CHAPTER XVIII

THE DANCE OF THE JEMEZ INDIANS

1

One of the poets at Santa Fe had decided to return East and finish a University course which he had broken by a year of freedom and poetry in New Mexico. So Wilfrid Ewart bought his horse, an Indian pony, white, small-footed, and wiry, and named as it were facetiously, "George." He proved too short for a man of six feet two, but except at starting, when he sometimes refused to budge for five minutes, he went as well as the other two horses, Billy and Buck. He proved to be branded with the mark of the Santo Domingo Indians, and there were many horses of his size and gait in their pueblo. Every time we met any of the Indians, however, they would ask suspiciously, "Where you get that horse?" George gave us some amusement, for he jumped sideways with all four feet at once when a car passed him, and though slow by habit he would upon occasion jump to an impulse that he was in a race with my impetuous Billy. The mile home from the post office we would sometimes find ourselves in a wild gallop, chased for moments by starved dogs who drove Billy to additional excitement.

We had a pleasant autumn at Santa Fe, pierced though it was by shafts of winter cold. The sun heat was great, but there was frost every night. Ewart had brought literary work, and he sat with his papers in a profuse sun bath; he became deeply sunburned, and the skin peeled from the back of his writing hand. But it was good for him. Arriving in indifferent health, it was remarkable how he improved.

It was unfortunate that winter came so rapidly. Though so far South we began to have weather much colder than that of New York--and the snow from the mountain summits crept lower. Snow swept down from the heights, driven by the wind into our valleys. There were several October days when the whole desert was clad in unnatural white. Then the sun came out and, like magic, uncovered the desert again, and the thirsty sand drank up what dissolved, and soon all was as before.

In a pleasant interlude between snowstorms in early November we set off for the Jemez Dance, the annual trading fair and _fiesta_ of November 12. My wife and I were on Buckskin and Billy. As we took no pack-horse along with us we had all our impedimenta strapped on to our saddles. We had been told we should find no water or provisions on the way, and so we carried more than we needed to have done. Ewart had four pounds of ham tied to the pommel of his saddle as well as a waterproof and toilet case, and his saddle pockets behind him were stuffed.

I carried bags before and behind. And Buck also was much encumbered, though his rider was so much lighter. Buck made a bad start by falling into the _Acequia Madre_, the irrigation ditch, with fore feet in front of a wretched rustic bridge and hind legs hanging in air. In this posture I had to undo his girths and liberate him from his packs ere we could get him on to his feet. He started, therefore, in a melancholy and cautious mood, and we walked him a good deal of the way. Indeed, in the evening, convinced that he was suffering from sprain, I persuaded Mrs. Graham to ride Billy whilst I led Buck by the reins. In this way we reached La Cienega and put up at a Mexican farm where we were very happily regaled, though we had to go to bed at eight o'clock and all slept in the same room. Next morning Buckskin showed that he had no sprain. I had led the horses to water and had returned to set our coffee-pot on the Mexicans' kitchen fire, and I had left them barely ten minutes when the farmer's wife came in and said two of the horses had got out of the inclosure. They were Billy and Buck. Lightly clad as I was, I threw my saddle on George and bridled him and went off at once. For I knew that the two miscreants would make for home at a good pace. George proved his worth that morning. Chasing other horses was what he was made for. He went like the wind after these horses. In a mile we got them in view; they were trotting steadily together; in a mile and a half they stopped and turned to consider us, and Buck stopped the hesitation by breaking into a hearty canter joined by Billy. But we overhauled them, and George, without any guidance from me, turned them both. If only I had been a cowboy and could have hauled the rope which I held in my hand! Alas, I missed the chance, and all three horses settled down for a cross-country gallop. I reflected that we should thus gallop up the main street of Santa Fe and up the Canon Road and into our familiar yard at noon. It was a perplexing thought. I slowed down George, therefore, and noticed that Billy and Buck did the same. I hastened again, they hastened; slowed, they slowed. But at five miles from La Cienega my second opportunity came, and I took it. A deep _arroyo_ was spanned by a bridge. It could be reached across country without my appearing to pursue the horses. At the bridge I dismounted and idled and appeared to be interested in the view whilst the two runaways approached. Both suddenly stopped and stared. Billy raised his head very high and kicked out friskily with his hind legs. Buck made a wily detour. But I showed not the least interest, so they began to graze here and there where a tuft of grass appeared. I thereupon made a cup of my hand as if it held corn, and approached Billy, calling him, keeping the hand out of the view of the inquisitive, greedy, but very crafty Buckskin. Billy, however, intoxicated by freedom and the morning air, cut a wild cantrip and fled. But Buck really thought I had corn, and when I approached him I got near enough to put a rope over his neck. Secured and tied to the bridge, he looked a repentant horse. It took another ten minutes to capture Billy, then I changed the saddle on to his back and started all three back to Cienega at a smart trot. Then of course I could reflect how pleasant an adventure it was, the best two hours of the day. It was a pity, however, that the horses should lose their freshness before the real riding of the morning commenced.

