ZUÑI FOLK TALES
THE TRIAL OF LOVERS:
OR THE MAIDEN OF MÁTSAKI AND THE RED FEATHER
(Told the First Night)
IN the days of the ancients, when Mátsaki was the home of the children of men, there lived, in that town, which is called “Salt City,” because the Goddess of Salt made a white lake there in the days of the New, a beautiful maiden. She was passing beautiful, and the daughter of the priest-chief, who owned more buckskins and blankets than he could hang on his poles, and whose port-holes were covered with turquoises and precious shells from the ocean—so many were the sacrifices he made to the gods. His house was the largest in Mátsaki, and his ladder-poles were tall and decorated with slabs of carved wood—which you know was a great thing, for our grandfathers cut with the tímush or flint knife, and even tilled their corn-fields with wooden hoes sharpened with stone and weighted with granite. That’s the reason why all the young men in the towns round about were in love with the beautiful maiden of Salt City.
Now, there was one very fine young man who lived across the western plains, in the Pueblo of the Winds. He was so filled with thoughts of the maiden of Mátsaki that he labored long to gather presents for her, and looked not with favor on any girl of his own pueblo.
One morning he said to his fathers: “I have seen the maiden of Mátsaki; what think ye?”
“Be it well,” said the old ones. So toward night the young man made a bundle of mantles and necklaces, which he rolled up in the best and whitest buckskin he had. When the sun was setting he started toward Mátsaki, and just as the old man’s children had gathered in to smoke and talk he reached the house of the maiden’s father and climbed the ladder. He lifted the corner of the mat door and shouted to the people below—“Shé!”
“Hai!” answered more than a pair of voices from below.
“Pull me down,” cried the young man, at the same time showing his bundle through the sky-hole.