rom 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 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 quacking hordes 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 influx of overlording whites, had made game
wilder and hunters fearful of being hunted. You can surmise also, for it
was a crude time and the land was raw, that the women became in turn the
game of the conquerors.

There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or outcast,
that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and foraged for
them, slinking savage 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
ebb and yet saving it alive on grasshoppers, lizards, 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 doe's not make all kinds, carriers, water-bottles,
and cradles,--these are kitchen ware,--but her works of art are all of
the same