CHAPTER XIX THE DANCE OF THE ZUNYI INDIANS
At the end of November I went to Cibola, which had been the goal, four hundred years ago, of Coronado and his companions. I had hoped to ride over the ground of Cortes' conquest of Mexico first and then follow the adventures of Coronado and his companions who followed the golden vision of Cibola northward. Thus I should have kept to the historical sequence—Columbus and the Indies, 1492, Balboa and the Pacific, 1513, Cortes and Montezuma, 1521, Coronado, 1541. But life and death break up elaborate plans. Since Wilfrid Ewart had joined us in New Mexico, we decided to follow Coronado first and seek, as he did, the far famed seven cities. We read the quaint Spanish narrative of Coronado's journey and we set off, and it was at the time of the wonderful Shaleco Dance.
A colored gentleman in 1540 was greatly responsible for the legend of the Seven Cities, though he paid for it with his life. But it may be that the Friars Marcos of Nice and Antonio of Santa Maria, who accompanied him, were more credulous. The black man is generally known as Stephen the Moor. All set off together but the friars, not liking the smell of their companion's skin, bade him go ahead and they would follow at a convenient distance. Stephen the Moor was not loath, and being of an adventurous spirit he improved his opportunity, made love to Indian girls as he went along and filled his bags with their turquoise. The friars lagged behind and spent so much time in prayer and hesitation that Stephen the Moor got to be two hundred and forty miles ahead of them. When he arrived at Cibola they were only at Chichilticalli.
The Indians of Cibola would not believe the blackamoor when he said he represented a white race and had a great white emperor. His complexion belied it. The Indians concluded it would be safer to kill him. They had never seen a black man before and were much perplexed. They did not believe Stephen the Moor's story; perhaps they could not understand it. But they evidently thought it would be safer to kill him than to let him go back to his tribe. So Stephen the Moor was choked, and the first discoverer of Cibola perished;—his harem and the bags of turquoise were scattered. When the friars, toiling through the desert, heard of it they were stricken with fear and gave away to the news bearers all that they had—except their vestments. They turned about precipitately and fled incontinently back to Court, bringing the tale of a mighty race of Indians and another Montezuma, of riches incredible and a sway mightier than the empire of the Aztecs. Strangely enough, the friars believed their own story.
Straightway an expedition was fitted out, of braggadocios and gallants, of noble desperadoes and desperate nobles—in short, of the best blood in all New Spain. Coronado took the head, and would not Coronado outdo the deeds of the great Cortes himself? The almost fabulous wealth and splendor of Mexico had prepared the naturally credulous minds of the Spaniards for even the most fantastic things. So it did not prove difficult to man and equip an army to conquer Cibola. The vanguard was all of "heroes," the rear was an ever-swelling army of camp followers.
They rode five hundred leagues; the honored friars, no longer timid, accompanying. Their plump horses grew thin and weak, and the riders walked beside them and shouldered their own empty treasure sacks, hoping ever to feed and fill in the rich country beyond. But every day was one of cactus and wild dusty waste. The hands of the prickly pears were dusty—water was the rarest things in the earth. But what did it matter? The rich rare Cibola was near.
Scores of times were the friars called upon to retell their story. And they abated no jot of the splendors. They sustained the courage of the army to cross one of the most dreadful wildernesses in the New World. And the Spaniards thought themselves well on the way to India or the fabulous approaches to Tibet and Turkestan.
When one reflects that this adventurous army, like that of Cortes, asked nothing else but gold, real fortune, one can understand the extent of their disillusion and chagrin. From a historical and geographical view it was a most valuable and interesting expedition. But what did that matter to them? When they found Cibola and realized that it had no treasure they journeyed another thousand miles in quest of it, the even more fantastic "Kingdom of Quivira" and people of a weaker race than Spaniards would have vanished away and disappeared in the deserts, like the streams of the Rockies.
