In the year that the boys were ten years old, the dance took place at night. As the houses of the town were built against the back wall and the sides of the open hollow, there was a fine open space in front under the overhanging arch, and there the Indians built a great fire. The pine branches crackled and burnt fiercely, the yellow flames leaped at the roof, darkening the soot-smudge already there, and a fragrant smoke full of red sparks curled out the arch and poured up into the sky.
Then drums began to sound, stately drums, and the older men of the village came out beating the drums and singing the deep-voiced buffalo song.
Then came the younger men, the dancers, climbing one by one from their council-chamber underground. The dancers wore moccasins of hide and turquoise beadwork trimmed with the black and white of skunk fur, their lean, strong legs were washed over with reddish brown paint, a broad band of white cloth encircled them from the waist to just above the knees, and their bare upper bodies and arms were painted like their legs. They wore turquoise and silver necklaces, and round their foreheads, bands of brilliant cloth.
Ten of the dancers were supposed to be buffaloes. You could not see their human heads at all, for they were hidden in real buffalo heads with hollow wooden frames. These dancers looked just like buffaloes with painted human bodies. Two little buffalo calves followed behind the grown-up dancers. When the older buffaloes pretended to be real buffaloes, and looked about and at the ground as if they were looking for grass, the two buffalo calves did the same thing.
The buffaloes and the buffalo calves....
The buffalo calves were the twin sons of the Talking God and Kai. They were proud beyond words to be in the dance. Their thick, straight, black hair had just the gloss of a blackbird’s wing in the sun, their eyes were a deep black-brown, and they were strongly made and of pleasant countenance, even as the Talking God, their father.
A day or two after the dance, the mother of the twins went down into the canyon to look for certain roots used in making a dye. As she was scanning the ground, she saw a ground owl sitting at the mouth of its burrow playing cat’s cradle with a thin buckskin thong. The Navahos say that the spider taught the owl this game, and that the owl taught it to men.
“Daughter of Pesh-li-kai,” said the ground owl, “where are your sons?”