The Yuma contingent was even larger than the Mohave one; and the attack was made at daybreak. It was not much of a fight. The first house entered gave the alarm and the settlement scattered amid yells. Only two Cocopa were killed by the Yuma and two young women, sisters, called Night-hawk, captured by the Mohave. The latter stayed with the Yuma four days to watch the scalp dance; but no one of them having touched the corpses, they were not in need of purification, and returned home.
The whole tribe came out to escort them to the kohota’s house. There the captives were made to sit down, while the kohota stood up and sang Pleiades. Then men and women, facing each other, danced. When the sun was at its height, they stopped, ate what the kohota’s women brought out, then lay in the shade or gambled. In the afternoon the kohota called out a Chutaha singer. Soon the sounding jar began to boom, the people left off their play, and danced: three rows of young men with feathers tied in their hair, one row of old men, and two women standing separate. Then at last, as the sun was coming low, the chief came with rattles in his hand and at the end of a song shouted: “Let him sing who wishes to! Let any woman sing! I appoint no one!” Women grasped the rattles and carried them, one to a Tumanpa singer, others to those who knew Vinimulya and Vinimulya-hapacha; and one was brought to Earth-tongue to sing Raven. Soon all four of the dance series were in progress at different places, while those women who liked Nyohaiva, having persuaded an old man to sing that, began to revolve about him standing shoulder to shoulder. As fast as one song ended, the singers took up another, for the sun had nearly set, and the sweating women clamored for more, while the crowd of people stood about.
With darkness they stopped to bathe and eat and rest, then danced again, singing as before and new kinds too, while off on the side, by the light of a fire, groups of men played hiding game to the Tudhulva songs through the night. In the morning the kohota had the assemblage bathe, fed them once more, and sent them home to return two days later.
This time they danced again all evening, all afternoon, and all night. As the sun rose, the kohota, still singing, took the two captives one by each hand, and walked toward the river. Behind him came the Tumanpa and Vinimulya singers, each with his crowd, and then the mass of people in procession. The kohota, still holding the two girls, ran over the bank, and every one followed. This made Mohaves of the captives, and people were no longer afraid of them. The kohota led them back to his house, where they were to live, and said, “Perhaps these girls will marry and bear children, who, belonging to both tribes, will make peace when they grow up, and there will be no more war.” So it came in part. After two years, one of the sisters married, and soon had a child. The other continued without husband. In time, formal peace was made between the Yuma and Cocopa; whereupon the kohota announced, “Since the tribes are friends now, let us not keep Night-hawk longer.” So a party led her to the Yuma, where her kinsmen met and escorted her home. Her sister remained with her Mohave husband.
Earth-tongue was beginning to grow old. His oldest son and one daughter both had children, and his hair showed first streaks of gray. He thought more of his youth, and commenced to remember what he had dreamed then. He knew he had seen Matavilya sick and gradually dying and burned, and his ashes washed away by the river that Mastamho made to flow out of the ground. He remembered too Mastamho’s house on Avikwa’me, with the multitudes inside it in rows like little children, and Mastamho instructing them; and how he repeated after him, correctly, until Mastamho said to him, “That is right! You know it! You have it! I gave it to you!” Then he had dreamed how Sky-rattle-snake was at last inveigled from his house far in the south ocean, and his head cut off on Avikwa’me. Earth-tongue saw his joints and blood and sweat and juices turn into eggs. From these eggs hatched Rattlesnake, Spider, Scorpion, and Yellow-ant, who went off to Three-Mountains and remote places, deep in the earth or high in the sky, and from there built four roads to all tribes. When they wish a man for a friend, they bite him and take his shadow home with them. “But another road leads from their house to my heart,” Earth-tongue would say, “and I know what they do. And I intercept the shadow before Rattlesnake has led it wholly to Three-Mountains, and sing it back; I break the roads of spittle that Spider has begun to wind four times around the man’s heart; and so he lives again.”
Then Earth-tongue commenced to be sent for when people were bitten—first his relatives, then others. He would stand up at once and sing to bring a cooling wind; and, reaching the sick person, sing over him from the north, west, south, and east, but not a fifth time, lest he die. Then, sending every one away but a wife or mother, and forbidding all drink, he would sit by the patient all night, singing his four songs from time to time. In the morning the sick person used to get up well.
Fighting interrupted these pursuits. It was a summons again from the Yuma, this time against the Maricopa; and two hundred of the Mohave responded. The seventh night they were on Maricopa soil and met eighty Yuma by appointment; and in the morning advanced to attack. But the Maricopa had got wind of their presence, and when the fight opened were reënforced by a vast number of the Pima. The Mohave and Yuma exhorted one another, and though man after man fell, gave ground slowly, fighting back outnumbered.
At last the enemy ran all in a body against them. Part of the Mohave broke before the shock and fled to the north, ultimately escaping. But sixty of them formed with the Yuma on a little knoll near the Gila, where they stood in a dense mass. As the Pima and Maricopa dashed against them, they dragged man after man struggling into their midst, where he was dispatched with fierce club blows on his head or thrusts into his face. Twice, Earth-tongue leaped out to grasp an opponent and fling him over his back, thus protecting his own skull, while his companions beat the struggling foe to death. The fighting grew wilder. The Pima no longer drew back to shoot but swirled incessantly around and into the dwindling cluster at bay. At last the shouts ceased; the dust began to settle; and all but two of the Yuma, and every man of the sixty Mohave, lay with crushed head or mangled body on foreign earth.
A. L. Kroeber