There was a Cibola, there is a Cibola, and Cibola will be. It is one of the most undisturbed spots in the world. The Zunyi Indians who inhabited the Seven Cities and who still live among the ruins of them, hold a remarkable belief. They are geoplanarians and have always considered the earth to be flat, and that at the extremities there is danger of falling off. Our London, New York, Tokio, San Francisco, Capetown, Melbourne, and the rest, they would reckon highly dangerous—and quite truly. Ages ago, it is said, the guardian Spirit led the Zunyi tribe to the safest spot, that is, to the very center of the earth, the point furthest away from the edge. The sacred rock, Hepatinah, in the Zunyi land, to-day as then, marks the center. There were a few thousand Indians in those cities when the Spaniards came and there are a few thousand still. They live in houses of dried mud and of quarried stone—they are heavily and beautifully adorned with turquoise and silver. They are gentle and mild in character but very firm of will, people of changeless purpose, and they have successfully withstood soldiers, missionaries, pioneers, commercial travelers and tourists for four hundred years. They are worshipers of Nature gods and have a religion which is all playfulness, dance, and drama, very beautiful in its expression and evidently more real to them than the faith of the missionaries.
I set out for Cibola on foot; Wilfrid Ewart went by car. My starting point was the Penitente village of San Rafael in New Mexico. Nearly all the inhabitants there practice self-flagellation in Lent and are Spanish-speaking. Not that their forefathers were followers of Coronado. The upper Rio Grande country was settled at a much later date, and then very sparsely and by people whose Catholicism was not entirely orthodox. The Penitentes are a "peculiar people," said by some to be an attempt to realize the Third Order of St. Francis, and quite possible having their causa prima in the zeal of the Franciscans. Be that as it may, San Rafael is a wide-spread, untidy and inhospitable settlement on a plain covered otherwise with innumerable volcanic cinders. The cactus alone of all the vegetable world seems at home among the gnarled and crusted and broken rocks and the blue-black cakes and slabs of volcanic asphalt. There are lines of tumbledown adobe houses down below, and three moradas or Penitente chapels on the hills above.
Among the inhabitants is a Jewish storekeeper, Solomon Bibo, once Governor of the Indian pueblo of Acoma, near by, and lord of the "Enchanted Mesa." "Mesa," by the way, is our old friend "mensa," a table, with the "n" left out, and means in Spanish a tableland. As the main characteristic of the country is the dark, sharp-edged tableland, we may have frequently to refer to "mesas."
As a young man, Solomon Bibo came into these parts and sold goods by the wayside, sold them to the Indians, started a trading post, married an Indian girl, won his way to the hearts and councils of the Acoma Indians, who, by the way, four hundred years before, from the height of their mesa, fiercely withstood Coronado. And Solomon who must have learned their language, and danced their dances, entered the tribe and was elected Governor.
That partly answers the question why Jews are not seen to go to Aberdeen. Why should they, when they can go to Acoma and become, as it were, princes?
However, Sol Bibo had had his day at the pueblo and was now leading storekeeper in San Rafael among these less congenial though not less profitable Penitente Spaniards.
Epiphany brought me my horse and we set off. To Cibola from San Rafael is somewhat over eighty miles, through the Zunyi mountains and the Mormon village of Ramah, getting on to what used to be a great but desolate highway in Spanish times from the South to the North.
The trail climbed upward from the warmer lower levels of the lava beds and wound into the mazes of great rock débris, up to banks of unmelted snow and long snow trails where spruce and pinyon blurted from the rocks. We reached wide, untrammeled fields of snow and entered a snowstorm which enveloped us in white veils. Epiphany took a blanket from under his horse and tied it about his shoulders, and I put on my gloves and turned up my collar. We cantered the horses through the snow, even galloped. For the snow made the Spaniard uneasy, and he urged speed. His horse Diamond did not look as if he would last out, but his master had no doubts, and though he plunged and stumbled and got into holes Epiphany merely swore at him, pulled him up, and urged him on the faster.
When the snowstorm lifted Epiphany seemed to be more at ease, but he had broken one of his stirrups and that forced him to a steady trot. We rode across to a deserted cabin, and he sought some wire to mend the stirrup whilst I opened a can of tongue and cut up a rough lunch. Epiphany then admitted he had never been to Ramah before in his life, though he had heard that it was Mormon and you could have more than one wife. This tickled his mind a good deal and he said: "I'll write to my girl when we get there to come and be my first wife." And while he spoke he arduously wound alfalfa wire about the wooden foot-cage of his stirrup.
"We must go much faster now," he cried. For the Mexican who is so slow over everything else is very impatient on horseback. Epiphany cantered uphill or downhill and over stones and holes in a mad style, not merely for a hundred yards or so but over leagues.
