III
Sinyella is half a skeptic. He sat back in the lodge and watched Sack, the medicine man, in the firelight beside his sister’s sick grandson. Let the other relatives shout to make the shaman strong: he would wait, if the boy died, he would kill the incompetent. The shaman knelt over the boy, swaying as he sang, his head to one side, his left knuckles clenched over his closed eyes, his clashing rattle in the other hand. Once he stopped rigid with open mouth, so that his familiar spirit might leave his chest to search for sickening ghosts outside the house. Then he rose and went out into the dark. Sinyella heard his spirit halloing and whistling as it returned to him out there. The shaman reëntered and resumed his singing. He put his lips to the boy’s forehead that the spirit might go in search of the sickness. He sucked the spirit back with a gulp, spat into his palm, and triumphantly exhibited its contents, some little white thread-like worms. “That was hard for me, but I have taken out all the sickness; there is no more there now.” Well, the boy’s father would give Sack a big blanket, but Sinyella decided that he, at any rate, would wait.
Musing as he waded through the crusted snow to his own lodge set snugly in the cedar thickets, he thought: Sack is young, he may not be much good, perhaps his spirit is weak. But I don’t know much about these things: there’s that star up there, Pagioga, the man-snatcher, and sometimes there are ghosts. I pray too: “Sun, my relative,” I say, “do something for me. You make me work so I can do anything: make good things for us: keep me always as I am now.” ... Of late his ears had been frequently ringing; ghosts were whispering to him. Suddenly he shouted, “Huuuu; no, though you talk that way, I am not going to die.”
It was well that they had collected a good store of pine nuts and wild seeds in the autumn after they left the canyon; the snow was thigh deep this winter. It was bitter cold; men and birds would freeze; the firewood on the ground was covered. But deep snow soon exhausted hunted deer and antelope, and there would be no lack of drinking water here on the plateau. The laden trees brought back to him that long past day when his father found the Navaho woman lost in the snow and took her to wife. He remembered other Navaho; those he had fought, those whose horses he had carried off, those who had despoiled him on a trading trip to the Hopi. There had been many a trip eastward to the Hopi villages, where the Navaho, quondam enemies, came to trade too. Presents exchanged, friendships renewed in night-long talks, buckskins and horn ladles traded for blankets, he would turn his packed horses back for the fortnight’s journey across the arid wastes toward his canyon home. There he would wait the coming of the Walapai, his blood brothers, from the west. Or, if they did not come, he would carry the Hopi woven stuffs to trade in their country. Once he had even penetrated beyond their range to the Mohave in the low land of the Colorado River, where, astounded at his effrontery, they had permitted him to stay and peaceably trade.
In all countries they knew him well: that was why people called him chief. He made himself a chief. True, his grandfather had been chief, like his fathers before him. But his own father was never chief; no one would call him that; he was a good-for-nothing. Now when I die, he thought, my two oldest sons will share it, as they will my fields. I have taught them both to talk like chiefs.
As, stooping, he lifted the door flap of his dome-shaped house he sensed to the full the flood of warmth and light. This was his own, these his people, and it was always good to be at home. The group reclining about the central fire broke off their cheerful chatter to greet him: back under the dark eaves he could hear the children, nominally asleep, giggling over some fine mischief. “The Walapai have come to ask our young men to join them next spring in a raid on the Paiute across the Grand Canyon; Panamida wants to go,” they told him.
“Panamida will fight them soon enough, let him but stay at home.”
“Panamida, younger brother, some nice Walapai girl will say to you, ‘Here’s a roasted lizard,’” said Grediva, mocking the gruff Walapai speech, amid the laughter of her relatives at the thought of eating lizard.
Sinyella smiled drowsily at the firelit faces: yes, all his own people. At his side he heard Lanso, “Grandfather, tell us just one story. Don’t refuse this time; the snakes will not bother now, it is winter.” Sinyella sat back where the children were listening, lying in the darkness. “Wolf and Coyote lived far to the west close to the ocean. Wolf said to Coyote, ‘This country holds no game, no deer, no antelope. All we eat is rats; that’s all we kill; that’s the only meat we have. I think I want you to go right down in the water, way down to the bottom of the ocean.’ Many elk lived under the water. Coyote tried: he went close to the water and put his head down, but he felt afraid. ‘I’m afraid to go down: I want you to go.’ Wolf said, ‘All right, I will go down and hunt. I will hunt a big elk and drive it right out. I will come out again after four sleeps.’”...
Leslie Spier
