A Telling Of The Salt Trail, Of Tse-Tse-Yote And The Delight-Makers

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Title:     A Telling Of The Salt Trail, Of Tse-Tse-Yote And The Delight-Makers
Author: Mary Hunter Austin [More Titles by Austin]

TOLD BY MOKE-ICHA

 

Oliver was so interested in his sister's account of how the corn came into the country, that that very evening he dragged out a tattered old atlas which he had rescued from the Museum waste, and began to look for the places named by the Corn Woman. They found the old Chihuahua Trail sagging south across the Rio Grande, which, on the atlas map, carried its ancient name of River of the White Rocks. Then they found the Red River, but there was no trace of the Tenasas, unless it might be, as they suspected from the sound, in the Country of the Tennessee. It was all very disappointing.. "I suppose," suggested Dorcas Jane, "they don't put down the interesting places. It's only the ones that are too dull to be remembered that have to be printed."

Oliver, who did not believe this was quite the principle on which atlases were constructed, had made a discovery. Close to the Rio Grande, and not far from the point where the Chihuahua Trail, crossed it, there was a cluster of triangular dots, marked Cliff Dwellings. "There was corn there," he insisted. "You can see it in the wall cases, and Cliff Dwellings are the oldest old places in the United States. If they were here when the Corn Woman passed, I don't see why she had to go to the Stone Houses for seed." And when they had talked it over they decided to go that very night and ask the Buffalo Chief about it.

"There was always corn, as I remember it," said the old bull, "growing tall about the tipis. But touching the People of the Cliffs--that would be Moke-icha's story."

The great yellow cat came slipping out from the over-weighted thickets of wild plum, and settled herself on her boulder with a bound. Stretching forth one of her steel-tipped pads toward the south she seemed to draw the purple distance as one draws a lady by her scarf. The thin lilac-tinted haze parted on the gorge of the Rio Grande, between the white ranges. The walls of the canon were scored with deep perpendicular gashes as though the river had ripped its way through them with its claws. Yellow pines balanced on the edge of the cliffs, and smaller, tributary canons, that opened into it, widened here and there to let in tall, solitary trees, with patches of sycamore and wild cherry and linked pools for trout.

"That was a country!" purred Moke-icha. "What was it you wished to know about it?"

"Ever so many things," said Oliver promptly--"if there were people there, and if they had corn--"

"Queres they were called," said Moke-icha, "and they were already a people, with corn of four colors for the four corners of the earth, and many kinds of beans and squashes, when they came to Ty-uonyi."

"Where were they when the Corn Woman passed? Who were the Blanket People, and what--"

"Softly," said Moke-icha. "Though I slept in the kivas and am called Kabeyde, Chief of the Four-Footed, I did not know _all_ the tales of the Queres. They were a very ancient people. On the Salt Trail, where it passed by Split Rock, the trail was bitten deep into the granite. I think they could not have been more than three or four hundred years in Ty-uonyi when I knew them. They came from farther up the river where they had cities built into the rock. And before that? How should I know? They said they came from a hole in the ground, from Shipapu. They traded to the south with salt which they brought from the Crawling Water for green stones and a kind of white wool which grew on bushes, from which they made their clothes. There were no wandering tribes about except the Dine and they were all devils."

"Devils they may have been," said the Navajo, "but they did not say their prayers to a yellow cat, O Kabeyde."

"I speak but as the People of the Cliffs," said Moke-icha soothingly. "If they called to Dine devils, doubtless they had reason; and if they made prayers and images to me, it was not without a reason: not without good reason." Her tail bristled a little as it curled at the tip like a snake. Deep yellow glints swam at the backs of her half-shut eyes.

"It was because of the Dine, who were not friendly to the Queres, that the towns were built as you see, with the solid outer wall and the doors all opening on a court, at the foot of the cliff. It was hot and quiet there with always something friendly going on, children tumbling about among the dogs and the turkeys, an old man rattling a gourd and singing the evil away from his eyes, or the _plump, plump_ of the mealing-stone from the doorways. Now and then a maiden going by, with a tray of her best cooking which she carried to her young man as a sign that she had accepted him, would throw me a morsel, and at evenings the priests would come out of the kivas and strike with a clapper of deer's shoulder on a flint gong to call the people to the dancing-places."

