Py-we-ack, the White Water
SINCE the peaks of Sky Mountains were little hills, the Ah-wah-nee-chees have lived in the deep, grassy valley the white man knows as Yo-sem-i-te. Eastward of To-co-yah, the Acorn Basket Rock, live the Mo-nos; and for a thousand years the sachems of the Ah-wah-nee-chees and the sachems of the Mo-nos smoked the pipe of peace together.
In the autumn when the Great Spirit swept through Ah-wah-nee with a breath of frost, painting the leaves all scarlet and gold and brown, scattering tufts of snow-white cloud across the blue sky, and weaving a web of bluish haze among the green pine tops, the Ah-wah-nee-chee braves prepared for the last great hunt of the year. The feast of the manzanita berries was past, and the feast of acorns, and after the autumn hunt came the feast of venison.
As the time of the feast drew near, runners were sent across the mountains, carrying a bundle of willow sticks, or a sinew cord or leaf of dried grass tied with knots, that the Mo-nos might know how many suns must cross the sky before they should go to Ah-wah-nee to share the feast of venison with their neighbors.
And the Mo-nos gathered together baskets of piñon nuts, and obsidian arrow-heads, and strings of shells, to carry with them to give in return for acorns and chinquapin nuts and basket willow, which do not grow on the farther side of Sky Mountains and which the Great Spirit has given in plenty to the children of Ah-wah-nee.
At the feast the great chiefs sat side by side and the smoke of their pipes curled into a single spiral in the air. And when all were gorged with food, they danced about the fire chanting the mighty deeds of their ancestors, or sat upon the ground playing the ancient hand game, he-no-wah, staking their arrows and their bearskin robes, their wampum and their women upon the hand that held the hidden willow stick.
Not only in their pastimes were they friends. When the Great Spirit wafted a soul to the happy land in the West, the runners went again across the Sky Mountains and the tribes gathered together to join in the funeral dance and mingle their voices in the funeral wail. In grief, as in joy, they were friends,—for a thousand years.
But the law of the mountain and the forest is not a law of peace, and it was the will of the Great Spirit that they should not dwell always in harmony.