We all set off at once for Penya Blanca, on the Rio Grande. We had hoped to ford the river that day, but now hope of that was gone. Yet it was a very pleasant day's riding, following over sand and bowlders and running water the scores of zig-zags of stream which threatened a profound ravine. All was gray. Tumultuous piles of rock stared down at us as we clattered along--the horses lapped at the water and made deep hoof-marks in the wet sand. There were no birds, no flowers, no evergreens--no life but that of ourselves and the sunlight on the gray pebbles. Even the fire which we made of water-washed wood burned with invisible flames, and the steam did not show till the water raised the lid of our coffeepot and boiled over. We sat together in the early afternoon, quaffed coffee, and ate down our weight of provisions. We had even got hay for our horses at a farmhouse, and we eased their girths and fed them a little and watered them ere we resumed our way.

We reached Penya Blanca at night, led o'er the moor by flickering lights. We nearly went to the Indian village of Cochiti, as its lights on the other side of the Rio Grande beckoned much more certainly. But after traversing a mile of deep sand we turned our horses and made for other lights which we judged rightly must indicate the settlement of the Mexicans. Penya Blanca is a squatters' village, extensive and substantial, though none of the settlers there have adequate legal title to the land they hold as theirs. Their forefathers came there to obtain the protection of the Cochiti Indians from the raiding Navajos, and they stopped there and took to themselves a large fertile slice of the lands of the Indians.

It was not too easy to obtain shelter for the night--but Ewart was taken in at a house where there was to be a wedding next day, and nobody there except he slept a wink all night long. He had hot coffee and a substantial breakfast before dawn. We were not so lucky, but we had a mattress and a floor in a room of an empty house. The horses fared best of all, being put into a cosy corral with heaps of alfalfa and corn and a grand disarray of cornhusks. Next morning we had them saddled at dawn, and rode to the fording of the river as sunrise was breaking over the mountains.

That day was a glorious one; first through the brown-leaved woods of the river shore, then up over sandbanks and crags, through copse and boscage, ever higher, to wild rocky country and vast wastes where no man lived and no cattle of any kind found pasture. The morning sun was over-swept by snow clouds, the winds hurried over mountain sides in white capes of flurrying snow. Snow blew lustily into our faces and over our horses. We rode into fast-dropping curtains of thick snow and rode through them and out of them into radiant sunlight again. There joined us on the way many Indians clad in cotton shirts and breeches and with old scarlet and orange blankets swathed about their shoulders like capes. Their polished ebony hair hung in long, rough-tied plaits from their lightly turbaned heads. I say turbaned, but the turban was no more than a gayly colored kerchief tied like a bandage around their temples.

"How!" "How!" they cried in little yelps as they drew abreast of us.

"Hello!" we replied. "Going to Jemez Dance?"

"_Si, si_," they answered. "You going?"

Few spoke any English, but they were delighted to have us of their company, and we went with various parties for many miles. Once there were more than twelve of us all cantering together over the vague trail, and it was a pretty sight.

"_Poco frio_--a little cold," was a favorite remark of ours.

"_Si, mucho frio_," they replied. "Not a little but very cold!"

They stopped and lit five-minute bonfires of dried weeds, just to warm their hands and bodies. Round these blazes they fairly danced. In the twilight of the late afternoon among the snow patches, these bonfire dances were most eerie in appearance.

