Chapter VI: Part D: They go for cane, apparently as a source of power, and quarrel

over it. The older almost kills the younger, but relents, concedes him what he wants, but then bewitches him. Omens of doom pile up effectively. The victim's state of mind may be an example of what a Mohave feels who believes himself bewitched. The magic operating too slowly, the younger brother is finally dispatched with the humiliation of having bones cut out of his body for use and play. The elder goes off with the non-kinsmen whom the uncle had left when he joined his blood nephews. This marks him as a traitor and Chemehuevi foreigner, as well as establishing two inimical groups or parties.

With part E, dealing with the posthumous birth of the hero, the main narrative begins. The hero evidences prenatal magic power, but this is a faculty often attributed by the Mohave to shamans, so that the manifestation is mythically expectable, rather than miraculous in our sense.

In the next section, F, the baby, grown to boyhood, steals his father's bone with which his foes are playing--compare the incident in Nyohaiva, 15--and sends it flying to break the western mountains and kill their inhabitants. It does not appear that these people are his foes: rather is he trying out his growing powers; and his real foes begin to foresee their end.

Then he goes on a long journey which constitutes part G. This travel is motivated by Mohave song-myth custom rather than by anything in the boy hero's situation. At the same time, it serves to give a sense of his growing up, and of having his life filled with experiences as a hero should. The Mohave narrator is in intent the teller of a near-epic, or of a novelistic romance, not of a short story which aims to cut to the essence of an action. From this point of view, the journey rounds, or properly fills out, the plot, though it contributes nothing vital. The incidents of the journey--down the Colorado from northern Mohave land to the mouth of the great river, including detours, and southeast along the Gulf shore--are characteristic. The traveler is awakened by birds, frightened by a rattlesnake, sees a horsefly, hummingbird, wild grapes, badger, jack rabbit, springs, cane, the surf, a crane, ducks, sea shells, and various other sights such as might make a boy watch or wonder. There is certainly a sense of unending interest in nature, of rapport with it, in these Mohave itineraries--a pre-Wordsworthian attitude, one might almost call it.

The narration is concise in this journey. There are 31 stages or paragraphs--between a fourth and a third of the whole story--and 54 songs out of 182, or the same proportion; but only about one-seventh or one-eighth of the length of the tale. Thus the tempo of narration is doubled during this part; which fact contributes to the fact that its interruption of the main action does not wear down plot-suspense unduly. Also, it is easier to devise long strings of simple songs of five or six words about horseflies darting or hummingbirds on their nests or cranes in the surf, than about dangers, feats, and dramatic tensions such as make up the preceding and succeeding sections.

As soon as Ahta-hane leaves the sea to turn inland--part H--the character of the telling changes. It becomes pure hero-story again, now of fairy-tale quality. The roster of place names is over with. We are somewhere in the desert--presumably in the Papaguería--but places and distances are undesignated. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the tale, in incidents and affects as well as in glimpses of unsuspected ethnography. The events comprise:

The hero hides himself from the four women.
Lets himself be found rotten but is restored.
Wins encounter with Meteor.
Wins gambling with Sun.
Through his winning makes himself attractive to his wives.

Complex as the action is here, it is thus nevertheless well tied together.

This is the longest section of Cane: about a quarter of the total narration, and this crowded with stirring events. But the songs of the section constitute only about a sixth, and the song stations or paragraphs about an eighth, of the total. There is much happening, but little of the discrete incident that best lends itself to singing about.