She stretched the fibre with one hand and rolled it on her knee with the other, twisting and twining it. "Thus was the string made and afterward woven into nets. The mesh of the net was just enough to let a rabbit's head through, but not his body, and the net was a little wider than a rabbit's jump when he goes fast and fleeing, and long enough to stretch half across the world. So on a day the net was set and the drive was begun as you have seen it, and as the Indians went they remembered their anger and taunted the rabbit people. So the song of Na'ÿang-wit'e was made. Now let us go and see how it fares with the rabbit people, for as it was of old so will it be to-day."
All this time the line of men moved steadily across the mesa toward the net. Now and then a rabbit turned, made bold by fright, and passed between the men as they marched. Then the nearest turned to shoot him as he ran, but it was left to the women to pick up the game. Already the foremost rabbits were at the net, turned back by it, leaping toward the hunters and fleeing again to the net. The old men closed in the ends of the lane where the rabbits ran about distractedly with shrill squeals of anguished fear. Some got their heads through the mesh but never their bodies, and as it is not the nature of rabbits to go backward they struggled and cried, getting themselves the more entangled; some blind with their haste came against it in mid-leap, and were thrown back stunned upon the sand. The men sang no more, for they had work to do, serious work, for on the dried flesh of the rabbits and the blankets made of their skins the campoodie must largely count for food and warmth in the winter season. They closed in to the killing and made short work of it with clubs and the butt ends of their guns. Then the women came up with the children and heaped up the great carriers with the game while the men wrung the sweat from their foreheads and counted up the kill. Most of the rabbits were the kind Alan had learned to call jack rabbits, but the Basket Woman picked up a fat little cotton-tail.
"This is little Tavwots," said she, "and you shall have him for your supper." Alan's mind still ran on the story of the first drive. "But is it true?" he asked her, before he had given thanks for the gift.
"Now this is the sign I shall give you that the tale is true," said the Basket Woman. "Ever since that day if one of the rabbit people meets an Indian in the trail he flees before him as you saw them flee to-day, and that is because of na'ÿang-wit'e and the first rabbit drive." Then she laughed, but Alan took his share of the kill on his shoulder and went back across the mesa slowly, wondering.
MAHALA JOE
A “WICKIUP,” OR INDIAN HUT