The Indians were so cold they made their horses go faster and faster to keep warm. But as ours were more heavily burdened we kept a more moderate pace and let the Indians go ahead. We made a big pot of coffee in the afternoon and that kept warm our toes otherwise chilled in the stirrups. The Indians, on in front, had been eating melons and throwing down chunks of rind. In this rind and mouthfuls of snow, Billy and Buck took enormous pleasure, simply guzzling over them. George, however, seemed to have toothache and turned his head away.

One of the Indians helped us greatly when we rode on. He was from San Felipe, and named Lorenzo. He turned out of the party he belonged to and watched us lest we should go astray. Possibly he saved us from a night wandering in the mountains. For when we had taken a wrong trail and gone some way upon it our attention was arrested by long persistent cries which we felt had references to us. And looking about, we saw the silhouette of Lorenzo on the top of a little mountain and saw that he was signaling us to come toward him.

This we did, and we found we had been going on a dangerous precipitous trail which in truth led no whither except to goat pastures and hideous abysses. Lorenzo went with us the rest of the way and we descended into the Jemez valley by a track that none but Mexican ponies would follow; down narrow gullies, along broken ledges, down sharp slides and drops. The whole country side dropped in tumultuous crags and steeps, shale slopes, cliffs, precipices--to the Jemez River. The last light of evening gleamed on us and we left our fate to Lorenzo and the horses to do with it what they would--an adventurous, and, as it seemed, a perilous, ride.

At nightfall, as the village church was ringing for vespers, we rode into the crowded pueblo and were four out of many who had come to the great dance and fiesta.

2

The Jemez Dance used to be one of the finest and most elaborate of the Indian dances, and the tribe, living more remotely, had kept itself more fresh and vivid and unspoiled than for instance the Tesuque Indians, the pets of the artists, who dance on the same day. But the growth of the great city of Albuquerque and the development of the high road to Jemez Springs have attracted the gaze of the white man in all its vulgar curiosity and ignorance. I do not speak of artists and poets, who are as reverent at a dance as the most pious at Mass, but of those who think of life as a colored supplement to a Sunday paper, a Chaplinade, a burlesque, something over which to be facetious.

"There's a bunch of dudes coming over from a dude ranch," said a cowboy, referring to a touring party from a fashionable resort.

"A speculator come here las' week from Albuquerque and booked up every spare room in the pueblo," said another. "But the road's nigh blocked with snow. Guess we sha'n't see any Albuquerque folk this year. Too much scared of being stranded. Once a party got snowed up here for a week."

"There's a man here I'd like to insult," said Ewart with a laugh. "He is Babbitt himself. I'd like to go up to him and say '_Mr. Babbitt, I believe_,' with a courtly bow."

Babbitt was certainly there with his wife and kodak and furs and waiting automobile, but he was not duplicated. He stood out in relief against all the rest. For all the lesser Babbitts had been scared by the snow.

November the 12th, Spanish festival of St. Iago, festival of the war cry by which the country was conquered, Saint Iago a ellos,--_Up and at them, St. James!_ was the great day at Jemez. It was a bleak Sunday morning and the stark, jagged hills, pedestals of rock, standing places which encompass the dark village were lit by radii of a flashing sunrise. Silhouetted up there stood solitary Indians, watching religiously, and they remained till night had fled and the living sanguine of the mountains was revealed. Down below, in the streets of the pueblo, you would think there were a hundred wild horses. For the visiting Indians, unable to find stabling, had turned their horses loose, and they ran about like dogs, hunting for provender, whinnying to one another, biting one another, kicking, scampering from yard to yard. Our three horses were set upon by droves which I sought to keep off whilst they ate.

Usually in the morning the Jemez Indians dance a horse dance--very fitting in such a place of horses--one Indian is made up as a horse, and he is accompanied by a drummer with a soot-colored face, and a naked mirth-maker. And these parade the mud-built town. But this year that dance was omitted.

