“Where are your sons?”
“In the village,” replied the mother of the twins.
For a moment or two after this, the owl said nothing whatever, but continued with his “cat’s cradle” game. Then suddenly he fixed his round yellow eyes on Kai, and said slowly, “If I were you, I would hide them there a while. The god whom we call the Mischief Maker is in the land, and if he finds the twins, he may do them harm. Keep them at home, Daughter of Pesh-li-kai.”
At these words the frightened mother dropped the little bundle of dye roots she had already gathered, and ran as fast as she could back to the village. When she reached her house, her heart almost stopped beating, for the boys were not there. She did find them, however, at their grandfather’s. They were seated on the ground near the tiny forge, watching Pesh-li-kai melting silver in a cup.
Calling the twins to her, their mother told them of the ground owl’s warning, and forbade them to leave the village even for a moment. She then gave them a buckskin cord to play cat’s cradle with, and went down the ladders to continue her search for the roots. As these were small and not very plentiful, she had to search the ground for them slowly and carefully.
About the middle of the afternoon, the mother became aware of a sound of the sighing of wind, a sound that did not die away, but grew louder and louder and louder till all the little pinyon pines in the canyon, rustling and moaning together, made a sound like the sea. Kai knew instantly that a cloud-burst was at hand. She had hardly gathered her roots together before the sky grew pitchy dark.
Great whirling billows of dust now swept up the black canyon; whirls of dust swept off the canyon rim into the tumult of the upper air; the whole world seemed to dissolve in a great, trembling, roaring sound of wind and rushing rain. With a peal of thunder that echoed and re-echoed from the canyon walls, the cloud-burst reached the valley.
Roaring rain of the southwest country, rain of the giant drops, rain that in the twinkling of an eye turns little rivers to deep streams. The thunder bird rode the wild dark, the wind, and the sheets of rain, the arrows of lightning fell from the bows of the thunder spirits.
Seeing the cloud-burst coming, the Indians working in the fields dropped their sticks and hoes and ran as fast as they could for the ladders. Kai ran pell-mell with the rest. The instant she reached the town she looked about for her sons.