I

The life apart enclosed him again. If some encounter with Indians bound for a dance, some reminiscent incident, brought on a momentary restlessness, he did not have to deal with it. It simply expressed itself in the smug feeling that what he had was so vastly superior to anything in their philosophy. He was a little sorry for those people. When he felt like that, he would stir his pony to a lope, with his head high, uplifted, thinking of Slim Girl, of some little thing to say or do for her. He was a young man very much in love, a young man with his mind made up to love.

At the beginning of the month of Little Snow, he surprised her by bringing an Indian home with him. She was disturbed and uneasy as she prepared the extra food. There was no reason to be bothered; just because something had never happened before did not make it a bad sign. Underneath all her self-confidence was a feeling which she refused to recognize, that this life of theirs hung by threads. Really, in her heart of hearts, she was surprised that everything ran so smoothly. Little things upset her.

Long-haired and hatless, the man’s pure Navajo costume, the heavy look of his jewelry, indicated the Northern country. Laughing Boy called him cousin, and questioned him about people and things at T’o Tlakai and all the Gyende district. The eager voice and the old, familiar names, the home things: she was afraid of all those people, those words. Life was lonely here. Perhaps if she were to keep him, she would have to give up and move back among his own kind. She observed to herself that this man, who was to bind her to The People, seemed to be driving her yet farther apart from them.

When they were alone for a minute, he said, “Why did you not give me my drink? Why did you not offer him one?”

“That drink is medicine that I know. You must leave it to me. There are things that must not be done about it, just like prayer-sticks and sacred cigarettes.” As she spoke, she prepared a stiff dose. “That man must not have it or know about it. You must not speak of it unless I say you may.”

“Good, then, I hear you.” He drained it off. He had missed it.

“I was afraid you would speak of it before him.”

“I thought about it. You had some reason, I thought. So I waited.”

She nodded.

“He is my uncle’s son; not Wounded Face at Tsé Lani, another one from T’o Tlakai. His sister is sick. They are going to hold a full Night Chant, ten nights. They want us to come, he says. Mountain Singer wants me to dance in it; it is a song that I know well. I have been in it before when he led.”

His voice told her, “This time I want to go. Now you must do something for me.” She saw that it would be a mistake to oppose him.

“Let us go, then; I think it will be a good thing. I shall be glad to see your country and your people, and a big dance like that is always good to go to.” There was under-pleading in her voice, but he knew that this was a gift to him. “When is the dance to be?”

“At the full of Little Snow Moon.”

It was obvious that he looked forward eagerly to the visit. This was to be her test that was coming, one more test, and she felt there were enough already. She excelled herself in tenderness and charm, and strengthened his drinks. His response to her was evidence of a steadily burning fire that would momentarily lull her doubts. In every act and word and look he seemed to testify his steadfastness, but still she was uneasy.

On the night before the start for T’o Tlakai, they sat late by the fire. He spoke eagerly of his own country, while she answered little. The colourful cliffs and canyons, the warm rock, the blue masses of distant mountains⁠—

“When it gets all hot there in the valley, when it is sunlight in the little crevices, and everything you look at seems to jump out at you, you look over towards the east. Just above the rim of the cliffs you see Chiz-na Hozolchi Mountain. It is far away, it is blue and soft. Even when the sky is blue as turquoise and hard as a knife-blade, it is soft, and more blue. You will like that country.”

Is he trying to persuade me to stay there? Perhaps we shall have to, in the end. I shall need all my strength.

“It will be fine when we ride in together. We shall have two good ponies. They will envy our jewelry. They will envy my saddle-blanket that you made me.”

And they will know about me, and his own people will talk to him.

“They are good people. You will like them.”

They are my enemies, more than if they were Utes.

When he fell silent, he would touch her arm with his fingertips. Then he would speak again, staring into the fire as a man will when he is seeing something, but always turning to look at her, almost shyly.

She relaxed, relieved of her fear. I am a fool. I am a crazy damned fool. I am the centre of all that he is thinking. He is all tied up in me. He cares for this and that, but I am the door through which it all comes. Listen to the way he is talking, see how he looks. We can go to a thousand dances and he will still be mine. Not all The People in the world can take him away. If he is ever lost to me, it will be I who have lost him.

She moved over and leant against him, her head on his shoulder. “I think your country will be very beautiful. I shall be glad to see it. Your people will not like me, I think, but I do not care, if we are together.”

II

Slim Girl’s idea of travel on horseback was that one should ride during the cooler part of the morning, rest out the noon downpour of light and heat in a shady place, and use the last of the day to find the nearest friendly hogan. There could be none of that now, she knew. Her man was a Navajo and a horseman; when he settled in the saddle, as the sides of his calves touched his pony’s barrel, and he felt the one current run through them, there was always that little look of uplift. Probably half of the waking hours of his life had been spent on a horse’s back, but not the longest day could destroy in him a certain pleasure in even the workaday jog or mechanical, mile-eating lope of a good pony.

She thought of this, as they skirted Los Palos in the dawn, and sighed, foreseeing heat and fatigue, stiffness and soreness in unromantic places, all to be concealed from this man of hers. He did not even know that it was necessary for one to be toughened to the saddle; he thought people were born that way, if he thought about it at all. She wondered, doubting, if any of the exaltation of their first ride to Los Palos would carry her through this.

