People of the Mesa: A Novel of Native America. Ardath Mayhar
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on the lip of the cliff, with the pinpoint glows of his people’s fires smiling at him from below and across the gorge? His work was done, and now there was time to retrace his steps, to see and understand what it was that he had learned and been and accomplished.
The ancient closed his eyes, and tears from the chill trickled down his cheeks. He didn’t notice, for he was seeing into the past.
Chapter Two
Uhtatse sat motionless, legs and arms folded precisely as the Shaman had taught him. If the limbs were at rest, the mind could grasp the Teaching, the old man insisted. So the boy positioned himself and focused his mind upon Ki-shi-o-te’s words.
“Not only the Kiyate threaten our people,” the Shaman was saying. “There are other enemies in the low places, though they have not yet come into our country. We understand the Kiyate, and they us, and our battles are not terrible matters. Others may prove, in time to come, to be more difficult to deal with.
“Yet there are matters more immediate and more important to our survival. The rain must come, and the snow, or our crops will fail. The catchments must hold soil and moisture; the deer must thrive in the Middle Way, and the plants grow on the mesa. For the deer to prosper, the oak leaves must be lush for browsing. The birds in the air and the growing things on our land must balance together, or we of the Ahye-tum-datsehe will suffer and perhaps will die.” He looked sternly about at the six boys sitting before him.
“You are thinking that these are things that even a babe should know, and that is true. But not until you grasp a snake by the tail do you really take heed of his fangs. You must open your minds to the reality of what I am saying. You must let your thought play with all the things that might happen if any one of the matters upon which our lives depend should fail us.” He stared at Uhtatse. “What would occur if the snow did not fall in winter?”
Uhtatse shivered. “There would be no water in the catchment basins. We could grow very little in the gardens, for the rains are small and undependable. The small springs might dry up, and the deer would go away or die. We also would have to look far to find water and food.”
Ki-shi-o-te nodded, a short jerk of his head. He turned his gaze toward Na-to-si. “And if the yucca sickened and died, here on the mesa, what would happen?”
The boy’s eyes widened. “There would be no long smooth cordage for bags and baskets and sandals. We would have nothing to clean with, for its soapy roots would wither and die. If the yucca died, we would do without many things.”
The catechism went on from boy to boy, from item to item, until all the necessary plants and creatures and phenomena of the mesa were tallied. When it was done, Uhtatse felt anew the wonder he had felt at his first lessoning. So few things sustained their lives on the high mesas.
If the corn god turned his eyes away, if the rain and snow god grew angry, if any of the gods of any of the vital elements of their lives should be angered at the People, then all must perish or move to another place. And to move meant risking a meeting with the Kiyate, who ranged the rugged lands below the mesas.
A sharp breeze swept down the canyon, eddying about the stone outcrop on which the Teacher sat with his pupils. It held the first bite of winter, and Uhtatse wished that he had worn his turkey-feather blanket. But it was not permissible for discomfort to distract him. He straightened his back more rigidly and kept his gaze upon his teacher.
He was glad when this part of his day was done—it was no easy thing to listen to the same words, day after day. Vital as they were, they were boring, too.
The thing that devoured him with curiosity was the question as to what ability the Old Ones might find in him. What task would be set him to perform all his life? He knew already that he was not a hunter, though he could provide adequately, if it was necessary. He worked willingly in his mother’s fields, but he had no feel for farming. His mother scolded him for dreaming or listening to the cries of birds while he was supposed to do things as simple as tending a fire or pulling weeds.
Yet the Teacher had chosen him, with six others, from all the other boys to hear the Teaching. From this rank would come a new Teacher, a new Healer, and a new One to smell the wind for change and for danger.
Three of their number would go back to the old tasks shared by all the members of the People. Uhtatse felt uneasily certain that he might be one of them. He felt inside himself no great aptitude for anything either ordinary or unusual. He seemed to be a gourd, hollowed out and ready for its content, yet still unaware what that might be. Yet he hoped, with the irrepressible confidence of youth, that they might find in him something he did not know was there.
On the day they were assigned to their life-tasks, the Teacher handed Uhtatse a sleek feather from an eagle. “You will learn to smell the wind,” he said. Uhtatse’s heart leaped with fierce joy, though he knew that to be the most difficult of all the skills to learn.
He was not apprenticed to the old One Who Smelled the Wind. That was not the way in which one learned the delicate craft of sensing what took place on the mesa. Each person must find his own path to that sensitivity that noted everything, feared nothing, and could judge the meaning of anything he sensed, instantly and unerringly.
For Uhtatse, it meant that all day, every day, as well as for many nights, he must range the mesas, listening, looking, hearing, smelling, tasting the air, watching the movements of deer and kangaroo rats and chipmunks, of magpies and ravens and hawks and eagles. Every living thing must become a part of him.
As he moved silently through the thick growths of juniper and piñon, or lay silently in the fields of corn, or stood motionless on the lip of any of the stony edges of the cliffs, he was absorbing the things he needed to know through every one of his senses. Even the pores of his skin seemed to soak up the things he must learn. The mesa soon became as much a part of him as the faint thudding of his heart.
A day came when a hawk altered its pattern as it wheeled above him. Its skree came, but at the wrong time and in the wrong tone. A group of deer amid the serviceberry bushes flicked their large ears and disappeared into the brush.
Uhtatse, hidden in a runnel cut into the stone by melting snow, closed his eyes and felt. Smelled. Sensed.
The light breeze brought to his nostrils the tang of strange bodies. Men were coming, and not men of any people living on the mesa. Strangers! Strangers were approaching the high places.
He rose and slid through the junipers without a sound. The old One Who Smelled the Wind was waiting for him at the house of the Teacher’s woman. Both smiled at the excited boy, as he gave them his news.
Ki-shi-o-te stared out over the fields toward the abrupt edge marking the drop to the Middle Way. “Warriors have gone to investigate those who come. But they are not Kiyate, Young One. These are the Anensi, who travel far and bring things for trading. You do not remember their last visit. Now you will meet with them, learn their sounds and smells, so that their coming will not disturb you the next time.”
The Old One looked at him. “You have done well. I have watched you as you have gone about the mesa, down into the valleys, along the cliffs and down their faces. We are fortunate in you. When I am too old to serve my people, you will be able to do our work well.”
The boy felt his face grow hot with pride, but he kept his expression solemn. To be praised by that one was an honor to be cherished. Perhaps the Shaman had known, after all, what he was doing when he chose Uhtatse to smell the wind.
Chapter Three
The old men were turning away toward the circling junipers. Ki-shi-o-te led, his skin cloak draped in its most dignified folds. The Old Woman came from around the corner of the pueblo and greeted her peers before falling in behind him, and Uhtatse came last. In single file, the Teacher, the Seer, and the two Ones Who Smelled the Wind made their way along the paths to the spot where their way would intersect that of the approaching Anensi.
Uhtatse was aflame with curiosity. Except for glimpses of distant Kiyate, as they moved across the low country beneath the mesa, he had seen no outlanders since he was a tiny child, too small to notice