The Black Panther of the Navaho

by Warren H. Miller

Then he drew back, with a quick start of surprise, for, huddled against the walls of the furnace he saw two figures, with ornamentally woven blankets fallen shapelessly around them. Sid whistled to himself, softly, as he glanced around with a shiver of superstitious fear. Then he got a new grip on his courage and looked down again. Yes, they were there;—two human figures squatting in the gloom, hugging the heat of their pottery fire that had long since gone out. Sid looked, and then slowly descended. They were an old man and his squaw, shriveled and dry as mummies, their clothing tattered and fallen into decay.

Their whole story was here; pathetic, gripping the heart with its human appeal. Sid added a new item to his philosophy,—the sacredness of the word HOME. These old people had stuck to their home until the last, huddling up to their life-giving fire with the ultimate feebleness of old age. Their young folk had doubtless migrated to one of the populous pueblos now flourishing; these two had stayed by the homes their fathers had built, the squaw tending her few vegetables, the old buck killing rabbits or an occasional deer, the pair making pottery and blankets as their forefathers had done since time immemorial—the last, last survivors of a communal home, where once a happy people had lived and loved!

And the flower of their lives was here, the imperishable immortality of art; for these jars and baskets were beautiful, as beautiful in form and decoration as any Greek or Etruscan vase. The story of their gods was there, just as on the Greek vases of two thousand years ago. One or both of these old folk had produced these, and left Beauty as their memorial.

Sid stood looking at them, reverently, and then stooped to examine the oven door, for the dull white of pottery decoration within had caught his eye. Raking out the sticks and charcoal, a great vase standing bottom upright within the oven came to view. Carefully he lifted it out and stood looking at it in wonder. It was tall and beautifully formed, with a swelling base and wide columnar neck that flared like a trumpet flower at the top. It was covered with black and white symbolic decorations,—rainbows, rain, clouds, lightnings, mountains, mesas, all in conventional figures that thrilled him with their mystic significance.

Now, why should these two have spent the last hours of life left to them in producing—this? ruminated Sid. Why, but the love of art, the worship of beauty that would not die within them so long as a spark of life remained! It was their monument, that immortal flowering of art,—the desire to make something beautiful that is bedded in the soul of man, is in truth the wine of life to those who have it, rich and fertile, in their beings.

Sid at length climbed up the ladder, thoughtfully, and went along the roofs of the three other pueblos. They were deserted and empty, but outside in the sun against the Old People’s room was the empty wooden frame of their blanket loom.

“Thus we lived, and thus we died; mark and learn who will!” sighed the boy, philosophically, clapping his hands together abstractedly. “And now,—how am I going to get back to Pinto and the Canyon?” he asked himself briskly. The climb back down those frightful ledges to the fir tree was only to be considered as a last resort. As he had passed no way out of the box canyon in getting to the pueblo, Sid reasoned that the entrance the former dwellers used must be somewhere up near its head, where there would be a slope of some sort. He went forward along the roofs of the four houses, hoping to find a trail that would lead to this route.

As he approached the last end wall, a faint but noisome odor smote his nostrils. The boy hesitated and laid hand on his small .32-20 belt pistol, for this smell was of tainted meat, and it warned him that an animal lair of some kind was near him. Cautiously he advanced and peered over the wall. Below him the ledge ended abruptly—the cliff men had built right to the end of it, so as to make it inaccessible from below at that end. Spruces grew out of the cliff wall and concealed it, but through their roots Sid thought he could detect worn spots where some creature had been in the habit of passing.

Then he turned his attention to the back of the high cave roof overhead whence came the odor. It shelved down behind the pueblo, and as he walked over to the inner walls, Sid could make out a black and dusty area in behind them, where the cave came down to the ledge floor. Here the shelf slabs were not three feet above the ledge floor, a slit of dense gloom, where water had once scoured out a soft stratum of rock. His eye gradually made out bones strewed on the soil under here, ribs, skulls, leg bones, all of sheep or deer; he could not say which.

“Phew!” he muttered, drawing back to the fresh air. “It’s either a cougar or a bear den—it can’t be the latter, unless it’s some small black bear, for nothing but a fly could come through those spruces on the cliff. It is a cat! Cougar—perhaps the Black Panther himself!—Why not?” he declared, with growing conviction. “I’ll just bet it was him, last night! He hunts around here, or did, until he found that stealing the Indians’ sheep was free, to him! Gosh, the beggar might be paying rent and taxes!” sniffed Sid. “Of all the nerve! He’s got a pretty soft thing—I’ll say!—until someone of us gets a shot at him, out here. And that’ll be me, I hope.”