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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Basket Woman, by Mary Austin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Basket Woman
+       A Book of Indian Tales for Children
+
+Author: Mary Austin
+
+Release Date: March 7, 2011 [EBook #35502]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BASKET WOMAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: Diacritic marks over letters are enclosed within
+  square brackets. For example, [)a] represents small letter "a" with
+  breve.
+
+
+
+
+  THE BASKET WOMAN
+
+  A BOOK OF INDIAN TALES
+  FOR CHILDREN
+
+  BY
+
+  MARY AUSTIN
+
+  _SCHOOL EDITION_
+
+
+  BOSTON, NEW YORK, AND CHICAGO
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  The Riverside Press, Cambridge
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY MARY AUSTIN
+  COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+
+
+  [Illustration: From photograph by A. A. Forbes
+  THE BASKET WOMAN]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+In preparing this volume of western myths for school use the object has
+been not so much to provide authentic Indian Folk-tales, as to present
+certain aspects of nature as they appear in the myth-making mood, that
+is to say, in the form of strongest appeal to the child mind. Indian
+myths as they exist among Indians are too frequently sustained by coarse
+and cruel incidents comparable to the belly-ripping joke in _Jack the
+Giant Killer_, or the blinding of Gloucester in _King Lear_, and when
+presented in story form, too often fall under the misapprehension of the
+myth as something invented and added to the imaginative life. It is, in
+fact, the root and branch of man's normal intimacy with nature.
+
+So slowly does the mind awaken to the realization of consciousness and
+personality as by-products of animal life only, that few escape carrying
+over into adult life some obsession of its persistence in inanimate
+things, say of malevolence in opals or luckiness in a rabbit's foot, or
+the capacity of moral discrimination against their victims residing in
+hurricanes and earthquakes. The chief preoccupation of the child in his
+earlier years is the business of abstracting the items of his
+environment from this pervading sense, and ascribing to them their
+proper degrees of awareness. He arrives in a general way at knowing that
+it hurts the cat's tail to be stepped on because the cat cries, and that
+it does not hurt the stick. But if the stick were provided with a
+squeaking apparatus he would be much longer in the process, and if the
+stick becomes a steed or a doll it is quite possible for him to weep
+with sympathetic pain at the abuse of it.
+
+He sees the tree and it is alive and sentient to him; you cut a stick
+horse from its boughs, and that is separately alive; cut the stick again
+into two horses, and they will prance whole and satisfying. Later when
+the game is played out, the stick may burn and furnish live flame to
+dance, live smoke to ascend, live ash to be treated with contumely; all
+of which arises not so much in the mere trick of invention as in the
+natural difficulty in thinking of objects freed from consciousness,
+almost as great as the philosopher's in conceiving empty space. There is
+a period in the life of every child when almost the only road to the
+understanding is the one blazed out by the myth-making spirit, kept open
+to the larger significance of things long after he is apprised that the
+thunder did not originate in the smithy of the gods nor the Walrus talk
+to the Carpenter. Any attempt, however, to hasten the proper
+distinctions of causes and powers by the suppression of myth making is
+likely to prove as disastrous as helping young puppies through their
+nine days' blindness by forcibly opening their eyes. You might get a few
+days' purchase of vision for some of them, but you would also have a
+good many cases of total blindness. What can be done by way of turning
+the myth-making period to advantage, this little book is partly to show.
+
+Of the three sorts of myths included, about a third are direct
+transcriptions from Indian myths current in the campodies of the West,
+but it must not be assumed that myths like _The Crooked Fir_ and _The
+White Barked Pine_ are in any sense "made up," or to be laid to the
+author's credit. Since the myth originates in an attitude of mind, it
+must be understood that, to the primitive mind, nearly the whole process
+of nature presents itself in mythical terms. It is not that the Indian
+imagines the tree having sentience--he simply isn't able to imagine its
+not having it. All his songs, his ceremonies, his daily speech, are full
+of the aspect of nature in terms of human endeavor. The story of _The
+Crooked Fir_ was suggested to me in the humorous comment of my Indian
+guide on one of the forks of Kings River, the first time my attention
+was caught by the uniform curve of the trunks, and he explained it to
+me. The myth of _The Stream That Ran Away_ might arise as simply as in
+the question of a child who has not lived long enough to understand the
+seasonal recession of waters, wishing to know why a stream that ran
+full some weeks ago is now dry. And if his mother has had trouble with
+his straying too far from the camp she might say to him that it had run
+away and the White people had caught it and set it to work in an
+irrigating ditch, "and that is what will happen to you if you don't
+watch out" ... or she might draw a moral on the neglect of duty if the
+occasion demanded it ... or if she were gifted with fancy, tell him that
+that was it which fell on us as rain in Big Meadow, and it would return
+to its banks when it had watered the high places. But whatever she would
+tell him would have an acute observation of nature behind it and would
+be stated in personal terms. It is so that the child begins to
+understand the continuity of natural forces and their relativity to the
+life of man.
+
+There is a third sort of story included with these, which aside from
+being of the stuff from which hero myths are made,--_Mahala Joe_ is in
+point,--has a value which must be gone into more particularly.
+
+What is important for the teacher to understand is that the myth,
+itself a living issue, will not bear too much handling; in the process
+of making it a part of the child's experience, the meaning of it must
+not be pulled up too often to learn if it has taken root. Unless it
+elucidates itself in the course of time,--and one must recall how long a
+period elapsed between the first reading of the _Ugly Duckling_, say,
+and its final revelation of itself,--unless its content is broadly human
+and personal, it has practically no educative value. It is not
+absolutely indispensable that the whole unfolding of it should be within
+the limited period of school life that affords it; some of the noblest
+human myths reveal as it were successive layers of insight and purport,
+taking change and color from the passing experience; but it remains true
+that the best time to insinuate the myth in the child's mind is when he
+is normally at the myth-making period.
+
+To make it, then, part of the child's possession it should be read to or
+by him at convenient intervals, until he can give back a fairly succinct
+version of it. Along with this must go the business of deepening and
+extending the background; and whether this is to be done at the time of
+the reading or intermediately, must depend largely on the local
+background. Children in schools on the Pacific slope should find
+themselves already tolerably furnished; any hill region in fact should
+yield suggestive material, without overlaying the content of the myth
+with trifling exactitudes of natural history.
+
+It is very difficult to say in a word all that is implied in the
+extension of the background. One has only to consider the amount of time
+spent in teaching the so-called Classic Myths, tremendous in their power
+of vitalizing and coloring their own and related times, and reflect on
+their failure to effect anything beyond their mere story interest in
+modern life, to realize that the value of a myth is directly in
+proportion as its background is common and accessible. What would happen
+in a locality calculated to suggest and with a teacher properly equipped
+to interpret the background of Greek and Roman mythology, is not
+proven, but in practical school work the author has found it best to
+defer the teaching of it until by general reading a point of contact is
+established, which enables the child to read _backward_ into its
+meaning, and for the actively myth-making period to use forms sprung
+naturally from the child's own environment. The better he can visualize
+and locate the objects mythically treated, the better they serve their
+purpose of rendering personal the influences of nature and sustaining
+him in that happy sense of the community of life and interest in the
+Wild.
+
+It is for this purpose of extending the background that the introductory
+sketches and some others are included in this collection. _The Golden
+Fortune_ could be read with _The White Barked Pine_, and _The Christmas
+Tree_ with _The Crooked Fir_. Any hill country or wooded district should
+furnish additional color, but let it be cautioned here, that though all
+the nature references in these tales are entirely dependable, the child
+is not to be made unhappy thereby. Whatever branch of school work it is
+found necessary to correlate with the myths, it should be in general
+recreative rather than instructive; for what is comprehended in the term
+Nature is after all not a miscellany of objects, but a state of mind set
+up by their happiest coincidences. The least that can be said to achieve
+a proper notion of a tree or a glacier is so much better than the most;
+a casual application to a known and neighboring circumstance goes
+further than any amount of explanation.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                              PAGE
+  THE BASKET WOMAN--FIRST STORY                  1
+  THE BASKET WOMAN--SECOND STORY                17
+  THE STREAM THAT RAN AWAY                      31
+  THE COYOTE-SPIRIT AND THE WEAVING WOMAN       43
+  THE CHEERFUL GLACIER                          59
+  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND                            71
+  THE CHRISTMAS TREE                            87
+  THE FIRE BRINGER                             107
+  THE CROOKED FIR                              119
+  THE SUGAR PINE                               129
+  THE GOLDEN FORTUNE                           141
+  THE WHITE-BARKED PINE                        161
+  NA [:Y]ANG-WIT'E, THE FIRST RABBIT DRIVE     171
+  MAHALA JOE                                   183
+  PRONOUNCING VOCABULARY                       221
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  THE BASKET WOMAN                  _Frontispiece_
+  A "CAMPOODIE," OR INDIAN VILLAGE              30
+  AN OLD MINE                                  142
+  A "WICKIUP," OR INDIAN HUT                   184
+
+
+
+
+THE BASKET WOMAN
+
+FIRST STORY
+
+
+The homesteader's cabin stood in a moon-shaped hollow between the hills
+and the high mesa; and the land before it stretched away golden and
+dusky green, and was lost in a blue haze about where the river
+settlements began. The hills had a flowing outline and melted softly
+into each other and higher hills behind, until the range broke in a
+ragged crest of thin peaks white with snow. A clean, wide sky bent over
+that country, and the air that moved in it was warm and sweet.
+
+The homesteader's son had run out on the trail that led toward the
+spring, with half a mind to go to it, but ran back again when he saw the
+Basket Woman coming. He was afraid of her, and ashamed because he was
+afraid, so he did not tell his mother that he had changed his mind.
+
+"There is the mahala coming for the wash," said his mother; "now you
+will have company at the spring." But Alan only held tighter to a fold
+of her dress. This was the third time the Indian woman had come to wash
+for the homesteader's wife; and, though she was slow and quiet and had a
+pleasant smile, Alan was still afraid of her. All that he had heard of
+Indians before coming to this country was very frightful, and he did not
+understand yet that it was not so. Beyond a certain point of hills on
+clear days he could see smoke rising from the campoodie, and though he
+knew nothing but his dreams of what went on there, he would not so much
+as play in that direction.
+
+The Basket Woman was the only Indian that he had seen. She would come
+walking across the mesa with a great cone-shaped carrier basket heaped
+with brushwood on her shoulders, stooping under it and easing the weight
+by a buckskin band about her forehead. Sometimes it would be a smaller
+basket carried in the same fashion, and she would be filling it with
+bulbs of wild hyacinth or taboose; often she carried a bottle-necked
+water basket to and from the spring, and always wore a bowl-shaped
+basket on her head for a hat. Her long hair hung down from under it, and
+her black eyes glittered beadily below the rim. Alan had a fancy that
+any moment she might pick him up with a quick toss as if he had been a
+bit of brushwood, and drop him over her shoulder into the great carrier,
+and walk away across the mesa with him. So when he saw her that morning
+coming down the trail from the spring, he hung close by his mother's
+skirts.
+
+"You must not be afraid of her, Alan," said his mother; "she is very
+kind, and no doubt has had a boy of her own."
+
+The Basket Woman showed them her white, even teeth in a smile. "This one
+very pretty boy," she said; but Alan had made up his mind not to trust
+her. He was thinking of what the teamster had said when he had driven
+them up from the railroad station with their belongings the day they
+came to their new home and found the Basket Woman spying curiously in
+at the cabin windows.
+
+"You wanter watch out how you behaves yourself, sonny," said the
+teamster, wagging a solemn jaw, "she's likely to pack you away in that
+basket o' her'n one of these days." And Alan had watched out very
+carefully indeed.
+
+It was not a great while after they came to the foothill claim that the
+homesteader went over to the campoodie to get an Indian to help at fence
+building, and Alan went with him, holding fast by his father's hand.
+They found the Indians living in low, foul huts; their clothes were also
+dirty, and they sat about on the ground, fat and good-natured. The dogs
+and children lay sleeping in the sun. It was all very disappointing.
+
+"Will they not hurt us, father?" Alan had said at starting.
+
+"Oh, no, my boy; you must not get any such notion as that," said the
+homesteader; "Indians are not at all now what they were once."
+
+Alan thought of this as he looked at the campoodie, and pulled at his
+father's hand.
+
+"I do not like Indians the way they are now," he said; and immediately
+saw that he had made a mistake, for he was standing directly in front of
+the Basket Woman's hut, and as she suddenly put her head out of the door
+he thought by the look of her mysterious, bright eyes that she had
+understood. He did not venture to say anything more, and all the way
+home kept looking back toward the campoodie to see if anything came of
+it.
+
+"Why do you not eat your supper?" said his mother. "I am afraid the long
+walk in the hot sun was too much for you." Alan dared not say anything
+to her of what troubled him, though perhaps it would have been better if
+he had, for that night the Basket Woman came for him.
+
+She did not pick him up and toss him over her shoulder as he expected;
+but let down the basket, and he stepped into it of his own accord. Alan
+was surprised to find that he was not so much afraid of her after all.
+
+"What will you do with me?" he said.
+
+"I will show you Indians as they used to be," said she.
+
+Alan could feel the play of her strong shoulders as they went out across
+the lower mesa and began to climb the hills.
+
+"Where do you go?" said the boy.
+
+"To Pahrump, the valley of Corn Water. It was there my people were
+happiest in old days."
+
+They went on between the oaks, and smelled the musky sweet smell of the
+wild grapevines along the water borders. The sagebrush began to fail
+from the slopes, and buckthorn to grow up tall and thicker; the wind
+brought them a long sigh from the lowest pines. They came up with the
+silver firs and passed them, passed the drooping spruces, the wet
+meadows, and the wood of thimble-cone pines. The air under them had an
+earthy smell. Presently they came out upon a cleared space very high up
+where the rocks were sharp and steep.
+
+"Why are there no trees here?" asked Alan.
+
+"I will tell you about that," said the Basket Woman. "In the old flood
+time, and that is longer ago than is worth counting, the water came up
+and covered the land, all but the high tops of mountains. Here then the
+Indians fled and lived, and with them the animals that escaped from the
+flood. There were trees growing then over all the high places, but
+because the waters were long on the earth the Indians were obliged to
+cut them down for firewood. Also they killed all the large animals for
+food, but the small ones hid in the rocks. After that the waters went
+down; trees and grass began to grow over all the earth, but never any
+more on the tops of high mountains. They had all been burned off. You
+can see that it is so."
+
+From the top of the mountain Alan could see all the hills on the other
+side shouldering and peering down toward the happy valley of Corn Water.
+
+"Here," said the Basket Woman, "my people came of old time in the
+growing season of the year; they planted corn, and the streams came
+down from the hills and watered it. Now we, too, will go down."
+
+They went by a winding trail, steep and stony. The pines stood up around
+and locked them closely in.
+
+"I see smoke arising," said Alan, "blue smoke above the pines."
+
+"It is the smoke of their hearth fires," said the Basket Woman, and they
+went down and down.
+
+"I hear a sound of singing," said the boy.
+
+"It is the women singing and grinding at the quern," she said, and her
+feet went faster.
+
+"I hear laughter," he said again, "it mixes with the running of the
+water."
+
+"It is the maidens washing their knee-long hair. They kneel by the water
+and stoop down, they dip in the running water and shake out bright drops
+in the sun."
+
+"There is a pleasant smell," said Alan.
+
+"It is pine nuts roasting in the cones," said the Basket Woman; "so it
+was of old time."
+
+They came out of the cleft of the hills in a pleasant place by singing
+water. "There you will see the rows of wickiups," said the Basket Woman,
+"with the doors all opening eastward to the sun. Let us sit here and see
+what we shall see."
+
+The women sat by the wickiups weaving baskets of willow and stems of
+fern. They made patterns of bright feathers and strung wampum about the
+rims. Some sewed with sinew and needles of cactus thorn on deerskin
+white and fine; others winnowed the corn. They stood up tossing it in
+baskets like grains of gold, and the wind carried away the chaff. All
+this time the young girls were laughing as they dried their hair in the
+sun. They bound it with flowers and gay strings of beads, and made their
+cheeks bright with red earth. The children romped and shouted about the
+camp, and ran bare-legged in the stream.
+
+"Do they do nothing but play?" said Alan.
+
+"You shall see," said the Basket Woman.
+
+Away up the mountain sounded a faint halloo. In a moment all the camp
+was bustle and delight. The children clapped their hands; they left off
+playing and began to drag up brushwood for the fires. The women put away
+their weaving and brought out the cooking pots; they heard the men
+returning from the hunt. The young men brought deer upon their
+shoulders; one had grouse and one held up a great basket of trout. The
+women made the meat ready for cooking. Some of them took meal and made
+cakes for baking in the ashes. The men rested in the glow of the fires,
+feathering arrows and restringing their bows.
+
+"That is well," said the Basket Woman, "to make ready for to-morrow's
+meat before to-day's is eaten."
+
+"How happy they are!" said the boy.
+
+"They will be happier when they have eaten," said she.
+
+After supper the Indians gathered together for singing and dancing. The
+old men told tales one after the other, and the children thought each
+one was the best. Between the tales the Indians all sang together, or
+one sang a new song that he had made. There was one of them who did
+better than all. He had streaked his body with colored earth and had a
+band of eagle feathers in his hair. In his hand was a rattle of wild
+sheep's horn and small stones; he kept time with it as he leapt and sang
+in the light of the fire. He sang of old wars, sang of the deer that was
+killed, sang of the dove and the young grass that grew on the mountain;
+and the people were well pleased, for when the heart is in the singing
+it does not matter much what the song is about. The men beat their hands
+together to keep time to his dancing, and the earth under his feet was
+stamped to a fine dust.
+
+"He is one that has found the wolf's song," said the Basket Woman.
+
+"What is that?" asked Alan.
+
+"It is an old tale of my people," said she. "Once there was a man who
+could not make any songs, so he got no praise from the tribe, and it
+troubled him much. Then, as he was gathering taboose by the river, a
+wolf went by, and the wolf said to him, 'What will you have me to give
+you for your taboose?' Then said the man, 'I will have you to give me a
+song.'
+
+"'That will I gladly,' said the wolf. So the wolf taught him, and that
+night he sang the wolf's song in the presence of all the people, and it
+made their hearts to burn within them. Then the man fell down as if he
+were dead, for the pure joy of singing, and when deep sleep was upon him
+the wolf came in the night and stole his song away. Neither the man nor
+any one who had heard it remembered it any more. So we say when a man
+sings as no other sang before him, 'He has the wolf's song.' It is a
+good saying. Now we must go, for the children are all asleep by their
+mothers, and the day comes soon," said the Basket Woman.
+
+"Shall we come again?" said Alan. "And will it all be as it is now?"
+
+"My people come often to the valley of Corn Water," said she, "but it
+is never as it is now except in dreams. Now we must go quickly." Far up
+the trail they saw a grayness in the eastern sky where the day was about
+to come in.
+
+"Hark," said the Basket Woman, "they will sing together the coyote song.
+It is so that they sing it when the coyote goes home from his hunting,
+and the morning is near.
+
+  "The coyote cries ...
+  He cries at daybreak ...
+  He cries ...
+  The coyote cries" ...
+
+sang the Basket Woman, but all the spaces in between the words were
+filled with long howls,--weird, wicked noises that seemed to hunt and
+double in a half-human throat. It made the hair on Alan's neck stand up,
+and cold shivers creep along his back. He began to shake, for the wild
+howls drew near and louder, and he felt the bed under him tremble with
+his trembling.
+
+"Mother, mother," he cried, "what is that?"
+
+"It is only the coyotes," said she; "they always howl about this time of
+night. It is nothing; go to sleep again."
+
+"But I am afraid."
+
+"They cannot hurt you," said his mother; "it is only the little gray
+beasts that you see trotting about the mesa of afternoons; hear them
+now."
+
+"I am afraid," said Alan.
+
+"Then you must come in my bed," said she; and in a few minutes he was
+fast asleep again.
+
+
+
+
+THE BASKET WOMAN
+
+SECOND STORY
+
+
+The next time Alan saw the Basket Woman he was not nearly so much afraid
+of her, though he did not venture to speak of their journey to Pahrump.
+He said to his mother, "Do you not wish the Indians could have stayed
+the way they were?" and his mother laughed.
+
+"Why, no, child," she said, "I do not think that I do. I think they are
+much better off as they are now." Alan, however, was not to be
+convinced. The next time he saw the Basket Woman he was even troubled
+about it.
+
+The homesteader had taken his family to the town for a day, and the
+first thing Alan saw when he got down from the wagon was the Basket
+Woman. She was sitting in a corner of the sidewalk with a group of other
+mahalas, with her blanket drawn over her shoulders, looking out upon
+the town, and her eyes were dull and strange.
+
+A stream of people went by them in the street, and minded them no more
+than the dogs they stepped over, sprawling at the doors of the stores.
+Some of the Indian women had children with them, but they neither
+shouted nor ran as they had done in the camp of Corn Water; they sat
+quietly by their mothers, and Alan noticed how worn and poor were the
+clothes of all of them, and how wishful all the eyes. He could not get
+his mind off them because he could not get them out of his sight for
+very long at a time. It was a very small town, and as he went with his
+mother in and about the stores he would be coming face to face with the
+mahalas every little while, and the Basket Woman's eyes were always sad.
