Zuñi Folk Tales

by Frank Hamilton Cushing

“Yaush! Come along, then,” said the elder sister; whereupon they gathered their cotton mantles and other garments into bundles, and, taking along a bag of yucca-root, or soap-weed, started together down the steep, crooked path to where the pool lay at the foot of the great mesa.

Now, far above the Town of the Cliffs, among the rocks of red-gray and yellow—red in the form of a bowlder-like mountain that looks like a frozen sand-bank—there is a deep cave. You have never seen it? Well! to this day it is called the “Cave of Átahsaia,” and there, in the times I tell of, lived Átahsaia himself. Uhh! what an ugly demon he was! His body was as big as the biggest elk’s, and his breast was shaggy with hair as stiff as porcupine-quills. His legs and arms were long and brawny,—all covered with speckled scales of black and white. His hair was coarse and snarly as a buffalo’s mane, and his eyes were so big and glaring that they popped out of his head like skinned onions. His mouth stretched from one cheek to the other and was filled with crooked fangs as yellow as thrown-away deer-bones. His lips were as red and puffy as peppers, and his face as wrinkled and rough as a piece of burnt buckskin. That was Átahsaia, who in the days of the ancients devoured men and women for his meat, and the children of men for his sweet-bread. His weapons were terrible, too. His finger-nails were as long as the claws of a bear, and in his left hand he carried a bow made of the sapling of a mountain-oak, with two arrows ready drawn for use. And he was never seen without his great flint knife, as broad as a man’s thigh and twice as long, which he brandished with his right hand and poked his hair back with, so that his grizzly fore-locks were covered with the blood of those he had slaughtered. He wore over his shoulders whole skins of the mountain lion and bear clasped with buttons of wood.

Now, although Átahsaia was ugly and could not speak without chattering his teeth, or laugh without barking like a wolf, he was a very polite demon. But, like many ugly and polite people nowadays, he was a great liar.

Átahsaia that morning woke up and stuck his head out of his hole just as the two maidens went down to the spring. He caught sight of them while his eyes travelled below, and he chuckled. Then he muttered, as he gazed at them and saw how young and fine they were: “Ahhali! Yaa-tchi!” (“Good lunch! Two for a munch!”) and howled his war-cry, “Ho-o-o-thlai-a!” till Teshaminkia, the Echo-god, shouted it to the maidens.

“Oh!” exclaimed the háni, clutching the arm of her elder sister; “listen!”

“Ho-o-o-thlai-a!” again roared the demon, and again Teshaminkia.

“Oh, oh! sister elder, what did I tell you! Why did we come out today!” and both ran away; then stopped to listen. When they heard nothing more, they returned to the spring and went to washing their clothes on some flat stones.

But Átahsaia grabbed up his weapons and began to clamber down the mountain, muttering and chuckling to himself as he went: “Ahhali! Yaa-tchi!” (“Good lunch! Two for a munch!”).

Around the corner of Great Mesa, on the high shelves of which stands the Town of the Cliffs, are two towering buttes called Kwilli-yallon (Twin Mountain). Far up on the top of this mountain there dwelt Áhaiyúta and Mátsailéma.

You don’t know who Áhaiyúta and Mátsailéma were? Well, I will tell you. They were the twin children of the Sun-father and the Mother Waters of the World. Before men were born to the light, the Sun made love to the Waters of the World, and under his warm, bright glances, there were hatched out of a foam-cup on the face of the Great Ocean, which then covered the earth, two wonderful boys, whom men afterward named Ua nam Atch Píahk’oa (“The Beloved Two who Fell”). The Sun dried away the waters from the high-lands of earth and these Two then delivered men forth from the bowels of our Earth-mother, and guided them eastward toward the home of their father, the Sun. The time came, alas! when war and many strange beings arose to destroy the children of earth, and then the eight Stern Beings changed the hearts of the twins to sawanikia, or the medicine of war. Thenceforth they were known as Áhaiyúta and Mátsailéma (“Our Beloved,” the “Terrible Two,” “Boy-gods of War”).