The children turned to look once more at the narrow rift of Ty-uonyi as it opened from the canon of the Rio Grande between two basalt columns to allow the sparkling Rito to pass where barely two men could walk abreast. Back from the stream the pale amber cliffs swept in smooth laps and folds like ribbons. Crowded against its sheer northern face the irregularly terraced heaps of the communal houses looked little as ant heaps at the foot of a garden wall. Tiers and tiers of the T-shaped openings of the cave dwellings spotted the smooth cliff, but along the single two-mile street, except for an occasional obscure doorway, ran the blank, mud-plastered wall of the kivas.

Where the floor of the canon widened, the water of the Rito was led out in tiny dikes and ditches to water the garden patches. A bowshot on the opposite side rose the high south wall, wind and rain washed into tents and pinnacles, spotted with pale scrub and blood-red flowers of nopal. Trails spidered up its broken steep, and were lost in the cloud-drift or dipped out of sight over the edge of the timbered mesa.

"We would go over the trail to hunt," said Moke-icha. "There were no buffaloes, but blacktail and mule deer that fattened on the bunch grass, and bands of pronghorn flashing their white rumps. Quail ran in droves and rose among the mesas like young thunder.

"That was my cave," said the Puma, nodding toward a hole high up like a speck on the five-hundred-foot cliff, close up under the great ceremonial Cave which was painted with the sign of the Morning and the Evening Star, and the round, bright House of the Sun Father. "But at first I slept in the kiva with Tse-tse-yote. Speaking of devils--there was no one who had the making of a livelier devil in him than my young master. Slim as an arrow, he would come up from his morning dip in the Rito, glittering like the dark stone of which knives are made, and his hair in the sun gave back the light like a raven. And there was no man's way of walking or standing, nor any cry of bird or beast, that he could not slip into as easily as a snake slips into a shadow. He would never mock when he was asked, but let him alone, and some evening, when the people smoked and rested, he would come stepping across the court in the likeness of some young man whose maiden had just smiled on him. Or if some hunter prided himself too openly on a buck he had killed, the first thing he knew there would be Tse-tse-yote walking like an ancient spavined wether prodded by a blunt arrow, until the whole court roared with laughter.

"Still, Kokomo should have known better than to try to make him one of the Koshare, for though laughter followed my master as ripples follow a skipping stone, he laughed little himself.

"Who were the Koshare? They were the Delight-Makers; one of their secret societies. They daubed themselves with mud and white paint to make laughter by jokes and tumbling. They had their kiva between us and the Gourd People, but Tse-tse-yote, who had set his heart on being elected to the Warrior Band, the Uakanyi, made no secret of thinking small of the Koshare.

"There was no war at that time, but the Uakanyi went down with the Salt-Gatherers to Crawling Water, once in every year between the corn-planting and the first hoeing, and as escort on the trading trips. They would go south till they could see the blue wooded slope below the white-veiled mountain, and would make smoke for a trade signal, three smokes close together and one farther off, till the Men of the South came to deal with them. But it was the Salt-Gathering that made Tse-tse-yote prefer the Warrior Band to the Koshare, for all that country through which the trail lay was disputed by the Dine. It is true there was a treaty, but there was also a saying at Ty-uonyi, 'a sieve for water and a treaty for the Dine.'"

[Illustration: Tse-tse-yote and Moke-icha]

The Navajo broke in angrily, "The Tellings were to be of the trails, O Kabeyde, and not of the virtues of my ancestors!" The children looked at him, round-eyed.

"Are you the Dine?" they exclaimed both at once. It seemed to bring the Cliff People so much nearer.

"So we were named, though we were called devils by those who feared us, and Blanket People by the Plainsmen. We were a tree whose roots were in the desert and whose branches were over all the north, and there is no Telling of the Queres, Cochiti, or Ty-uonyi, O Kebeyde,"--he turned to the puma,--"which I cannot match with a better of those same Dine."

"There were Dine in this Telling," purred Moke-icha, "and one puma. There was also Pitahaya, the chief, who was so old that he spent most of the time singing the evil out of his eyes. There was Kokomo, who wished to be chief in his stead, and there was Willow-in-the-Wind, the turkey girl, who had no one belonging to her. She had a wind-blown way of walking, and her long hair, which she washed almost every day in the Rito, streamed behind her like the tips of young willows. Finally, there was Tse-tse-yote. But one must pick up the trail before one settles to the Telling," said Moke-icha.

