I
Lanso is a hedonist of seven. Day dawns late down in Cataract Canyon,
but even spring nights in Arizona are chill, and one’s own soft-woven
bedding, cedar-bark mat and rabbit-skin blanket, suffuse a warmth
one would not willingly forego. But,—“Lanso,” whispers grandfather
Sinyella, “up and run toward the daylight. Run, that you grow straight
and lusty. And heed me; take your torch and touch it to your elbows and
your wrists that you may never be rheumatic as I, your relative. Oh
yes, and as you turn back, fling the torch behind you, turn once again
and snatch it up, that your memory may be strong too, that you may
remember quickly a forgotten deer charm when you go to hunt.”
Lanso leaves his creekside home, worms his way among the slender
cotton-woods, and emerging on the race course, drops into a dogged trot
through the deep sand. The race course—but that is a place for a mad,
scrambling dash; perched with brothers, and sisters too, on the bare
back of father’s horse. What need to run afoot: foot races come at
dance time, and that will have to wait until the harvest is in. Dance
time—Lanso hums the songs. “Yes, I know them all; next time I, too,
will dance....”
It is lighter when Lanso turns back: all the Havasupai are astir.
Acrid smoke begins to drift over the willow thickets; ethereal strata
that rest in the still air against the towering rock walls; walls that
stretch to the winter home high on the plateau above. There in the
clearing is his home; the willow-thatched dome for rainy days, the
branch-covered, dirt-roofed, box-like shade for refuge from the midday
sun, and Hat’s sand-drifted hut merging in the swell of the creek bank.
Lanso scents breakfast in the bubbling clay pot, the inexhaustible
pot that stands day-long with open-mouthed hospitality extended to
all comers. But even a cold-whetted appetite will not tempt him to a
sidelong foray on the mess; no, there was bravery needed for the sharp
reproach and unbearable ridicule meted out to unmannerly pilferers.
Better to wait until Round-one, Hat’s wife, should call the family,
Lanso, her nephew, not last among them, to the stew of ground corn and
big-horn meat, little loaves of corn meal tied in the husks and baked
in the embers, sweet mescal juice, and salt from the cave far down the
canyon. Then he would creep up to the elders grouped on the ground
around the pots and baskets, and from the side of Fox, his favorite
uncle, beg for tasty bits fished out with sharpened twigs, and to take
his turn at the brimming, horn ladles.
“Now,” said old Sinyella, “the brush is burned and our fields are
cleared: to-day we will plant.” So, off the whole family trooped;
men and children on horses, the women, their babies strapped to
the cradle board in their arms, trudging along beside them. Lanso,
clutching hard at his grandfather’s back, rocked to the easy canter of
their horse. Here was business afoot he understood: next to the victims
that fell before his arrows—very small creatures, indeed—this would be
his chief contribution to the family larder. Yesterday he had watched
them playing shinney, gambling for the future crops, and he had guessed
they would begin to-day.
Down through the broad fields they rode, noting here the dam that
spread a somewhat broken wing to scoop the creek to the level of
the fields, there an irrigation ditch that needed mending, until
they reached the family fields. These were Sinyella’s and had been
Sinyella’s father’s and grandfather’s, and one day would go to Lanso.
Turning out the horses to graze at the foot of the rocky slope, they
climbed to the storage houses set high above the reach of devastating
floods, plastered like swallows’ nests in a crevice at the base of the
cliff. The seed corn secured, Sinyella knelt in the field and scratched
a hole with his pointed digging-stick. Then he prayed, “Grow good,
corn; when your stalk grows, grow tall; grow like the ancient corn up
there,” and dropping some kernels in the hole, he chewed another and
blew it toward the “corn,” two white rocks high on the canyon wall.
Then two short steps forward and he knelt to dig again. Lanso watched,
and then followed; first a few kernels, a deft sweep to fill the hole,
and then the next hill. Row after row they planted together under the
white morning sun that rose to flood the canyon with its light and
heat....
Back in the deep shade of the huge cotton-wood he saw his grandfather
playing with his little brother—a toddling fellow not yet worthy of
a name. Now he was searching for his mislaid arrows for he heard a
twittering from a nearby bush. “Yes,” Sinyella teased the baby, “that
bird is calling to you, ‘You are not a boy; you have no arrow to kill
me; you are a girl.’” Grandfather knew everything: he made fine bows
and arrows, and he told long stories in the winter evenings. “Next
winter,” Lanso thought, “I will track rabbits in the snow when it lies
in the cedar glades where our other home is; now I must hunt down
here....”
The bushes spawned boys, Lanso among them. There were birds to be shot,
dogs to be worried, deadfalls to be looked to, horses to be watered,
sprawled over, and raced. They all ran down the canyon to Coyote’s,
where there was that curious Navaho visitor to watch. Mornings are
short when there are cliffs to scale, tanning to watch, flat cactus
to roll for arrow-marks, food to beg from some friend—and relatives
lived everywhere; Wooden-leg to listen to as he told of his trip to the
Walapai people to fetch a bride, mock ambushes in the willows, and the
creek, with its cooling embrace as it closes overhead....