We emerged on to a magnificent, snow-covered plateau and plunged gayly across it, not guessing that there were twenty miles of it and that it was not to be conquered in an hour. Over all the white prairie the tops of withered stems poked through the snow, and you knew the trail by the absence of the stems and a shadow, a vague indentation. Rosy mesas called to the woods and to us from a far horizon, and slowly as we rode there came into view what looked like a great white castle or cathedral fully ten miles away but glittering in late sunlight. I felt I could not be mistaken; this must be the famous "Mesa Escrita" or Inscription Rock, as the Americans call it, whereon Spanish explorers and travelers have written their names even from the time of Onate.
As it stands hard by the road to Ramah we made for it and rode for nearly two hours toward it before it seemed to grow near us. But by then the snow clouds had returned. Eager airs swept the plateau with earfuls of snow and wisps of blown drift. Evening dusk was closing rapidly in, and it looked as if we should be out in the storm all night when we espied a Mexican rancher coming towards us on his horse. This was Caromillo, returning from Ramah to his cabin with a sack of flour, and he advised us to spend the night with him.
So we rode back to a tiny adobe hut whose door was bolted from within. And the little old man let himself in at a window and then undid the bolt. It was like an icehouse inside, but we readily unsaddled our horses and led them into the corral and then lit a fire in the hut and put on pots to boil. It then rapidly grew hot, and we stretched ourselves on the clay floor, drank coffee, munched bread and cheese and fried salmon from a tin.
Night had come down outside and hid the great rock which we were so near, and when I went out to look at the horses a three-ways blowing snow tempest made whirls of snow dust in the air. Curiously enough, the moon was shining behind the storm and lit up the snow-swept little cabin and barn with a dim turnip-lantern light.
There was not much comfort in Caromillo's house; we slept on the clay floor, but even it could impart a feeling of home in the midst of such a storm. But the Mexicans were strange men to be quartered with. Epiphany, who had torn his shirt riding through the thorns, took that garment off with some idea of mending it, and his bare back was all scarred with the marks of his Penitente creed. Flippant and cynical in his conversation, light-hearted certainly, and yet he was bound in the ascetic traditions and gloomy piety of his people. I would not ask him about his religion, yet I wondered if he ever would be "crucified" and hang on a Penitente cross till he fainted, as so many of them do.
Next morning there was a silver dawn. The Mesa Escrita was all encrusted and hanging with snow. It had taken on an aspect of the fantastic and hardly belonged to this world. And as we rode towards it, because of the mists it grew further away. I saw it as it were removed into the past, with wanderers remaining there from a bygone age. I would have liked to write my name also on the great rock—I came and I passed. But being on our horses we did not stay. We left our footprints in the snow. The snow was deep; the silence was utter. Even our horses made not the slightest sound as they padded over the trackless waste of snow. Snow-veils hurried across the mesas—snow descended upon us and hid all from view. Thus it was that on Thanksgiving morning we got lost and neither of us could say which was the way.
We rode up to the stone giants, a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet high standing at the entrance to the Cañon de los Gigantos, and they looked down at us with their snow-crowned heads. We rode to ranch houses only to find them empty of human beings as their byres were devoid of cattle. Epiphany saw a dark figure in the snow and spurred hard after it and I followed, and we came up with a fleeing Indian squaw and a dog, and she would say nothing but plunged abruptly into the bush. When we found her again it was in a hogan, a shelter only one third covered from the snow. There was a fire burning, and the squaw sat herself down in front of it and would answer naught, either to Spanish or to English questions. Her little children stared at us, and her dogs sat on their haunches about the fire.
We got nothing from her. But, to cut a story short, we went after that by compass and map and got to Voigt's ranch, and being Thanksgiving Day there was a grand spread of turkey and cranberry sauce and many preserves, and very pretty girls to look at and intelligent people to talk to. The storm and the wilderness had been suddenly changed for civilization. I went that night to a Mormon wedding dance at Ramah.
Mr. Voigt is the official curator of Inscription Rock and has done a great deal to preserve the remarkable surface which is scrawled not only with the names of famous Spaniards but with the pictographs and hieroglyphics of the Cave dwellers. It has certainly been a great cave-dwelling region at one time. Voigt took me behind his ranch house to a well-preserved village of cave dwellings. He found when he bought the property he had bought this prehistoric village also. Natural caves had been added to by the hollowing out of the rock, and the houses partitioned off and the wind walled off with piled rocks and mud. The theory is that the people of Cibola, to defend themselves from the Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos, took to caves at one time. But of course theories innumerable could be brought forward. No one has learned to read the hieroglyphics.
