The Trail Book Part 9

"Tse-tse-yote took me, a nine days' cub, from the lair in Shut Canon 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 s.h.i.+papu.

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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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, n.o.body 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 gra.s.s 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 Canon.

'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 canon 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 canon 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 Canon; 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.'

"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 Dine 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 Dine 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 s.h.i.+fting 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, Dine 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 s.h.i.+papu, for which he has long been ready, and take the girl for your trouble.'

"'Good,' said the Dine. '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.'