"Tse-tse-yote took me, a nine days' cub, from the lair in Shut Canon and brought me up in his mother's house, the fifth one on the right from the gate that was called, because of a great hump of arrow-stone which was built into it, Rock-Overhanging. When he was old enough to leave his mother and sleep in the kiva of his clan, he took me with him, where I have no doubt, we made a great deal of trouble. Nights when the moon called me, I would creep out of Tse-tse's arms to the top of the ladder. The kivas opened downward from a hole in the roof in memory of Shipapu. Half-awake, Tse-tse would come groping to find me until he trod on one of the others by mistake, who would dream that the Dine were after him and wake the kiva with his howls. Or somebody would pinch my tail and Tse-tse would hit right and left with his pillows--"

"Pillows?" said Oliver.

"Mats of reed or deerskin. They would slap at one another, or snatch at any convenient ankle or hair, until Kokomo, the master of the kiva, would have to come and cuff them apart. Always he made believe that Tse-tse or I had started it, and one night he tried to throw me out by the skin of my neck, and I turned in his hand--How was I to know that the skin of man is so tender?--and his smell was the smell of a man who nurses grudges.

"After that, even Tse-tse-yote saw that I was too old for the kiva, so he made me a cave for myself, high up under the House of the Sun Father, and afterward he widened it so that he could sit there tying prayer plumes and feathering his arrows. By day I hunted with Tse-tse-yote on the mesa, or lay up in a corner of the terrace above the court of the Gourd Clan, and by night--to say the truth, by night I did very much as it pleased me. There was a broken place in the wall-plaster by the gate of the Rock-Overhanging, by which I could go up and down, and if I was caught walking on the terrace, nobody minded me. I was Kabeyde, and the hunters thought I brought them luck."

Thus having picked up the trail to her satisfaction, Moke-icha tucked her paws under her comfortably and settled to her story.

"When Tse-tse-yote took me to sleep with him in the kiva of his clan, Kokomo, who was head of the kiva, objected. So Tse-tse-yote spent the three nights following in a corner of the terrace with me curled up for warmth beside him. Tse-tse's father heard of it and carried the matter to Council. Tse-tse had taken me with his own hands from the lair, knowing very well what my mother would have done to him had she come back and found him there; and Tse-tse's father was afraid, if they took away the first fruits of his son's courage, the courage would go with it. The Council agreed with him. Kokomo was furious at having the management of his kiva taken out of his hands, and Tse-tse knew it. Later, when even Tse-tse's father agreed that I was too old for the kiva, Tse-tse taught me to curl my tail under my legs and slink on my belly when I saw Kokomo. Then he would scold me for being afraid of the kind man, and the other boys would giggle, for they knew very well that Tse-tse had to beat me over the head with a firebrand to teach me that trick.

"It was a day or two after I had learned it, that we met Willow-in-the-Wind feeding her turkey flock by the Rito as we came from hunting, and she scolded Tse-tse for making fun of Kokomo.

"'It is plain,' she said, 'that you are trying to get yourself elected to the Delight-Makers.'

"'You know very well it is no such thing,' he answered her roughly, for it was not permitted a young man to make a choice of the society he would belong to. He had to wait until he was elected by his elders. The turkey girl paddled her toes in the Rito.

"'There is only one way,' she said, 'that a man can be kept from making fun of the Koshare, and that is by electing him a member. Now, _I_ thought you would have preferred the Uakanyi,'--just as if she did not know that there was little else he thought of.

"Tse-tse pulled up the dry grass and tossed it into the water. 'In the old days,' he said, 'I have heard that Those Above sent the Delight-Makers to make the people laugh so that the way should not seem long, and the Earth be fruitful. But now the jests of the Koshare are scorpions, each one with a sting in its tail for the enemies of the Delight-Makers. I had sooner strike mine with a knife or an arrow.'

"'Enemies, yes,' said Willow-in-the-Wind, 'but you cannot use a knife on those who sit with you in Council. You know very well that Kokomo wishes to be chief in place of Pitahaya.'

"Tse-tse looked right and left to see who listened. 'Kokomo is a strong man in Ty-uonyi,' he said; 'it was he who made the treaty with the Dine. And Pitahaya is blind.'

"'Aye,' said the turkey girl; 'when you are a Delight-Maker you can make a fine jest of it.'

