"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 fend¹ 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 caverns² of the Black Rock and ate tule roots and fresh-water clams³ that they dug out of the slough⁴ bottoms with their toes. In the interim⁵, while the tribes swallowed their defeat, and before the rumor⁶ 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 mere⁷ trough between hills, a draught⁸ for storms, hardly a crow's flight from the sharp Sierras of the Snows to the curled, red and ochre, uncomforted, bare ribs⁹ of Waban. Midway of the groove¹⁰ runs a burrowing¹¹, dull river, nearly a hundred miles from where it cuts the lava¹² 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 edible¹³ white roots, and in the soddy meadows tubers of joint¹⁴ 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 quacking¹⁵ hordes¹⁶ 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 influx¹⁷ of overlording whites, had made game wilder and hunters fearful of being hunted. You can surmise¹⁸ also, for it was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became in turn the game of the conquerors¹⁹.
 
There used to be in the Little Antelope²⁰ a she dog, stray or outcast, that had a litter in some forsaken²¹ lair²², and ranged and foraged²³ for them, slinking savage²⁴ 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 ebb²⁵ and yet saving it alive on grasshoppers²⁶, lizards²⁷, 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 does 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 flaring²⁸, 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 plumed³⁰ crests³¹ of the valley quail³². 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 pillage³³, 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 snares³⁴ 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 flare³⁵ 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 swelling³⁶ 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 weaver³⁷ and the warp³⁸ lived next to the earth and were saturated³⁹ 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 willows⁴⁰ for basketry by the creek⁴¹ 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 trickle⁴² 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 trout⁴³ begin to leap, the end of the pinon harvest, about the beginning of deep snows. So they get nearer the s............