamed for life.
AT BREAKFAST
 
It is still early morning on San Francisco Bay. The tide is going out, and the sun, just topping the eastern hills, is reflected in the placid waters as in a great oval mirror. On the horizon beyond the expanse of the waters of the bay, the sunlight glitters on the snowy summit of Mt. Hamilton; to the left, looms the hazy outline of Mt. Diablo; and to the right, glorious in the clear sunlight, stands green-clad Mt. Tamalpais, guarding the entrance to the broad channel heading north into San Pablo Bay. The surface of the channel is slightly choppy, because here passes out to sea the collected volume of the great rivers that drain the interior mountains and valleys. The shore of the bay is low and marshy, lying in sweeping curves. Along these curves faint blue smokes rise at intervals against the shadowy276 background of the hills. These smokes mark settlements, of which there are along the entire bay shore about two hundred, strung like pearls on a necklace.
In one of the curving arms of the bay, smoke ascends from a grayish spot in the marshland, some three hundred yards back of the shore line. It is the village of Kawina. Four miles farther east, directly on the water front, lies the village of Akalan. Beyond that the shore line turns, and other settlements hug the shore at every point where a fresh water streamlet empties into the bay.
The clam diggers are straggling along the beach toward home. A number of young men from Akalan have gone to the head of the cove a few rods away. They are engaged in dragging a dozen or more curiously shaped bundles of dried tule-rushes down the muddy slope to the tide channel, which drains the extensive marshes ranging along the entire east base of the potrero. When the clam gatherers left home the channel was dry, but the tide already is fast returning and the breakfast bringers have to be assisted across.
It is a lively, not to say noisy, occasion. The older children glide down the slippery mud into the water, and flounder across amidst laughter and shouting. Only the women with their baskets, and the smaller children cross by ferry; for these tule bundles are boats or, rather, floats. Some of them carry only from four to six persons, others as many as fifteen. The ferrying proceeds rather slowly, to the lively chatter of the women. The children have run on ahead, up the grassy incline to the village.
The grass suddenly ceases at the foot of a blackish eminence on which the village stands. The eminence is about twenty feet high and of an irregular contour, the slope in places being gradual, in others steep, while the top is roughly flattened. On approaching nearer, the whole mound-like structure appears to be composed of the shells of clams, mussels, and oysters. There is an occasional brightly colored abalone shell. Here and there are scattered pairs of deer antlers, and the wing bones of ducks, geese, and other birds with feathers still attached. Crushed or broken bones of various animals lie everywhere. And there are fish bones. Flies are swarming about; the odor is far from enticing. Closer inspection would reveal the presence of ashes and charcoal, as well as a goodly number of bowlders and pebbles of crackly surface. The impression is that277 of a huge ash pile or refuse heap. And yet on top of it all stands the village!
The village is an irregularly grouped cluster of about thirty hive-shaped huts, with openings facing either south or east. The huts themselves are constructed on a framework of slender poles set in circles from twelve to sixteen feet in diameter, the top ends being bent together and intertwined some eight or nine feet above the ground. Over this is placed a layer of twigs and grass, and this again is covered with earth and sod. Only the top is left open for the exit of smoke. This morning, however, the fires are out in front of the doors, each family having its own.
A number of fair-sized bowlders form a ring around the edge of the dying embers. Ranged about each of these circles, within reaching distance, are seated the members of the family. Even the older men, who do not condescend often to eat with the women and children, are present. They are mostly grizzled, ill-kempt, sluggish looking fellows, who have barely had time to rub the sleep out of their eyes. Through the rainy winter months they have been comparatively inactive, the women have been doing the work; but now it is April and the warmth of spring is bringing them out of their hibernation. Soon they will be off for the entire summer, and fall to leading an active life among the hills where food is not so easily obtained as it is on the bay shore, though it can be had in greater variety if all hands, including the men, make the effort.
The clams brought in from the beach are being distributed, and the older folk place them, just as they are, on the hot rocks around the fire. The smaller children watch intently and yet uneasily, having repeatedly been scolded for poking their fingers against the sizzling shellfish lying nearest on the rocks. Suddenly some of the clams open up, ready to eat. They have been cooked in the most admirable fashion in their own juice. In the group around the fire, next to one of the rear huts, are seated a very old man, a middle-aged woman, two children, and a half-grown boy. It is the boy Wixi, who has just proposed to his mother to boil some of the fish.
“Boiled fish! Boiled fish! Who ever heard of boiled fish?” blurts out the old man in a cracked voice. He is blind, or nearly so, judging from his dull, deeply sunken eyes. His hair, as well as his straggly beard, is white, and his face and neck are seamed and 278 wrinkly, suggestive of tanned alligator skin. His body is thin and frail, his hands shaking.
“Well, fish could be boiled,” Wixi retorts. “You boil acorn meal and you boil buckeye meal and you boil lots of things. Why couldn’t you boil fish?”
“Why couldn’t you boil fish? Why couldn’t you boil fish?” the old man screams, his whole frame trembling. “You couldn’t boil fish because—because nobody ever did such a thing! Chakalli didn’t tell us to boil fish.”
This sort of dispute has been an almost daily occurrence for many moons, since the time of the boy’s initiation ceremony, when he began to assume the responsibilities of manhood. His father, as Wixi would say, is away. A shaman, he had failed to cure the poisoned wound of a certain chief, and he had been quietly waylaid on the trail. Since then, his family had had to suffer partial disgrace.
That was some years ago, and the boy, thrown thus early upon his own resources, had learned through stress of circumstances to practice a number of new devices. He discovered that by suspending a grass mat in a vertical position by means of an upright stick to serve as a support, he was able alone to sail his tule float speedily before the wind. Other young men would have copied his device, only they had elders in direct authority and were prevented. But Wixi, being already something of an outcast in the village, was suffered to do much as he pleased, his feeble old grandfather being in no position to check him.
On this occasion, Wixi, instead of arguing with the old man, dips his hands quickly into a basket standing in a slight hollow, well away from the fire, and brings out four or five small rocks dripping with water. He throws them to one side, and by means of a couple of sticks, pulls several rocks out of the fire and drops them, one by one, into the basket, half full of water. There is a momentary splutter and rise of steam, and then the water in the basket begins to boil. Wixi places several chunks of the stingaree in the boiling water, and in a short time is eating boiled fish.
DRAKE PASSES
 