One especially good service Mr. Voigt has performed as curator of the Rock, and that is, to have erased the names of a score or so of modern visitors who with a nonchalance which is almost sublime had written their names down with those of the Conquistadores; the Winkelsteins of Chicago, the Jones's of Jonesville.
This Mesa Escrita is, however, little visited. For it is thirty or forty miles from Cibola or Zunyi, and those who go to the Indian pueblo seldom go further. It is in part of the most remote country of America—as the Zunyis themselves think, it is the place furthest from the edge. Hence, I suppose, the Mormon settlement of Ramah. For the Mormons, being a persecuted sect, have ever sought out places where they were not likely to be disturbed.
Ramah is an American village, not Mexican or Indian in type, but a bit of North America, all little wooden houses and neatly fenced yards. We drove to the wedding dance and I talked to the Bishop and the elders and found a rather sad lot of Mormons where, after all, far from polygamy being practiced, there were not enough girls to go round. The eligible brides seemed mostly pale and thin. With what devotion the Mormon young men clasped Betty and Katharine who, unlike the Mormon girls, were well-formed, open-air girls full of life and desire.
Another day passed and we drove to Zunyi. It was the last stage. There was deep snow and mist over it with vague sunset lights wandering in the mist. Up on the mesas I saw the first two of the cities of Cibola—in the ruins in which Coronado left them. And there in the mist I saw a third of the cities, but greater and grander, with towers and domes, and unlike anything Indians ever built. Golden and rose lights of sunset tinted the shadowy outline. I said to Voigt and his nieces—"Look! Cibola!" but even as I did so it had gone—melted into the general configuration of the Mesas of Zunyi. It was Coronado's mirage seen again—and his disillusionment.
It was dark when we arrived at the real Cibola, the strange and unwonted city which the Spaniards found, the home far from the haunts of other men, of the wonderful Zunyi tribe with their coal-black hair, bright-colored little turbans, turquoise earrings, bead necklaces and silver rings and bracelets and brooches and ceintures, with their elaborate dances and religious rituals, and a Nature worship against which Catholicism has never been able to make way.
When we entered the first large house we saw that the Shaleco Birds had already come down from the mountains, and in each of the Shaleco houses prayers were being chanted by the Indians. Zunyi's halls were all alight with large lamps and hung with every kind of glittering wampum. There were great white beams and white walls decorated with dados of printed cotton, there were ropes along the wall and there hung silver belts and serapes—waist swathes—deerskins, shawls, beautiful blankets, necklaces. There were bowls of the sacred meal upon the floor, and a long line of sprinkled meal led up to what seemed to be an altar—the Shaleco altar. In front of that stood motionless the framework and vest of the Shaleco Bird, as it was being consecrated, and Indians chanted unendingly prayers and incantations. Along the walls stood visiting Indians, chiefly Navajos, wrapped in their resplendent blankets, waiting and silent.
Up till midnight, however, the chief activity seemed to be in the kitchens where a great feast was being prepared. The kitchens were large enough for stacks of joints of meat to be piled up—and along the whole length of the walls flamed log-fires with a dozen high old earthenware pots simmering upon them. The odor of the joints was almost overpowering, but it was pleasantly blended with the smoke which went up the vast vent of the hollow wall. Old squaws with bent backs tended pots and flames and they wore long bright kerchiefs on their heads and down their backs. Certainly they never knew how cold it was outside.
We went to "Pablito" and "Emily," fanciful names of an Indian and his wife. Their true names they will seldom divulge. They gave us a room and blankets—in case we could snatch a few hours of sleep now and then. Pablito's house was a strange hive of activity. It had a long corridor which led to a bake-house, and through our room and along this corridor went a procession of squaws carrying pumpkins so heavy we interceded now and then to help them, and carrying tubs of "chili con carne"—roast meat and chili—and of frijoles (beans).