+
+His mother, when she had finished her shopping, gave him a silver dime
+and told him that he might spend it as he wished. As soon as Alan had
+turned the corner on that errand there was the Basket Woman with her
+chin upon her knees and her blanket drawn over her shoulders. Alan
+stopped a moment in front of her; he would have liked to say something
+comforting, but found himself still afraid.
+
+Her eyes looked on beyond him, blurred and dim; he supposed she must be
+thinking of the happy valley, and grew so very sorry for her that, as he
+could not get the courage to speak, he threw his dime into her lap and
+ran as fast as he could away. It seemed to him as he ran that she called
+to him, but he could not be sure.
+
+That night, almost as soon as he had touched the pillow, she came and
+stood beside him without motion or sound, and let down the basket from
+her back.
+
+"Do we go to Corn Water?" asked Alan as he stepped into it.
+
+"To my people of old time," said the Basket Woman, "so that you need not
+be so much sorry."
+
+Then they went out by the mesa trail, where the sage showed duskily
+under a thin rim of moon. It seemed to Alan that they went slowly,
+almost heavily. When they came to the parting of the ways, she let down
+the basket to rest. A rabbit popped, startled, out of the brush, and
+scurried into the dark; its white tail, like a signal, showed the way it
+went.
+
+"What was that?" asked Alan.
+
+"Only little Tavwots, whom we scared out of his nest. Lean forward," she
+said, "and I will tell you a tale about him." So the boy leaned his head
+against the Basket Woman's long black hair, and heard the story of
+Little Tavwots and How He Caught the Sun in a Snare.
+
+"It was long ago," said the Basket Woman. "Tavwots was the largest of
+all four-footed things, and a mighty hunter. He would get up as soon as
+it was day and go to his hunting, but always before him was the track of
+a great foot on the trail; and this troubled him, for his pride was as
+big as his body and greater than his fame.
+
+"'Who is this?' cried Tavwots, 'that goes with so great a stride before
+me to the hunting? Does he think to put me to shame?'
+
+"'T'-sst!' said his mother, 'there is none greater than thee.'
+
+"'Nevertheless,' said Tavwots, 'there are the footprints in the trail.'
+The next morning he got up earlier, but there were always the great
+footprints and the long stride before him.
+
+"'Now I will set me a trap for this impudent fellow,' said Tavwots, for
+he was very cunning. So he made a snare of his bowstring and set it in
+the trail overnight, and in the morning when he went to look, behold, he
+had caught the sun in his snare. All that quarter of the earth was
+beginning to smoke with the heat of it.
+
+"'Is it you?' cried Tavwots, 'who made the tracks in my trail?'
+
+"'It is I,' said the sun. 'Come now and set me free before the whole
+earth is afire.' Then Tavwots saw what he had to do, so he drew his
+knife and ran to cut the bowstring. But the heat was so great that he
+ran back before he had done it, and was melted down to one half his
+size. Then the smoke of the burning earth began to curl up against the
+sky.
+
+"'Come again, Tavwots,' cried the sun. So he ran again and ran back, and
+the third time he ran he cut the bowstring, and the sun was set free
+from the snare. But by that time Tavwots was melted down to as small as
+he is now, and so he remains. Still you may see by the print of his feet
+as he leaps in the trail how great his stride was when he caught the sun
+in his snare.
+
+"So it is always," said the Basket Woman, "that which is large grows
+less, and my people, which were great, have dwindled away."
+
+After that she became quiet, and they went on over the mountain. Because
+he was beginning to be acquainted with it, the way seemed shorter to
+Alan than before. They passed over the high barren ridges, and he began
+to look for the camp at Corn Water.
+
+"I see no smoke," said Alan.
+
+"It would bring down their enemies like buzzards on carrion," said the
+Basket Woman.
+
+"There is no sound of singing nor of laughter," said the boy.
+
+"Who laughs in the time of war?" said she.
+
+"Is there war?" asked Alan.
+
+"Long and bitter," said the Basket Woman. "Let us go softly and come
+upon them unawares."
+
+So they went, light of foot, among the pines until they saw the wickiups
+opening eastward to the sun, but many of them stood ruined and awry.
+There were only the very old and the children in the camp, and these did
+not run and play. They stole about like mice in the meadow sod, and if
+so much as a twig snapped in the forest, they huddled motionless as
+young quail. The women worked in the growing corn; they dug roots on the
+hill slope and caught grasshoppers for food. One made a noose of her
+long black hair plucked out, and snared the bright lizards that ran
+among the rocks. It seemed to Alan that the Indians looked wishful and
+thinner than they should; but such food as they found was all put by.
+
+"Why do they do this?" asked the boy.
+
+"That the men who go to war may not go fasting," said the Basket Woman.
+"Look, now we shall have news of them."
+
+A young man came noiselessly out of the wood, and it was he who had sung
+the new song on the night of feasting and dancing. He had eagle feathers
+in his hair, but they were draggled; there was beadwork on his leggings,
+but it was torn with thorns; there was paint on his face and his body,
+but it was smeared over red, and as he came into the camp he broke his
+bow across his knee.
+
+"It is a token of defeat," said the Basket Woman; "the others will come
+soon." But some came feebly because of wounds, and it seemed the women
+looked for some who might never come. They cast up their arms and cried
+with a terrible wailing sound that rose and shuddered among the pines.
+
+"Be still," said the young man; "would you bring our enemies down upon
+us with your screeching?" Then the women threw themselves quietly in the
+dust, and rocked to and fro with sobbing; their stillness was more
+bitter than their crying.
+
+Suddenly out of the wood came a storm of arrows, a rush of strange,
+painted braves, and the din of fighting.
+
+"Shut your eyes," said the Basket Woman, "it is not good for you to
+see." Alan hid his face in the Basket Woman's dress, and heard the noise
+of fighting rage and die away. When he ventured to look again on the
+ruined huts and the trampled harvest, there were few left in the camp of
+Corn Water, and they had enough to do to find food for their poor
+bodies. They winnowed the creek with basket-work weirs for every
+finger-long troutling that came down in it, and tore the bark off the
+pine trees to get at the grubs underneath.
+
+"Why do they not go out and kill deer as before?" asked Alan.
+
+"Their enemies lurk in the wood and drive away the game," said the
+Basket Woman.
+
+"Why do they not go to another place?"
+
+"Where shall they go, when their foes watch every pass?" said she.
+
+It seemed to Alan that many days and nights passed while they watched by
+the camp; and the days were all sorrowful, and always, as before, the
+best meat was set aside for the strongest.
+
+"Why is this so?" asked the boy.
+
+"Because," said the Basket Woman, "those who are strong must stay so to
+care for the rest. It is the way of my people. You see that the others
+do not complain." And it was so that the feeble ones tottered silently
+about the camp or sat still a long time in one place with their heads
+upon their knees.
+
+"How will it end?" asked Alan.
+
+"They must go away at last," said she, "though the cords of their hearts
+are fastened here. But there is no seed corn, and the winter is close at
+hand."
+
+Then there began to be a tang of frost in the air, and the people
+gathered up their household goods, and, though there was not much of
+them, they staggered and bent under the burden as they went up out of
+the once happy valley to another home. The women let down their long
+hair and smeared ashes upon it; they threw up their lean arms and
+wailed long and mournfully as they passed among the pines. Alan began to
+tremble with crying, and felt the Basket Woman patting him on the
+shoulder. Her voice sounded to him like the voice of his mother telling
+him to go to sleep again, for there was nothing for him to be troubled
+about. After he grew quieter, the Indian woman lifted him up. "We must
+be going," she said, "it is not good for us to be here."
+
+Alan wished as they went up over the mountain that she would help him
+with talk toward forgetting what he had seen, but the long hair fell
+over her face and she would not talk. He shivered in the basket, and the
+night felt colder and full of fearsome noises.
+
+"What is that?" he whispered, as a falling star trailed all across the
+dark.
+
+"It is the coyote people that brought the fire to my people," said the
+Basket Woman. Alan hoped she would tell him a tale about it, but she
+would not. They went on down the mountain until they came to the borders
+of the long-leaved pines. Alan heard the sough of the wind in the
+needles, and it seemed as if it called.
+
+"What is that?" he whispered.
+
+"It is Hi-no-no, the wind, mourning for his brother, the pine tree," but
+she would not tell him that tale, either. She went faster and faster,
+and Alan felt the stir of her shoulders under him. He listened to the
+wind, and it grew fierce and louder until he heard the house beams
+creak, for he was awake in his own bed. A strong wind drove gustily
+across the mesa and laid hold of the corners of the roof.
+
+The next morning the homesteader said that he must go to the campoodie
+and Alan might go with him. Alan was quite pleased, and said to his
+mother while she was getting him ready, "Do you know, I think Indians
+are a great deal better off as they are now."
+
+"Why, yes," said his mother, smiling, "I think so, too."
+
+
+  [Illustration: From photograph by A. A. Forbes
+  A "CAMPOODIE," OR INDIAN VILLAGE]
+
+
+
+
+THE STREAM THAT RAN AWAY
+
+
+In a short and shallow canyon on the front of Oppapago running eastward
+toward the sun, one may find a clear brown stream called the creek of
+Pinon Pines. That is not because it is unusual to find pinon trees on
+Oppapago, but because there are so few of them in the canyon of the
+stream. There are all sorts higher up on the slopes,--long-leaved yellow
+pines, thimble cones, tamarack, silver fir and Douglas spruce; but here
+there is only a group of the low-heading, gray nut pines which the
+earliest inhabitants of that country called pinons.
+
+The canyon of Pinon Pines has a pleasant outlook and lies open to the
+sun, but there is not much other cause for the forest rangers to
+remember it. At the upper end there is no more room by the stream border
+than will serve for a cattle trail; willows grow in it, choking the path
+of the water; there are brown birches here and ropes of white clematis
+tangled over thickets of brier rose. Low down the ravine broadens out to
+inclose a meadow the width of a lark's flight, blossomy and wet and
+good. Here the stream ran once in a maze of soddy banks and watered all
+the ground, and afterward ran out at the canyon's mouth across the mesa
+in a wash of bone-white boulders as far as it could. That was not very
+far, for it was a slender stream. It had its source really on the high
+crests and hollows of Oppapago, in the snow banks that melted and seeped
+downward through the rocks; but the stream did not know any more of that
+than you know of what happened to you before you were born, and could
+give no account of itself except that it crept out from under a great
+heap of rubble far up in the canyon of the Pinon Pines. And because it
+had no pools in it deep enough for trout, and no trees on its borders
+but gray nut pines; because, try as it might, it could never get across
+the mesa to the town, the stream had fully made up its mind to run
+away.
+
+"Pray what good will that do you?" said the pines. "If you get to the
+town, they will turn you into an irrigating ditch and set you to
+watering crops."
+
+"As to that," said the stream, "if I once get started I will not stop at
+the town." Then it would fret between its banks until the spangled
+frills of the mimulus were all tattered with its spray. Often at the end
+of the summer it was worn quite thin and small with running, and not
+able to do more than reach the meadow.
+
+"But some day," it whispered to the stones, "I shall run quite away."
+
+If the stream had been inclined for it, there was no lack of good
+company on its own borders. Birds nested in the willows, rabbits came to
+drink; one summer a bobcat made its lair up the bank opposite the brown
+birches, and often deer fed in the meadow. Then there was a promise of
+better things. In the spring of one year two old men came up into the
+canyon of Pinon Pines. They had been miners and partners together for
+many years, they had grown rich and grown poor, and had seen many hard
+places and strange times. It was a day when the creek ran clear and the
+south wind smelled of the earth. Wild bees began to whine among the
+willows, and the meadow bloomed over with poppy-breasted larks. Then
+said one of the old men, "Here is good meadow and water enough; let us
+build a house and grow trees. We are too old to dig in the mines."
+
+"Let us set about it," said the other; for that is the way with two who
+have been a long time together: what one thinks of, the other is for
+doing. So they brought their possessions and made a beginning that day,
+for they felt the spring come on warmly in their blood; they wished to
+dig in the earth and handle it.
+
+These two men who, in the mining camps where they were known, were
+called "Shorty" and "Long Tom," and had almost forgotten that they had
+other names, built a house by the water border and planted trees. Shorty
+was all for an orchard, but Long Tom preferred vegetables. So they did
+each what he liked, and were never so happy as when walking in the
+garden in the cool of the day, touching the growing things as they
+walked and praising each other's work.
+
+"This will make a good home for our old age," said Long Tom, "and when
+we die we can be buried here."
+
+"Under the pinon pines," said Shorty. "I have marked out a place."
+
+So they were very happy for three years. By this time the stream had
+become so interested it had almost forgotten about running away. But
+every year it noted that a larger bit of the meadow was turned under and
+planted, and more and more the men made dams and ditches to govern its
+running.
+
+"In fact," said the stream, "I am being made into an irrigating ditch
+before I have had my fling in the world. I really must make a start."
+
+That very winter by the help of a great storm it went roaring down the
+meadow over the mesa, and so clean away, with only a track of muddy
+sand to show the way it had gone. All the winter, however, Shorty and
+Long Tom brought water for drinking from a spring, and looked for the
+stream to come back. In the spring they hoped still, for that was the
+season they looked for the orchard to bear. But no fruit set on the
+trees, and the seeds Long Tom planted shriveled in the earth. So by the
+end of summer, when they understood that the water would not come back
+at all, they went sadly away.
+
+Now what happened to the creek of Pinon Pines is not very well known to
+any one, for the stream is not very clear on that point, except that it
+did not have a happy time. It went out in the world on the wings of the
+storm and was very much tossed about and mixed up with other waters,
+lost and bewildered. Everywhere it saw water at work, turning mills,
+watering fields, carrying trade, falling as hail, rain, and snow, and at
+the last, after many journeys, found itself creeping out from under the
+rocks of Oppapago in the canyon of Pinon Pines. Immediately the little
+stream knew itself and recalled clearly all that had happened to it
+before.
+
+"After all, home is best," said the stream, and ran about in its choked
+channels looking for old friends. The willows were there, but grown
+shabby and dying at the top; the birches were quite dead, but stood
+still in their places; and there was only rubbish where the white
+clematis had been. Even the rabbits had gone away. The little stream ran
+whimpering in the meadow, fumbling at the ruined ditches to comfort the
+fruit-trees which were not quite dead. It was very dull in those days
+living in the canyon of Pinon Pines.
+
+"But it is really my own fault," said the stream. So it went on
+repairing the borders with the best heart it could contrive.
+
+About the time the white clematis had come back to hide the ruin of the
+brown birches, a young man came and camped with his wife and child in
+the meadow. They were looking for a place to make a home. They looked
+long at the meadow, for Shorty and Long Tom had taken away their house
+and it did not appear to belong to any one.
+
+"What a charming place!" said the young wife, "just the right distance
+from town, and a stream all to ourselves. And look, there are
+fruit-trees already planted. Do let us decide to stay."
+
+Then she took off the child's shoes and stockings to let it play in the
+stream. The water curled all about the bare feet and gurgled
+delightedly.
+
+"Ah, do stay," begged the happy water, "I can be such a help to you, for
+I know how a garden should be irrigated in the best manner."
+
+The child laughed and stamped the water up to his bare knees. The young
+wife watched anxiously while her husband walked up and down the stream
+border and examined the fruit-trees.
+
+"It is a delightful place," he said, "and the soil is rich, but I am
+afraid the water cannot be depended upon. There are signs of a great
+drought within the last two or three years. Look, there is a clump of
+birches in the very path of the stream, but all dead; and the largest
+limbs of the fruit-trees have died. In this country one must be able to
+make sure of the water supply. I suppose the people who planted them
+must have abandoned the place when the stream went dry. We must go on
+farther." So they took their goods and the child and went on farther.
+
+"Ah, well," said the stream, "that is what is to be expected when one
+has a reputation for neglecting one's duty. But I wish they had stayed.
+That baby and I understood each other."
+
+He had quite made up his mind not to run away again, though he could not
+be expected to be quite cheerful after all that had happened; in fact,
+if you go yourself to the canyon of the Pinon Pines you will notice that
+the stream, where it goes brokenly about the meadow, has quite a
+mournful sound.
+
+
+
+
+THE COYOTE-SPIRIT AND THE WEAVING WOMAN
+
+
+The Weaving Woman lived under the bank of the stony wash that cut
+through the country of the mesquite dunes. The Coyote-Spirit, which, you
+understand, is an Indian whose form has been changed to fit with his
+evil behavior, ranged from the Black Rock where the wash began to the
+white sands beyond Pahranagat; and the Goat-Girl kept her flock among
+the mesquites, or along the windy stretch of sage below the campoodie;
+but as the Coyote-Spirit never came near the wickiups by day, and the
+Goat-Girl went home the moment the sun dropped behind Pahranagat, they
+never met. These three are all that have to do with the story.
+
+The Weaving Woman, whose work was the making of fine baskets of split
+willow and roots of yucca and brown grass, lived alone, because there
+was nobody found who wished to live with her, and because it was
+whispered among the wickiups that she was different from other people.
+It was reported that she had an infirmity of the eyes which caused her
+to see everything with rainbow fringes, bigger and brighter and better
+than it was. All her days were fruitful, a handful of pine nuts as much
+to make merry over as a feast; every lad who went by a-hunting with his
+bow at his back looked to be a painted brave, and every old woman
+digging roots as fine as a medicine man in all his feathers. All the
+faces at the campoodie, dark as the mingled sand and lava of the Black
+Rock country, deep lined with work and weather, shone for this singular
+old woman with the glory of the late evening light on Pahranagat. The
+door of her wickiup opened toward the campoodie with the smoke going up
+from cheerful hearths, and from the shadow of the bank where she sat to
+make baskets she looked down the stony wash where all the trails
+converged that led every way among the dunes, and saw an enchanted mesa
+covered with misty bloom and gentle creatures moving on trails that
+seemed to lead to the places where one had always wished to be.
+
+Since all this was so, it was not surprising that her baskets turned out
+to be such wonderful affairs, and the tribesmen, though they winked and
+wagged their heads, were very glad to buy them for a haunch of venison
+or a bagful of mesquite meal. Sometimes, as they stroked the perfect
+curves of the bowls or traced out the patterns, they were heard to sigh,
+thinking how fine life would be if it were so rich and bright as she
+made it seem, instead of the dull occasion they had found it. There were
+some who even said it was a pity, since she was so clever at the craft,
+that the weaver was not more like other people, and no one thought to
+suggest that in that case her weaving would be no better than theirs.
+For all this the basket-maker did not care, sitting always happily at
+her weaving or wandering far into the desert in search of withes and
+barks and dyes, where the wild things showed her many a wonder hid from
+those who have not rainbow fringes to their eyes; and because she was
+not afraid of anything, she went farther and farther into the silent
+places until in the course of time she met the Coyote-Spirit.
+
+Now a Coyote-Spirit, from having been a man, is continually thinking
+about men and wishing to be with them, and, being a coyote and of the
+wolf's breed, no sooner does he have his wish than he thinks of
+devouring. So as soon as this one had met the Weaving Woman he desired
+to eat her up, or to work her some evil according to the evil of his
+nature. He did not see any opportunity to begin at the first meeting,
+for on account of the infirmity of her eyes the woman did not see him as
+a coyote, but as a man, and let down her wicker water bottle for him to
+drink, so kindly that he was quite abashed. She did not seem in the
+least afraid of him, which is disconcerting even to a real coyote;
+though if he had been, she need not have been afraid of him in any case.
+Whatever pestiferous beast the Indian may think the dog of the
+wilderness, he has no reason to fear him except when by certain signs,
+as having a larger and leaner body, a sharper muzzle, and more evilly
+pointed ears, he knows him the soul of a bad-hearted man going about in
+that guise. There are enough of these coyote-spirits ranging in Mesquite
+Valley and over towards Funeral Mountains and about Pahranagat to give
+certain learned folk surmise as to whether there may not be a strange
+breed of wolves in that region; but the Indians know better.
+
+When the coyote-spirit who had met the basket woman thought about it
+afterward, he said to himself that she deserved all the mischance that
+might come upon her for that meeting. "She knows," he said, "that this
+is my range, and whoever walks in a coyote-spirit's range must expect to
+take the consequences. She is not at all like the Goat-Girl."
+
+The Coyote-Spirit had often watched the Goat-Girl from the top of
+Pahranagat, but because she was always in the open where no
+lurking-places were, and never far from the corn lands where the old
+men might be working, he had made himself believe he would not like that
+kind of a girl. Every morning he saw her come out of her leafy hut,
+loose the goats from the corral, which was all of cactus stems and broad
+leaves of prickly-pear, and lead them out among the wind-blown hillocks
+of sand under which the trunks of the mesquite flourished for a hundred
+years, and out of the tops of which the green twigs bore leaves and
+fruit; or along the mesa to browse on bitterbrush and the tops of
+scrubby sage. Sometimes she plaited willows for the coarser kinds of
+basket-work, or, in hot noonings while the flock dozed, worked herself
+collars and necklaces of white and red and turquoise-colored beads, and
+other times sat dreaming on the sand. But whatever she did, she kept far
+enough from the place of the Coyote-Spirit, who, now that he had met the
+Weaving Woman, could not keep his mind off her. Her hut was far enough
+from the campoodie so that every morning he went around by the Black
+Rock to see if she was still there, and there she sat weaving patterns
+in her baskets of all that she saw or thought. Now it would be the
+winding wash and the wattled huts beside it, now the mottled skin of the
+rattlesnake or the curled plumes of the quail.