"She had been brought up a foundling in the house of the old chief and was fond of him. Tse-tse, who had heard and said more than became a young man, was both angry and frightened; therefore he boasted.

"'Kokomo shall not make me a Koshare,' he said; 'it will not be the first time I have carried the Council against him.'

"At that time I did not know so much of the Dine as that they were men. But the day after Willow-in-the-Wind told Tse-tse that Kokomo meant to have him elected to the Koshare if only to keep him from making a mock of Kokomo, we went up over the south wall hunting.

"It was all flat country from there to the roots of the mountains; great pines stood wide apart, with here and there a dwarf cedar steeping in the strong sun. We hunted all the morning and lay up under a dark oak watching the young winds stalk one another among the lupins. Lifting myself to catch the upper scent, I winded a man that was not of Ty-uonyi. A moment later we saw him with a buck on his shoulders, working his way cautiously toward the head of Dripping Spring Canon. 'Dine!' said Tse-tse; 'fighting man.' And he signed to me that we must stalk him.

"For an hour we slunk and crawled through the black rock that broke through the mesa like a twisty root of the mountain. At the head of Dripping Spring we smelled wood smoke. We crept along the canon rim and saw our man at the bottom of it. He had hung up his buck at the camp and was cutting strips from it for his supper.

"'Look well, Kabeyde,' said my master; 'smell and remember. This man is my enemy.' I did not like the smell in any case. The Queres smell of the earth in which they dig and house, but the Dine smelled of himself and the smoke of sagebrush. Tse-tse's hand was on the back of my neck. 'Wait,' he said; 'one Dine has not two blankets.' We could see them lying in a little heap not far from the camp. Presently in the dusk another man came up the canon from the direction of the river and joined him.

"We cast back and forth between Dripping Spring and the mouth of the Ty-uonyi most of the night, but no more Dine showed themselves. At sunrise Willow-in-the-Wind met us coming up the Rito.

"'Feed farther up,' Tse-tse told her; 'the Dine are abroad.'

"Her face changed, but she did not squeal as the other women did when they heard it. Therefore I respected her. That was the way it was with me. Every face I searched, to see if there was fear in it, and if there was none I myself was a little afraid; but where there was fear the back of my neck bristled. I know that the hair rose on it when we came to tell our story to the Council. That was when Kokomo was called; he came rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, pretending that Tse-tse had made a tale out of nothing.

"'We have a treaty with the Dine,' he said. 'Besides, I was out rehearsing with the Koshare last night toward Shut Canon; if there had been Dine _I_ should have seen them.'

"It was then that I was aware of Tse-tse's hand creeping along my shoulders to hide the bristling.

"'He is afraid,' said Tse-tse to me in the cave; 'you saw it. Yet he is not afraid of the Dine. Sometimes I think he is afraid of me. That is why he wished me to join the Koshare, for then he will be my Head, and without his leave I can do nothing.'

"This was a true saying. Only a few days after that, I found one of their little wooden images, painted and feathered like a Delight-Maker, in my cave. It was an invitation. It smelled of Kokomo and I scratched dirt on it. Then came Tse-tse, and as he turned the little Koshare over in his hand, I saw that there were many things had come into his head which would never come into mine. Presently I heard him laugh as he did when he had hit upon some new trick for splitting the people's sides, like the bubble of a wicker bottle held under water. He took my chin in his hand. 'Without doubt,' he said, 'this is Kokomo's; he would be very pleased if you returned it to him.' I understood it as an order.

"I carried the little Delight-Maker to Kokomo that night in the inner court, when the evening meal was over and the old men smoked while the younger sat on the housetops and moaned together melodiously. Tse-tse looked up from a game of cherry stones. 'Hey, Kokomo, have you been inviting Kabeyde to join the Koshare? A good shot!' he said, and before Kokomo could answer it, he began putting me through my tricks."

"Tricks?" cried the children.

"Jumping over a stick, you know, and showing what I would do if I met the Dine." The great cat flattened herself along the ground to spring, put back her ears, and showed her teeth with a snarly whine, almost too wicked to be pretended. "I was very good at that," said Moke-icha.

"'The Delight-Maker was for you, Tse-tse,' said the turkey girl next morning. 'Kokomo cannot prove that you gave it to Kabeyde, but he will never forgive you.'

