Now they had turned into birds. No one changed them, but they became thus. They went with the darkness and therefore are black. As they flew off, they said: "We fly with the help of the wind. When the wind blows hard, we fly high: it helps us; it whirls us around." (4 songs.)[31]
[31] The last song of the cycle is: matahaik (for mat-haik) ikwêrevik, wind whirls.
V. DEER
DISCUSSION
This tale of Aqwāq-sivāre or Deer-singing was recorded at Needles, on March 21, 1903, from Yellow-thigh, known also as Enter-fire and Three-horses, a man of one of the Tobacco clans, who call their daughters Kaṭa. Yellow-thigh did not profess to have dreamed this song-myth-cycle: he said he had learned it from his older relatives. His son also knew it.
The beginning and end of the story, comprising about a quarter of its length, deal with two great felines, Jaguar and Mountain Lion. At least, that is who they are here construed as being: certain doubts of identification will be discussed in a moment. These two create for themselves a pair of Deer, who travel eastward for two nights and on the second day of their journey are ambushed by the cats who have gone ahead to lie in wait for them in the Walapai country, in order that the Walapai may learn hunting. Three-fourths of the story relate to the wanderings of the Deer, and all the songs of the cycle except the very last set are sung by them. The listener's emotional identification is thus with the Deer, rather than with their creators and destroyers; as the cycle name would also indicate. The result is that most of the tale is pervaded by a flavor of doom, such as the Mohave manage to inject, however inarticulately, into many of their mythical narratives.
The geography—after formal respects are paid to the beginning of things at Ha'avulypo—is simple: a west-to-east journey from Gabrielino or Serrano country near the sea in California to Walapai territory in upland Arizona. This includes something of a swerve first north and then south to take in Avikwame and the upper part of Mohave valley.
Biologically, the Jaguar has his regular northern limits in Sinaloa or southern Sonora. Occasional strays however roamed into Arizona and perhaps southern California. He was certainly a traditional animal to most Mohave: very few of them could ever have seen one, even in the old days; but he was not imaginary. There is some confusion as to which name designates which feline, or whether one of them may not in fact be Wolf. I have translated Numeta as Jaguar, and Hatekulye as Mountain Lion (Puma), because Nume is Wildcat, and the Jaguar is spotted dark on yellow like that smaller stub-tailed animal.[1] Hatekulye was said by the Mohave to refer to a long tail, a feature which many Indian tribes note about Mountain Lion. Etymologically, the word seems to mean "long dog"; which would of course be Wolf. In that event, nume-ta, the "real cat" or "large cat," would presumably be the commoner Mountain Lion, and Jaguar would not enter into the present story. The wobbliness of identification by the Mohave and other Yumans is increased by the fact that two other large carnivores besides the jaguar, the wolf and the bear, are not regular habitants of their lands.
[1] These are the vocabulary data: In all Yuman dialects, nume', or some obvious dialectic variant, means wildcat. In Walapai (F. Kniffen et al., Walapai Ethnography, AAA-M 42, 1935) nyimi-ta was given as mountain lion (p. 64), and hat-akwila as wolf, described by some, however, as blunt-nosed like a cat, and perhaps confused with straggling jaguars; it also was a rare animal. In Yuma, I was given xat-akūly for mountain lion (łaqol-k meaning long), to which īmtša xantš-ekuł was said to be the Cocopa equivalent. I secured no words for jaguar or wolf. In Maricopa my forms ran: name', wildcat; nam·e-t or nam·et xat-ekyulyk, mountain lion; xat-ekwily(k) or xat-ekuly, wolf. Spier, Comparative Vocabularies (Univ. N. Mex. Publ. Anthr. no. 2, 1946, pp. 104 seq.) gives these Maricopa forms: name-s, wildcat; name-t, cougar (viz., mountain lion); name-t hatagult, "cougar wolf"; name-t katca-s, jaguar; xatagult, xatagulya, wolf, ? from xatagwilg, "bigger than a dog" (xat). In the same place he gives the Havasupai forms as nyim'i, wildcat; nyimita, mountain lion; hatagwila, wolf; no form for jaguar. The weight of this comparative evidence would seem to make the heroes of the present Mohave tale Mountain Lion and Wolf rather than Jaguar and Mountain Lion. But what is perhaps surest is that two of these three carnivores did not occur regularly in Mohave territory, and Mountain Lion was probably uncommon, so that a degree of uncertainty prevailed as to the identity of all of them.