At eleven we all lay down to try to sleep, the girls chaffing one another a great deal. I had expected to meet Wilfrid Ewart and the poet Witter Bynner at the Zunyi Dance, and we heard they had arrived. But in these first hours they eluded us. I do not know whether it was the expectation of meeting Ewart or Bynner or merely the spirit of the age, but the two pretty nieces, of which perhaps Betty was the more vain (though who can say?), insisted on curling their hair at one in the morning. They had brought curling tongs with them, and so relit the oil lamp and heated the tongs in the glass chimney and laboriously curled each beautiful lock. We men watched them from the floor, with half-closed eyes. Then we got up also and sallied forth into the ice-bound streets and visited the shrines again.
By that time the Indians had feasted their guests and all the dances were in full activity. Where before in the hall of a Shaleco house had been the drone and the stillness of prayers before a shrine there was now the gayety of marvelous ritual dances and Nature ballets.
The Shaleco and the Mudheads were dancing together. I imagine that Shaleco is the Spanish name for the Bird-god of the Zunyi Indians. Chaleco is Spanish for a vest, and the chief characteristic of the Bird-god is his beautiful embroidered vests which hang over interior hoops and fold over one another. The Bird is nine or ten feet high. Imagine, therefore, how high the rooms in which he dances! He is an astonishing bird. He wears a sun halo of eagles' feathers, he has horns of turquoise color, and at his throat is a voluminous black ruff of thickly clustered little feathers. Black holes are his eyes, and his beak is a long, straight, cleft piece of wood which opens and shuts and clack-clacks in menace or in mirth. The embroidered vests below are of turquoise color fading toward green. Inside all this, of course, is a hidden Indian, hidden in all except his moccasins.
The Mudheads, in contrast to the Shalecos, were almost naked and were ugly. Their bodies were painted mud color (adobe color), and they wore over their natural heads a mask of misshapenness. They looked like badly made men of mud—as if some journeyman had made man. There were knobs on their heads, finger holes for eyes; they had protruding, bottle-neck mouths. They wore no jewelry, but round their middles hung a slit kilt of black material, and as they danced their bare, mud-colored hips slipped in and out.
I was told they represented in mythology the offspring of a brother and sister. Their function, however, was that of clowns. I took their real symbolism to mean, human beings in the presence of the Nature god, absurd and ugly. When the Shalecos had returned to the mountains I noticed that the Mudheads took off their masks and danced seriously and beautifully again.
But in the strange midnight the Shalecos in the dance constantly chased them. There was something whimsical in the expression of the Shaleco, especially when it leaped forward dancing from the shrine. It ran like a bird and squeaked and clack-clacked as it ran. Katharine Voigt took the attention of the Shaleco directly she entered the first hall. Was it her bright red tam-o-shanter or her curled locks? I cannot say. But he flew at her across the room so that she retreated whilst the Bird, with the lightest of turns, had checked its speedy advance and was returning to the shrine, and the four Mudheads present were mumming and spluttering and step-dancing back and forth in ungainly gestures, and the chorus of singers and drummers at the back of the room kept the throb of time. Scores of Indians watched from the sides, scores crowded the doorways, the light of the large lamps above was warm and bright, and the dancing never ceased.
We went from house to house. At another house a band of Zunyis were dancing a Navajo dance in honor of the Navajos present. At another the Longhorns were dancing. The Longhorns had mitered heads of red and blue, masked, hidden faces, black feather-ruffs at the throat like that of the Shaleco, but bare body and legs and beautiful brown moccasins. They carried in their hands spears of horn and a bunch of twigs. In their dance the chief movement was a running forward with bent knees, like a Roman soldier spear in hand. But they smote no one till the dance was over next day. Then I believe they smote every one they could.
In another hall danced a buckskin-headed child of dawn with a white taperlike point on the height of his head and a crimson diadem set with silver conches about his brows; a beautiful and serene figure, and one of the most delicate of the dancers. It was in the house where he was dancing that I met the poet Bynner, tired and yet spellbound. "This is the most beautiful of them all, I think," he said. The dance was pure poetry to him.
In another room danced the Firegod, naked blackened, ugly. His whole body was soot colored and he had, like a string about his middle, the meanest of loin cloths. Far from being a Firegod he seemed an uncouth savage. But with him danced two Shaleco Birds, a Longhorn, and six Mudheads, and they made an astonishing medley.