+
+At last the Coyote-Spirit grew so bold that when there was no one
+passing on the trail he would go and walk up and down in front of the
+wickiup. Then the Weaving Woman would look up from her work and give him
+the news of the season and the tribesmen in so friendly a fashion that
+he grew less and less troubled in his mind about working her mischief.
+He said in his evil heart that since the ways of such as he were known
+to the Indians,--as indeed they were, with many a charm and spell to
+keep them safe,--it could be no fault of his if they came to harm
+through too much familiarity. As for the Weaving Woman, he said, "She
+sees me as I am, and ought to know better," for he had not heard about
+the infirmity of her eyes.
+
+Finally he made up his mind to ask her to go with him to dig for roots
+around the foot of Pahranagat, and if she consented,--and of course she
+did, for she was a friendly soul,--he knew in his heart what he would
+do. They went out by the mesa trail, and it was a soft and blossomy day
+of spring. Long wands of the creosote with shining fretted foliage were
+hung with creamy bells of bloom, and doves called softly from the
+Dripping Spring. They passed rows of owlets sitting by their burrows and
+saw young rabbits playing in their shallow forms. The Weaving Woman
+talked gayly as they went, as Indian women talk, with soft mellow voices
+and laughter breaking in between the words like smooth water flowing
+over stones. She talked of how the deer had shifted their feeding
+grounds and of whether the quail had mated early that year as a sign of
+a good season, matters of which the Coyote-Spirit knew more than she,
+only he was not thinking of those things just then. Whenever her back
+was turned he licked his cruel jaws and whetted his appetite. They
+passed the level mesa, passed the tumbled fragments of the Black Rock
+and came to the sharp wall-sided canons that showed the stars at noon
+from their deep wells of sombre shade, where no wild creature made its
+home and no birds ever sang. Then the Weaving Woman grew still at last
+because of the great stillness, and the Coyote-Spirit said in a hungry,
+whining voice,--
+
+"Do you know why I brought you here?"
+
+"To show me how still and beautiful the world is here," said the Weaving
+Woman, and even then she did not seem afraid.
+
+"To eat you up," said the Coyote. With that he looked to see her fall
+quaking at his feet, and he had it in mind to tell her it was no fault
+but her own for coming so far astray with one of his kind, but the woman
+only looked at him and laughed. The sound of her laughter was like water
+in a bubbling spring.
+
+"Why do you laugh?" said the Coyote, and he was so astonished that his
+jaws remained open when he had done speaking.
+
+"How could you eat me?" said she. "Only wild beasts could do that."
+
+"What am I, then?"
+
+"Oh, you are only a man."
+
+"I am a coyote," said he.
+
+"Do you think I have no eyes?" said the woman. "Come!" For she did not
+understand that her eyes were different from other people's, what she
+really thought was that other people's were different from hers, which
+is quite another matter, so she pulled the Coyote-Spirit over to a
+rain-fed pool. In that country the rains collect in basins of the solid
+rock that grow polished with a thousand years of storm and give back
+from their shining side a reflection like a mirror. One such lay in the
+bottom of the black canyon, and the Weaving Woman stood beside it.
+
+Now it is true of coyote-spirits that they are so only because of their
+behavior; not only have they power to turn themselves to men if they
+wish--but they do not wish, or they would not have become coyotes in the
+first place--but other people in their company, according as they think
+man-thoughts or beast-thoughts, can throw over them such a change that
+they have only to choose which they will be. So the basket-weaver
+contrived to throw the veil of her mind over the Coyote-Spirit, so that
+when he looked at himself in the pool he could not tell for the life of
+him whether he was most coyote or most man, which so frightened him that
+he ran away and left the Weaving Woman to hunt for roots alone. He ran
+for three days and nights, being afraid of himself, which is the worst
+possible fear, and then ran back to see if the basket-maker had not
+changed her mind. He put his head in at the door of her wickiup.
+
+"Tell me, now, am I a coyote or a man?"
+
+"Oh, a man," said she, and he went off to Pahranagat to think it over.
+In a day or two he came back.
+
+"And what now?" he said.
+
+"Oh, a man, and I think you grow handsomer every day."
+
+That was really true, for what with her insisting upon it and his
+thinking about it, the beast began to go out of him and the man to come
+back. That night he went down to the campoodie to try and steal a kid
+from the corral, but it occurred to him just in time that a man would
+not do that, so he went back to Pahranagat and ate roots and berries
+instead, which was a true sign that he had grown into a man again. Then
+there came a day when the Weaving Woman asked him to stop at her hearth
+and eat. There was a savory smell going up from the cooking-pots, cakes
+of mesquite meal baking in the ashes, and sugary white buds of the yucca
+palm roasting on the coals. The man who had been a coyote lay on a
+blanket of rabbit skin and heard the cheerful snapping of the fire. It
+was all so comfortable and bright that somehow it made him think of the
+Goat-Girl.
+
+"That is the right sort of a girl," he said to himself. "She has always
+stayed in the safe open places and gone home early. She should be able
+to tell me what I am," for he was not quite sure, and since he had begun
+to walk with men a little, he had heard about the Weaving Woman's eyes.
+
+Next day he went out where the flock fed, not far from the corn lands,
+and the Goat-Girl did not seem in the least afraid of him. So he went
+again, and the third day he said,--
+
+"Tell me what I seem to you."
+
+"A very handsome man," said she.
+
+"Then will you marry me?" said he; and when the Goat-Girl had taken time
+to think about it she said yes, she thought she would.
+
+Now, when the man who had been a coyote lay on the blanket of the
+Weaving Woman's wickiup, he had taken notice how it was made of willows
+driven into the ground around a pit dug in the earth, and the poles
+drawn together at the top, and thatched with brush, and he had tried at
+the foot of Pahranagat until he had built another like it; so when he
+had married the Goat-Girl, after the fashion of her tribe, he took her
+there to live. He was not now afraid of anything except that his wife
+might get to know that he had once been a coyote. It was during the
+first month of their marriage that he said to her, "Do you know the
+basket-maker who lives under the bank of the stony wash? They call her
+the Weaving Woman."
+
+"I have heard something of her and I have bought her baskets. Why do you
+ask?"
+
+"It is nothing," said the man, "but I hear strange stories of her, that
+she associates with coyote-spirits and such creatures," for he wanted to
+see what his wife would say to that.
+
+"If that is the case," said she, "the less we see of her the better. One
+cannot be too careful in such matters."
+
+After that, when the man who had been a coyote and his wife visited the
+campoodie, they turned out of the stony wash before they reached the
+wickiup, and came in to the camp by another trail. But I have not heard
+whether the Weaving Woman noticed it.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHEERFUL GLACIER
+
+
+Very many years ago, at the foot of a nameless peak between Mount Ritter
+and Togobah, after three successive years of deep snow there was a
+glacier born. It crept out fanwise from a furrow on the mountain-side,
+very high up, above the limit of the white-barked pines, and its upper
+end was lost under the drift of loose snow that trailed down the slope.
+For three successive winters the gray veil of storms hung month-long
+about the crest of the Sierras, while the snow came falling, falling,
+and the wind kept heaping, heaping, until the drifts sagged and slipped
+of their own weight down the long groove of the mountain; and since it
+lay on the sunless northern slope, and as it happened the summers that
+came between fell cool and rainy, there, when the spring thaw had
+cleared the loose snow, spread out on a little stony flat lay the rim of
+the glacier. Yet it was a very little one, a rod or two of clear
+shining ice that ran into deep blue and gray sludge under a drift of
+coarse, whitish granules, and very high up, fine dry particles of snow
+like powdered glass. So it lay at the time of year when the mountain
+sheep began to come back to their summer feeding-grounds.
+
+When the thaw had cleared the heather and warmed the lichened rocks,
+they loosed their hold of the ice, and the great weight of it began to
+crawl down the mountain. At the first slow thrill of motion the little
+glacier creaked with delight.
+
+"Ah," it said, "it is evident that I am not a mere snow bank, for in
+that case I should remain in one place. Now I know myself truly a
+glacier." For up to that time it had been in some doubt.
+
+By the end of the summer it had advanced more than a span in the shadow
+of the peak. Then the snows began, deep and heavy, but the glacier did
+not complain; it hugged the floor of the rift where it lay, and thought
+of the time when it should start on its travels again. So, because of
+thinking about it so much, or because the snows were deeper and the
+summers not so warm, the glacier increased and went forward until it had
+quite crossed the stony flat, and began to believe it might make its
+mark in the world. There were any number of reasons for thinking so. To
+begin with, all that neighborhood was deeply scarred and scoured by the
+trail of old glaciers, and the high peaks glittered with the keen polish
+of ice floes. All down the slope shone glassy bosses of clear granite
+succeeding to beds of cassiope and blue heather, polished slips of
+granite, pentstemon and more heather, smooth granite that the feet could
+take no hold upon, then saxifrage and meadowsweet, and so down to the
+stream border, where the water quarreled with the stones. And by the
+time the little glacier had settled that it would leave such a mark on
+the mountain-side, shining and softened by small blossomy things, it had
+come quite to the farthest border of the flat, and looked over the edge
+of a sharp descent. It was much too far to bend over, for though the
+glacier was all of brittle ice, it could bend a little.
+
+"But it is really nothing," said the glacier. "I have only to grind down
+the cliff until it is the proper height;" and it took a firmer hold on
+the sharp fragments of stones it had gathered on its way down the
+ravine. The pressure of the sodden snow above kept on, however, and
+before the glacier had fairly begun its grinding the ice rim was pushed
+out beyond the bluff, broke off, and lay at the foot in a shining heap.
+
+"So much the better," said the cheerful glacier. "What with grinding
+above and filling with broken ice below, the work will be accomplished
+in half the time."
+
+But that never really happened, for this was the last season the ice
+reached to the far edge of the flat. The next year there was less snow
+and more sun. The long slope of bare rocks gathered up the heat and held
+it so that the ice began to melt underneath, and a stream ran from it
+and fell over the cliff in a fine silvery veil.
+
+"How very fortunate," said the glacier, "to become the head of a river
+so early in my career. Besides, this is a much easier way of getting
+over the falls."
+
+Then the water began to purr in sheer content where it went among the
+stones; it increased and went down the canyon toward the white torrent of
+the creek that flowed from Togobah, and the next summer a water ousel
+found it. She came whirling up the course of the stream like a thrown
+pebble, plump and slaty blue, scattering a spray of sound as clear and
+round as the trickle of ice water that went over the falls. The ousel
+sat on the edge of the ice rim to finish her song, and it timed with the
+running of the stream.
+
+"You should understand," said the glacier, "that I started in life with
+the intention of cutting my way down the mountain. But now I am become a
+river I am quite as well pleased."
+
+"Everything is the best," said the ousel; "that has been the motto of my
+family for a long time, and I am sure I have proved it." And if one
+listened close as she flew in and out of the falls and sought in the
+white torrent for her food, one understood that it was the burden of her
+song. "Everything is the best," she sang, and kept on singing it when
+the glacier had grown so small by running that it was quite hollowed out
+under the roof of granulated snow, and the light came through it softly
+and wonderfully blue. Then the ousel would go far up into this ice cave
+until the sound of her singing came out wild and sweet, mixed with the
+water and the tinkle of the ice. As for the words of her song, the
+glacier never disagreed with her, though by now it had retreated clear
+across its stony flat. But the wind brought in the seeds of dwarf willow
+that sprouted and took root, and bright little buttercups began to come
+up and shiver in the flood of ice water.
+
+"It seems I am to have a meadow of my own," said the glacier, by the
+time there was stone-crop and purple pentstemon blowing in the damp
+crevices about its border. "I do not believe there is a prettier ice
+garden on this side of the mountain. And to think that all I once
+wished was to leave a track of bare and shining stones! The ousel is
+right, everything is for the best."
+
+The ousel always went downstream at the beginning of the winter, when
+the running waters were shut under snow bridges and the pools were
+puddles of gray sludge, down and down to the foothill borders, and at
+the turn of the year followed up again in the wake of the thaw. So it
+was not often that the ousel and the glacier saw each other between
+October and June.
+
+"But of course," said the glacier, "the longer you are away, the more we
+have to say to each other when you come."
+
+"And anyway it cannot be helped," said the ousel. For though she did not
+mind the storms and cold weather, one cannot really exist without
+eating.
+
+After one of these winter trips, the ousel noticed that the stream that
+came over the fall had quite failed, ran only a slender trickle that
+dripped among the shivering fern and was lost in the rock crevices, and
+though she was such a cheerful little body, she did not like to be the
+first to speak of it. It seemed as if the glacier could not last much
+longer at that rate. So she flitted about in the lace-work caverns of
+the ice, and sang airily and sweet, and the words of her song were what
+they had always been.
+
+"That is quite true," said the glacier. "You see how it is with me; once
+I was very proud to run over the fall with a splashing sound, but now I
+find it better to keep all the water for my meadow."
+
+In fact, there was quite a border of sod all about where the ice had
+been, and a great mat of white-belled cassiope in the middle. It grew
+greener and more blossomy every year. The ousel grew so used to finding
+it there, and so pleased with the society of the glacier, which was
+quite after her own heart, that it was a great grief to her as she came
+whirling up the stream in the flood tide of the year to find that they
+had both, the meadow and the ice, wholly disappeared.
+
+That had been a winter of long, thunderous storms, and a great splinter
+of granite had fallen away from the mountain peaks and slid down in a
+heap of rubble over the place where the glacier had been. There was now
+no trace of it under sharp, broken stones.
+
+But because they had been friends, the ousel could not keep quite away
+from the place, but came again and again and flew chirruping around the
+foot of the hill. One of those days when the sun was strong and the
+heather white on the wild headlands, she saw a slender rill of water
+creeping out at the bottom of the rubbish heap, and knew at once by the
+cheerful sound of it that it must be her friend the glacier, or what was
+left of it.
+
+"Yes, indeed," bubbled the spring, "it is really surprising what good
+luck I have. As a glacier, I suppose I should have quite melted away in
+a few summers; but with all this protection of loose stones, I shouldn't
+wonder if I became a perennial spring."
+
+And in fact that is exactly what occurred, for with the snow that sifted
+down between the broken boulders, and the snow water that collected in
+the hollow where the meadow had been, the spring has never gone quite
+dry. Every summer, when the heather and pentstemon and saxifrage on the
+glacier slip are at their best, the cheerful water comes out of the foot
+of the nameless peak and the ousel comes up from the white torrent and
+sits upon the stones. Then they sing together, and their voices blend
+perfectly; but if you listen carefully, you will observe that the words
+of their song are always the same.
+
+
+
+
+THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
+
+
+The Basket Woman was washing for the homesteader's wife at the spring,
+and Alan, by this time very good friends with her, was pulling up
+sagebrush for the fire, when the coyote came by. It was a clear, wide
+morning, warm and sweet, with gusty flaws of cooler air moving down from
+Pine Mountain. There was a lake of purple lupins in the swale, and the
+last faint flush of wild almonds burning on the slope. The grapevines at
+the spring were full of bloom and tender leaf. Eastward, above the high
+tilted mesa under the open sky, the buzzards were making a
+merry-go-round. That was the way Alan always thought of their
+performance when he saw them circling slantwise under the sun. Round and
+round they went, now so low that he could see how the shabby wing
+feathers frayed out at the edges, now so high that they became mere
+specks against the sky.
+
+"What makes them go round and round?" asked Alan of the mahala.
+
+"They go about to wait for their dinner, but the table is not yet
+spread," said she. The Basket Woman did not use quite such good English;
+but though Alan understood her broken talk, you probably would not. The
+little boy could not imagine, though he tried, what a buzzard's dinner
+might be like. The high mesa, with the water of mirage rolling over it,
+was a kind of enchanted land to him where almost anything might happen.
+He would lie contentedly for hours with his head pillowed on the
+hillocks of blown sand about the roots of the sage, and look up at the
+merry-go-round. He noticed that, although others joined them from the
+invisible upper sky, none ever seemed to go away, but hung and circled
+and faded into the thin blue deeps of air. Often he saw them settle
+flockwise below the rim of the mesa and beyond his sight, wondering
+greatly what they might be about.
+
+The morning at the spring he watched them in the intervals of tending
+the sagebrush fire, and then it was that the coyote came by, going in
+that direction. His head was cocked to one side, and he seemed to watch
+the merry-go-round out of the corner of his eye as he went.
+
+Alan thought the little gray beast had not seen them at the spring, but
+in that he was mistaken. A quarter of an hour before, as he came up out
+of the gully that hid his lair, the coyote had sighted the boy and the
+Basket Woman and made sure in his own mind that they had no gun. So, as
+it lay in his way, he came quite close to them; opposite the spring he
+paused a moment with one foot lifted, and eyed them with a wise and
+secret look. He went on toward the mesa, stopped again, looked back and
+then up at the whirling buzzards, and went on again.
+
+"Where does that one go?" asked Alan.
+
+"Eh," said the Basket Woman, "he goes also to the dinner. It is good
+eating they have out there on the mesa together."
+
+Alan looked after him, and the coyote paused and looked back over his
+shoulder as one who expects to be followed, and quite suddenly it came
+into the boy's mind to go up on the mesa and see what it was all about.
+The Basket Woman was bent above her tubs and did not see him go; when
+she missed him she supposed he had gone back to the house. Alan trotted
+on after the coyote until he lost him in a sunken place full of boulders
+and black sage; but he had been headed still toward that spot above
+which the black wings beat dizzily, and that way Alan went, climbing by
+the help of stout shrubs to the mesa, which here fell off steeply to the
+valley, and then on until he saw his coyote or another one, going
+steadily toward the merry-go-round.
+
+The mesa was very warm, and swam in misty blueness although the day was
+clear. Dim shapes of mountains stood up on the far edge, and near by a
+procession of lonely, low hills rounded like the backs of dolphins
+appearing out of the sea. Stubby shrubs as tall as Alan's shoulder
+covered the mesa sparingly, and in wide spaces there were beds of
+yellow-flowered prickly-pear; singly and far stood up tall stems of
+white-belled yucca, called in that country Candles of Our Lord. Alan
+could not follow the coyote close among the scrub, but dropped presently
+into a cattle trail that ran toward the place where he supposed the
+coyote's dinner must be, and so trudged on in it while the sun wheeled
+high in the heavens and the whole air of the mesa quivered with the
+heat.
+
+It is certain that in his wanderings Alan must have traveled that day
+and the next as much as twenty miles from the spring, though he might
+easily have been lost in less time, for his head hardly came above the
+tops of the scrub, and there were no landmarks to guide by, other than
+the low hills which seemed to alter nothing whichever way one looked at
+them. As for the buzzards, they rose higher and higher into the dim,
+quivering air. Alan began to be thirsty, next tired, and then hungry. He
+tried to turn toward home, but got no nearer, and finally understood
+that he might be lost, so he ran about wildly for a time, which made
+matters no better. He began to cry and to run eagerly at the same time
+until, blind and breathless, he would fall and lie sobbing, and wish
+that he might see his mother or the Basket Woman come walking across the
+mesa with her basket on her back. By this time it was hot and close and
+he had come where the scant-leaved shrubs were far between, and with
+heat and running the tears were dried out of him. He sobbed in his
+breath and his lips were cracked and dry. It fell cooler as night drew
+on, but he grew sick with hunger, and shuddered with the fear of
+darkness. Far off across the mesa the coyotes began to howl.
+
+Down in the homesteader's cabin nobody slept that night. When they first
+missed Alan, which was at noon, no one had the least idea where he was.
+His mother had supposed him at the spring, and the Basket Woman thought
+he had gone to his mother. It was all open ground about the cabin from
+the mesa and the foot of the hills, and below it toward the valley bare
+stretches of moon-white sands.
+
+The homesteader thought that the boy might have gone to the campoodie;
+but there they found he had not been, and none of the Indians had seen
+him; but by three of the clock they were all out beating about the
+spring to pick up the light trail of his feet, and there they were when
+the quick dark came on and stopped them.
+
+By the earliest light of the next morning the Basket Woman, who was
+really very fond of him, had come out of her hut to ask for news, but
+when she had looked up to the sky for a token of what the day was to be,
+she saw the buzzards come slantwise out of space and begin the
+merry-go-round. All at once she remembered Alan's question of the day
+before, and though she could not reasonably expect any one to take any
+notice of it, an idea came into her head and a gleam into her beady
+eyes. She caught her pony from the corral, riding him astride as Indian
+women ride, with the wicker water bottle slung across her shoulder and a
+parcel of food hid in her bosom. She went up the mesa rim toward the
+spot where the buzzards swung circling in the sky.
+
+When Alan awoke that morning under the creosote bush, he thought he
+must have come nearly to the place he had meant to find the day before.