Instead the traders and the Navajos chaffered over the price of blankets. Snowflakes fell indolently on to the gray streets, on to the horses' backs, on to the many hogs, on to the quaint mud domes of the bread ovens, the _estufas_, in front of the houses, but it settled most of all on the gorgeous handwoven blankets of the Navajos. Every year hundreds of Navajos ride in from their country, which lies between the Jemez River and the Grand Cañon, and bring a years' product in woven blankets, and there come to meet them here many Indians from Santo Domingo. For the Domingo Indians mine turquoise, and are clever craftsmen in silver. The Navajos want silver and turquoise ornaments; the Domingans want blankets. So a great barter takes place. Besides these, the white trader comes and buys in dozens and makes many profitable deals.

"Don't tell anybody," said Mrs. Babbitt. "I've brought these parrot feathers. Don't you think I might get a bracelet with them?"

And she did.

Meanwhile from a squatters' village came a meager crowd of Mexicans in black, and filled the seats of the little Indian church, and gave to the _fiesta_ the appearance of a Christian festival. A priest also appeared and a Roman Mass was sung. A group of Mexican youths with guns waited to fire a volley in air at the elevation of the Host--but they were discouraged and took to random firing instead.

"I think we'd better give these fellows a wide berth," said Ewart, as he watched the way they were fooling with their rifles.

They were neither pious nor careful, for they continued taking shots at sparrows and crows while the figures of St. Iago and the emblems of the Church were carried past them in procession.

Curiously irrelevant seemed the diminutive, black-dressed procession, following a white-surpliced priest, a man with a lantern, a man with a Cross, and two men with figures of the Saint, a Mexican carrying a modern, machine-made St. James and an Indian carrying the original Indian-made image of wood. The Navajos, all between six and seven feet tall, swathed from head to ankles in voluminous, bright colored blankets, looked exceedingly morosely at the spectacle, only their dark, cavernous eyes staring from faces which they covered even to their noses with the flaps of their blankets. The wind blew, the dust rose, the snow came slanting down, and the black-robed Mexicans turned their faces away as they trudged. The Cross and the flickering lantern wavered in air as they went.

There met them, accidentally, the heralds of the dance, the ugliest and squattest of the Jemez Indians, their faces blackened out with soot, and bearing in their hands tiny, home-made drums which they beat with a will. The tom-tom was beaten by two of them, and a third, with widely dilated eyes and old, strained, carved-out face and flying hair, sang in pagan voice--_Hoi hoi ho-ho, ha-ha-ha-ha_. The Church went one way; they went another, without a salute, as if one were invisible to the other.

At noon the Presbyterian missionary made his annual visit and, with the Agent and the District Nurse and the aid of a harmonium, struck up "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me." The Indians had marched out in their beauty; no ugliness now, no devil frightening, but a serene picture of physical loveliness. The _Koshare_, spirits of ancestors, mirth-makers, leaders of the dance, had been prohibited this year, their nakedness having been considered unseemly by the white onlookers. But the youth of the village were nearly naked, and nothing short of glory to their Creator.

The dance was like wind in the corn or fast-traveling shadows on the hills; it was like the dimpling of the waves where many waters meet together; it was like the arching of the necks, the waving of the manes of many horses on the prairie; it was like the trembling of morning light upon the mountains and the sea. The snowflakes emulated it but did not succeed. And all who watched seemed turned to stone, to perfect immobility, by the perfection of the movement that they saw. The hundreds of tall Navajos were like statues, and those on the roofs looking down on the wide, brown, sandy, open place of the dance--there were many on the roofs--looked like figures that had survived centuries and looked on unmoved hundreds of time, hundreds of years. They were completely and sharply silhouetted against the mountains and the sky.

The Jemez men were painted a dark yellow, and wore white moccasins threaded with silver bells. In their hands they carried gourds with peas in them which they rattled. 'Twixt their bare arms and an armlet they carried slips of green pine. They were crowned with leaves and feathers, they had turquoise necklaces on their smooth round necks. And their long, coal-black hair hung on their backs to the mount of their hips. The barefooted women wore green _tablitas_, like crowns, on their heads, and colored _fajas_ about their waists. They had bracelets and rings, they held green branches in their hands. Their dance was a tremble, a departure from calm; the men's dance between them a prolonged ecstasy, a descending out of eternal movement into calm.