"True enough, at the next festival the Koshare set the whole of Ty-uonyi shouting with a sort of play that showed Tse-tse scared by rabbits in the brush, and thinking the Dine were after them. Tse-tse was furious and the turkey girl was so angry on his account that she scolded _him_, which is the way with women.

"You see," explained Moke-icha to the children, "if he wanted to be made a member of the Warrior Band, it wouldn't help him any to be proved a bad scout, and a bringer of false alarms. And if he could be elected to the Uakanyi that spring, he would probably be allowed to go on the salt expedition between corn-planting and the first hoeing. But after I had carried back the little Delight-Maker to Kokomo, there were no signs of the four-colored arrow, which was the invitation to the Uakanyi, and young men whom Tse-tse had mimicked too often went about pretending to discover Dine wherever a rabbit ran or the leaves rustled.

"Tse-tse behaved very badly. He was sharp with the turkey girl because she had warned him, and when we hunted on the mesa he would forget me altogether, running like a man afraid of himself until I was too winded to keep up with him. I am not built for running," said Moke-icha, "my part was to pick up the trail of the game, and then to lie up while Tse-tse drove it past and spring for the throat and shoulder. But when I found myself neglected I went back to Willow-in-the-Wind who wove wreaths for my neck, which tickled my chin, and made Tse-tse furious.

"The day that the names of those who would go on the Salt Trail were given out--Tse-tse's was not among them--was two or three before the feast of the corn-planting and the last of the winter rains. Tse-tse-yote was off on one of his wild runnings, but I lay in the back of the cave and heard the myriad-footed Rain on the mesa. Between showers there was a soft foot on the ladder outside, and Willow-in-the-Wind pushed a tray of her best cooking into the door of the cave and ran away without looking. That was the fashion of a love-giving. I was much pleased with it."

"Oh!--" Dorcas Jane began to say and broke off. "Tell us what it was!" she finished.

Moke-icha considered.

"Breast of turkey roasted, and rabbit stew with pieces of squash and chia, and beans cooked in fat,--very good eating; and of course thin, folded cakes of maize; though I do not care much for corn cakes unless they are well greased. But because it was a love-gift I ate all of it and was licking the basket-tray when Tse-tse came back. He knew the fashion of her weaving,--every woman's baskets had her own mark,--and as he took it from me his face changed as though something inside him had turned to water. Without a word he went down the hill to the chief's house and I after him.

"'Moke-icha liked your cooking so well,' he said to the turkey girl, 'that she was eating the basket also. I have brought it back to you.' There he stood shifting from one foot to another and Willow-in-the-Wind turned taut as a bowstring.

"'Oh,' she said, 'Moke-icha has eaten it! I am very glad to hear it.' And with that she marched into an inner room and did not come out again all that evening, and Tse-tse went hunting next day without me.

"The next night, which was the third before the feast of planting, being lonely, I went out for a walk on the mesa. It was a clear night of wind and moving shadow; I went on a little way and smelled man. Two men I smelled, Dine and Queresan, and the Queresan was Kokomo. They were together in the shadow of a juniper where no man could have seen them. Where I stood no man could have heard them.

"'It is settled, then,' said Kokomo. 'You send the old man to Shipapu, for which he has long been ready, and take the girl for your trouble.'

"'Good,' said the Dine. 'But will not the Ko-share know if an extra man goes in with them?'

"'We go in three bands, and we have taken in so many new members that no one knows exactly.'

"'It is a risk,' said the Dine.

"And as he moved into the wind I knew the smell of him, and it was the man we had seen at Dripping Spring; not the hunter, but the one who had joined him.

"'Not so much risk as the chance of not finding the right house in the dark,' said Kokomo; 'and the girl has no one belonging to her. Who shall say that she did not go of her own accord?'

"'At any rate,' the Dine laughed, 'I know she must be as beautiful as you say she is, since you are willing to run the risk of my seeing her.'

"They moved off, and the wind walking on the pine needles covered what they said, but I remembered what I had heard because they smelled of mischief.

"Two nights later I remembered it again when the Delight-Makers came out of the dark in three bands and split the people's sides with laughter. They were disguised in black-and-white paint and daubings of mud and feathers, but there was a Dine among them. By the smell I knew him. He was a tall man who tumbled well and kept close to Kokomo. But a Dine is an enemy. Tse-tse-yote had told me. Therefore I kept close at his heels as they worked around toward the house of Pitahaya, and my neck bristled. I could see that the Dine had noticed me. He grew a little frightened, I think, and whipped at me with the whip of feathers which the Koshare carried to tickle the tribesmen. I laid back my ears--I am Kabeyde, and it is not for the Dine to flick whips at me. All at once there rose a shouting for Tse-tse, who came running and beat me over the head with his bow-case.

