Earth-tongue went into battle with much inward excitement, but little fear, and listened obediently to the admonitions of his seasoned kinsmen. Even before arrows could reach, the shooting began. Before long, arrows flew feebly by, and then it became necessary to twist sharply sidewise to avoid them. At this distance the two lines shot at each other, taunting and leaping, while, in the rear, half-grown boys and a few old men helped to gather up and replenish bundles of arrows. What the Halchidhoma lacked in frequency of shots, they partly made up in greater openness of target; and before long, struck men began to withdraw temporarily on each side. The Mohave could have made short work by charging in a body with their clubs; but they had asked for an open stand-up fight, and besides found pleasure in the game, which fell increasingly to their advantage. For hours they sweated in the sun, gradually and irregularly forcing the Halchidhoma line back, and shouting whenever one of the foe was carried off.
At last the leaders called that it was time to cease, and defied the foe to resume in the same spot on the fourth day. Then they trooped victoriously home, without a fatality, though a few, weakened from bleeding or with parts of shafts broken off in them, were carried on the backs of companions. Earth-tongue had been struck twice. One arrow had grazed the skin of his flank when he became over-confident and failed to bend his body with sudden enough vigor. Then, one of three shafts that came toward him almost at once had imbedded itself a finger-joint’s depth in the front of his thigh, and hung there until he hastily plucked it out. Neither wound bled profusely, especially after a bit of charcoal was reached him to rub in for stanching; and he returned stiff, tired, and proud. The Halchidhoma losses were severer. None of them appeared to have fallen dead on the field; but at least half had been struck, and a number so vitally or often that they would die.
For four days the Mohave treated their wounds, talked of the next battle, and ate their hosts’ provisions. Then they set out. But the Halchidhoma had sent their families down-stream and taken up a new stand farther back. Here they joined once more, and the fight went on as before but with ever more preponderance to the Mohave, until these, wearied by the noon sun, contemptuously drew off to the river to drink. The Halchidhoma seized the occasion to run to their children and women, set these across the river, and strike east over the desert. When the victors reappeared, the fugitives were far. The Mohave thereupon decided to occupy their fields and houses until the dispossessed might come to drive them out; which the latter, by this time safely received among the Maricopa far across the desert on the Gila, had no intention of doing. However, the Mohave lived nearly a year in the land of the Halchidhoma, adjusting themselves as they could; and returned only as the next flood and planting time approached, taking the Kohuana along to settle among themselves, where these enforced visitors remained for some years.
Before the stay in the Halchidhoma country was over, Earth-tongue and Kata had drifted apart. The derangement of accustomed residence, enforced with others, Earth-tongue’s pride as an incipient warrior, the fact that no child was born, all contributed to separate them increasingly. Each formed new interests while vaguely jealous of the other’s; and in the end Earth-tongue brought not Kata but another girl to his parents’ house.
Soon after his first child was born,—a daughter, called Owich like the sisters of himself, his father, and his father’s father,—Earth-tongue grew restless for adventure, and, the time being one of peace, joined himself to those that would travel. Ten or twenty in number, they would go out: too few to excite apprehension of treacherous intent, too many to be made away with safely. Each carried maize, water, his weapons, and whatever he might wish to trade. On shorter journeys they prided themselves on being able to travel at a trot four days without food, and with only such drink as the desert might afford, chewing perhaps a bit of willow as a relief for the dryness of their mouths. But these hardships they underwent mostly in emulation, or toward the last of a return with Mohave land before them. Again and again Earth-tongue went down the river, through Yuma, Kamia, Halyikwamai, and Cocopa settlements, to the flat shores of the salt sea; east into the Walapai mountains and down into the chasm of the Havasupai, where he saw strange-speaking and strangely dressed Hopi and Navaho, heard of their stone towns, and brought home their belts and, once, a blanket of white cotton.
To the northwest he visited the Chemehuevi and other Paiutes about their scattered springs, and ate their foods of seeds and wild fruits, some familiar, some strange; and mescal and sometimes deer. Theirs was a strange language too, but he had heard a little from the few Chemehuevi who lived at the northern extreme of Mohave valley and beyond it on Cotton-wood island; and many of his companions could speak more. They went from Paiute band to band, to where the river no longer flows from the north but from the east, beyond the Muddy, and found each group like the last in customs, but of new foods. They listened to the stories of the Paiute, who dreamed of the mountain Nüvant as the Mohave do of Avikwa’me, and to whom they sang their songs, which the Paiute wished to hear.
To the west were many tribes, all different tongued, but mostly easy to understand a little when one knew Chemehuevi. There were the Vanyume on their river that dried into nothing and left them always half-starved; the Hanyuvecha in the range of great pines beyond; northward, about Three-Mountains, the Kuvahye, adjoined by other mountaineers, little tribes, unwarlike, friendly to the visitors, some of whom they hailed as old friends. They offered no smoke, but gave tobacco crushed in a mortar with shells; which Earth-tongue and his companions ate in courtesy, and were nearly all made to sweat and vomit violently thereby. From a crest near here they looked over a vast plain beyond, in which shimmered what one of his companions said were large lakes. He had been there and seen the people, who lived in long houses of rushes,—a hundred fires in line within one house,—and ate rush roots, and slept on rushes, and at night worms came up and troubled the sleepers. And in the tumbled range on which they stood, but beyond them, were the Like-Mohave, a very little like them in speech, but naked, unkempt, and poor. Them Earth-tongue saw, but not in their own houses.
And going out again, he traversed the land of the tribes to the southwest, unfriendly, half-sullen, and dangerous to small parties. The Hakwicha dug wells and ate mesquite; beyond them were people in the mountains, about hot springs, who sang to turtle shells instead of gourds; and still farther, stretching down to the ocean that one could see from their peaks, lived the Foreign-Kamia, speaking almost like the real Kamia, but knowing nothing of farmed foods, eating rattle-snakes, and a hostile lot to venture among. They had some grudges to pay off to the Mohave for plundered settlements, but were not a people to travel far from their homes even for revenge.
The Yavapai, too, Earth-tongue came to know, though theirs was not an attractive country to visit. They dreamed and sang like the Mohave, but of other animals; and some of their stories were the same. Their neighbors and friends were the Roaming-Yavapai, a small-statured, sharp-eyed people, wearing their hair flowing, fierce lance fighters, taciturn, violent, untrustworthy; but inclined favorably to the Mohave in spite of the utter unintelligibility of their speech because they knew them through the Yavapai as traditionally hostile, like themselves, against the Maricopa and that people of innumerable houses, the Pima. These last Earth-tongue never came to know save on the field of battle.
One early summer, as the river was flooding, its rise suddenly stopped. The inundation being wont to grow in interrupted stages the people waited quietly for its resumption. But the water fell back and back. Then some began to declare that it might not rise again, and advised planting at once before the moist ground should dry: but others pointed out that high water was yet due, and had often come late, and that present planting in that case would cause the seed to wash out and be lost. So nearly all waited with concern and much discussing; until finally the river was wholly back within its banks and dropping decisively. Then they knew that nothing more was to be hoped for that season, and men and women hastened to save what they might of the crop. But many of the fields had remained untouched by water, and most of the others were already half dry. In some, the maize and beans never sprouted; in some they came up indeed, but soon wilted; and though the women carried water in jars, only small patches could be effectively served in this hand fashion.