Away in a corner, long-haired, long-faced, sat the chorus, with wide-open mouths, never ceasing their Ho-i-ho, ho-ho-ho, ha-ha-ha-ha, and beating on their tiny drums. Resplendent scarlet and orange colors lined the walls, the blanket cloaks of the tall, Moorish-looking Navajo Indians. Wampum glittered on every wall. Eyes glittered also. Glittered also the embroidered vests and strange blue horns of the Shaleco Birds—only the Mudheads made dissonance and disharmony, bubbling through their mud masks and calling out obscenities and bad jokes and posturing misshapenness. But all moved, back and forth, back and forth, tripping it, turning, marking time, waving hands to the time of the tomtoms in the corner.
What the Spaniards of Coronado thought of all this has not been recorded. Their eyes sought gold—but this is not a gold country; the Indians do not wear it, do not seek it. Even to take all their silver and turquoise away is not to equal one or even one tenth of the value of one of Montezuma's presents to Hernan Cortes. They must have been annoyed. The Shalecos, the Mudheads, the Longhorns! Had they ridden five hundred leagues to see these?
They had no poets with them, only brutal soldiers and vulgar priests. They were even capable of burning these innocent Indians alive, and proposed, as a lesson in their Christianity, to burn two hundred of them at once in one day. Even that was waste of time when the question of gold was in the mind. Behold, a clever Indian has started the story of Golden Quivira, and will lead Coronado a thousand miles further into the desert, away from Cibola which asks only to be left in peace.
The Spaniards in Southern Mexico found gems innumerable and gold without price, and they obliterated without a thought Aztec culture. But in the North they found nothing but sand and cactus, and so left the Indians for the most part at peace.
So to-day at the "center of the earth" the Shalecos still come down from the mountains and dance for the children of Cibola. We watched them till dawn—then we returned to our room. Emily, our little Zunyi hostess, was sleeping in my blanket on the floor, and was alarmed and about to get up again when she saw us return, but I gently put her back on the floor and patted her on the cheek so that she settled down to sleep again. The rest of us lay down on the floor in the miscellany of blankets and wraps and slept as we could for an hour or two till the sun came up. For it had been a tiring night, even for us who merely looked on.
Only next noon did I encounter Wilfrid Ewart, though he also had been pilgrimaging from room to room and dance to dance the night long. Which shows how much was happening in Zunyi when two friends could thus miss one another all night.
"What happens to-day?" he asked of a tall friendly Indian standing bareheaded in the snow.
"Shaleco go way back up into the mountains. Not come for another year," said he playfully. "Way up ... and no come for another year. Next year Shaleco come again."
And in a little while the six Shaleco Birds came out of the houses and crossed the river, and the Longhorns came, and the Firegod, and the one I call the Child of Dawn, and they danced in the snow which had melted under the noonday sun and in the mud. First the Longhorns danced alone. Then they returned to the pueblo and its streets and roofs, and smote men and women on their backs; once, thwack, twice, thwack, whilst the fleet-footed Shalecos danced by the river's edge.
Hundreds of men and women watched from the house tops of the pueblo. Over a hundred horsemen, with gay kerchiefs about their brows, stood on the further side of the river with the Shalecos, and five or six cars with American sightseers were drawn up also. The mighty mountains, the Butte and the Twin Butte, immemorially sacred, looked down at the scene across the snows. Then the Longhorns returned from smiting the village and danced again with the great strange Shaleco birds. The hundred horsemen suddenly galloped away toward the mountains, and Shalecos and Longhorns began to move rapidly away from the pueblo. And I stood with Wilfrid Ewart in the snow and shine of that fair afternoon and watched them fade from our eyes.
"Shaleco has gone away to the mountains. Shaleco not come again for another year," said I softly, echoing the Indian.
"By Jove!" cried Wilfrid, as if waking from a reverie. "That was fine. This has been the best of it all—"
And then Wilfrid had to go. For he was one in a crowd in a car. And I was left behind when almost every one else had gone.
And at night I saw the Mudheads dance again, this time without their masks, and showing their true features. Two old men stood, one each side of the sacred shrine, and balanced eagle feathers while they danced, now and then dipping the feathers in the sacred meal. The drum men beat the drums and hallooed, and the brown men danced and perspired. The Shalecos, alas, were gone. The Mudheads had become ourselves, now repentant and prayerful and asking blessings from the Bird.