NA'ŸANG-WIT'E, THE FIRST RABBIT
DRIVE
NA'ŸANG-WIT'E, THE FIRST RABBIT DRIVE
The Basket Woman was walking over the mesa with the great carrier at her back. Behind her straggled the children and the other women of the campoodie, each with a cone-shaped basket slung between her shoulders. Alan clapped his hands when he saw them coming, and ran out along the path.
"You come see rabbit drive," she said, twinkling her shrewd black eyes under the border of her basket cap. Alan took hold of a fold of her dress as he walked beside her, for he was still a little afraid of the other Indians, but since the time of his going out to see the buzzards making a merry-go-round, he knew he should never be afraid of the Basket Woman again. The other women laughed a great deal as they looked at him, showing their white teeth and putting back the black coarse hair out of their eyes, and Alan felt that the things they said to each other were about him, though they could hardly have been unpleasant with so much smiling. Now he could see the men swarm out of the huts under the hill, all afoot but a dozen of the old men, who rode small kicking ponies at a tremendous pace, digging their heels into the horses' ribs. They passed up the mesa in a blur of golden dust; westward they dwindled to a speck, something ran between them from man to man, now thick like a cord, then shaken out and vanishing in air. Then the riders dropped from their horses and fumbled on the ground. Alan plucked at the Basket Woman's dress.
"Tell me what it is they do," he said.
"It is the net which they set with forked stakes of willow," answered the Basket Woman. Now the young men and the middle-aged began to form a line across the mesa, standing three man's lengths apart in the sage. Some of them were armed with guns and others had only clubs; all were merry, laughing and calling to one another. They began to move forward evenly with a marching movement, beating the brush as they went. Presently up popped a rabbit from the sage and ran before them in long flying leaps; far down the line another bounded from a stony wash, his lean flanks turned broadside to the sun.
Then the hunters broke into shouts of laughter and clapping, then one began to sing and the song passed from man to man along the line; then the men crouched a little as Indians do in singing, then their bodies swayed and they stamped with each staccato note as they moved forward. Rabbits sprang up in the scrub and went before them like the wind, and as each one leaped into view and laid back his ears in flight, the cries and laughter grew and the singing rose louder. The wind blew it back to the women and children straggling far behind, who took it up, and the burden of it was this,—