+There was the coyote skulking out in the cactus scrub, and the buzzards
+wheeling low and large. It was a hot, smoky morning, the soil was all of
+coarse gravel, loose and white. Over to the right of him lay a still
+blue pool, and a broad river flowed into it in soft billows without
+sound. The coyote went toward it, looking back over his shoulder, and
+Allan followed, for his tongue was swollen in his mouth with thirst. The
+little boy was quite clear in his mind; he knew that he was lost, that
+he was very hungry, and that it was necessary to find his father and
+mother very soon. As he had come toward the mountains the day before, he
+thought that he should start directly away from them. He thought he
+could not be far from the campoodie, for it came to him dimly that he
+had heard the Indians singing the coyote song in the night, but he meant
+to have a drink in the soft still billows of the stream. A little ahead
+of him the coyote seemed to have gone into it, his head just cleared
+the surface, and the water heaved to the movements of his shoulders. But
+somehow Alan got no nearer to it. The stream seemed to loop and curve
+away from him, and presently he saw the lake behind him and could not
+think how that could be, for he did not understand that it was a lake
+and river of mirage. He saw the trees stand up on its borders, and
+fancied that the air which came from it was moist and cool. Always the
+coyote went before and showed him the way, and at last he lifted up his
+long thin muzzle and made a doleful cry. Mostly it seemed to Alan that
+the coyotes howled like dogs, but a little crazily; now it appeared that
+this one spoke in words that he could understand. When he told his
+mother of it afterwards, she said it was only the fever of his thirst
+and fatigue, but the Basket Woman believed him.
+
+"Ho, ho!" cried the coyote, "come, come, my brothers, to the hunting!
+Come!"
+
+A great black shadow of wings fell over them and a voice cried huskily,
+"What of the quarry?"
+
+"The quarry is close at hand," said the coyote, and Alan wondered
+dizzily what they might be talking about. He could not look up, for his
+eyes were nearly blinded by the light that beat up from the sand, but he
+saw wing shadows thickening on the ground.
+
+"Where do you go now?" cried the voice in the upper air.
+
+"Round and about to the false water until he is very weary," said the
+coyote; and it seemed to Alan that he must follow where the gray dog
+went in a maze of moving shadows. He trembled and fell from weakness a
+great many times and lay with his face in the shelter of the prickle
+bushes, but always he got up and went on again.
+
+"Have a care," cried the voice in the air, "here comes one of his own
+kind."
+
+"What and where?" said the coyote.
+
+"It is a brown one riding on a horse; she comes up from the gully of big
+rocks."
+
+"Does she follow a trail?" panted the coyote.
+
+"She follows no trail, but rides fast in this direction," croaked the
+voice, but Alan took no interest in it. He did not know that it was the
+Basket Woman coming to rescue him. He thought of the merry-go-round, for
+he saw that he had come back to the creosote bush where he had spent the
+night, and he thought the earth had come round with him, for it rocked
+and reeled as he went. His tongue hung out of his mouth and his lips
+cracked and bled, his feet were blistered and aching from the sharp
+rocks, the hot sands, and cactus thorns. Round and round with him went
+scrub and sand, on one side the shadow of black wings, and on the other
+the smooth flow of mirage water which he might never reach. Through it
+all he could hear the soft _biff, biff_ of the broad wings and the long,
+hungry, whining howl that seemed to detach itself from any throat and
+come upon him from all quarters of the quivering air. Dizzily went the
+merry-go-round, and now it seemed that the false water swung nearer,
+that it went around with him, that it bore him up, for he no longer felt
+the earth under him, that it buoyed and floated him far out from the
+place where he had been, that it grew deliciously cool at last, that it
+laved his face and flowed in his parched throat; and at last he opened
+his eyes and found the Basket Woman trickling water in his mouth from
+her wicker water bottle. It was noon of his second day from home when
+she found him on Cactus Flat, by going straight to the point where she
+saw the black wings hanging in the air. She laid him on the horse before
+her and dripped water in his mouth and coaxed and called to him, but
+never left off riding nor halted until she came up with others of the
+search party who had followed up by the place where Alan had climbed to
+the mesa, and followed slowly by a faint trail. But to Alan it was all
+as if he had dreamed that the Basket Woman had brought him as before
+from the valley of Corn Water. The first that he realized was that his
+father had him, and that his mother was crying and kissing the Basket
+Woman. It was several days before he was able to be about again, and
+then only under promise that he would go no farther than the spring.
+The first thing he saw when he looked up was the buzzards high up over
+the mesa making a merry-go-round in the clear blue, and it was then he
+remembered that he had not yet found out what it was all about.
+
+
+
+
+THE CHRISTMAS TREE
+
+
+Eastward from the Sierras rises a strong red hill known as Pine
+Mountain, though the Indians call it The Hill of Summer Snow. At its
+foot stands a town of a hundred board houses, given over wholly to the
+business of mining. The noise of it goes on by day and night,--the creak
+of the windlasses, the growl of the stamps in the mill, the clank of the
+cars running down to the dump, and from the open doors of the drinking
+saloons, great gusts of laughter and the sound of singing. Billows of
+smoke roll up from the tall stacks and by night are lit ruddily by the
+smelter fires all going at a roaring blast.
+
+Whenever the charcoal-burner's son looked down on the red smoke, the
+glare, and the hot breath of the furnaces, it seemed to him like an
+exhalation from the wickedness that went on continually in the town;
+though all he knew of wickedness was the word, a rumor from passers-by,
+and a kind of childish fear. The charcoal-burner's cabin stood on a spur
+of Pine Mountain two thousand feet above the town, and sometimes the boy
+went down to it on the back of the laden burros when his father carried
+charcoal to the furnaces. All else that he knew were the wild creatures
+of the mountain, the trees, the storms, the small flowering things, and
+away at the back of his heart a pale memory of his mother like the faint
+forest odor that clung to the black embers of the pine. They had lived
+in the town when the mother was alive and the father worked in the
+mines. There were not many women or children in the town at that time,
+but mining men jostling with rude quick ways; and the young mother was
+not happy.
+
+"Never let my boy grow up in such a place," she said as she lay dying;
+and when they had buried her in the coarse shallow soil, her husband
+looked for comfort up toward The Hill of Summer Snow shining purely,
+clear white and quiet in the sun. It swam in the upper air above the
+sooty reek of the town and seemed as if it called. Then he took the
+young child up to the mountain, built a cabin under the tamarack pines,
+and a pit for burning charcoal for the furnace fires.
+
+No one could wish for a better place for a boy to grow up in than the
+slope of Pine Mountain. There was the drip of pine balm and a wind like
+wine, white water in the springs, and as much room for roaming as one
+desired. The charcoal-burner's son chose to go far, coming back with
+sheaves of strange bloom from the edge of snow banks on the high ridges,
+bright spar or peacock-painted ores, hatfuls of berries, or strings of
+shining trout. He played away whole mornings in glacier meadows where he
+heard the eagle scream; walking sometimes in a mist of cloud he came
+upon deer feeding, or waked them from their lair in the deep fern. On
+snow-shoes in winter he went over the deep drifts and spied among the
+pine tops on the sparrows, the grouse, and the chilly robins wintering
+under the green tents. The deep snow lifted him up and held him among
+the second stories of the trees. But that was not until he was a great
+lad, straight and springy as a young fir. As a little fellow he spent
+his days at the end of a long rope staked to a pine just out of reach of
+the choppers and the charcoal-pits. When he was able to go about alone,
+his father made him give three promises: never to follow a bear's trail
+nor meddle with the cubs, never to try to climb the eagle rocks after
+the young eagles, never to lie down nor to sleep on the sunny, south
+slope where the rattlesnakes frequented. After that he was free of the
+whole wood.
+
+When Mathew, for so the boy was called, was ten years old, he began to
+be of use about the charcoal-pits, to mark the trees for cutting, to
+sack the coals, to keep the house, and cook his father's meals. He had
+no companions of his own age nor wanted any, for at this time he loved
+the silver firs. A group of them grew in a swale below the cabin, tall
+and fine; the earth under them was slippery and brown with needles.
+Where they stood close together with overlapping boughs the light among
+the tops was golden green, but between the naked boles it was a vapor
+thin and blue. These were the old trees that had wagged their tops
+together for three hundred years. Around them stood a ring of saplings
+and seedlings scattered there by the parent firs, and a little apart
+from these was the one that Mathew loved. It was slender of trunk and
+silvery white, the branches spread out fanwise to the outline of a
+perfect spire. In the spring, when the young growth covered it as with a
+gossamer web, it gave out a pleasant odor, and it was to him like the
+memory of what his mother had been. Then he garlanded it with flowers
+and hung streamers of white clematis all heavy with bloom upon its
+boughs. He brought it berries in cups of bark and sweet water from the
+spring; always as long as he knew it, it seemed to him that the fir tree
+had a soul.
+
+The first trip he had ever made on snow-shoes was to see how it fared
+among the drifts. That was always a great day when he could find the
+slender cross of its topmost bough above the snow. The fir was not very
+tall in those days, but the snows as far down on the slope as the
+charcoal-burner's cabin lay shallowly. There was a time when Mathew
+expected to be as tall as the fir, but after a while the boy did not
+grow so fast and the fir kept on adding its whorl of young branches
+every year.
+
+Mathew told it all his thoughts. When at times there was a heaviness in
+his breast which was really a longing for his mother, though he did not
+understand it, he would part the low spreading branches and creep up to
+the slender trunk of the fir. Then he would put his arms around it and
+be quiet for a long beautiful time. The tree had its own way of
+comforting him; the branches swept the ground and shut him in dark and
+close. He made a little cairn of stones under it and kept his treasures
+there.
+
+Often as he sat snuggled up to the heart of the tree, the boy would slip
+his hand over the smooth intervals between the whorls of boughs, and
+wonder how they knew the way to grow. All the fir trees are alike in
+this, that they throw out their branches from the main stem like the
+rays of a star, one added to another with the season's growth. They
+stand out stiffly from the trunk, and the shape of each new bough in the
+beginning and the shape of the last growing twig when they have spread
+out broadly with many branchlets, bending with the weight of their own
+needles, is the shape of a cross; and the topmost sprig that rises above
+all the star-built whorls is a long and slender cross, until by the
+springing of new branches it becomes a star. So the two forms go on
+running into and repeating each other, and each star is like all the
+stars, and every bough is another's twin. It is this trim and certain
+growth that sets out the fir from all the mountain trees, and gives to
+the young saplings a secret look as they stand straight and stiffly
+among the wild brambles on the hill. For the wood delights to grow
+abroad at all points, and one might search a summer long without finding
+two leaves of the oak alike, or any two trumpets of the spangled
+mimulus. So, as at that time he had nothing better worth studying
+about, Mathew noticed and pondered the secret of the silver fir, and
+grew up with it until he was twelve years old and tall and strong for
+his age. By this time the charcoal-burner began to be troubled about the
+boy's schooling.
+
+Meantime there was rioting and noise and coming and going of strangers
+in the town at the foot of Pine Mountain, and the furnace blast went on
+ruddily and smokily. Because of the things he heard Mathew was afraid,
+and on rare occasions when he went down to it he sat quietly among the
+charcoal sacks, and would not go far away from them except when he held
+his father by the hand. After a time it seemed life went more quietly
+there, flowers began to grow in the yards of the houses, and they met
+children walking in the streets with books upon their arms.
+
+"Where are they going, father?" said the boy.
+
+"To school," said the charcoal-burner.
+
+"And may I go?" asked Mathew.
+
+"Not yet, my son."
+
+But one day his father pointed out the foundations of a new building
+going up in the town.
+
+"It is a church," he said, "and when that is finished it will be a sign
+that there will be women here like your mother, and then you may go to
+school."
+
+Mathew ran and told the fir tree all about it.
+
+"But I will never forget you, never," he cried, and he kissed the trunk.
+Day by day, from the spur of the mountain, he watched the church
+building, and it was wonderful how much he could see in that clear, thin
+atmosphere; no other building in town interested him so much. He saw the
+walls go up and the roof, and the spire rise skyward with something that
+glittered twinkling on its top. Then they painted the church white and
+hung a bell in the tower. Mathew fancied he could hear it of Sundays as
+he saw the people moving along like specks in the streets.
+
+"Next week," said the father, "the school begins, and it is time for you
+to go as I promised. I will come to see you once a month, and when the
+term is over you shall come back to the mountain." Mathew said good-by
+to the fir tree, and there were tears in his eyes though he was happy.
+"I shall think of you very often," he said, "and wonder how you are
+getting along. When I come back I will tell you everything that happens.
+I will go to church, and I am sure I shall like that. It has a cross on
+top like yours, only it is yellow and shines. Perhaps when I am gone I
+shall learn why you carry a cross, also." Then he went a little timidly,
+holding fast by his father's hand.
+
+There were so many people in the town that it was quite as strange and
+fearful to him as it would be to you who have grown up in town to be
+left alone in the wood. At night, when he saw the charcoal-burner's
+fires glowing up in the air where the bulk of the mountain melted into
+the dark, he would cry a little under the blankets, but after he began
+to learn, there was no more occasion for crying. It was to the child as
+though there had been a candle lighted in a dark room. On Sunday he
+went to the church and then it was both light and music, for he heard
+the minister read about God in the great book and believed it all, for
+everything that happens in the woods is true, and people who grow up in
+it are best at believing. Mathew thought it was all as the minister
+said, that there is nothing better than pleasing God. Then when he lay
+awake at night he would try to think how it would have been with him if
+he had never come to this place. In his heart he began to be afraid of
+the time when he would have to go back to the mountain, where there was
+no one to tell him about this most important thing in the world, for his
+father never talked to him of these things. It preyed upon his mind, but
+if any one noticed it, they thought that he pined for his father and
+wished himself at home.
+
+It drew toward midwinter, and the white cap on The Hill of Summer Snow,
+which never quite melted even in the warmest weather, began to spread
+downward until it reached the charcoal-burner's home. There was a great
+stir and excitement among the children, for it had been decided to have
+a Christmas tree in the church. Every Sunday now the Christ-child story
+was told over and grew near and brighter like the Christmas star. Mathew
+had not known about it before, except that on a certain day in the year
+his father had bought him toys. He had supposed that it was because it
+was stormy and he had to be indoors. Now he was wrapped up in the story
+of love and sacrifice, and felt his heart grow larger as he breathed it
+in, looking upon clear windless nights to see if he might discern the
+Star of Bethlehem rising over Pine Mountain and the Christ-child come
+walking on the snow. It was not that he really expected it, but that the
+story was so alive in him. It is easy for those who have lived long in
+the high mountains to believe in beautiful things. Mathew wished in his
+heart that he might never go away from this place. He sat in his seat in
+church, and all that the minister said sank deeply into his mind.
+
+When it came time to decide about the tree, because Mathew's father was
+a charcoal-burner and knew where the best trees grew, it was quite
+natural to ask him to furnish the tree for his part. Mathew fairly
+glowed with delight, and his father was pleased, too, for he liked to
+have his son noticed. The Saturday before Christmas, which fell on
+Tuesday that year, was the time set for going for the tree, and by that
+time Mathew had quite settled in his mind that it should be his silver
+fir. He did not know how otherwise he could bring the tree to share in
+his new delight, nor what else he had worth giving, for he quite
+believed what he had been told, that it is only through giving the best
+beloved that one comes to the heart's desire. With all his heart Mathew
+wished never to live in any place where he might not hear about God. So
+when his father was ready with the ropes and the sharpened axe, the boy
+led the way to the silver firs.
+
+"Why, that is a little beauty," said the charcoal-burner, "and just the
+right size."
+
+They were obliged to shovel away the snow to get at it for cutting, and
+Mathew turned away his face when the chips began to fly. The tree fell
+upon its side with a shuddering sigh; little beads of clear resin stood
+out about the scar of the axe. It seemed as if the tree wept. But how
+graceful and trim it looked when it stood in the church waiting for
+gifts! Mathew hoped that it would understand.
+
+The charcoal-burner came to church on Christmas eve, the first time in
+many years. It makes a difference about these things when you have a son
+to take part in them. The church and the tree were alight with candles;
+to the boy it seemed like what he supposed the place of dreams might be.
+One large candle burned on the top of the tree and threw out pointed
+rays like a star; it made the charcoal-burner's son think of Bethlehem.
+Then he heard the minister talking, and it was all of a cross and a
+star; but Mathew could only look at the tree, for he saw that it
+trembled, and he felt that he had betrayed it. Then the choir began to
+sing, and the candle on top of the tree burned down quite low, and
+Mathew saw the slender cross of the topmost bough stand up dark before
+it. Suddenly he remembered his old puzzle about it, how the smallest
+twigs were divided off in each in the shape of a cross, how the boughs
+repeated the star form every year, and what was true of his fir was true
+of them all. Then it must have been that there were tears in his eyes,
+for he could not see plainly: the pillars of the church spread upward
+like the shafts of the trees, and the organ playing was like the sound
+of the wind in their branches, and the stately star-built firs rose up
+like spires, taller than the church tower, each with a cross on top. The
+sapling which was still before him trembled more, moving its boughs as
+if it spoke; and the boy heard it in his heart and believed, for it
+spoke to him of God. Then all the fear went out of his heart and he had
+no more dread of going back to the mountain to spend his days, for now
+he knew that he need never be away from the green reminder of hope and
+sacrifice in the star and the cross of the silver fir; and the thought
+broadened in his mind that he might find more in the forest than he had
+ever thought to find, now that he knew what to look for, since
+everything speaks of God in its own way and it is only a matter of
+understanding how.
+
+It was very gay in the little church that Christmas night, with laughter
+and bonbons flying about, and every child had a package of candy and an
+armful of gifts. The charcoal-burner had his pockets bulging full of
+toys, and Mathew's eyes glowed like the banked fires of the
+charcoal-pits as they walked home in the keen, windless night.
+
+"Well, my boy," said the charcoal-burner, "I am afraid you will not be
+wanting to go back to the mountain with me after this."
+
+"Oh, yes, I will," said Mathew happily, "for I think the mountains know
+quite as much of the important things as they know here in the town."
+
+"Right you are," said the charcoal-burner, as he clapped his boy's hand
+between both his own, "and I am pleased to think you have turned out
+such a sensible little fellow." But he really did not know all that was
+in his son's heart.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIRE BRINGER
+
+
+This is one of the stories that Alan had from the Basket Woman after she
+came to understand that the boy really loved her tales and believed
+them. She would sit by the spring with her hands clasped across her
+knees while the clothes boiled and Alan fed the fire with broken brush,
+and tell him wonder stories as long as the time allowed, which was never
+so long as the boy liked to hear them. The story of the Fire Bringer
+gave him the greatest delight, and he made a game of it to play with
+little Indian boys from the campoodie who sometimes strayed in the
+direction of the homesteader's cabin. It was the story that came
+oftenest to his mind when he lay in his bed at night, and saw the stars
+in the windy sky shine through the cabin window.
+
+He heard of it so often and thought of it so much that at last it seemed
+to him that he had been part of the story himself, but his mother said
+he must have dreamed it. The experience came to him in this way: He had
+gone with his father to the mountains for a load of wood, a two days'
+journey from home, and they had taken their blankets to sleep upon the
+ground, which was the first time of Alan's doing so. It was the time of
+year when white gilias, which the children call "evening snow," were in
+bloom, and their musky scent was mingled with the warm air in the soft
+dark all about him.
+
+He heard the camp-fire snap and whisper, and saw the flicker of it
+brighten and die on the lower branches of the pines. He looked up and
+saw the stars in the deep velvet void, and now and then one fell from
+it, trailing all across the sky. Small winds moved in the tops of the
+sage and trod lightly in the dark, blossomy grass. Near by them ran a
+flooding creek, the sound of it among the stones like low-toned,
+cheerful talk. Familiar voices seemed to rise through it and approach
+distinctness. The boy lay in his blanket harking to one recurring note,
+until quite suddenly it separated itself from the babble and called to
+him in the Basket Woman's voice. He was sure it was she who spoke his
+name, though he could not see her; and got up on his feet at once. He
+knew, too, that he was Alan, and yet it seemed, without seeming strange,
+that he was the boy of the story who was afterward to be called the Fire
+Bringer. The skin of his body was dark and shining, with straight, black
+locks cropped at his shoulders, and he wore no clothing but a scrap of
+deerskin belted with a wisp of bark. He ran free on the mesa and
+mountain where he would, and carried in his hand a cleft stick that had
+a longish rounded stone caught in the cleft and held by strips of skin.
+By this he knew he had waked up into the time of which the Basket Woman
+had told him, before fire was brought to the tribes, when men and beasts
+talked together with understanding, and the Coyote was the Friend and
+Counselor of man. They ranged together by wood and open swale, the boy
+who was to be called Fire Bringer and the keen, gray dog of the
+wilderness, and saw the tribesmen catching fish in the creeks with their
+hands and the women digging roots with sharp stones. This they did in
+summer and fared well, but when winter came they ran nakedly in the snow
+or huddled in caves of the rocks and were very miserable. When the boy
+saw this he was very unhappy, and brooded over it until the Coyote
+noticed it.
+
+"It is because my people suffer and have no way to escape the cold,"
+said the boy.
+
+"I do not feel it," said the Coyote.
+
+"That is because of your coat of good fur, which my people have not,
+except they take it in the chase, and it is hard to come by."
+
+"Let them run about, then," said the Counselor, "and keep warm."
