American Museum of Natural History -- Fiction; Indians of North America -- Fiction; Nature stories, American; Western stories
"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."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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