lows more, and is full of clean winey winds. There are some
odors, too, that get into the blood. There is the spring smell of sage
that is the warning that sap is beginning to work in a soil that looks
to have none of the juices of life in it; it is the sort of smell that
sets one thinking what a long furrow the plough would turn up here, the
sort of smell that is the beginning of new leafage, is best at the
plant's best, and leaves a pungent trail where wild cattle crop. There
is the smell of sage at sundown, burning sage from campoodies and sheep
camps, that travels on the thin blue wraiths of smoke; the kind of smell
that gets into the hair and garments, is not much liked except upon long
acquaintance, and every Paiute and shepherd smells of it indubitably.
There is the palpable smell of the bitter dust that comes up from the
alkali flats at the end of the dry seasons, and the smell of rain from
the wide-mouthed canons.

And last the smell of the salt grass country, which is the beginning of
other things that are the end of the mesa trail.

THE BASKET MAKER

"A Man," says Seyavi of the campoodie, "must have a woman, but a woman
who has a child will do very well."

That was perhaps why, when she lost her mate in the dying struggle of
his race, she never took another, but set her wit to fend for herself
and her young son. No doubt she was often put to it in the beginning to
find food for them both. The Paiutes had made their last stand at the
border of the Bitter Lake; battle-driven they died in its waters, and
the land filled with cattle-men and adventurers for gold: this while
Seyavi and the boy lay up in the caverns of the Black Rock and ate tule
roots and fresh-water clams that they dug out of the slough bottoms with
their toes.

In the interim, while the tribes swallowed their defeat, and before the
rumor of war died out, they must have come very near to the bare core of
things. That was the time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of mother wit,
and how much more easily one can do without a man than might at first be
supposed.

To understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is
lived in and the procession of the year. This valley is a narrow one, a
mere trough between hills, a draught for storms, hardly a crow's flight
from the sharp Sierras of the Snows to the curled, red and ochre,
uncomforted, bare ribs of Waban. Midway of the groove runs a burrowing,
dull river, nearly a hundred miles f