+
+"They run till they are weary," said the boy, "and there are the young
+children and the very old. Is there no way for them?"
+
+"Come," said the Coyote, "let us go to the hunt."
+
+"I will hunt no more," the boy answered him, "until I have found a way
+to save my people from the cold. Help me, O Counselor!"
+
+But the Coyote had run away. After a time he came back and found the boy
+still troubled in his mind.
+
+"There is a way, O Man Friend," said the Coyote, "and you and I must
+take it together, but it is very hard."
+
+"I will not fail of my part," said the boy.
+
+"We will need a hundred men and women, strong and swift runners."
+
+"I will find them," the boy insisted, "only tell me."
+
+"We must go," said the Coyote, "to the Burning Mountain by the Big Water
+and bring fire to your people."
+
+Said the boy, "What is fire?"
+
+Then the Coyote considered a long time how he should tell the boy what
+fire is. "It is," said he, "red like a flower, yet it is no flower;
+neither is it a beast, though it runs in the grass and rages in the wood
+and devours all. It is very fierce and hurtful and stays not for asking,
+yet if it is kept among stones and fed with small sticks, it will serve
+the people well and keep them warm."
+
+"How is it to be come at?"
+
+"It has its lair in the Burning Mountain, and the Fire Spirits guard it
+night and day. It is a hundred days' journey from this place, and
+because of the jealousy of the Fire Spirits no man dare go near it. But
+I, because all beasts are known to fear it much, may approach it without
+hurt and, it may be, bring you a brand from the burning. Then you must
+have strong runners for every one of the hundred days to bring it safely
+home."
+
+"I will go and get them," said the boy; but it was not so easily done as
+said. Many there were who were slothful and many were afraid, but the
+most disbelieved it wholly, for, they said, "How should this boy tell us
+of a thing of which we have never heard!" But at the last the boy and
+their own misery persuaded them.
+
+The Coyote advised them how the march should begin. The boy and the
+Counselor went foremost, next to them the swiftest runners, with the
+others following in the order of their strength and speed. They left the
+place of their home and went over the high mountains where great jagged
+peaks stand up above the snow, and down the way the streams led through
+a long stretch of giant wood where the sombre shade and the sound of the
+wind in the branches made them afraid. At nightfall where they rested
+one stayed in that place, and the next night another dropped behind, and
+so it was at the end of each day's journey. They crossed a great plain
+where waters of mirage rolled over a cracked and parching earth and the
+rim of the world was hidden in a bluish mist; so they came at last to
+another range of hills, not so high but tumbled thickly together, and
+beyond these, at the end of the hundred days, to the Big Water quaking
+along the sand at the foot of the Burning Mountain.
+
+It stood up in a high and peaked cone, and the smoke of its burning
+rolled out and broke along the sky. By night the glare of it reddened
+the waves far out on the Big Water when the Fire Spirits began their
+dance.
+
+Then said the Counselor to the boy who was soon to be called the Fire
+Bringer, "Do you stay here until I bring you a brand from the burning;
+be ready and right for running, and lose no time, for I shall be far
+spent when I come again, and the Fire Spirits will pursue me." Then he
+went up the mountain, and the Fire Spirits when they saw him come were
+laughing and very merry, for his appearance was much against him. Lean
+he was, and his coat much the worse for the long way he had come.
+Slinking he looked, inconsiderable, scurvy, and mean, as he has always
+looked, and it served him as well then as it serves him now. So the Fire
+Spirits only laughed, and paid him no farther heed. Along in the night,
+when they came out to begin their dance about the mountain, the Coyote
+stole the fire and began to run away with it down the slope of the
+Burning Mountain. When the Fire Spirits saw what he had done, they
+streamed out after him red and angry in pursuit, with a sound like a
+swarm of bees.
+
+The boy saw them come, and stood up in his place clean limbed and taut
+for running. He saw the sparks of the brand stream back along the
+Coyote's flanks as he carried it in his mouth and stretched forward on
+the trail, bright against the dark bulk of the mountain like a falling
+star. He heard the singing sound of the Fire Spirits behind and the
+labored breath of the Counselor nearing through the dark. Then the good
+beast panted down beside him, and the brand dropped from his jaws. The
+boy caught it up, standing bent for the running as a bow to speeding the
+arrow; out he shot on the homeward path, and the Fire Spirits snapped
+and sung behind him. Fast as they pursued he fled faster, until he saw
+the next runner stand up in his place to receive the brand. So it passed
+from hand to hand, and the Fire Spirits tore after it through the scrub
+until they came to the mountains of the snows. These they could not
+pass, and the dark, sleek runners with the backward-streaming brand bore
+it forward, shining star-like in the night, glowing red through sultry
+noons, violet pale in twilight glooms, until they came in safety to
+their own land. Here they kept it among stones, and fed it with small
+sticks, as the Coyote had advised, until it warmed them and cooked their
+food. As for the boy by whom fire came to the tribes, he was called the
+Fire Bringer while he lived, and after that, since there was no other
+with so good a right to the name, it fell to the Coyote; and this is the
+sign that the tale is true, for all along his lean flanks the fur is
+singed and yellow as it was by the flames that blew backward from the
+brand when he brought it down from the Burning Mountain. As for the
+fire, that went on broadening and brightening and giving out a cheery
+sound until it broadened into the light of day, and Alan sat up to hear
+it crackling under the coffee-pot, where his father was cooking their
+breakfast.
+
+
+
+
+THE CROOKED FIR
+
+
+The pipsissawa, which is sometimes called prince's pine, is half as tall
+as the woodchuck that lives under the brown boulder; and the seedling
+fir in his first season was as tall as the prince's pine, so for the
+time they made the most of each other's company. The woodchuck and the
+pipsissawa were never to be any taller, but the silver fir was to keep
+on growing as long as he stood in the earth and drew sap. In his second
+season, which happened to be a good growing year, the fir was as tall as
+the woodchuck and began to look about him.
+
+The forest of silver firs grew on a hill-slope up from a water-course as
+far as the borders of the long-leaved pines. Where the trees stood close
+together the earth was brown with the litter of a thousand years, and
+little gray hawks hunted in their green, windy glooms. In the open
+spaces there were thickets of meadowsweet, fireweed, monkshood, and
+columbine, with saplings and seedlings in between. When the fir which
+was as tall as the woodchuck had grown a year or two longer, he made a
+discovery. All the firs on the hill-slope were crooked! Their trunks
+bulged out at the base toward the downward pitch of the hill; and it is
+the proper destiny of fir trees to be straight.
+
+"They should be straight," said the seedling fir. "I feel it in my
+fibres that a fir tree should be straight." He looked up at the fir
+mother very far above him on her way to the sky, with the sun and the
+wind in her star-built boughs.
+
+"I shall be straight," said the seedling fir.
+
+"Ah, do not be too sure of it," said the fir mother. But for all that
+the seedling fir was very sure, and when the snow tucked him in for the
+winter he took a long time to think about it. The snows are wonderfully
+deep in the canyon of the silver firs. From where they gather in the
+upper air the fir mother shakes them lightly down, packing so softly
+and so warm that the seedlings and the pipsissawas do not mind.
+
+About the time the fir had grown tall enough to be called a sapling he
+made another discovery. The fir mother had also a crooked trunk. The
+sapling was greatly shocked; he hardly liked to speak of it to the fir
+mother. He remembered his old friend the pipsissawa, but he had so
+outgrown her that there was really no comfort in trying to make himself
+understood, so he spoke to the woodchuck. The woodchuck was no taller
+than he used to be, but when he climbed up on the brown boulder above
+his house he was on a level with the sapling fir, and though he was not
+much of a talker he was a great thinker and had opinions.
+
+"Really," said the fir, "I hardly like to speak of it, but you are such
+an old friend; do you see what a crook the fir mother has in her trunk?
+We firs you know were intended to be straight."
+
+"That," said the woodchuck, "is on account of the snow."
+
+"But, oh, my friend," said the sapling, "you must be mistaken. The snow
+is soft and comfortable and braces one up. I ought to know, for I spend
+whole winters in it."
+
+"_Gru-r-ru-_," said the woodchuck crossly; "well for you that you do, or
+I should have eaten you off by now."
+
+After this the little fir kept his thoughts to himself; he was very much
+afraid of the woodchuck, and there is nothing a young fir fears so much
+as being eaten off before it has a chance to bear cones. But in fact the
+woodchuck spent the winter under the snow himself. He went into his
+house and shut the door when the first feel of snow was in the air, and
+did not come out until green things began to grow in the cleared spaces.
+
+Not many winters after that the fir was sufficiently tall to hold the
+green cross, that all firs bear on their topmost bough, above the snow
+most of the winter through. Now he began to learn a great many things.
+The first of these was about the woodchuck.
+
+"Really that fellow is a great braggart," said the fir; "I cannot think
+how I came to be afraid of him."
+
+In those days the sapling saw the deer getting down in the flurry of the
+first snows to the feeding grounds on the lower hills, saw the mountain
+sheep nodding their great horns serenely in the lee of a tall cliff
+through the wildest storms. In the spring he saw the brown bears
+shambling up the trails, ripping the bark off of dead trees to get at
+the worms and grubs that harbored there; lastly he saw the woodchuck
+come out of his hole as if nothing had ever happened.
+
+And now as the winters came on, the fir began to feel the weight of the
+snow. When it was wet and heavy and clung to its branches, the little
+fir shivered and moaned.
+
+"Droop your boughs," creaked the fir mother; "droop them as I do, and
+the snow will fall."
+
+So the sapling drooped his fan-spread branches until they lay close to
+the trunk; and the snow wreaths slipped away and piled thickly about his
+trunk. But when the snow lay deep over all the slope, it packed and
+slid down toward the ravine and pressed strongly against the sapling
+fir.
+
+"Oh, I shall be torn from my roots," he cried; "I shall be broken off."
+
+"Bend," said the fir mother, "bend, and you will not break." So the
+young fir bent before the snow until he was curved like a bow, but when
+the spring came and the sap ran in his veins, he straightened his trunk
+anew and spread his branches in a star-shaped whorl.
+
+"After all," said the sapling, "it is not such a great matter to keep
+straight; it only requires an effort."
+
+So he went on drooping and bending to the winter snows, growing strong
+and straight with the spring, and rejoicing. About this time the fir
+began to feel a tingling in his upper branches.
+
+"Something is going to happen," he said; something agreeable in fact,
+for the tree was fifty years old, and it was time to grow cones. For
+fifty years a silver fir has nothing to do but to grow branches, thrown
+out in annual circles, every one in the shape of a cross. Then it grows
+cones on the topmost whorl, royal purple and burnished gold, erect on
+the ends of the branches like Christmas candles. The sapling fir had
+only three in his first season of bearing, but he was very proud of
+them, for now he was no longer a sapling, but a tree.
+
+When one has to devote the whole of a long season to growing cones, one
+has not much occasion to think of other things. By the time there were
+five rows of cone-bearing branches spread out broadly from the silver
+fir, the woodchuck made a remark to the pipsissawa which is sometimes
+called prince's pine. It was not the same pipsissawa, nor the same
+woodchuck, but one of his descendants, and his parents had told him the
+whole story.
+
+"It seems to me," said he, "that the fir tree is not going to be
+straight after all. He never seems quite to recover from the winter
+snow."
+
+"Ah," said the pipsissawa, "I have always thought it better to have
+your seeds ripe and put away under ground before the snow comes. Then
+you do not mind it at all."
+
+The woodchuck was right about the fir; his trunk was beginning to curve
+toward the downward slope of the hill with the weight of the drifts. And
+that went on until the curve was quite fixed in the ripened wood, and
+the fir tree could not have straightened up if he had wished. But to
+tell the truth, the fir tree did not wish. By the end of another fifty
+years, when he wagged his high top above the forest gloom, he grew to be
+quite proud of it.
+
+"There is nothing," he said to the sapling firs, "like being able to
+endure hard times with a good countenance. I have seen a great deal of
+life. There are no such snows now as there used to be. You can see by
+the curve of my trunk what a weight I have borne."
+
+But the young firs did not pay any attention to him. They had made up
+their minds to grow up straight.
+
+
+
+
+THE SUGAR PINE
+
+
+Before the sugar pine came up in the meadow of Bright Water it had swung
+a summer long in the burnished cone of the parent tree, until the wind
+lifted it softly to the earth where it swelled with the snow water and
+the sun, and began to grow into a tree. But it knew nothing whatever of
+itself except that it was alive and growing; and in its first season was
+hardly so tall as the Little Grass of Parnassus that crowded the sod at
+the Bright Water. In fact, it was a number of years before it began to
+overtop the meadowsweet, the fireweed, the tall lilies, the monkshood,
+and columbine, and under these circumstances it could not be expected to
+have much of an opinion of itself.
+
+During those years the young pine suffered a secret mortification
+because it had no flowers. It stood stiff and trimly in its plain dark
+green, every needle like every other one, and no honey-gatherer visited
+it. When all the meadow ran over with rosy and purple bloom, the pine
+tree trembled and beads of clear resin oozed out upon its bark like
+tears; and the trouble really seemed worse than it was because everybody
+made so much of it. Even the hummingbirds as they came hurtling through
+the air would draw back conspicuously when they came to the pine, and
+though they said politely, "I beg your pardon, I took you for a flower,"
+the seedling felt it would have been better had they said nothing at
+all.
+
+"Well, why don't you grow flowers?" said the meadowsweet; "it is easy
+enough. Just do as I do," and she spread her drift of blossoms like a
+fragrant snow. But the sugar pine found it impossible to be anything but
+stiff and plainly green, though every year in the stir and tingle of new
+sap he felt a promise of better things.
+
+"I suppose," he said one day, "I must be in some way different from the
+rest of you."
+
+"Ah, that is the way with you solemn people," said the fireweed, "always
+imagining yourself better than those about you to excuse your
+disagreeableness. Any one can see by the way you hold yourself that you
+have too much of an opinion of yourself."
+
+The little pine tree sighed; he had not said "better," only "different,"
+and he began to realize year by year that this was so.
+
+"You should try to be natural," said the meadowsweet; "do not be so
+stiff, and then every one will love you though you are so plain."
+
+Then the sugar pine reached out and tried to mingle with the flowers,
+but the sharp needles tore their frills and the stiff branches did not
+suit with their graceful swaying, so he was obliged to give it up. It
+seemed, in fact, the more he tried to be like the others the worse he
+grew.
+
+"If only you were not so odd," said all the flowers. None of the young
+growing things in the meadow understood that it is natural for a pine
+tree to be stiff.
+
+The sugar pine was not always unhappy. There were days when he caught
+golden glints of the stream that ran smoothly about the meadow, in a bed
+of leopard-colored stones, and, reflecting all the light that fell into
+the hollow of the hills, gave the place its name; days when the air was
+warm and the sky was purely blue, and the resinous smell of the pines on
+the meadow border came to the seedling like a sweet savor in a dream,
+for as yet he did not understand what he was to be. He was pleased just
+to be looking at the summer riot of the flowering things, and loved the
+cool softness of the snow when he was tucked into comfortable darkness
+to dream of the spring odor of the pines. Then, when it seemed that the
+meadow had forgotten him, the little tree would fall to thinking the
+thoughts proper to his kind, and found the time pass pleasantly.
+
+"I suppose," he thought, "it is not good for me to flower as the other
+plants. If I began like them I should probably end like them, and I feel
+that I could not be satisfied with that. After all, one should not try
+to be so much like others, but to be the very best of one's own sort."
+
+Very early the young tree had noticed that he was the only one of all
+that company that kept green and growing the winter through. He would
+have been secretly very proud of it, but the flowers took good care to
+let him know their opinion of such airs.
+
+"It is simply that you wish to be considered peculiar," said the
+columbine; "one sees that you like nothing so much as to be in other
+people's mouths, but let me tell you, you will not get yourself any
+better liked by such behavior." After that the little tree wished
+nothing so much as that he might be the commonest summer-flowering weed.
+
+"But I am not," he said; "no, I am not, and I would do very well as I am
+if they would let me be happy in my own way."
+
+That summer the seedling grew as tall as the meadowsweet, and could look
+across the open space to the parent pine poised on her noble shaft, her
+spreading crown gathering sunshine from the draughts of upper air. She
+seemed to rock a little as if she dozed upon her feet, and the great
+sweep of limbs with pendulous golden cones made a gentle sighing. Then
+the despised little seedling felt a thrill go through him, and felt a
+shaking in all his slender twigs. He bowed himself among the lilies, and
+was both glad and ashamed, for though he could not well believe it, he
+knew himself akin to the great sugar pines. After that he gave up trying
+to be one of the flowers. Once he even ventured to speak of it to the
+meadowsweet.
+
+"Well, if it is any satisfaction to you to think so; but do not let any
+one else hear you say that. You are likely to get yourself
+misunderstood. I tell you this because I am your friend," said the
+meadowsweet, but really she had misunderstood him herself.
+
+Then a rumor arose in the neighborhood that the sombre, stubborn shrub
+conceited himself to be a pine, and the rumor ran with laughter and
+nodding the length of the meadow until it reached the old alder on the
+edge of Bright Water. The alder had stood with his feet in the stream
+for longer than the meadowsweet could remember, and saw everything that
+went on by reflection.
+
+"Do not laugh too soon," said the alder tree, "I have seen stranger
+things than that happen in this meadow," for he was indeed very old.
+
+"We have known him a good many seasons," said the fireweed, "and he has
+not done anything worth mentioning yet."
+
+All this was very hard for the young pine to bear, but there was better
+coming. That summer the forest ranger came riding in Bright Water and a
+learned man rode with him, praising the flowers and counting the numbers
+and varieties of bloom. How they prinked and flaunted in their pride!
+
+"That is all very pretty, as you say," answered the ranger as they came
+by the place of the pine, "and I suppose they perform a sort of service
+in keeping the soil covered, but the trees are the real strength of the
+mountain. Ah, here is a seedling of the right sort! I must give that
+fellow a chance," and he began pulling up great handfuls of the
+blossoming things around the tree.
+
+"What is it?" asked his companion.
+
+"A sugar pine," he said; "probably a seedling of that splendid specimen
+yonder," and he went on clearing the ground to let in sun and air.
+
+"But you must admit," said his friend, "that a seedling pine cuts rather
+a poor figure among all this flare of bloom."
+
+"Oh, you wait fifty or sixty years," said the ranger, "and then you will
+see what sort of a figure it makes. It really takes a pine of this sort
+a couple of hundred years to reach its prime," and they rode talking up
+the trail.
+
+Word of what had happened was carried all about the meadow and made a
+great stir. When it came to the alder tree he wagged his old head. "Ah,
+well," he said, "I told you so."
+
+"I will not believe it until I see it," said the fireweed.
+
+"They might have known it before," sighed the young pine, "and they
+ought to be proud to think I grew up in the same meadow with them."
+
+But they were not; they went on flaunting their blossoms as if nothing
+had occurred, and the young tree grew up as he was meant to be, and the
+pines on the meadow border sent him greeting on the wind. He still kept
+his trim spire-shaped habit, but he could very well put up with that for
+the time being. He felt within himself the promise of what he was to be.
+After fifty or sixty years, as the ranger had said, he began to put out
+strong cone-bearing boughs that shaped themselves by the storms and the
+wind in sweeping, graceful lines, and spread out to shelter the horde of
+flowering things below. Squirrels ran up the trunk and whistled cheerily
+in his windy top.
+
+"He grew here in our neighborhood," said the tall lilies; "we knew him
+when he was a seedling sprig, and now he is the tallest of the pines."
+
+"Suppose he is," said the fireweed. "What is the good of a pine tree
+anyway?"
+
+But the sugar pine did not hear. He had grown far above the small folk
+of the meadow, and went on growing for a hundred years. He gathered the
+sun in his high branches and rocked upon his shaft. He talked gently in
+his own fashion with his own kind.
+
+
+  [Illustration: AN OLD MINE
+  From photograph by A. A. Forbes]
+
+
+
+
+THE GOLDEN FORTUNE
+
+
+A little way up from the trail that goes toward Rex Monte, not far from
+the limit of deep snows, there is what looks to be a round dark hole in
+the side of the mountain. It is really the ruined tunnel of an old mine.
+Formerly a house stood on the ore dump at one side of the tunnel, a
+little unpainted cabin of pine; but a great avalanche of snow and stones
+carried them, both the house and the dump, away. The cabin was built and
+owned by a solitary miner called Jerry, and whether he ever had any
+other name no one in the town below Kearsarge now remembers.
