Several times during the night I awoke, convinced that I was slowly freezing; and on one of the occasions I was quite certain that I had died and reached a certain destination; for at the edge of the Wash a troop of coyotes had assembled, and they made night hideous. It was my first close-up of such a chorus, a bedlam of ghoulish chattering. Fiends might have been braver, but they could not have uttered cries more horribly depraved. The coyote is very low in the social scale of the Desert. While the orthodox Navajo will not kill one, even as the Hopi will seldom slay a snake, this does not mean that he rejoices in the vicinity of the beast. Notwithstanding the souls of ancestors that are believed to possess him, “Mi-he,” the coyote, receives little welcome or respect. There is something so miserably unclean, so slinkingly evil, in Mi-he, the jackal of the Southwest, that I have yet to discover anything of sympathy for him under any conditions. He follows and preys on the sheep and calves, poor, stupid, defenseless creatures, and in a remote spot I have seen several of him circle a band of wild ponies, patiently waiting for a colt to drop behind. At night, when there are mysteries and fancies enough without him, his mournful howl, followed by ghoulish chattering like unearthly laughter or the mockery of lost souls, gives the Indian good cause to include him among the worthless members of a savage mythology. But morning brought the radiant sun god, and all unclean things fled away. Warmed into amiability, we covered the last five miles to our goal. Oraibi occupies a projecting point of a huge tumbled mesa, one that has known the rack and twist of volcanic convulsion. Below it in the plain were a Government school, a trading-post, and quite a settlement of Indians who had been persuaded to remove from the unsanitary height. To reach the pueblo proper, we drove up a long, winding sand-road, using the drifts and dunes of centuries for a ladder. This connected with a rather perilous mesa-ledge road, overhanging the valley, around the edge of which we found the ancient town. The newcomer to the Hopi desert always assumes that the Indian sought the heights because of view and scenic beauty, purest air, and freedom. Freedom had something to do with it, for there is no doubt he was driven to accept the mesa as a citadel. In order that he might have a chance to defend himself against marauding “Apaches du Navaju,” who raided his camps and herds, killed his sons, and carried his women into captivity, he risked the scarcity of water, depending on pools during sieges, and fortified the mesas. There, with his house built for closer defense and his flocks under the ledges, he felt secure. The fields of the tribe, presenting assurance against famine, were of necessity at a distance from these strongholds, and this handicap trained the Hopi into the wonderful long-distance runner that he is to-day.