They surged up the village street, ever forward, ever more of them, more strung-out, more beautiful--accompanying at the side were dramatic groups in everyday attire, chanting, exhorting the unseen Powers, roaring together fantastic choruses of semimusical gibberish. And the drums beat inexorably, as if they were the voice of the gods, the control whom no one at any time had ever disobeyed.

You are changed to stone, yes, to the stone of the Stone Age. Babbitt has gone; there is only this that you see. Ah, no--for somewhere a church bell has been set a-ringing and a harmonium is playing a hymn; yes, there it is, in much rebellion and complaint--"_Nearer, my God, to Thee!_" Mr. Babbitt nonchalantly strides in among the dancers and distributes cigarettes which the dancers, being nearly naked, cannot put away. He will not be denied. He photographs the scene. He has a knowing look. The Indian Governor is angered, but what can he do? There is nothing the white man understands except force; neither manners, nor reason, nor what is sacred. So the will of the white man will prevail. The beautiful dancing will cease.

"I give it ten years," said the Forestry agent of the Government. "By that time they will all be citizens. It will be a Presbyterian village."

"Just like a village in the Highlands of Scotland," I hazarded.

The agent smiled. For he was a Highlander by extraction. The Scot, though sentimental at home about "the snowflake that softly reposes" on his native hills, about the heather, the kilt, the bagpipe, and the rest, is often the most unsentimental and prosaic fellow when in the presence of another nation's romance.

However, the Presbyterians have it not all their own way in Jemez. The Catholics claim it as their ground, sanctified by the blood of Franciscan martyrs. They are educating the children and making them, therefore, extremely naughty and ill-behaved during the dance. For they are taught to despise paganism. The pranks played by the children on their dancing fathers and mothers I should prefer not to mention in describing the beautiful dance. Yet they were there and were signs of the times.

3

The night after the dance there was a fight between the Navajos and the Apaches, two or three score of the latter having ridden in and begun strutting through the pueblo with their orange-colored scarves and big feathers in their dark sombreros. They and the Navajos were the fiercest of the Indians and used to ravage the whole country even down as far as Chihuahua in Old Mexico. And they are still warlike people, ready to start strife on a slight pretext. The Navajos are especially untamable.

The horses also this night got into trouble, their exasperation and hunger seeming to possess them. Juan Louis Pecos, the Indian who had charge of our three steeds, did the best he could, but that was not much. George and Buck were tied to a post. Billy had been put in hobbles and turned loose. But the Indian horses constantly invaded the yard of the house where we were staying, and the unhobbled ones drove Billy away from his feed. Juan, having taken part in the dance, was very late in bringing the alfalfa, and when he brought it it proved to be of a very thorny nature, reaped with abundant weeds from Indian fields. Just after nine at night we had an exciting half hour.

Billy, having been dispossessed, vented his rage on George, whom in any case he regarded as an interloper, and drove him round and round the post to which he was tied until the rope was wound tight. The little white pony looked as if he were going to strangle himself, and he was in a violent excitement, kicking out with his hind legs and straining with all his neck muscles. Buck, tied near him, craftily avoided all entanglements. But Billy, hobbled as he was, could not be restrained. Ewart untied Buck and he scampered off, and I cut George's rope, sawing it for several seconds, for it was a very stout fine line of an unbreakable kind. George meanwhile let out at all and sundry, and when cut loose dashed away with Billy after him.

Mrs. Graham happily recaptured Buckskin at the drinking trough--fortunately he had not grasped the geography of the large ramshackle yard, else he would no doubt forthwith have set off for home. Ewart and I chased the other two horses to the accompaniment of the clangor of Billy 's chain-hobbles. They got into the main street of the pueblo and Billy made such a pace, even hobbled, that we could not overtake them; he leapt like a hobbyhorse, he trotted in short rapid steps, and he certainly made the white pony go. George, however, doubled on us and Billy doubled across our tracks also. We cried to Apaches and Navajos to aid us, but they looked on gloomily from their blankets. Dogs rushed about and barked and gave chase, and we, with electric torches in our hands, strove to see the horses we were after. Billy was audible by the sound of his hobbles. But suddenly, to my horror, I saw his big shadowy body leap in air and heard a sickening thud. He seemed to have gone neck over crop. I could not surmise what had happened to him. There was, however, a chance to run down George in a corner of a waste field, and I ran to assist Ewart. George was recaptured. Then with torches we sought the form of Billy. He made not a sound now and might be dead.

