Chapter 6

"At that the Corn Women came hurrying, for they saw that the people were both frightened and angry; they brought armsful of corn and seeds for the carriers, they took bracelets from their arms and put them for gifts in the baskets. The priests of the Sun did not say anything. One of the women's headbands slipped and the basket swung sideways. Given-to-the-Sun whipped off her belt and tucked it under the basket rim to make it ride more evenly. The woman felt something hard in the belt pressing her shoulder, but she knew better than to say anything. In silence the crowd parted and let the Seven pass. They went swiftly with their eyes on the ground by the north gate to the mountain. The priests of the Sun stood still on the steps of the Hill of the Sun and their eyes glittered. The Sacrifice of the Sun had come back to them.

"When our women passed the gate, the crowd saw Given-to-the-Sun restore what was in her hand to the Medicine bag; she lifted her arms above her head and began the prayer to the Sun."

* * * * *

"I see," said Dorcas after a long pause; "she stayed to keep the People of the Sun pacified while the women got away with the seed. That was splendid. But, the Eye of the Sun, I thought you saw her put that in the buckskin bag again?"

"She must have had ready another stone of shape and size like it," said the Corn Woman. "She thought of everything. She was a wise woman, and so long as she was called Given-to-the-Sun the Eye of the Sun was hers to give. Shungakela was not surprised to find that his wife had stayed at the Hill of the Sun; so I suppose she must have told him. He asked if there was a token, and the woman whose basket she had propped with her girdle gave it to him with the hard lump that pressed her shoulder. So the Medicine of the Sun came back to us.

"Our men had met the women at the foot of the mountain and they fled all that day to a safe place the men had made for them. It was for that they had stayed, to prepare food for flight, and safe places for hiding in case they were followed. If the pursuit pressed too hard, the men were to stay and fight while the women escaped with the corn. That was how Given-to-the-Sun arranged it.

"Next day as we climbed, we saw smoke rising from the Hill of the Sun, and Shungakela went apart on the mountain, saying, 'Let me alone, for I make a fire to light the feet of my wife's spirit...' They had been married twenty years.

"We found the tribe at Painted Rock, but we thought it safer to come on east beyond the Staked Plains as Given-to-the-Sun had advised us. At Red River we stopped for a whole season to plant corn. But there was not rain enough there, and if we left off watching the fields for a day the buffaloes came and cropped them. So for the sake of the corn we came still north and made friends with the Tenasas. We bought help of them with the half of our seed, and they brought us over the river, the Missi-Sippu, the Father of all Rivers. The Tenasas had boats, round like baskets, covered with buffalo hide, and they floated us over, two swimmers to every boat to keep us from drifting downstream.

"Here we made a town and a god-house, to keep the corn contented. Every year when the seed is gathered seven ears are laid up in the god-house in memory of the Seven, and for the seed which must be kept for next year's crop there are seven watchers"--the Corn Woman included the dancers and herself in a gesture of pride. "We are the keepers of the Seed," she said, "and no man of the tribe knows where it is hidden. For no matter how hungry the people may become the seed corn must not be eaten. But with us there is never any hunger, for every year from planting time till the green corn is ready for picking, we keep all the ceremonies of the corn, so that our cribs are filled to bursting. Look!"

The Corn Woman stood up and the dancers getting up with her shook the rattles of their leggings with a sound very like the noise a radiator makes when some one is hammering on the other end of it. And when Dorcas turned to look for the Indian cribs there was nothing there but the familiar wall cases and her father mending the steam heater.

VII

A TELLING OF THE SALT TRAIL, OF TSE-TSE-YOTE AND THE DELIGHT-MAKERS; 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 canyon 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 canyons, 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 canyon 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 canyon 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.'"

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 Canyon 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 Canyon. '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 canyon 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 canyon 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 Canyon; 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.'