+
+Jerry was old and lean, and his hair, which had been dark when he was
+young, was now bleached to the color of the iron-rusted rocks about his
+mine. For thirty years he had prospected and mined through that country
+from Kearsarge to the Coso Hills, but always in the pay of other men,
+and at last he had hit upon this ledge on Rex Monte. To all who looked,
+it showed a very slender vein between the walls of country rock, and the
+ore of so poor a quality that with all his labor he could do no more
+than keep alive; but to all who listened, Jerry could tell a remarkable
+story of what it had been, and what he expected it to be. Very many
+years ago he had discovered it at the end of a long prospect, when he
+was tired and quite discouraged for that time. There was not much
+passing then on the Rex Monte, and Jerry drew out of the trail here in
+the middle of the afternoon to rest in the shadow of a great rock. So
+while he lay there very weary, between sleeping and waking, he gazed out
+along the ground, which was all strewn with rubble between the stiff,
+scant grass. As he looked it seemed that certain bits of broken stone
+picked themselves out of the heap, and grew larger, in some way more
+conspicuous, until, Jerry averred, they winked at him. Then he reached
+out to draw them in with his hand, and saw that they were all
+besprinkled with threads and specks of gold. You may guess that Jerry
+was glad, then that he sprang up and began to search for more stones,
+and so found a trail of them, and followed it through the grass stems
+and the heather until he came to the ledge cropping out by a dike of
+weathered rocks. And in those days the ledge was ah, so rich! Now it
+seemed that Jerry was to have a mine of his own. So he named it the
+Golden Fortune, and told no man what he had found, but went down to the
+town which lies in a swale at the foot of Kearsarge, and brought back as
+much as was needful for working the mine in a simple way.
+
+It was nearing the end of the summer, when the hills expect the long
+thunder and drumming rain, and, not many weeks after that, the quiet
+storms that bring the snow. Jerry had enough to do to make all safe and
+comfortable at the Golden Fortune before winter set in. It was too steep
+here on the hill-slope for the deep snows to trouble him much, so he
+built his cabin against the rock, with a covered way from it to the
+tunnel of the mine, that he might work on all winter at no unease
+because of storms.
+
+It was perhaps a month later, with Jerry as busy as any of the wild folk
+thereabout, and the nights turning off bitter cold with frost. Of
+mornings he could hear the thin tinkle of the streams along fringes of
+delicate ice. It was the afternoon of a day that fell warm and dry with
+a promise of snow in the air. Jerry was roofing in his cabin, so intent
+that a voice hailed him before he was aware that there was a man on the
+trail. Jerry knew at once by his dress and his speech that he was a
+stranger in those parts, and he saw that he was not very well prepared
+for the mountain passes and the night. He knew this, I say, with the
+back of his mind, but took no note of it, for he was so occupied with
+his house and his mine. He suffered a fear to have any man know of his
+good fortune lest it should somehow slip away from him. So when the
+stranger asked him some questions of the trail, it seemed that what
+Jerry most wished was to get rid of him as quickly as possible. He was
+a young man, ruddy and blue-eyed, and a foreigner, what was called in
+careless miners' talk, "some kind of a Dutchman," and could not make
+himself well understood. Jerry gathered that he desired to know if he
+were headed right for the trail that went over to the Bighorn Mine,
+where he had the promise of work. So they nodded and shrugged, and Jerry
+made assurance with his hands, as much as to say, it is no great way;
+and when the young man had looked wistfully at the cabin and the boding
+sky, he moved slowly up the trail. When he came to the turn where it
+goes toward Rex Monte, he lingered on the ridge to wave good-by, so
+Jerry waved again, and the man dropped out of sight. At that moment the
+sun failed behind a long gray film that deepened and spread over all
+that quarter of the sky.
+
+Jerry had cause to remember the stranger in the night and fret for him,
+for the wind came up and began to seek in the canyon, and the snow fell
+slanting down. It fell three days and nights. All that while the gray
+veil hung about Jerry's house; now and then the wind would scoop a great
+lane in it to show how the drifts lay on the heather, then shut in tight
+and dim with a soft, weary sound, and Jerry, though he worked on the
+Golden Fortune, could not get the young stranger out of his mind.
+
+When the sun and the frost had made a crust over the snow able to bear
+up a man, he went over the Pass to Bighorn to inquire if the stranger
+had come in, though he did not tell at that time, nor until long after,
+how late it was when the man passed his cabin, how wistfully he turned
+away, nor what promise was in the air. The snow lay all about the Pass,
+lightly on the pines, deeply in the hollows, so deeply that a man might
+lie under it and no one be the wiser. And there it seemed the stranger
+must be, for at the Bighorn they had not heard of him, but if he were
+under the snow, there he must lie until the spring thaw. Of whatever
+happened to him, Jerry saw that he must bear the blame, for, by his own
+account, from that day the luck vanished from the Golden Fortune; not
+that the ore dwindled or grew less, but there were no more of the golden
+specks. With all he could do after that, Jerry could not maintain
+himself in the cabin on the slope of Rex Monte. So it came about that
+the door was often shut, and the picks rusted in the tunnel of the
+Golden Fortune for months together, while Jerry was off earning wages in
+more prosperous mines.
+
+All his days Jerry could not quite get his mind away from the earlier
+promise of the mine, and as often as he thought of that he thought of
+the stranger whom he had sent over the trail on the evening of the
+storm. Gradually it came into his mind in a confused way that the two
+things were mysteriously connected, that he had sent away his luck with
+the stranger into the deep snow. For certainly Jerry held himself
+accountable, and in that country between Kearsarge and the Coso Hills to
+be inhospitable is the worst offense.
+
+Every year or so he came back to the mine to work a little, and
+sometimes it seemed to promise better and sometimes not. Finally, Jerry
+argued that the luck would not come back to it until he had made good to
+some other man the damage he had done to one. This set him looking for
+an opportunity. Jerry mentioned his belief so often that he came at
+last, as is the way of miners, to accept it as a thing prophesied of old
+time. Afterward, when he grew old himself, and came to live out his life
+at the Golden Fortune, he would be always looking along the trail at
+evening time for passers-by, and never one was allowed to go on who
+could by any possibility be persuaded to stay the night in Jerry's
+cabin. Often when there was a wind, and the snow came slanting down,
+Jerry fancied he heard one shouting in the drift; then he would light a
+lantern and sally forth into the storm, peering and crying.
+
+About that time, when he went down into the town below Kearsarge once in
+a month or so for supplies, the people smiled and wagged their heads,
+but Jerry conceived that they whispered together about the unkindness
+he had done to the stranger so many years gone, and he grew shyer and
+went less often among men. So he companioned more with the wild things,
+and burrowed deeper into the hill. His cabin weathered to a semblance of
+the stones, rabbits ran in and out at the door, and deer drank at his
+spring.
+
+From the slope where the cabin stood, the trail, which led up from the
+town, winding with the winding of the canyon, went over the Pass, and so
+into a region of high meadows and high, keen peaks, the feeding-ground
+of deer and mountain sheep. The ravine of Rex Monte was the easiest
+going from the high valleys to the foothills, where all winter the feed
+kept green. Every year Jerry marked the trooping of the wild kindred to
+the foothill pastures when the snow lay heavily on all the higher land,
+and saw their returning when the spring pressed hard upon the borders of
+the melting drifts. So, as he grew older and stayed closer by his mine,
+Jerry learned to look to the furred and feathered folk for news of how
+the seasons fared, and what was doing on the high ridges. When the
+grouse and quail went down, it was a sign that the snow had covered the
+grass and small seed-bearing herbs; the passing of deer--shapely bulks
+in a mist of cloud--was a portent of deep drifts over the buckthorn and
+the heather. Lastly, if he saw the light fleeting of the mountain sheep,
+he looked for wild and bitter work on the crest of Kearsarge and Rex
+Monte. It was mostly at such times that Jerry heard voices in the storm,
+and he would go stumbling about with his lantern into the swirl of
+falling snow, until the wind that played up and down the great canyon,
+like the draughts in a chimney, made his very bones a-cold. Then he
+would creep back to drowse by the warmth of his fire and dream that the
+blue-eyed stranger had come back and brought the luck of the Golden
+Fortune. So he passed the years until the winter of the Big Snow. It was
+so called many winters after, for no other like it ever fell on the east
+slope of Kearsarge.
+
+It came early in the season, following a week of warm weather, when the
+sky was full of a dry mist that showed ghostly gray against the sun and
+the moon; great bodies of temperate air moved about the pines with a
+sound of moaning and distress. The deer, warned by their wild sense,
+went down before ever a flake fell, and Jerry, watching, shivered in
+sympathy, recalling that so they had run together, and such a spell of
+warm weather had gone before a certain snow, years ago before the luck
+departed from the Golden Fortune. As the fume of the storm closed in
+about the cabin, and flakes began to form lightly in the middle air, the
+old man's wits began to fumble among remembrances of the stranger on the
+trail, and he would hearken for voices. The snow began, then increased,
+and fell steadily, wet and blinding.
+
+The third night of its falling Jerry waked out of a doze to hear his
+name shouted, muffled and feebly, through the drift. So it seemed to
+him, and he made haste to answer it. There was no wind; on the very
+steep slope where the cabin stood was a knee-deep level, soft and
+clogging; in the hollows it piled halfway up the pines. Jerry's lantern
+threw a faint and stifled gleam. There was no further cry, but something
+struggled on the trail below him; dim, unhuman shapes wrestled in the
+smother of the snow. Jerry sent them a hail of assurance cut off short
+by the white wall of the storm.
+
+There was a little sag in the hill-front where the trail turned off to
+the cabin, and here the moist snow fell in a lake, into which the trail
+ran like a spit, and was lost. Down this trail at the last fierce end of
+the storm came the great wild sheep, the bighorn, the heaviest-headed,
+lightest-footed, winter-proof sheep of the mountains that God shepherds
+on the high battlements of the hills. Down they came when there was no
+meadow, nor thicket, nor any smallest twig of heather left uncovered on
+the highlands, and took the lake of soggy snow by Jerry's cabin in the
+dark. They had come far under the weight of the great curved horns
+through the clogging drifts. Here where the trail failed in the white
+smudge they found no footing, floundered at large, sinking belly-deep
+where they stood, and not daring to stand lest they sink deeper. If any
+cry of theirs, hoarse and broken, had reached old Jerry's dreaming, they
+spent no further breath on it. By something the same sense that made him
+aware of their need, Jerry understood rather than saw them strain
+through the falling veil of snow. It was a sharp struggle without sound
+as they won out of the wet drift to the firmer ground. They went on like
+shadows pursued by the ghost of a light that wavered with the old man's
+wavering feet. It was no night for a man to be abroad in, but Jerry
+plowed on in the drift till he found the work that was cut out for him.
+There where the snow was deepest, yielding like wool, he found the
+oldest wether of the flock, sunk to the shoulders, too feeble for the
+struggle, and still too noble for complaining. How many years had Jerry
+waited to do a good turn on the trail where he had done his worst: and
+in all these years he had lost the sense of distinction which should be
+between man and beast. He put his shoulder under the fore shoulder of
+the sheep, where he could feel the heart pound with certain fear.
+
+Jerry knew the trail, as he knew the floor of his mine, by the feel of
+the ground under him, so as he heaved and guided with his shoulder, the
+great ram grew quieter and lent himself to the effort till they came
+clear of the swale, and the sweat ran down from Jerry's forehead. But
+the bighorn could do no more. In the soft fleece of the snow he stood
+cowed and trembling. The snow came on faster, and wiped out the trail of
+the flock; he made no motion to go after. Such a death comes to the wild
+sheep of the mountains often enough: to fail from old age in some sudden
+storm, to sink in the loose snow and await the quest of the wolf, or the
+colder mercy of the drift. He turned his back to the storm which began
+to slant a little with the rising wind, and looked not once at Jerry nor
+at the hills where he had been bred. But Jerry cast his eye upon the
+sheep, which was full heavier then than he, and then up at the steep
+where his cabin stood, remembering that he had nothing there that might
+serve a sheep for food. Then he bent down again, and by dint of pulling
+and pushing, and by a dim sense that began to filter through the man's
+brain to the beast, they made some progress on the trail. They went over
+broken boulders and floundered in the drifts, where Jerry half carried
+the sheep and was half borne up and supported by the spread of the great
+horns. They crossed Pine Creek, which ran dumbly under the snow, housed
+over by the stream tangle. The flakes hissed softly on Jerry's lantern
+and struck blindingly on his eyes, but ever as they went the sheep was
+eased of his labor, grew assured, and carried himself courageously.
+Finally they came where the storm thinned out, and whole hill-slopes
+covered with buckthorn and cherry warded off the snow by springy arches,
+and Jerry drew up to rest under a long-leaved pine while the sheep went
+on alone, nodding his great horns under the branches of the scrub. He
+neither lingered nor looked back, and met the new chance of life with as
+much quietness as the chance of death. Jerry was worn and weary, and
+there was a singing in his brain. The pine trees broke the wind and shed
+off the snow in curling wreaths. It seemed to the old man most good to
+rest, and he drowsed upon his feet.
+
+"If I sleep I shall freeze," he said; and it seemed on the whole a
+pleasant thing to do. So it went on for a little space; then there came
+a shape out of the dark, a hand shook him by the shoulder, and a voice
+called him by name. Then he started out of dreaming as he had started at
+that other call an hour ago, and it seemed not strange to him, the
+night, nor the storm, nor the face of the blue-eyed man that shone out
+of the dark, but whether by the light of his lantern he could not tell.
+He shook the snow from his shoulders.
+
+"I have expected you long," he said.
+
+"And now I have come," said the stranger and smiled.
+
+"Have you brought the luck again?"
+
+"Come and see," said the man.
+
+Then Jerry took his hand and leaned upon him, and together they went up
+the trail between the drifts.
+
+"You bear me no ill-will for what I did?" said Jerry.
+
+And the stranger answered, "None."
+
+"I have wished it undone many times," said the old man. "I have tried
+this night to repay it."
+
+"By what you have done this night I am repaid," said the stranger.
+
+"It was only a sheep."
+
+"It was one of God's creatures," said the man.
+
+So they went on up the trail, and it seemed sometimes to Jerry that he
+wandered alone in the dark, that he was cold, and his lantern had gone
+out; and again he would hear the stranger comfort and encourage him. At
+last they came toward the cabin, and saw the light stream out of the
+window and the fire leap in the stove. Then Jerry thought of the mine,
+and that the stranger had brought back the luck again. It seemed that
+the young man had promised him this, though he could not be sure of
+that, nor very clear in his mind on any point except that he had come
+home again. But as he drew near, it seemed a brightness came out of the
+tunnel of the mine, a warmth and a great light. As he came into it
+tremblingly, he saw that the light came from the walls, and from the
+lode at the far end of it, and it was the brightness of pure gold. And
+Jerry smiled and stretched out his arms to it, making sure that the luck
+had come again.
+
+After the week of the Big Snow there were people in the town who
+remembered Jerry, and wondered how he fared. So when the snow had a
+crust over it, they came up by the windy canyon and sought him in his
+house, where the door stood open and a charred wick flared feebly in the
+lamp, and in his mine, where they found him at the far end of the
+tunnel, and it seemed as if he slept and smiled.
+
+"It is a worthless lode," they said, "but he loved it."
+
+So they took powder and made a blast, and with it a great heap of
+stones, shutting off the end of the tunnel from the outer air, and so
+left him with his luck and the Golden Fortune.
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE-BARKED PINE
+
+
+The white-barked pine grew on the slope of Kearsarge highest up of all
+the pines, so high that nothing grew above it but brown tufts of grass
+and the rosy Sierra primroses that shelter under the edges of broken
+boulders. The white-barked pines are squat and short, trunks creeping
+along the rocks, and foliage all matted in a close green thatch by the
+winter's weight. Snow lies on the slope of Kearsarge eight months in the
+year, deep and smooth over the pines and the jagged rocks; other months
+there are great storms of rain, and always a strong wind roaring through
+the Pass, so that, try as it might, no tree could stand erect on those
+heights. The white-barked pine stretched its body along the ground, and
+though it was four hundred years old, it was no thicker than a man's
+leg, and its young branches of seventy-five or a hundred years were
+still so supple that one could tie knots in them. It grew near the
+trail, which here crossed through a gap in the crest of the range and
+straggled on down the other side of the mountain.
+
+Along this trail went many strange things in their season. Early in the
+year, before the snow had melted at all on the high places, went a great
+lumbering bear that had a lair above Big Meadows, going down to the
+calf-pens and pig-sties of the town at the foot of Kearsarge. He ranged
+back and forth on these little excursions of fifteen or twenty miles in
+the hungry season of the year, and sometimes there were hunters on his
+trail with dogs and guns, but nothing ever came of it. When the trail
+began to run a rivulet from the drip of melting snow banks, the forest
+ranger went up the Pass, singing as he went and beating his arms to keep
+himself warm. Afterwards when the snow water was all drained off, he
+came back and mended the trail. All through the summer there would be
+parties of miners and hunters with long strings of pack mules, going
+over Kearsarge to camp in Big Meadows or on the fork of King's River.
+Sometimes there were parties of Indians with women and children, making
+very merry with berries, fish, and deer meat. Nearly always, whatever
+went over the mountain came back again, and the white pine noticed that
+the same people came again another season. In four hundred years one has
+space for observation and reflection. Gradually the pine tree grew into
+the conviction that the other side of the mountain must be much finer
+than this.
+
+"Else why," said he, "should so many people go there every year?"
+
+It was very fine, you may be sure, on the white pine's side, but the
+tree had known it all for so many years, it no longer pleased him. From
+where he grew he looked down between the ridges on a great winding canyon
+full of singing trees, with blue lakes like eyes winking between them.
+He could watch in the open places the white feet of the water on its way
+to the valley, and from the falls long rainbows of spray blown out as if
+they were blowing kisses to the white-barked pine. Below all this lay
+the valley, hollow like a cup, full of fawn-colored and violet mist,
+and the farms and orchards lay like dregs at the bottom of the cup.
+Beyond the valley rose other noble ranges with cloud shadows playing all
+along their slopes.
+
+"It is very tiresome to look at the same things for four hundred years,"
+said the white-barked pine. "If I could only get to the top, now. Do
+tell me, what is it like on the other side?" he said to the wind.
+
+"Oh!" said the wind, "it rains and snows. There are trees and bushes and
+blue lakes. It is not at all different from this side."
+
+A deer said the same thing when it slept one night under the thatch of
+the highest pine. "It is all meadows and hills, only sometimes the grass
+is not so good there, and again sometimes it is better. It is very much
+like this."
+
+"I do not believe them," said the pine to himself. "They are simply
+trying to console me for not realizing my ambition. But I am not a
+sapling any longer, let me tell you that."
+
+"At least," said a young tree that grew a little farther down, "you are
+higher up than any of us."
+
+"Of what use is that if I do not get to the top?" said the unhappy pine.
+"There is a bunch of blue flowers there, I can see it quite plainly just
+where the trail dips over the ridge. Surely I am as capable of climbing
+as any blue weed."
+
+"But," said the young pine, "weeds do not have to grow cones."
+
+"Oh, as for cones," cried the tree quite crossly, "the seasons are so
+short I hardly ever ripen any, and if I do the squirrels get them. I do
+believe I have not started a seedling these two hundred years. It is no
+use to talk to me, I shall be happy only when I have seen the other side
+of the mountain."
+
+It seems what one desires with all one's heart for a long time finally
+comes to pass in some fashion or other. That very season the
+white-barked pine went up over Kearsarge to the other side. Early in the
+summer, when the rosy primroses had just begun to blow beside the drifts
+that hugged the shade of the boulders, a party of miners went up the
+trail with a long string of pack mules burdened with picks and shovels,
+flour and potatoes, and other things that miners use. The last pull up
+the Kearsarge trail is the hardest, over a steep waste of loose stones
+that want very little encouragement to go roaring down as an avalanche
+into the ravine below. The miners shouted, the mules scrambled and
+panted on the steep, but just as they came by the last of the
+white-barked pines, one slipped and went rolling over and over on the
+jagged stones. As happens very frequently when a pack animal falls, the
+mule was not very much hurt, but the pack saddle was quite ruined.
+
+"We must do the best we can," said one of the men, and he cut down the
+white-barked pine. He chopped off the boughs, and split the trunk in
+four pieces to mend the pack. It was a very small tree though it was so
+old.
+
+"Ah! Ah!" said the tree, "it hurts, but one does not mind that when one
+is realizing an ambition. Now I shall go to the top." So he went over
+Kearsarge on mule-back quite like an old traveler.
+
+"Well, we are rid of his complaining," said the pine who stood next to
+him, "and now _I_ am the highest up of all the pines. I wonder if it is
+really so much finer on the other side."
+
+His old companion, in four pieces, was swinging down the other side of
+the mountain, and as he went, he saw high peaks and soddy meadows, long
+winding canons with white glancing waters; and heard the chorus of the
+falls. When it was night the miners lit a fire and loosened up the
+packs, and after dark, when the wind began to move among the trees and
+the fire burned low, one of the men threw a piece of the white-barked
+pine on it.
+
+"Oh! Oh!" cried the pine as the flames caught hold of it, "and is this
+really the end of all my travels?"
+
+"How that green wood sputters!" said the man; "it is not fit even for
+firewood."
+
+The next day the wind took up the ash and carried it back over the pass,
+and dropped it where the chopped boughs lay fainting on the ground.
+
+"Ah, is that you?" they said; "now you can tell us what it is like on
+the other side."
+
+"How ignorant you are," said the ash of the white-barked pine, "one
+would know you have never traveled. It is exactly like this side." But
+he could not hear what they had to say to that, for the wind whirled him
+away.
+
+
+
+
+NA'[:Y]ANG-WIT'E, THE FIRST RABBIT DRIVE
+
+
+The Basket Woman was walking over the mesa with the great carrier at her
+back. Behind her straggled the children and the other women of the
+campoodie, each with a cone-shaped basket slung between her shoulders.
