There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or
outcast, that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and
foraged for them, slinking savage and afraid, remembering and
mistrusting humankind, wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.

I have thought Seyavi might have had days like that, and have had
perfect leave to think, since she will not talk of it. Paiutes
have the art of reducing life to its lowest ebb and yet saving it
alive on grasshoppers, lizards, and strange herbs; and that time
must have left no shift untried. It lasted long enough for Seyavi
to have evolved the philosophy of life which I have set down at the
beginning. She had gone beyond learning to do for her son, and
learned to believe it worth while.

In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the
fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of
her experience. If she goes on crimping and uncrimping with the
changing mode, it is safe to suppose she has never come up against
anything too big for her. The Indian woman gets nearly the same
personal note in the pattern of her baskets. Not that she does not
make all kinds, carriers, water-bottles, and cradles,--these
are kitchen ware,--but her works of art are all of the same piece.
Seyavi made flaring, flat-bottomed bowls, cooking pots really, when
cooking was done by dropping hot stones into water-tight food
baskets, and for decoration a design in colored bark of the
procession of plumed crests of the valley quail. In this pattern
she had made cooking pots in the golden spring of her wedding year,
when the quail went up two and two to their resting places about
the foot of Oppapago. In this fashion she made them when, after
pillage, it was possible to reinstate the housewifely crafts.