The Enchanted Burro / And Other Stories as I Have Known Them from Maine to Chile and California

by Charles Fletcher Lummis

The flat-faced mother brought him two tortillas[9] for lunch; and putting her hands upon his shoulders, looked at him a moment from wet eyes, saying not a word. And slinging over his shoulder the bow-case and quiver, Lelo trudged away.

He plodded along the crooked meadow road, white-patched here and there with crystals of alkali; jumped the main irrigating ditch with a great bound, and took “across lots” over the adobe fences and through the vineyards and the orchards of apple, peach and apricot.

In the farther edge of the last orchard stood a tiny adobe house, where old Reyes had lived in the summer-time to guard her ripening fruits. Since her death it had been abandoned, with the garden, and next summer the Indian congress could allot it to any one who asked, since it would have been left untilled for five years. The house was half hidden from sight—overshadowed on one side by ancient pear trees and on the other by the black cliffs of an advance guard of the lava flow.

As he passed the ruined hut Lelo suddenly stooped and began looking anxiously at a footprint in the soft earth. “That was from no moccasin of the Tee-wahn,” he muttered to himself, “for the sole is flatter than ours. And it comes out of the house, where no one ever goes, now that Grandmother Reyes is dead. But this! For in three steps it is no more the foot of a man, but of a beast—going even to the bushes where I saw the Enchanted Burro that morning”—and all of a tremble, Lelo leaned up against the wall of the house. It was all he could do to keep from turning and bolting for home—and you need not laugh at him. The bow-case at his side was from the tawny mountain lion Lelo had slain with his own hands in the cañons of the Tetilla; and when Refúgio, the youngest medicine-man, fell wounded in the fore-front of the fight at Tajique, it was Lelo who had lumbered forward and brought him away in his arms, saving his life and hair from the Cumanche knife. But it takes a braver man to stand against his own superstitions than to face wild beast or wilder savage; and now, though Lelo did not flee, his knees smote together and the blood seemed to have left his head dry and over-light. He sat down, so weak was he; and, with back against the wall, he tried to gather his scattered thoughts.

At that very moment, if Lelo had turned his head a very little more to the left and looked at one particular rift in the thorny greasewoods that choked the foot of the cliff, he might have seen two dark, hungry eyes fixed upon him; but Lelo was not looking that way so much as to the corner of the cliff. There he would have to pass to the field; and it was just around that corner that he had seen the Enchanted Burro. “And there also I have seen the mouth of a cave, where they say the ogres used to live and where no one dares to enter”—and he shivered again, like one half frozen. Then he did look back to the left, but saw nothing, for the eyes were no longer there. Only, a few rods farther to the left, and where Lelo could not see for the wall at his back, the tall, white ears of a burro were moving quietly along in the bushes, which hid the rest of its body. Now and then the animal stopped and cocked up its ears, as if to listen; and its eyes rose over the bush, shining with a deep, strange light. Just beyond was the low adobe wall which separated Reyes’s garden from the next—running from the foot of the cliff down past the old house.

To go on to the field needed even more courage than to keep from fleeing for home; and stubborn as he was, Lelo was trying to muster up legs and heart to proceed. He even rose to his feet and drew back his elbows fiercely, straining the muscles of his chest, where there seemed to be such a weight. Just around the corner of the house, at that same moment, a burro’s head, with white ears and a blazed face, rose noiselessly above the adobe fence, and seeing nothing, a pair of black hoofs came up, and in a swift bound the animal was over the wall—so lightly that even the sharp Indian ears not fifteen feet away heard nothing of it.

But if Lelo did not notice, a sharper watcher did. “Kay-eé-w’yoo!” cried a complaining voice, and a brown bird with broad wings and a big, round head went fluttering from its perch on the roof. Lelo started violently, and then smiled at himself. “It is only tecolóte,” he muttered, “the little owl that lives with the túsas,[10] and they say he is very wise. To see where he went.”

The boy stole around the corner of the house, but the owl was nowhere to be seen, and he started back.

As he turned the angle again, he caught sight of a burro’s head just peeping from around the other corner; and Lelo felt the blood sinking from his face. The beast gave a little start and then dropped its head to a bunch of alfalfa that was green at the corner. But this did not relieve Lelo’s terror. It was Paloma—dead Paloma—now the Witch Burro. There was no mistaking that jovero face. And plain it was, too, that this was no longer burro-true, but one of the accursed spirits in burro shape. Those eyes! They seemed, in that swift flash in which they had met Lelo’s, to be sunk far, far into the skull; and he was sure that deep in them he saw a dull gleam of red. And the ears and head—they were touched with death, too! Their skin seemed hard and ridgy as a rawhide, instead of fitting as the skin does in life. So, also, was the neck; but no more was to be seen for the angle of the wall.