Mary Austin

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ From the slope where the cabin stood, the trail, which led up from the town, winding with the winding of the cañon, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 156] between man and beast. ”

“ 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 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 [Pg 149] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 34] 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 cañon's mouth across the mesa in a wash of bone-white boulders as far as it could. ”

“ One such lay in the bottom of the black cañon, 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”