+Alan clapped his hands when he saw them coming, and ran out along the
+path.
+
+"You come see rabbit drive," she said, twinkling her shrewd black eyes
+under the border of her basket cap. Alan took hold of a fold of her
+dress as he walked beside her, for he was still a little afraid of the
+other Indians, but since the time of his going out to see the buzzards
+making a merry-go-round, he knew he should never be afraid of the Basket
+Woman again. The other women laughed a great deal as they looked at him,
+showing their white teeth and putting back the black coarse hair out of
+their eyes, and Alan felt that the things they said to each other were
+about him, though they could hardly have been unpleasant with so much
+smiling. Now he could see the men swarm out of the huts under the hill,
+all afoot but a dozen of the old men, who rode small kicking ponies at a
+tremendous pace, digging their heels into the horses' ribs. They passed
+up the mesa in a blur of golden dust; westward they dwindled to a speck,
+something ran between them from man to man, now thick like a cord, then
+shaken out and vanishing in air. Then the riders dropped from their
+horses and fumbled on the ground. Alan plucked at the Basket Woman's
+dress.
+
+"Tell me what it is they do," he said.
+
+"It is the net which they set with forked stakes of willow," answered
+the Basket Woman. Now the young men and the middle-aged began to form a
+line across the mesa, standing three man's lengths apart in the sage.
+Some of them were armed with guns and others had only clubs; all were
+merry, laughing and calling to one another. They began to move forward
+evenly with a marching movement, beating the brush as they went.
+Presently up popped a rabbit from the sage and ran before them in long
+flying leaps; far down the line another bounded from a stony wash, his
+lean flanks turned broadside to the sun.
+
+Then the hunters broke into shouts of laughter and clapping, then one
+began to sing and the song passed from man to man along the line; then
+the men crouched a little as Indians do in singing, then their bodies
+swayed and they stamped with each staccato note as they moved forward.
+Rabbits sprang up in the scrub and went before them like the wind, and
+as each one leaped into view and laid back his ears in flight, the cries
+and laughter grew and the singing rose louder. The wind blew it back to
+the women and children straggling far behind, who took it up, and the
+burden of it was this,--
+
+  [Illustration: E - ya - ha hi, E - ya, E - ya - hi!]
+
+But every man sang it for himself, beginning when he liked and leaving
+off, and when a rabbit started up under foot or one over-leaped himself
+and went sprawling to the sand the refrain broke out again, but the
+words, when there were any, seemed not to have anything to do with the
+hunt, and sounded to Alan like a game.
+
+"_He-yah-hi, hi!_ he has it; he has it, he has the white, he has it!"
+
+"_Na'yang-wit'e!_" chuckled the Basket Woman. "_Na'yang-wit'e,
+na'yang-wit'e!_ It is as it was of old time, look now and you shall
+see."
+
+Alan looked at the hunters again, and whether it was because of the
+blown dust of the mesa, or the quiver of heat that rose up from the
+sand, or because the Basket Woman had laid her hand upon him, he saw
+that they were not as they had been a moment since. Now they wore no
+hats and were naked from the waist up, clothed below with deerskin
+garments. Quivers of the skin of cougars with the tails hanging down
+were slung between their shoulders, and the arrows in them were pointed
+with tips of obsidian and winged with eagle feathers. Every man carried
+his bow or his spear in his hand. Bright beads and bits of many-colored
+shell hung and glittered in their hair. Rabbits went before them like
+grasshoppers for number, and the song and the shouting were fierce and
+wild. "But what is it all about?" asked Alan.
+
+"_Na'yang-wit'e, na'yang-wit'e_," laughed the Basket Woman. "Wait and I
+will tell you the story of that song, for it is so that every song has
+its story, without which no one may understand it. It is not well to go
+too near the guns; sit you here and I will tell."
+
+So Alan bent down the sagebrush to make him a springy seat and the
+Basket Woman sat upon the ground with her hands clasped about her knees.
+
+"Long and long ago," said the Basket Woman, "when men and beasts talked
+together, there were none so friendly and none so much about the
+wickiups as the rabbit people, and some of our fathers have told that
+it was they who taught my people the game of _na'yang-wit'e_. I know
+not if that be true, but there were none so cunning as they to play it.
+And this is the manner of the game: there should be two sticks, or
+better, two bits of bone of the fore leg of a deer, made smooth and
+small to fit the palm. One of them is all white and the other has sinew
+of deer stained black and wound about it. These the players pass from
+hand to hand, and another will guess where is the place of the white,
+and he who guesses best shall win all the other's goods. It is good
+sport playing, and between man and man it comes even in the end, for
+sometimes one has the goods and sometimes another, but when my people
+played with the rabbit people it was not good, for the rabbits won every
+time. Then my people drew together, all the Indians of every sort, and
+made a great game against the rabbit people. There were two long rows
+across the mesa, and between them were all the goods piled high, all the
+beads and ornaments of shell, all the feather work and fine dressed
+deerskin, all the worked moccasins, the quivers, the bows, all the
+blankets, the baskets, and the woven mats. So they played at sunrise, so
+at noon, so when it was night and the fires were lit. So on into the
+night, and when it was morning the game was done, for the Indians had no
+more goods. _Ay-aiy!_" said the Basket Woman, "long will the rabbit
+people sorrow for that day, for it was then that the Indians first
+contrived together how they might be rid of them. Then they gathered up
+the milkweed," and she reached out and plucked a tall stem of it growing
+beside her, white flowered and slender, with fine leaves like grass.
+"Then they broke it so," and she laid it across a stone and beat it
+lightly with a stick, "then they drew out the threads soft and white,
+and so they rolled it into string."
+
+She stretched the fibre with one hand and rolled it on her knee with the
+other, twisting and twining it. "Thus was the string made and afterward
+woven into nets. The mesh of the net was just enough to let a rabbit's
+head through, but not his body, and the net was a little wider than a
+rabbit's jump when he goes fast and fleeing, and long enough to stretch
+half across the world. So on a day the net was set and the drive was
+begun as you have seen it, and as the Indians went they remembered their
+anger and taunted the rabbit people. So the song of _Na'yang-wit'e_ was
+made. Now let us go and see how it fares with the rabbit people, for as
+it was of old so will it be to-day."
+
+All this time the line of men moved steadily across the mesa toward the
+net. Now and then a rabbit turned, made bold by fright, and passed
+between the men as they marched. Then the nearest turned to shoot him as
+he ran, but it was left to the women to pick up the game. Already the
+foremost rabbits were at the net, turned back by it, leaping toward the
+hunters and fleeing again to the net. The old men closed in the ends of
+the lane where the rabbits ran about distractedly with shrill squeals of
+anguished fear. Some got their heads through the mesh but never their
+bodies, and as it is not the nature of rabbits to go backward they
+struggled and cried, getting themselves the more entangled; some blind
+with their haste came against it in mid-leap, and were thrown back
+stunned upon the sand. The men sang no more, for they had work to do,
+serious work, for on the dried flesh of the rabbits and the blankets
+made of their skins the campoodie must largely count for food and warmth
+in the winter season. They closed in to the killing and made short work
+of it with clubs and the butt ends of their guns. Then the women came up
+with the children and heaped up the great carriers with the game while
+the men wrung the sweat from their foreheads and counted up the kill.
+Most of the rabbits were the kind Alan had learned to call jack rabbits,
+but the Basket Woman picked up a fat little cotton-tail.
+
+"This is little Tavwots," said she, "and you shall have him for your
+supper." Alan's mind still ran on the story of the first drive. "But is
+it true?" he asked her, before he had given thanks for the gift.
+
+"Now this is the sign I shall give you that the tale is true," said the
+Basket Woman. "Ever since that day if one of the rabbit people meets an
+Indian in the trail he flees before him as you saw them flee to-day, and
+that is because of _na'yang-wit'e_ and the first rabbit drive." Then she
+laughed, but Alan took his share of the kill on his shoulder and went
+back across the mesa slowly, wondering.
+
+
+  [Illustration: From photograph by A. A. Forbes
+  A "WICKIUP," OR INDIAN HUT]
+
+
+
+
+MAHALA JOE
+
+
+I
+
+In the campoodie of Three Pines, which you probably know better by its
+Spanish name of Tres Pinos, there is an Indian, well thought of among
+his own people, who goes about wearing a woman's dress, and is known as
+Mahala Joe. He should be about fifty years old by this time, and has a
+quiet, kindly face. Sometimes he tucks up the skirt of his woman's dress
+over a pair of blue overalls when he has a man's work to do, but at
+feasts and dances he wears a ribbon around his waist and a handkerchief
+on his head as the other mahalas do. He is much looked to because of his
+knowledge of white people and their ways, and if it were not for the
+lines of deep sadness that fall in his face when at rest, one might
+forget that the woman's gear is the badge of an all but intolerable
+shame. At least it was so used by the Paiutes, but when you have read
+this full and true account of how it was first put on, you may not think
+it so.
+
+Fifty years ago the valley about Tres Pinos was all one sea of moving
+grass and dusky, greenish sage, cropped over by deer and antelope, north
+as far as Togobah, and south to the Bitter Lake. Beside every
+considerable stream which flowed into It from the Sierras was a Paiute
+campoodie, and all they knew of white people was by hearsay from the
+tribes across the mountains. But soon enough cattlemen began to push
+their herds through the Sierra passes to the Paiutes' feeding-ground.
+The Indians saw them come, and though they were not very well pleased,
+they held still by the counsel of their old men; night and day they made
+medicine and prayed that the white men might go away.
+
+Among the first of the cattlemen in the valley about Tres Pinos was Joe
+Baker, who brought a young wife, and built his house not far from the
+campoodie. The Indian women watched her curiously from afar because of
+a whisper that ran among the wattled huts. When the year was far gone,
+and the sun-cured grasses curled whitish brown, a doctor came riding
+hard from the fort at Edswick, forty miles to the south, and though they
+watched, they did not see him ride away. It was the third day at evening
+when Joe Baker came walking towards the campoodie, and his face was set
+and sad. He carried something rolled in a blanket, and looked anxiously
+at the women as he went between the huts. It was about the hour of the
+evening meal, and the mahalas sat about the fires watching the
+cooking-pots. He came at last opposite a young woman who sat nursing her
+child. She had a bright, pleasant face, and her little one seemed about
+six months old. Her husband stood near and watched them with great
+pride. Joe Baker knelt down in front of the mahala, and opened the roll
+of blankets. He showed her a day-old baby that wrinkled up its small
+face and cried.
+
+"Its mother is dead," said the cattleman. The young Indian mother did
+not know English, but she did not need speech to know what had happened.
+She looked pitifully at the child, and at her husband timidly. Joe Baker
+went and laid his rifle and cartridge belt at the Paiute's feet. The
+Indian picked up the gun and fingered it; his wife smiled. She put down
+her own child, and lifted the little white stranger to her breast. It
+nozzled against her and hushed its crying; the young mother laughed.
+
+"See how greedy it is," she said; "it is truly white." She drew up the
+blanket around the child and comforted it.
+
+The cattleman called to him one of the Indians who could speak a little
+English.
+
+"Tell her," he said, "that I wish her to care for the child. His name is
+Walter. Tell her that she is to come to my house for everything he
+needs, and for every month that he keeps fat and well she shall have a
+fat steer from my herd." So it was agreed.
+
+As soon as Walter was old enough he came to sleep at his father's house,
+but the Indian woman, whom he called _Ebia_, came every day to tend
+him. Her son was his brother, and Walter learned to speak Paiute before
+he learned English. The two boys were always together, but as yet the
+little Indian had no name. It is not the custom among Paiutes to give
+names to those who have not done anything worth naming.
+
+"But I have a name," said Walter, "and so shall he. I will call him Joe.
+That is my father's name, and it is a good name, too."
+
+When Mr. Baker was away with the cattle Walter slept at the campoodie,
+and Joe's mother made him a buckskin shirt. At that time he was so brown
+with the sun and the wind that only by his eyes could you tell that he
+was white; he was also very happy. But as this is to be the story of how
+Joe came to the wearing of a woman's dress, I cannot tell you all the
+plays they had, how they went on their first hunting, nor what they
+found in the creek of Tres Pinos.
+
+The beginning of the whole affair of Mahala Joe must be laid to the
+arrow-maker. The arrow-maker had a stiff knee from a wound in a
+long-gone battle, and for that reason he sat in the shade of his
+wickiup, and chipped arrow points from flakes of obsidian that the young
+men brought him from Togobah, fitting them to shafts of reeds from the
+river marsh. He used to coax the boys to wade in the brown water and cut
+the reeds, for the dampness made his knee ache. They drove bargains with
+him for arrows for their own hunting, or for the sake of the stories he
+could tell. For an armful of reeds he would make three arrows, and for a
+double armful he would tell tales. These were mostly of great huntings
+and old wars, but when it was winter, and no snakes in the long grass to
+overhear, he would tell Wonder-stories. The boys would lie with their
+toes in the warm ashes, and the arrow-maker would begin.
+
+"You can see," said the arrow-maker, "on the top of Waban the tall
+boulder looking on the valleys east and west. That is the very boundary
+between the Paiute country and Shoshone land. The boulder is a hundred
+times taller than the tallest man, and thicker through than six horses
+standing nose to tail; the shadow of it falls all down the slope. At
+mornings it falls toward the Paiute peoples, and evenings it falls on
+Shoshone land. Now on this side of the valley, beginning at the
+campoodie, you will see a row of pine trees standing all upstream one
+behind another. See, the long branches grow on the side toward the hill;
+and some may tell you it is because of the way the wind blows, but I say
+it is because they reach out in a hurry to get up the mountain. Now I
+will tell you how these things came about.
+
+"Very long ago all the Paiutes of this valley were ruled by two
+brothers, a chief and a medicine man, Winnedumah and Tinnemaha. They
+were both very wise, and one of them never did anything without the
+other. They taught the tribes not to war upon each other, but to stand
+fast as brothers, and so they brought peace into the land. At that time
+there were no white people heard of, and game was plenty. The young
+honored the old, and nothing was as it is now."
+
+When the arrow-maker came to this point, the boys fidgeted with their
+toes, and made believe to steal the old man's arrows to distract his
+attention. They did not care to hear about the falling off of the
+Paiutes; they wished to have the tale. Then the arrow-maker would hurry
+on to the time when there arose a war between the Paiutes and the
+Shoshones. Then Winnedumah put on his war bonnet, and Tinnemaha made
+medicine. Word went around among the braves that if they stood together
+man to man as brothers, then they should have this war.
+
+"And so they might," said the arrow-maker, "but at last their hearts
+turned to water. The tribes came together on the top of Waban. Yes;
+where the boulder now stands, for that is the boundary of our lands, for
+no brave would fight off his own ground for fear of the other's
+medicine. So they fought. The eagles heard the twang of the bowstring,
+and swung down from White Mountain. The vul-tures smelled the smell of
+battle, and came in from Shoshone land. Their wings were dark like a
+cloud, and underneath the arrows flew like hail. The Paiutes were the
+better bowmen, and they caught the Shoshone arrows where they struck in
+the earth and shot them back again. Then the Shoshones were ashamed, and
+about the time of the sun going down they called upon their medicine
+men, and one let fly a magic arrow,--for none other would touch
+him,--and it struck in the throat of Tinnemaha.
+
+"Now when that befell," went on the arrow-maker, "the braves forgot the
+word that had gone before the battle, for they turned their backs to the
+medicine man, all but Winnedumah, his brother, and fled this way from
+Waban. Then stood Winnedumah by Tinnemaha, for that was the way of those
+two; whatever happened, one would not leave the other. There was none
+left to carry on the fight, and yet since he was so great a chief the
+Shoshones were afraid to take him, and the sun went down. In the dusk
+they saw a bulk, and they said, 'He is still standing;' but when it was
+morning light they saw only a great rock, so you see it to this day. As
+for the braves who ran away, they were changed to pine trees, but in
+their hearts they are cowards yet, therefore they stretch out their arms
+and strive toward the mountain. And that," said the arrow-maker, "is how
+the tall stones came to be on the top of Waban. But it was not in my day
+nor my father's." Then the boys would look up at Winnedumah, and were
+half afraid, and as for the tale, they quite believed it.
+
+The arrow-maker was growing old. His knee hurt him in cold weather, and
+he could not make arrow points fast enough to satisfy the boys, who lost
+a great many in the winter season shooting at ducks in the tulares.
+Walter's father promised him a rifle when he was fifteen, but that was
+years away. There was a rock in the canyon behind Tres Pinos with a great
+crack in the top. When the young men rode to the hunting, they shot each
+an arrow at it, and if it stuck it was a promise of good luck. The boys
+scaled the rock by means of a grapevine ladder, and pried out the old
+points. This gave them an idea.
+
+"Upon Waban where the fighting was, there must be a great many arrow
+points," said Walter.
+
+"So there must be," said Joe.
+
+"Let us go after them," said the white boy; but the other dared not, for
+no Paiute would go within a bowshot of Winnedumah; nevertheless, they
+talked the matter over.
+
+"How near would you go?" asked Walter.
+
+"As near as a strong man might shoot an arrow," said Joe.
+
+"If you will go so far," said Walter, "I will go the rest of the way."
+
+"It is a two days' journey," said the Paiute, but he did not make any
+other objection.
+
+It was a warm day of spring when they set out. The cattleman was off to
+the river meadow, and Joe's mother was out with the other mahalas
+gathering taboose.
+
+"If I were fifteen, and had my rifle, I would not be afraid of
+anything," said Walter.
+
+"But in that case we would not need to go after arrow points," said the
+Indian boy.
+
+They climbed all day in a bewildering waste of boulders and scrubby
+trees. They could see Winnedumah shining whitely on the ridge ahead, but
+when they had gone down into the gully with great labor, and up the
+other side, there it stood whitely just another ridge away.
+
+"It is like the false water in the desert," said Walter. "It goes
+farther from you, and when you get to it there is no water there."
+
+"It is magic medicine," said Indian Joe. "No good comes of going against
+medicine."
+
+"If you are afraid," said Walter, "why do you not say so? You may go
+back if you like, and I will go on by myself."
+
+Joe would not make any answer to that. They were hot and tired, and awed
+by the stillness of the hills. They kept on after that, angry and apart;
+sometimes they lost sight of each other among the boulders and
+underbrush. But it seemed that it must really have been as one or the
+other of them had said, for when they came out on a high mesa presently,
+there was no Winnedumah anywhere in sight. They would have stopped then
+and taken counsel, but they were too angry for that, so they walked on
+in silence, and the day failed rapidly, as it will do in high places.
+They began to draw near together and to be afraid. At last the Indian
+boy stopped and gathered the tops of bushes together, and began to weave
+a shelter for the night, and when Walter saw that he made it large
+enough for two, he spoke to him.
+
+"Are we lost?" he said.
+
+"We are lost for to-night," said Joe, "but in the morning we will find
+ourselves."
+
+They ate dried venison and drank from the wicker bottle, and huddled
+together because of the dark and the chill.
+
+"Why do we not see the stone any more?" asked Walter in a whisper.
+
+"I do not know," said Joe. "I think it has gone away."
+
+"Will he come after us?"
+
+"I do not know. I have on my elk's tooth," said Joe, and he clasped the
+charm that hung about his neck. They started and shivered, hearing a
+stone crash far away as it rolled down the mountain-side, and the wind
+began to move among the pines.
+
+"Joe," said Walter, "I am sorry I said that you were afraid."
+
+"It is nothing," said the Paiute. "Besides, I am afraid."
+
+"So am I," whispered the other. "Joe," he said again after a long
+silence, "if he comes after us, what shall we do?"
+
+"We will stay by each other."
+
+"Like the two brothers, whatever happens," said the white boy, "forever
+and ever."
+
+"We are two brothers," said Joe.
+
+"Will you swear it?"
+
+"On my elk's tooth."
+
+Then they each took the elk's tooth in his hand and made a vow that
+whether Winnedumah came down from his rock, or whether the Shoshones
+found them, come what would, they would stand together. Then they were
+comforted, and lay down, holding each other's hands.
+
+"I hear some one walking," said Walter.
+
+"It is the wind among the pines," said Joe.
+
+A twig snapped. "What is that?" said the one boy.
+
+"It is a fox or a coyote passing," said the other, but he knew better.
+They lay still, scarcely breathing, and throbbed with fear. They felt a
+sense of a presence approaching in the night, the whisper of a moccasin
+on the gravelly soil, the swish of displaced bushes springing back to
+place. They saw a bulk shape itself out of the dark; it came and stood
+over them, and they saw that it was an Indian looking larger in the
+gloom. He spoke to them, and whether he spoke in a strange tongue, or
+they were too frightened to understand, they could not tell.
+
+"Do not kill us!" cried Walter, but the Indian boy made no sound. The
+man took Walter by the shoulders and lifted him up.
+
+"White," said he.
+
+"We are brothers," said Joe; "we have sworn it."
+
+"So," said the man, and it seemed as if he smiled.
+
+"Until we die," said both the boys. The Indian gave a grunt.
+
+"A white man," he said, "is--white." It did not seem as if that was what
+he meant to say.