I found him at last, lying stretched out as if he had breathed his last. But he was far from dead. Seeing me, he made a great effort to get up, but fell back helpless. Then I saw what had happened. He had caught the shoe of one of his hind legs in the chain which held his two fore legs, and a link was firmly embedded between the iron and the hoof. I felt much relieved, petted him, and then with a big stone in one hand and the electric light and his hind leg in the other I started the awkward job of knocking the bit of chain out of his hoof. Ewart held George and shed his light also on the scene. Indians came and peered at us out of the darkness, and the hubbub of dogs barking continued all over the village.

Billy was freed without further accident, and the three horses were tied up in separate places, and in a repentant mood they stood and watched till morning. They looked very miserable at dawn. For they had had no corn, and the other horses had stolen their hay, and they had had a series of frights in the night. I went with an old Indian on to the top of his roof, and we filled a sack with ripe corn on the cobs--some yellow, some scarlet, some almost blue, and we fed the horses personally, each of us his own, and that was a great comfort. Then we saddled up and rode on to the trading post of San Ysidro.

Here an enormous trade was being done by white traders buying up all manner of Indian wares and selling store goods in exchange. We took refuge in Miller's Trading Store and put our horses in charge of "Velvet Joe" who led them to happy quarters. Buck rolled on his back for a long time and then sat on the soft ground and looked around him like a contented dromedary. Velvet Joe came and told us the horse was ill. But he did not understand the joy of the escape from that exasperating pueblo and its wild horses. Billy and George, having contemplated Buckskin for a while, followed his example and took a good roll also.

Next day we rode to Zia on sand dunes over the Jemez River, in a fullness of sunshine. In the evening we made the pueblo of Santa Ana and slept in an Indian house, all on the floor of a mud-built room. An ex-governor was our host, a very gentle and indeed beautiful Indian. At dawn the day following we climbed the dark table mountain, having to lead our horses and coax them to mount the steep slopes of volcanic scoriæ and bowlders. Looking backward, we saw Santa Ana removed to obscurity and littleness far away on the yellow evenness of the river shore. We with our horses were exalted on black and dreadful cliffs. Cold winds sprang at us from the ravines. Persistent winds blew against us and athwart us. We achieved nevertheless the summit--and the summit was a new country, a wide, grassy plateau miles across, but without view except cloud and sky. Perhaps we were lucky, but we rode on to the faint sheep trail to San Felipe and came at last, after an hour or two of riding, to a plunging, rocky stairway leading downward, a nose-dive down to the Rio Grande River, and there, like a Moorish city, lay the beautiful yellow pueblo of San Felipe. The horses did not object to the steep descent; all three in single file we descended slowly and processionally, down to the village of our friend Lorenzo. And the first Indian we met there was he.

Lorenzo took us where we could get food, and happily put us on the way to Santo Domingo which at nightfall we reached. We still rode on to the Mexican stores and inn two or three miles nearer Santa Fe, and there, feeling pretty tired, we did justice to a hot supper of ham and eggs and coffee and potatoes and other good things.

The next day was the last day of our ride, and we experienced a violent snowstorm, climbing La Bajada Hill in an upflutter of snowflakes, and finding the moor above it deep in snow. A pitiless east wind drove a blizzard against us, caking our right-hand sides with ice and snow. The horses grew all white; "domes of silence" raised their hoofs, additional snow boots fixed on their hoofs. They stumbled repeatedly. Twenty miles in a raging blizzard was an ordeal for them as much as for us, but they knew they were nearing home and comfortable, happy quarters. "There's no Place Like Home" was written on the knowing features of Buck. And Billy, who was none the worse for his adventure with his hobbles, encouraged Buck onward as it seemed.

That night, when we had all changed our clothes and the horses were fed and housed and we sat and watched three-foot logs flaming from a broad hearth, we felt we had had an adventure--we had gone far, we had seen new life, we had lived intimately with our horses for a week, and it had been greatly worth while.

Cigarette smoke rose from our chairs in meditative rings.