. Yet you hear them laughing at the hour when they draw in to
the campoodie after labor, when there is a smell of meat and the steam
of the cooking pots goes up against the sun. Then the children lie with
their toes in the ashes to hear tales; then they are merry, and have the
joys of repletion and the nearness of their kind. They have their hills,
and though jostled are sufficiently free to get some fortitude for what
will come. For now you shall hear of the end of the basket maker.

In her best days Seyavi was most like Deborah, deep bosomed, broad in
the hips, quick in counsel, slow of speech, esteemed of her people. This
was that Seyavi who reared a man by her own hand, her own wit, and none
other. When the townspeople began to take note of her--and it was some
years after the war before there began to be any towns--she was then in
the quick maturity of primitive women; but when I knew her she seemed
already old. Indian women do not often live to great age, though they
look incredibly steeped in years. They have the wit to win sustenance
from the raw material of life without intervention, but they have not
the sleek look of the women whom the social organization conspires to
nourish. Seyavi had somehow squeezed out of her daily round a spiritual
ichor that kept the skill in her knotted fingers along after the
accustomed time, but that also failed. By all counts she would have been
about sixty years old when it came her turn to sit in the dust on the
sunny side of the wickiup, with little strength left for anything but
looking. And in time she paid the toll of the smoky huts and became
blind. This is a thing so long expected by the Paiutes that when it
comes they find it neither bitter nor sweet, but tolerable because
common. There were three other blind women in the campoodie, withered
fruit on a bough, but they had memory and speech. By noon of the sun
there were never any left in the campoodie but these or some mother of
weanlings, and they sat to keep the ashes warm upon the hearth. If it
were cold, they burrowed in the blankets of the hut; if it were warm,
they followed the shadow of the wickiup around. Stir much out of their
places they hardly dared, since one might not help another; but they
called, in high, old cracked voices, gossip and reminder across the ash
heaps.

Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour to spare,
there are things to be learned of life not set down in any books,
fo