The fires have flashed more than once from mountain to mountain and have been answered not only by Akalan, but by every one of the 279 two hundred settlements on the bay shore. The principal event, one for which no predetermined signal existed, was the passage along the California coast of the Golden Hind, early in the summer of 1579. The great captain, Sir Francis Drake, did not see the Golden Gate because of the heavy fog, but the watchers on Mt. Tamalpais saw his ship and did their duty as best they knew. Before evening of that day, every dweller on the bay shore (those on the coast could see for themselves) understood that Wasaka, the Eagle who brought the original fire to the Mutsun people while they yet lived in the far North, had passed by.
Three or four weeks later, when the vessel returned from the North, and was drawn ashore for repairs within the shelter of Point Reyes, the signals were revised as a result of messages brought to Tamalpais by runners from the Tamala?os, otherwise known as the “peaked-house” people, who lived directly at Drake’s landing place. This time the Mutsunes were informed that it was not Wasaka, but the great Chakalli himself. Chakalli, the “Man Above,” or the “Great One Above,” was much in their thoughts, but to have him visit was an event foreboding ill. Nearly every one wished to flee from his presence. As it turned out, the visitor conducted himself peaceably and in due course went away, leaving few of the Mutsunes any the wiser.
Drake’s Bay, as it happened, lay in the country of the Miwok people, who spoke a different tongue from the Mutsunes and who, besides, were ordinarily jealous of their territorial rights. But a few of the Mutsunes had gone around by sea, Wixi among them. Wixi was the only one from Akalan who had gone, and the adventure proved a turning point in his life. He came back somewhat of a hero, at least in the eyes of those of his own age, the older men holding aloof. Wixi had learned many wonderful things during his few days’ sojourn with the bearded white men, among them that other people used sails to drive their boats. If any doubted the story that he told, he had but to exhibit the proofs: a small mirror, a couple of strings of colored glass beads, a square of red cloth, and, above all, a truly marvelous thing, a knife of metal. These things were given Wixi by the great captain himself, in the general exchange of presents that followed one of the Indian dancing ceremonies that we read of in Drake’s own log book.
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IN THE COUNCIL LODGE
 
In early manhood Wixi had become fairly conscious of his own strength and skill, as well as of his power to direct and improve the life of his people. He had decided, however, to wait his time. The old men would slowly give way or would “disappear.” Why quarrel? Besides, it was not his nature to hurry. His patie............