piece. Seyavi made flaring, 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 plumed crests of the valley quail. 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 pillage, 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
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.