Quail ran then in the Black Rock by hundreds,--so you will still
find them in fortunate years,--and in the famine time the women cut
their long hair to make snares when the flocks came morning and
evening to the springs.

Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money, in a
generation that preferred iron pots for utility. Every Indian
woman is an artist,--sees, feels, creates, but does not
philosophize about her processes. Seyavi's bowls are wonders of
technical precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with
them, but the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of
humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl.

There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck
trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate
the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket
without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you
might own one a year without thinking how it was done;
but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness. The weaver and
the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same
elements. Twice a year, in the time of white butterflies and again
when young quail ran neck and neck in the chaparral, Seyavi cut
willows for basketry by the creek where it wound toward the river
against the sun and sucking winds. It never quite reached the
river except in far-between times of summer flood, but it always
tried, and the willows encouraged it as much as they could. You
nearly always found them a little farther down than the trickle of
eager water. The Paiute fashion of counting time appeals to me
more than any other calendar. They have no stamp of heathen gods
nor great ones, nor any succession of moons as have red men of the