"'They will think I set you on to threaten the Koshare because they mocked me,' he said. 'Have you not done me mischief enough already?'

"That was when we were back in the cave, where he penned me till morning. There was no way I could tell him that there was a Dine among the Koshare."

"But I thought--" began Oliver, he looked over to where Arrumpa stood drawing young boughs of maple through his mouth like a boy stripping currants. "Couldn't you just have told him?"

"In the old days," said Moke-icha, "men spoke with beasts as brothers. The Queres had come too far on the Man Trail. I had no words, but I remembered the trick he had taught me, about what to do when I met a Dine. I laid back my ears and snarled at him.

"'What!' he said; 'will you make a Dine of _me_?' I saw him frown, and suddenly he slapped his thigh as a man does when thought overtakes him. Being but a lad he would not have dared say what he thought, but he took to spending the night on top of the kiva. I would look out of my cave and see him there curled up in a corner, or pacing to and fro with the dew on his blanket and his face turned to the souls of the prayer plumes drifting in a wide band across the middle heaven.

"I would have been glad to keep him company, but as neither Tse-tse nor Willow-in-the-Wind paid any attention to me in those days, I decided that I might as well go with the men and see for myself what lay at the other end of the Salt Trail.

"I gave them a day's start, so that I might not be turned back; but it was not necessary, since no man looked back or turned around on that journey, and no one spoke except those who had been over the trail at least two times. They ate little,--fine meal of parched corn mixed with water,--and what was left in the cup was put into the earth for a thank offering. No one drank except as the leader said they could, and at night they made prayers and songs.

"The trail leaves the mesa at the Place of the Gap, a dry gully snaking its way between puma-colored hills and boulders big as kivas. Lasting Water is at the end of the second day's journey; rainwater that slips down into a black basin with rock overhanging, cool as an olla. The rocks in that place when struck give out a pleasant sound. Beyond the Gap there is white sand in waves like water, wild hills and raw, red canons. Around a split rock the trail dips suddenly to Sacred Water, shallow and white-bordered like a great dead eye."

"I know that place," said the Navajo, "and I think this must be true, for there is a trail there which bites deep into the granite."

"It was deep and polished even in my day," said Moke-icha, "but that did not interest me. There was no kill there larger than rabbits, and when I had seen the men cast prayer plumes on the Sacred Water and begin to scrape up the salt for their packs, I went back to Ty-uonyi. It was not until I got back to Lasting Water that I picked up the trail of the Dine. I followed it half a day before it occurred to me that they were going to Ty-uonyi. One of the smells--there were three of them--was the Dine who had come in with the Koshare. I remembered the broken plaster on the wall and Tse-tse asleep on the housetops. _Then_ I hurried.

"It was blue midnight and the scent fresh on the grass as I came up the Rito. I heard a dog bark behind the first kiva, and, as I came opposite Rock-Overhanging, the sound of feet running. I smelled Dine going up the wall and slipped back in my hurry, but as I came over the roof of the kiva a tumult broke out in the direction of Pitahaya's house. There was a scream and a scuffle. I saw Tse-tse running and sent him the puma cry at which does asleep with their fawns tremble. Down in the long passage between Pitahaya's court and the gate of Rock-Overhanging, Tse-tse answered with the hunting-whistle.

"There was a fight going on in the passage. I could feel the cool draught from the open gate,--they must have opened it from the inside after scaling the wall by the broken plaster,--and smelled rather than saw that one man held the passage against Tse-tse. He was armed with a stone hammer, which is no sort of weapon for a narrow passage. Tse-tse had caught bow and quiver from the arms that hung always at the inner entrance of the passage, but made no attempt to draw. He was crouched against the wall, knife in hand, watching for an opening, when he heard me padding up behind him in the darkness.

"'Good! Kabeyde,' he cried softly; 'go for him.'

