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 slung¹ 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 swarm² out of the huts under the hill, all afoot but a dozen of the old men, who rode small kicking ponies³ at a tremendous pace, digging their heels into the horses' ribs⁴. They passed up the mesa in a blur⁵ of golden dust; westward⁶ they dwindled⁷ to a speck⁸, 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 fumbled⁹ 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-aged¹⁰ began to form a line across the mesa, standing¹¹ three man's lengths apart in the sage¹². 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 stony¹⁴ 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 crouched¹⁵ 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,—
 
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 sprawling¹⁶ 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'ÿang-wit'e!" chuckled¹⁷ the Basket Woman. "Na'ÿang-wit'e, na'ÿang-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 cougars¹⁸ with the tails hanging down were slung between their shoulders, and the arrows in them were pointed¹⁹ with tips of obsidian²⁰ and winged with eagle feathers. Every man carried his bow or his spear in his hand. Bright beads²¹ and bits of many-colored shell hung and glittered in their hair. Rabbits went before them like grasshoppers²² for number, and the song and the shouting were fierce and wild. "But what is it all about?" asked Alan.
 
"Na'ÿang-wit'e, na'ÿang-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^............