But the Indians had no treacherous intentions whatever, and continued to share with the shipwrecked unfortunates their own scanty provision. Fever, hunger and despair, reduced the eighty men who had come ashore, to less than twenty. All but Cabeça and two others who were helpless from fever at last departed on the desperate adventure of trying to find their way overland to Mexico. One of the two left behind died and the other ran away in delirium, leaving Cabeça de Vaca alone, as the slave of the Indians.
He discovered presently that he was of little use to them, for though he could have cut wood or carried water, this was squaws' work, and should a man be seen doing it every tradition of the tribe would be upset. He was of no use as a hunter, for he had not the hawk-like sight of an Indian or the Indian instinct for following a trail. He could dig out the wild roots they ate, which grew among canes and under water, but this was laborious and painful work, which made his hands bleed. With tools, or even metal with which to make them, he might have made himself the most useful member of the tribe, but as it was, he was even poorer than the wretched people among whom he lived, for they knew how to make the most of what was in the country, and he had no such training.
The lonely Spaniard studied their language and customs diligently. He found that they made knives and arrows of shell, and clothing of woven fibers of grass and leaves, and deerskin. They went from one part of the country to another according to the food supply. In prickly pear time they went into the cactus region to gather the fruit, on which they mainly lived during the season. When pinon nuts were ripe they went into the mountains and gathered these, threshing them out of the cones to be eaten fresh, roasted, or ground into flour for cakes baked on flat stones. They had no dishes except baskets and gourd-rinds, and their houses were tent-poles covered with hides. When a squaw wished to roast a piece of meat she thrust a sharp stick through it. When she wished to boil it she filled a large calabash-rind with water, put in it the materials of her stew, and threw stones into the fire to heat. When very hot these stones were raked out with a loop of twisted green reed or willow-shoots and put into the water. When enough had been put in to make the water boil, it was kept boiling by changing the cooled stones for hotter ones until the meat was cooked.
Many of the baskets made by the squaws were curiously decorated, and made of fine reed or fiber sewed in coils with very fine grass-thread, so that they were both light and strong. There were cone-shaped carrying-baskets borne on the back with a loop passed around the forehead; in these the squaws carried grain, fruit, nuts or occasionally babies. There were baskets for sifting grain and meal, and a sort of flask that would hold water. The materials were gathered from mountains, valleys and plains over a range of hundreds of miles—grasses here, bark fiber there, dyes in another place, maguey leaves in another, and for black figures in decoration the seed-pods called "cat's claws" or the stems of maiden-hair fern. A design was not copied exactly, but each worker made the pattern in the same general form and sometimes improved on it. There was a banded pattern in a diamond-shaped criss-cross almost exactly like the shaded markings on a rattlesnake-skin. The Indians believed in a goddess or Snake-Mother, who lived underground and knew about springs; and as water was the most important thing in that land of deserts, they showed respect to the Snake-Mother by baskets decorated in her honor. Another design showed a round center with four zigzag lines running to the border. This was intended for a lake with four streams flowing out of it, widening as they flowed; but it looked rather like a cross or a swastika. There was a design in zigzags to represent the lightning, and almost all the patterns had to do in some way with lakes, rivers, rain, or springs.
As the exile of Spain began to know the country he sometimes ventured on journeys alone, without the tribe, to the north, away from the coast. In these wanderings he met with tribes whose language was not wholly strange, but whose customs and occupations were not exactly like those of his own Indians. Once he found a village of deerskin tents where the warriors were painting themselves with red clay, for a dance. He remembered that the squaws, when he came away some days before, were in great lamentation because they had no red paint for their baskets. He took out a handful of shells and found that these Indians were only too pleased to pay for them in red earth, deerskin, and tassels of deer hair dyed red. They would hardly let him go till he promised to come again and bring them more shells and shell beads. This suggested to him a way in which he might make himself of use and value.
Longer and longer journeys he took, trading shells for new dyes, flint arrow-heads, strong basket-reeds, and hides and furs of all sorts, learning more and more of the country as he trafficked. Once he found families living in a house built of stone and mud bricks, in the crevice of a cliff, getting water from a little brook at the base of it, and raising corn and vegetables along the waterside. Their houses had no real doors. They had trap-doors in the roof, reached by a notched tree-trunk inside and one outside. The corn that grew in the little farm at the foot of the cliff was of different colors, red, yellow, blue and white. Each kind was put in a separate basket. Each kind of meal was made separately into thin cakes cooked on a very hot flat stone. A handful of the batter was slapped on with the fingers so deftly that though the cake was thin, crisp and even, the cook never burned herself. The people were always on their guard against roving bands of Indians who lived in tipis, or wigwams, and were likely to attack the cliff-dwellers at any moment.
Cabeça de Vaca became interested in these wandering tribes, and moved north to see what they were like. He found them quite ready to trade with him and extremely curious about his wares. They had hides upon their tipis of a sort he had not seen before, not smooth, but covered with curly brown fur like a big dog's. It was some time before the Spanish trader made out what sort of animal wore such a skin, though he knew at first sight that it must be a very large one. Finally the old medicine man with whom he was talking began to make sketches on the inside of one of the great robes. The Spaniard in his turn made sketches, drawing a horse, a goat, a bear, a wolf, a bull. When he drew the bull the old Indian got excited. He declared that that was very like the animal they hunted, but that their bulls had great humped shoulders like this—he added a high curved line over the back. Cabeça came to the conclusion that it must be some sort of hunchbacked cow, but whatever it was, the curly furry hide was comforting on cold nights. The old Indian told him a few days after that some of the young men had just come in with news of a herd of these great animals moving along one of their trails, and if the white men cared to travel with them he could see them for himself.
It did not take the trader long to make up his mind. He went with the Indians at the slow trot which covers so many miles in a day, and sooner than they had expected, they saw from a little rise in the ground a vast herd of slowly moving animals which at first the white man took for black cattle. But they were not cattle.
There was the huge hump with the curly mane, and there were the short horns and slender, neat little legs which had seemed so out of proportion in the old Indian's sketch. From their point of view they could see the hunters cut out one animal and attack him with their arrows and lances without arousing the fears of the rest. The creatures moved quietly along, grazing and pawing now and then, darkening the plain almost as far as the eye could see. The trader spent several days with the tribe, and when he went south again he had a bundle of hides so large that he had to drag it on a kind of hurdle made of poles. He had helped the Indians decorate some of the hides they had, and whenever he did this he wrote his own name, the date, and a few words, somewhere on the skin.