The great cat bounded lightly to the ground, took two or three stretchy steps, shaking the sleep from her flanks, yawned prodigiously, and trotted off toward a thicket of wild plums into which she slipped like a beam of yellow light into water. A moment later she reappeared on the opposite side, bounded back and settled herself on the boulder. Around the circle ran the short "Huh! Huh!" of Indian approval. The Navajo shifted his blanket.
"A Diné could have done no more for a friend," he admitted.
"I see," said Oliver. "When the Diné saw you coming out of the mesquite they would have been perfectly sure there was no man there. But anyway, they might have taken a shot at you."
"And the twang of the bowstring and the thrashing about of the kill in the thicket would have told Tse-tse exactly wheretheywere," said the Navajo. "The Diné when they hunt man do not turn aside for a puma."
"The hardest part of it all," said Moke-icha, "was to keep from showing I winded him. I heard the Diné move off, fox-calling to one another, and at last I smelled Tse-tse working down the gully. He paid no attention to me whatever; his eyes were fixed on the Diné who stood by the spring with his back to him looking down on the turkey girl who was huddled against the rocks with her hands tied behind her. The Diné looked down with his arms folded, evil-smiling. She looked up and I saw her spit at him. The man took her by the shoulder, laughing still, and spun her up standing. Half a bowshot away I heard Tse-tse-yote. 'Down! Down!' he shouted. The girl dropped like a quail. The Diné, whirling on his heel, met the arrow with his throat, and pitched choking. I came as fast as I could between the boulders--I am not built for running--Tse-tse had unbound the girl's hands and she leaned against him.
"Breathing myself before drinking, I caught a new scent up the Gap where the wind came from, but before I had placed it there came a little scrape on the rocks under the roof of Lasting Water, small, like the rasp of a snake coiling. I had forgot there were three Diné at Ty-uonyi; the third had been under the rock drinking. He came crawling now with his knife in his teeth toward Tse-tse. Me he had not seen until he came round the singing rock, face to face with me...
"When it was over," said Moke-icha, "I climbed up the black roof of Lasting Water to lick a knife cut in my shoulder. Tse-tse talked to the girl, of all things, about the love-gift she had put in the cave for me. 'Moke-icha had eaten it before I found her,' he insisted, which was unnecessary. I lay looking at the Diné I had killed and licking my wound till I heard, around the bend of the Gap, the travel song of the Queres.
"It was the Salt Pack coming back, every man with his load on his shoulders. They put their hands in their mouths when they saw Tse-tse. There was talk; Willow-in-the-Wind told them something. Tse-tse turned the man he had shot face upward. There was black-and-white paint on his body; the stripes of the Koshare do not come off easily. I saw Tse-tse look from the man to Kokomo and the face of the Koshare turned grayish. I had lived with man, and man-thoughts came to me. I had tasted blood of my master's enemies; also Kokomo was afraid, and that is an offense to me. I dropped from where I lay ... I had come to my full weight ... I think his back was broken.
"It is the Way Things Are," said Moke-icha. "Kokomo had let in the Diné to kill Pitahaya to make himself chief, and he would have killed Tse-tse for finding out about it. That I saw and smelled in him. But I did not wait this time to be beaten with my master's bow-case. I went back to Shut Cañon, for now that I had killed one of them, it was not good for me to live with the Queres. Nevertheless, in the rocks above Ty-uonyi you can still see the image they made of me."