"I sprang straight for the opening I could see behind the Dine, and felt him go down as I cleared the entrance. Tse-tse panted behind me,--'Follow, follow!' I could hear the men my cry had waked, pouring out of the kivas, and knew that the Dine we had knocked over would be taken care of. We picked up the trail of those who had escaped, straight across the Rito and over the south wall, but it was an hour before I realized that they had taken Willow-in-the-Wind with them. Old Pitahaya was dead without doubt, and the man who had taken Willow-in-the-Wind was, by the smell, the same that had come in with Kokomo and the Koshare.

"We were hot on their trail, and by afternoon of the next day I was certain that they were making for Lasting Water. So I took Tse-tse over the rim of the Gap by a short cut which I had discovered, which would drop us back into the trail before they had done drinking. Tse-tse, who trusted me to keep the scent, was watching ahead for a sight of the quarry. Thus he saw the Dine before I winded them. I don't know whether they were just a hunting-party, or friends of those we followed. We dropped behind a boulder and Tse-tse counted while I lifted every scent.

"'Five,' he said, 'and the Finisher of the Paths of Our Lives knows how many more between us and Lasting Water!'

"We did not know yet whether they had seen us, but as we began to move again cautiously, a fox barked in the scrub that was not a fox. Off to our left another answered him. So now we were no longer hunters, but hunted.

"Tse-tse slipped his tunic down to his middle and, unbinding his queue, wound his long hair about his head to make himself look as much like a Dine as possible. I could see thought rippling in him as he worked, like wind on water. We began to snake between the cactus and the black rock toward the place where the fox had last barked."

"But _toward_ them---" Oliver began.

"They were between us and Lasting Water,"--Moke-icha looked about the listening circle and the Indians nodded, agreeing. "When a fox barked again, Tse-tse answered with the impudent folly of a young kit talking back to his betters. Evidently the man on our left was fooled by it, for he sheered off, but within a bowshot they began to close on us again.

"We had come to a thicket of mesquite from which a man might slip unnoticed to the head of the gully, provided no one watched that particular spot too steadily. There we lay among the thorns and the shadows were long in the low sun. Close on our right a twig snapped and I began to gather myself for the spring. The ground sloped a little before us and gave the advantage. The hand of Tse-tse-yote came along the back of my neck and rested there. 'If a puma lay up here during the sun,' he whispered, 'this is the hour he would go forth to his hunting. He would go stretching himself after sleep and having no fear of man, for where Kabeyde lies up, who expects to find man also.' His hand came under my chin as his custom was in giving orders. This was how I understood it; this I did--"

The great cat bounded lightly to the ground, took two or three stretchy steps, shaking the sleep from her flanks, yawned prodigiously, and trotted off toward a thicket of wild plums into which she slipped like a beam of yellow light into water. A moment later she reappeared on the opposite side, bounded back and settled herself on the boulder. Around the circle ran the short "Huh! Huh!" of Indian approval. The Navajo shifted his blanket.

"A Dine could have done no more for a friend," he admitted.

"I see," said Oliver. "When the Dine saw you coming out of the mesquite they would have been perfectly sure there was no man there. But anyway, they might have taken a shot at you."

"And the twang of the bowstring and the thrashing about of the kill in the thicket would have told Tse-tse exactly where _they_ were," said the Navajo. "The Dine when they hunt man do not turn aside for a puma."

"The hardest part of it all," said Moke-icha, "was to keep from showing I winded him. I heard the Dine move off, fox-calling to one another, and at last I smelled Tse-tse working down the gully. He paid no attention to me whatever; his eyes were fixed on the Dine who stood by the spring with his back to him looking down on the turkey girl who was huddled against the rocks with her hands tied behind her. The Dine looked down with his arms folded, evil-smiling. She looked up and I saw her spit at him. The man took her by the shoulder, laughing still, and spun her up standing. Half a bowshot away I heard Tse-tse-yote. 'Down! Down!' he shouted. The girl dropped like a quail. The Dine, whirling on his heel, met the arrow with his throat, and pitched choking. I came as fast as I could between the boulders--I am not built for running--Tse-tse had unbound the girl's hands and she leaned against him.

"Breathing myself before drinking, I caught a new scent up the Gap where the wind came from, but before I had placed it there came a little scrape on the rocks under the roof of Lasting Water, small, like the rasp of a snake coiling. I had forgot there were three Dine at Ty-uonyi; the third had been under the rock drinking. He came crawling now with his knife in his teeth toward Tse-tse. Me he had not seen until he came round the singing rock, face to face with me...

