n 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