Zuñi Folk Tales

by Frank Hamilton Cushing

Translator’s Introduction

DEEP down in cañons of the Southwest, especially where they are joined by other cañons, the traveller may see standing forth from or hugging the angles of the cliffs, great towering needles of stone—weird, rugged, fantastic, oftentimes single, as often—like gigantic wind-stripped trees with lesser trees standing beside them—double or treble. Seen suddenly at a turn in the cañon these giant stones startle the gazer with their monstrous and human proportions, like giants, indeed, at bay against the sheer rock walls, protecting their young, who appear anon to crouch at the knees of their fathers or cling to their sides.

Few white men behold these statuesque stones in the moonlight, or in the gray light and white mists of the morning. At midday they seem dead or asleep while standing; but when the moon is shining above them and the wanderer below looks up to them, lo! the moon stands still and these mighty crags start forth, advancing noiselessly. His back is frozen, and even in the yielding sand his feet are held fast by terror—a delicious, ghostly terror, withal! Still he gazes fascinated, and as the shadow of the moonlight falls toward him over the topmost crest, lo, again! its crown is illumined and circled as if by a halo of snow-light, and back and forth from this luminous fillet over that high stony brow, black hair seems to tumble and gather.

Again, beheld in the dawn-light, when the mists are rising slowly and are waving to and fro around the giddy columns, hiding the cliffs behind them, these vast pinnacles seem to nod and to waver or to sway themselves backward and forward, all as silently as before. Soon, when the sun is risen and the mists from below fade away, the wind blows more mist from the mesa; you see clouds of it pour from the cliff edge, just behind and above these great towers, and shimmer against the bright sky; but as soon as these clouds pass the crag-nests they are lost in the sunlight around them—lost so fast, as yet others come on, that the stone giants seem to drink them.

Of such rocks, according to their variety and local surroundings, the Zuñis relate many tales which are so ingenious and befitting that if we believed, as the Zuñis do, that in the time of creation when all things were young and soft and were therefore easily fashioned by whatever chanced to befall them—into this thing or that thing, into this plant or that plant, this animal or that, and so on endlessly through a dramatic story longer than Shakespeare or the Bible—we would fain believe also as he does in the quaint incidents of these stories of the time when all things were new and the world was becoming as we see it now.

One of these tales, a variant of others pertaining to particular standing rocks in the west, south, or east, is told of that wonder to all beholders, “El Capitan,” of the Cañon de Chelly in the north. No one who has seen this stupendous rock column can fail to be interested in the following legend, or will fail to realize how, as this introduction endeavors to make plainer, the Zuñi poet and philosopher of olden times built up a story which he verily believed quite sufficient to account for the great shaft of sandstone and its many details and surroundings.—F. H. C.

Häki Suto, or Foretop Knot, he whose hair was done up over his forehead like a quail’s crest, lived among the great cliffs of the north long ago, when the world was new. He was a giant, so tall that men called him Lo Ikwithltchunona, or the Cloud-swallower. A devourer of men was he,—men were his meat—yea, and a drinker of their very substance was he, for the cloud-breaths of the beloved gods, and souls of the dead, whence descend rains, even these were his drink. Wherefore the People of the Cliffs sought to slay him, and hero after hero perished thuswise. Wherefore, too, snow ceased in the north and the west; rain ceased in the south and the east; the mists of the mountains above were drunk up; the waters of the valleys below were dried up; corn withered in the fields; men hungered and died in the cliffs.

Then came the Twin Gods of War, Áhaiyúta and Mátsailéma, who in play staked the lives of foes and fierce creatures. “Lo! it is not well with our children, men,” said they. “Let us destroy this Häki Suto, the swallower of clouds,” said they.

They were walking along the trail which leads southward to the Smooth-rocks-descending.

“O, grandchildren, where be ye wending?” said a little, little quavering voice. They looked,—the younger, then the elder. There on the tip of a grass-stalk, waving her banner of down-stuff, stood their grandmother, Spinner of Meshes.