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windows. Smiling, I leaned in her direction. She smiled back.

We listened to the laughter, to the hum of conversations. She told me, she didn’t know why Hoopa Indians always found so much to laugh about. Once again I sensed her isolation. Even the children were staying away.

Gradually we opened up to each other.

She too was staring at that beautiful flat-bottomed basket with its wide band of geometric pattern. Although, unlike the curious White lady, she didn’t have to approach it, to look inside it. She knew how the assistant must place the rocks so the acorn soup continued to cook and the valuable basket wasn’t damaged. I prayed that someone would bring her a bowl of the gruel later.

Turning to me, she muttered, “Yes the Jump Dance is to make things nice, to make things grow. It’s for salmon, for health, for crops.” After a pause, she added:

“I was in the Jump Dance down on the river at the old Brooks place.”

“When was that?,” I asked, keenly interested.

“1904,” she replied.

I thought to myself, wasn’t that the Jump Dance the unusual Yurok intellectual Robert Spott had described for young Alfred Kroeber in such rich detail?

“Robert Spott, he knew how to talk well ,“ she added abruptly. I flinched in surprise. It was as If she were reading my mind. I hadn’t mentioned Robert Spott’s name out loud.

By this date, unsolicited, three Indians—Florence Shaughnessy, Frank Douglas, and the river guide Ike McCovey—had commented on this ability of Robert Spott to speak English. As had Alfred Kroeber and Erik Erikson decades earlier. It was something that was still remembered, that was still important, in the 1960’s. Also, on the first day I had met Harry Roberts, he told me, “Robert Spott talked ‘well’ because his adoptive father, the great Captain Spott made certain he stayed in White school long enough to learn how to.” It was Robert Spott’s linguistic skill, allied to his extensive Indian education and remarkable memory that had helped make possible the many early documents that, today, mostly molder away on dusty library shelves.

Tomorrow the wind coming up the Trinity River will blow over a deserted dance ground. The fall salmon and steelhead will run upriver under a silent river-terrace. And this old Yurok lady will be on her way back home, near the mouth of the Klamath River. Her son will drive her there.

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