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 cañon 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 cañons, 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
Diné 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 Diné 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 Diné, 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 cañon 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 cañon 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 Diné. 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 Diné.'"
[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 Diné?" 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 Diné."
"There were Diné 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 Cañon 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 Diné 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 Diné.
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 Diné 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 Cañon.
'Diné!' 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 cañon 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 Diné smelled of himself and
the smoke of sagebrush. Tse-tse's hand was on the back of my neck.
'Wait,' he said; 'one Diné 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 cañon 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 Diné showed themselves. At
sunrise Willow-in-the-Wind met us coming up the Rito.
"'Feed farther up,' Tse-tse told her; 'the Diné 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 Diné,' he said. 'Besides, I was out
rehearsing with the Koshare last night toward Shut Cañon; if there had
been Diné _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 Diné. 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 Diné." 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 Diné 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 Diné 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, Diné 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 Diné. '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 Diné.
"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 Diné 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.