+
+"Come, I will take you to your people. They search for you about the
+foot of Waban. These three hours I have watched you and them." The boys
+clutched at each other in the dark. They were sure now who spoke to
+them, and between fear and fatigue and the cramp of cold they staggered
+and stumbled as they walked. The Indian stopped and considered them.
+
+"I cannot carry both," he said.
+
+"I am the older," said Joe; "I can walk." Without any more words the man
+picked up Walter, who trembled, and walked off down the slope. They went
+a long way through the scrub and under the tamarack pines. The man was
+naked to the waist, and had a quiver full of arrows on his shoulder.
+The buckthorn branches whipped and scraped against his skin, but he did
+not seem to mind. At last they came to a place where they could see a
+dull red spark across an open flat.
+
+"That," said the Indian, "is the fire of your people. They missed you at
+afternoon, and have been looking for you. From my station on the hill I
+saw." Then he took the boy by the shoulders.
+
+"Look you," he said, "no good comes of mixing white and brown, but now
+that the vow is made, see to the keeping of it." Then he stepped back
+from them and seemed to melt into the dark. Ahead of them the boys saw
+the light of the fire flare up with new fuel, and shadows, which they
+knew for the figures of their friends, moved between them and the flame.
+Swiftly as two scared rabbits they ran on toward the glow.
+
+When Walter and Joe had told them the story at the campoodie, the
+Paiutes made a great deal of it, especially the arrow-maker.
+
+"Without a doubt," he said, "it was Winnedumah who came to you, and
+not, as some think, a Shoshone who was spying on our land. It is a great
+mystery. But since you have made a vow of brothers, you should keep it
+after the ancient use." Then he took a knife of obsidian and cut their
+arms, and rubbed a little of the blood of each upon the other.
+
+"Now," he said, "you are one fellowship and one blood, and that is as it
+should be, for you were both nursed at one breast. See that you keep the
+vow."
+
+"We will," said the boys solemnly, and they went out into the sunlight
+very proud of the blood upon their bared arms, holding by each other's
+hands.
+
+
+II
+
+When Walter was fifteen his father gave him a rifle, as he had promised,
+and a word of advice with it.
+
+"Learn to shoot quickly and well," he said, "and never ride out from
+home without it. No one can tell what this trouble with the Indians may
+come to in the end."
+
+Walter rode straight to the campoodie. He was never happy in any of his
+gifts until he had showed them to Joe. There was a group of older men at
+the camp, quartering a deer which they had brought in. One of them,
+called Scar-Face, looked at Walter with a leering frown.
+
+"See," he said, "they are arming the very children with guns."
+
+"My father promised it to me many years ago," said Walter. "It is my
+birthday gift."
+
+He could not explain why, and he grew angry at the man's accusing tone,
+but after it he did not like showing his present to the Indians.
+
+He called Joe, and they went over to a cave in the black rock where they
+had kept their boyish treasures and planned their plays since they were
+children. Joe thought the rifle a beauty, and turned it over admiringly
+in the shadow of the cave. They tried shooting at a mark, and then
+decided to go up Oak Creek for a shot at the gray squirrels. There they
+sighted a band of antelope that led them over a tongue of hills into
+Little Round Valley, where they found themselves at noon twelve miles
+from home and very hungry. They had no antelope, but four squirrels and
+a grouse. The two boys made a fire for cooking in a quiet place by a
+spring of sweet water.
+
+"You may have my rifle to use as often as you like," said Walter, "but
+you must not lend it to any one in the campoodie, especially to
+Scar-Face. My father says he is the one who is stirring up all this
+trouble with the whites."
+
+"The white men do not need any one to help them get into trouble," said
+Joe. "They can do that for themselves."
+
+"It is the fault of the Indians," said Walter. "If they did not shoot
+the cattle, the white men would leave them alone."
+
+"But if the white men come first to our lands with noise and trampling
+and scare away the game, what then will they shoot?" asked the Paiute.
+
+Walter did not make any answer to that. He had often gone hunting with
+Joe and his father, and he knew what it meant to walk far, and fasting,
+after game made shy by the rifles of cattlemen, and at last to return
+empty to the campoodie where there were women and children with hungry
+eyes.
+
+"Is it true," he said after a while, "that Scar-Face is stirring up all
+the Indians in the valley?"
+
+"How should I know?" said Joe; "I am only a boy, and have not killed big
+game. I am not admitted to the counsels of the old men. What does it
+matter to us whether of old feuds or new? Are we not brothers sworn?"
+
+Then, as the dinner was done, they ate each of the other's kill, for it
+was the custom of the Paiutes at that time that no youth should eat game
+of his own killing until he was fully grown. As they walked homeward the
+boys planned to get permission to go up on Waban for a week, after
+mountain sheep, before the snows began.
+
+Mr. Baker looked grave when Walter spoke to him.
+
+"My boy," he said, "I wish you would not plan long trips like this
+without first speaking to me. It is hardly safe in the present state of
+feeling among the Indians to let you go with them in this fashion. A
+whole week, too. But as you have already spoken of it, and it has
+probably been talked over in the campoodie, for me to refuse now would
+look as if I suspected something, and might bring about the thing I most
+fear."
+
+"You should not be afraid for me with Joe, father, for we are brothers
+sworn," said Walter, and he told his father how they had mixed the blood
+of their arms in the arrow-maker's hut after they had come back from
+their first journey on Waban.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Baker, who had not heard of this before, "I know that
+they set great store by these superstitious customs, but I have not much
+faith in the word of a Paiute when he is dealing with a white man.
+However, you had better go on with this hunting trip. Take Hank with
+you, and Joe's father, and do not be gone more than five days at the
+outside."
+
+Hank was one of Mr. Baker's vaqueros, and very glad to get off for a
+few days' hunting on the blunt top of Waban. On the Monday following
+they left the Baker ranch for the mountain. As the two boys rode up the
+boulder-strewn slope it set them talking of the first time they had gone
+that way on their fruitless hunt for arrow points about the foot of
+Winnedumah, and of all that happened to them at that time. The valley
+lay below them full of purple mist, and away by the creek of Tres Pinos
+the brown, wattled huts of the campoodie like great wasps' nests stuck
+in the sage. Hank and Joe's father, with the pack horses, were ahead of
+them far up the trail; Joe and Walter let their own ponies lag, and the
+nose of one touched the flank of the other as they climbed slowly up the
+steep, and the boys turned their faces to each other, as if they had
+some vague warning that they would not ride so and talk familiarly
+again, as if the boiling anger of the tribes in the valley had brewed a
+sort of mist that rose up and gloomed the pleasant air on the slope of
+Waban.
+
+"Joe," said Walter, "my father says if it came to a fight between the
+white settlers and the Paiutes, that you would not hold by the word we
+have passed."
+
+"That is the speech of a white man," said Joe.
+
+"But would you?" the other insisted.
+
+"I am a Paiute," said Joe; "I will hold by my people, also by my word; I
+will not fight against you."
+
+"Nor I against you, but I would not like to have my father think you had
+broken your word."
+
+"Have no care," said the Indian, "I will not break it."
+
+Mr. Baker looked anxiously after his son as he rode to the hunting on
+Waban; he looked anxiously up that trail every hour until the boy came
+again, and that, as it turned out, was at the end of three days. For the
+trouble among the Indians had come to something at last,--the wasps were
+all out of nest by the brown creeks, and with them a flight of stinging
+arrows. The trouble began at Cottonwood, and the hunting party on Waban
+the second day out saw a tall, pale column of smoke that rose up from
+the notch of the hill behind the settlement, and fanned out slowly into
+the pale blueness of the sky.
+
+It went on evenly, neither more nor less, thick smoke from a fire of
+green wood steadily tended. Before noon another rose from the mouth of
+Oak Creek, and a third from Tunawai. They waved and beckoned to one
+another, calling to counsel.
+
+"Signal fires," said Hank; "that means mischief."
+
+And from that on he went with his rifle half cocked, and walked always
+so that he might keep Joe's father in full view. By night that same day
+there were seven smoke trees growing up in the long valley, and
+spreading thin, pale branches to the sky. There was no zest left in the
+hunt, and in the morning they owned it. Walter was worried by what he
+knew his father's anxiety must be. Then the party began to ride down
+again, and always Hank made the Indian go before. Away by the foot of
+Oppapago rose a black volume of smoke, thick, and lighted underneath by
+flames. It might be the reek of a burning ranch house. The boys were
+excited and afraid. They talked softly and crowded their ponies together
+on the trail.
+
+"Joe," said Walter whisperingly, "if there is battle, you will have to
+go to it."
+
+"Yes," said Joe.
+
+"And you will fight; otherwise they will call you a coward, and if you
+run away, they will kill you."
+
+"So I suppose," said Joe.
+
+"Or they will make you wear a woman's dress like To-go-na-tee, the man
+who got up too late." This was a reminder from one of the arrow-maker's
+tales. "But you have promised not to fight."
+
+"Look you," said the Indian boy; "if a white man came to kill me, I
+would kill him. That is right. But I will not fight you nor your
+father's house. That is my vow."
+
+The white boy put out his hand, and laid it on the flank of the foremost
+pony. The Indian boy's fingers came behind him, and crept along the
+pony's back until they reached the other hand. They rode forward without
+talking.
+
+Toward noon they made out horsemen riding on the trail below them. As it
+wound in and out around the blind gullies they saw and lost sight of
+them a dozen times. At last, where the fringe of the tall trees began,
+they came face to face. It was Mr. Baker and a party of five men; they
+carried rifles and had set and anxious looks.
+
+"What will you have?" said Indian Joe's father as they drew up before
+him under a tamarack pine.
+
+"My son," said the cattleman.
+
+"Is there war?" said the Indian.
+
+"There is war. Come, Walter."
+
+The boys were still and scared. Slowly Hank and Walter drew their horses
+out of the path and joined the men. Indian Joe and his father passed
+forward on the trail.
+
+"Do them no harm," said Joe Baker to those that were with him.
+
+"Good-by, Joe," said Walter half aloud.
+
+The other did not turn his head, but as he went they noticed that he had
+bared his right arm from the hunting shirt, and an inch above the elbow
+showed a thin, white scar. Walter had the twin of that mark under his
+flannels.
+
+Mr. Baker did not mind fighting Indians; he thought it a good thing to
+have their troubles settled all at once in this way, but he did not want
+his son mixed up in it. The first thing he did when he got home was to
+send him off secretly by night to the fort, and from there he passed
+over the mountains with other of the settlers' families under strong
+escort, and finally went to his mother's people in the East, and was put
+to school. As it turned out he never came back to Tres Pinos, he does
+not come into this story any more.
+
+When the first smoke rose up that showed where the fierce hate of the
+Paiutes had broken into flame, the Indians took their women and children
+away from the pleasant open slopes, and hid them in deep canons in
+secret places of the rocks. There they feathered arrows, and twisted
+bowstrings of the sinew of deer. And because there were so many grave
+things done, and it was not the custom for boys to question their
+elders, Joe never heard how Walter had been sent away. He thought him
+still at the ranch with his father, and it is because of this mistake
+that there is any more story at all.
+
+You may be sure that, of those two boys, Joe's was the deeper loving,
+for, besides having grown up together, Walter was white, therefore
+thinking himself, and making the other believe it, the better of the
+two. But for this Walter made no difference in his behavior; had Joe to
+eat at his table, and would have him sleep in his bed, but Joe laughed,
+and lay on the floor. All this was counted a kindness and a great honor
+in the campoodie. Walter could find out things by looking in a book,
+which was sheer magic, and had taught Joe to write a little, so that he
+could send word by means of a piece of paper, which was cleverer than
+the tricks Joe had taught him, of reading the signs of antelope and elk
+and deer. The white boy was to the Indian a little of all the heroes
+and bright ones of the arrow-maker's tales come alive again. Therefore
+he quaked in his heart when he heard the rumors that ran about the camp.
+
+The war began about Cottonwood, and ran like wildfire that licked up all
+the ranches in its course. Then the whites came strongly against the
+Paiutes at the Stone Corral, and made an end of the best of their
+fighting men. Then the Indians broke out in the north, and at last it
+came to such a pass that the very boys must do fighting, and the women
+make bowstrings. The cattlemen turned in to Baker's ranch as a centre,
+and all the northern campoodies gathered together to attack them. They
+had not much to hope for, only to do as much killing as possible before
+the winter set in with the hunger and the deep snows.
+
+By this time Joe's father was dead, and his mother had brought the boy a
+quiver full of arrows and a new bowstring, and sent him down to the
+battle.
+
+And Joe went hotly enough to join the men of the other village, nursing
+his bow with great care, remembering his father, but when he came to
+counsel and found where the fight must be, his heart turned again, for
+he remembered his friend. The braves camped by Little Round Valley, and
+he thought of the talk he and Walter had there; the war party went over
+the tongue of hills, and Joe saw Winnedumah shining whitely on Waban,
+and remembered his boyish errand, the mystery of the tall, strange
+warrior that came upon them in the night, their talk in the hut of the
+arrow-maker, and the vow that came afterward.
+
+The Indians came down a ravine toward Tres Pinos, and there met a band
+of horses which some of their party had run in from the ranches; among
+them was a pinto pony which Walter had used to ride, and it came to
+Joe's hand when he called. Then the boy wondered if Walter might be
+dead, and leaned his head against the pony's mane; it turned its head
+and nickered softly at his ear.
+
+The war party stayed in the ravine until it grew dark, and Joe watched
+how Winnedumah swam in a mist above the hills long after the sun had
+gone quite down, as if in his faithfulness he would outwatch the dark;
+and then the boy's heart was lifted up to the great chief standing still
+by Tinnemaha. "I will not forget," he said. "I, too, will be faithful."
+Perhaps at this moment he expected a miracle to help him in his vow as
+it had helped Winnedumah.
+
+In the dusk the mounted Indians rode down by the Creek of Tres Pinos.
+When they came by the ruined hut where his father had lived, Joe's heart
+grew hot again, and when he passed the arrow-maker's, he remembered his
+vow. Suddenly he wheeled his pony in the trail, hardly knowing what he
+would do. The man next to him laid an arrow across his bow and pointed
+it at the boy's breast.
+
+"Coward," he whispered, but an older Indian laid his hand on the man's
+arm.
+
+"Save your arrows," he said. Then the ponies swept forward in the
+charge, but Joe knew in an instant how it would be with him. He would
+be called false and a coward, killed for it, driven from the tribe, but
+he would not fight against his sworn brother. He would keep his vow.
+
+A sudden rain of arrows flew from the advancing Paiutes; Joe fumbled his
+and dropped it on the ground. He was wondering if one of the many aimed
+would find his brother. Bullets answered the arrow flight. He saw the
+braves pitch forward, and heard the scream of wounded ponies.
+
+He hoped he would be shot; he would not have minded that; it would be
+better than being called a coward. And then it occurred to him, if
+Walter and his father came out and found him when the fight was done,
+they would think that he had broken his word. The Paiutes began to seek
+cover, but Joe drove out wildly from them, and rode back in the friendly
+dark, and past the ruined campoodie, to the black rocks. There he crept
+into the cave which only he and Walter knew, and lay on his face and
+cried, for though he was an Indian he was only a boy, and he had seen
+his first fight. He was sick with the thought of his vow. He lay in the
+black rocks all the night and the day, and watched the cattlemen and the
+soldiers ranging all that county for the stragglers of his people, and
+guessed that the Paiutes had made the last stand. Then in the second
+night he began to work back by secret paths to the mountain camp. It
+never occurred to him not to go. He had the courage to meet what waited
+for him there, but he had not the heart to go to it in the full light of
+day. He came in by his mother's place, and she spat upon him, for she
+had heard how he had carried himself in the fight.
+
+"No son of mine," said she.
+
+He went by the women and children and heard their jeers. His heart was
+very sick. He went apart and sat down and waited what the men would say.
+There were few of them left about the dying fire. They had washed off
+their war paint, and their bows were broken. When they spoke at last, it
+was with mocking and sad scorn.
+
+"We have enough of killing," said the one called Scar-Face. "Let him
+have a woman's dress and stay to mend the fire."
+
+So it was done in the presence of all the camp; and because he was a
+boy, and because he was an Indian, he said nothing of his vow, nor
+opened his mouth in his defense, though his heart quaked and his knees
+shook. He had the courage to wear the badge of being afraid all his
+life. They brought him a woman's dress, though they were all too sad for
+much laughter, and in the morning he set to bringing the wood for the
+fire.
+
+Afterward there was a treaty made between the Paiutes and the settlers,
+and the remnant went back to the campoodie of Tres Pinos, and Joe
+learned how Walter had been sent out of the valley in the beginning of
+the war, but that did not make any difference about the woman's dress.
+He and Walter never met again. He continued to go about in dresses,
+though in time he was allowed to do a man's work, and his knowledge of
+English helped to restore a friendly footing with the cattlemen. The
+valley filled very rapidly with settlers after that, and under the
+slack usage of the tribe, Mahala Joe, as he came to be known, might have
+thrown aside his woman's gear without offense, but he had the courage to
+wear it to his life's end. He kept his sentence as he kept his vow, and
+yet it is certain that Walter never knew.
+
+
+
+
+  PRONOUNCING VOCABULARY Of
+  INDIAN NAMES AND WORDS
+
+
+  CAMPOODIE (k[)a]mp'[=o]-dy). A group of Indian huts, from the
+    Spanish campo, a field or prairie. In some localities written
+    "_campody_."
+
+  HINONO (h[)i]-n[)o]-n[)o]). A legendary Indian hero.
+
+  MAHALA (m[.a]-h[:a]'l[)a]). An Indian woman, perhaps a corruption
+    from the Spanish _mujer_, woman.
+
+  MESA (m[=a]'sae). A table-land, or plateau with a steeply sloping
+    side or sides.
+
+  MESQUITE (m[)e]s-k[=e]t'). A thorny desert shrub, bearing edible
+    pods, like the locust tree, which are ground into meal for food.
+
+  NA'[:Y]ANG-WIT'E. An Indian gambling game.
+
+  OPPAPAGO (op-p[)a]-p[=a]'g[=o]). A mountain peak near Mt. Whitney.
+    The name signifies "The Weeper," in reference to the streams that
+    run down from it continually like tears.
+
+  PAHRUMP (p[.a]h-r[)u]mp'). From the Indian words _pah_, water, and
+    rump, corn, "corn-water," i. e. a place where there is water
+    enough to grow corn.
+
+  PAIUTES (p[=i]'[=u]t). The name of a large tribe of Indians
+    inhabiting middle California and Nevada. The name is derived from
+    the Indian word _pah_, water, and is used to distinguish this
+    tribe from the related tribe of Utes, who lived in the desert away
+    from running water.
+
+  PENSTEMON (p[)e]ni-st[=e]'m[)o]n). A wild flower common to the
+    lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
+
+  PHARANAGAT (ph[)a]-r[)a]n-[)a]-g[)a]t'). An Indian name of a
+    place. The meaning is uncertain.
+
+  PINON (p[.=e]-ny[=o]n'). The Spanish name for the one-leaved, nut
+    pine.
+
+  PIPSISEWA (p[)i]p-s[)u]s'[=e]-w[.a]). A wild flower common to
+    the lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
+
+  QUERN (kw[^u]rn). A primitive mill for grinding corn. It consists
+    of two circular stones, the upper being turned by hand.
+
+  SHOSHONE (sh[.=o]-sh[=o]'n[.=e]). An Indian tribe split in two by
+    the Pintes, and living north and south of them. In this book the
+    southern division only is referred to.
+
+  TABOOSE (t[.a]-b[)oo]s'). Small tubercles of the joint grass;
+    they appear on the joints of the roots early in spring, and are an
+    important item of food to the Indians.
+
+  TAVWOTS (t[)a]v-w[)o]ts'). The rabbit.
+
+  TINNEMAHA (tin-ny-m[.a]-hae'). A legendary Indian hero.
+
+  TOGOBAH (t[=o]-g[=o]-bae').             } Indian names of places. The
+  TOGONATEE (t[=o]-g[=o]-n[)a]-t[=e]').  } meaning is uncertain.
+
+  TULARE (t[=oo]-lae're). A marshy place overgrown with the bulrushes
+    known as _tule_.
+
+  VAQUERO (vae-k[=a]'r[=o]). The Spanish word for cowboy (from
+    _vaca_, a cow).
+
+  WABAN (w[)a]-b[)a]n'). An Indian name of a place. The meaning is
+    uncertain.
+
+  WICKIUP (w[)i]k'[)i]-[)u]p). An Indian hut of brush, or reeds. It
+    is often pieced out with blankets and tin cans.
+
+  WINNEDUMAH (win-ny-d[=u]'m[)a]h). A legendary Indian hero.
+
+
+
+
+  Books by Mary Austin
+
+
+  THE FLOCK. Fully illustrated by E. Boyd Smith.
+    Square crown 8vo. $2.00, _net_. Postage, 18 cents.
+
+  ISIDRO. Illustrated by Eric Pape. 12mo, $1.50.
+
+  THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN. California Sketches.
+    With Illustrations by E. Boyd Smith. 8vo, $2.00, _net_.
+    Postage, 24 cents.
+
+  THE BASKET WOMAN. Square 12mo, $1.50.
+
+
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+  CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
+  U. S. A.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Basket Woman, by Mary Austin
+
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