The Basket Woman Part 1

The Basket Woman.

by Mary Austin.

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 coa.r.s.e 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 G.o.ds 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 a.s.sumed 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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.blest human myths reveal as it were successive layers of insight and purport, taking change and color from the pa.s.sing 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 exact.i.tudes 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 Cla.s.sic 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 circ.u.mstance goes further than any amount of explanation.

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 pa.s.sed them, pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s 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.