nd them in fortunate
years,--and in the famine time the women cut their long hair to make
snares 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 flare 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 swelling 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 weaver and the warp lived next to the earth and were
saturated 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 willows for basketry by the creek 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 trickle 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 trout begin to leap, the end of the pinon harvest, about the
beginning of deep snows. So they get nearer the sense of the season,
which runs early or late according as the rains are forward or delayed.
But whenever Seyavi cut willows for baskets was always a golden time,
and the soul of the weather went into the wood. If you had ever owned
one of Seyavi's golden russet cooking bowls with the pattern of plumed
quail, you would understand all this without saying anything.

Before Seyavi made baskets for the satisfaction of desire,--for that is
a house-bred theory of art that makes anything more of it,--she danced
and dressed her hair. In those days, when the spring