"When it was over," said Moke-icha, "I climbed up the black roof of Lasting Water to lick a knife cut in my shoulder. Tse-tse talked to the girl, of all things, about the love-gift she had put in the cave for me. 'Moke-icha had eaten it before I found her,' he insisted, which was unnecessary. I lay looking at the Dine I had killed and licking my wound till I heard, around the bend of the Gap, the travel song of the Queres.

"It was the Salt Pack coming back, every man with his load on his shoulders. They put their hands in their mouths when they saw Tse-tse. There was talk; Willow-in-the-Wind told them something. Tse-tse turned the man he had shot face upward. There was black-and-white paint on his body; the stripes of the Koshare do not come off easily. I saw Tse-tse look from the man to Kokomo and the face of the Koshare turned grayish. I had lived with man, and man-thoughts came to me. I had tasted blood of my master's enemies; also Kokomo was afraid, and that is an offense to me. I dropped from where I lay ... I had come to my full weight ... I think his back was broken.

"It is the Way Things Are," said Moke-icha. "Kokomo had let in the Dine to kill Pitahaya to make himself chief, and he would have killed Tse-tse for finding out about it. That I saw and smelled in him. But I did not wait this time to be beaten with my master's bow-case. I went back to Shut Canon, for now that I had killed one of them, it was not good for me to live with the Queres. Nevertheless, in the rocks above Ty-uonyi you can still see the image they made of me."

 

[THE END]

NOTE:

MOKE-ICHA'S STORY

A _tipi_ is the sort of tent used by the Plains Indians, made of tanned skins. It is sometimes called a _lodge_, and the poles on which the skins are hung are usually cut from the tree which for this reason is called the lodge-pole pine. It is important to remember things like this. By knowing the type of house used, you can tell more about the kind of life lived by that tribe than by any other one thing. When the poles were banked up with earth the house was called an _earth lodge_. If thatched with brush and grass, a _wickiup_. In the eastern United States, where huts were covered with bark, they were generally called _wigwams_. In the desert, if the house was built of sticks and earth or brush, it was called a _hogan_, and if of earth made into rude bricks, a _pueblo_.

The Queres Indians live all along the Rio Grande in pueblos, since there is no need of their living now in the cliffs. You can read about them at Ty-uonyi in "The Delight-Makers."

A _kiva_ is the underground chamber of the house, or if not underground, at least without doors, entered from the top by means of a ladder.

_Shipapu_, the place from which the Queres and other pueblo Indians came, means, in the Queres language, "Black Lake of Tears," and according to the Zuni, "Place of Encompassing Mist," neither of which sounds like a pleasant place to live. Nevertheless, all the Queres expect to go there when they die. It is the Underworld from which the Twin Brothers led them when the mud of the earliest world was scarcely dried, and they seem to have gone wandering about until they found Ty-uonyi, where they settled.

The stone puma, which Moke-icha thought was carved in her honor, can still be seen on the mesa back from the river, south of Tyuonyi. But the Navajo need not have made fun of the Cliff-Dwellers for praying to a puma, since the Navajos of to-day still say their prayers to the bear. The Navajos are a wandering tribe, and pretend to despise all people who live in fixed dwellings.

The "ghosts of prayer plumes," which Moke-icha saw in the sky, is the Milky Way. The Queres pray by the use of small feathered sticks planted in the ground or in crevices of the rocks in high and lonely places. As the best feathers for this purpose are white, and as everything is thought of by Indians as having a spirit, it was easy for them to think of that wonderful drift of stars across the sky as the spirits of prayers, traveling to Those Above. If ever you should think of making a prayer plume for yourself, do not on any account use the feathers of owl or crow, as these are black prayers and might get you accused of witchcraft.

The _Uakanyi_, to which Tse-tse wished to belong, were the Shamans of War; they had all the secrets of strategy and spells to protect a man from his enemies. There were also Shamans of hunting, of medicine and priestcraft.

It was while the Queres were on their way from Shipapu that the Delight-Makers were sent to keep the people cheerful. The white mud with which they daubed themselves is a symbol of light, and the corn leaves tied in their hair signify fruitfulness, for the corn needs cheering up also. There must be something in it, for you notice that clowns, whose business it is to make people laugh, always daub themselves with white.

[The end]
Mary Hunter Austin's short story: Telling Of The Salt Trail, Of Tse-Tse-Yote And The Delight-Makers

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