It was not so bad as she had feared. At this late time of year it was hardly hot even at midday. Her weaving and occasional hours in the cornfield had hardened her somewhat. The high-cantled Navajo saddle he had made for her, with its seat of slung leather over which a dyed goatskin was thrown, was more comfortable than one would have thought possible. The miles stretched out before them, shrank, and were overpassed. She was tired in the late afternoon, thirsty from dust, silent. She watched this man who rode before her, so easy in his saddle, so at home, going back to his own country.

She no longer had her own, different background. She was afraid because of him. It was no longer she who was strong, leading, marking the places for him to set down his feet. Now it was she who must fumble, uncertain, and he who must hold her up. What hobbles would she have on him now? It was all right, that he felt all for her, that she was the centre of things, but how could she be sure when his own people and his own things spoke to him? There was nothing to do but wait and be watchful, and meantime a little mouse was gnawing at her heart.

They spent the night at a friendly hogan. There, too, he was at home and she astray. She saw his natural sociability expand in the evening gossip, and she learned with surprise that he had an established place among these people, who looked at her faintly askance. He was already known, and his opinions on horses were listened to with respect.

She had been drawn to him first just because of these things. She wanted him as a link between herself and just such as these people. But more, terribly more now, she needed him, himself completely hers with no fragment left out, and so they had become her enemies.

Yet there was plenty with which to comfort herself. Their opinion of her changed visibly when they learned that it was she who had woven Laughing Boy’s saddle-blanket. The red background, with the black and white interlocked fret of the heat lightning, was a gay and handsome thing. The women examined it, felt its weave, and spoke highly of it. There was an evident, kindhearted relief at this proof that she was regular.

More important was the subtle difference, the special quality of her husband’s attitude towards her when compared with their host and his wife. In that house was the usual peace and understanding of an Indian’s home, but there was none of that faint reverence and intimate desire that she felt when Laughing Boy spoke to her. She knew she should be proud and happy, but sleep was long in coming as they lay in their blankets about the dying fire.

The second day was like the first, save that, instead of growing stiff and sore, she grew stiffer and sorer. Her fears rode with her behind the saddle; she wondered after her old, arrogant sureness.

They made camp for themselves, having come to a section where no one lived. She was unhappy in mind and body, not overjoyed at their roofless stopping place and the prospect of a cold night, nor pleased with bread and coffee and a little dried meat. After supper they sat in silence, smoking and looking into the coals. She thought that silence was inimical.

At last he said, “I shall set a trap back there by those rocks; we should have a prairie-dog for breakfast. They are good. I know you do not care for this food we just had. You are used to better.”

“I do not mind. You must not think about me.”

“I wish you had brought some of that whiskey. Since you have taught me that, everything is flat without it. There is no salt in things. I missed it last night, and I do now.”

“I brought some. I did not know you wanted it. Here is about enough for two drinks. You will have to take it just plain.”

“That is all right. Give me some, then.”

He drank his dose eagerly.

“There will be none of that at T’o Tlakai,” she told him.

“That is all right. It does not belong there; it is part of the new world you have made for me. I do not think I could go back to just living, like these other people.”

She thought to herself, that is well enough, while we are alone. You will lose the need for the drink in the time we are there, perhaps you will forget about it.

Nonetheless she felt better, and noticed that the night was beautiful with stars. After all, camping thus was part of her people’s heritage. She was doing a Navajo thing. Her blanket sufficed to keep her warm; she fell asleep as soon as she closed her eyes.

As they went farther north, at first the desert rather appalled her. She was accustomed to the southeastern part of the Navajo country, grey bluffs, and grey rolling plateaus and harshly monotonous, distant mountains. Since she had known fertile California and the bustle and comfort of the places where civilized man gathers together to domesticate the scenery, she had never been able to feel any deep liking for the empty desert and the hostile fury of its silence. Now they were come among warm, golden cliffs, painted with red and purplish brown and luminous shadows, a broken country that changed with the changing sun, narrow canyons, great mesas, yellow sands, and distant, blue mountains.

They rode along a defile, scarcely a hundred yards wide, whose walls, twice as high, looked as though they had just drawn apart, and might decide to close again. Scrub oak, in the bottom, clustered along a running stream. The place was full of shadow. Looking up, one saw magnificent, dark firs growing along the ledges and hanging valleys. Up there, the ruddy rock, touched by the sunlight, became dull orange and buff, with flecks of gold, and a golden line where it met a flawless sky. Their horses’ feet made a tiny, soft noise in the sand. Nested on one ledge was a village of the long-vanished Old People, square little stone houses high up, with black spots of doorways that watched the canyon. Laughing Boy pointed to the ruin.

“Yota Kien,” he said. “Some of the Divine Ones live there, they say. The two brothers came here when they were looking for Talking God, they say.”

They stopped to rest and water the horses. She looked about her, feeling the quiet, absorbing the place. She had a sense of rest and of growth. She had not known that one could feel intimate about anything so grand.

He brought her to a high place late one afternoon, a spur of Dzhil Clizhini. It had been a fatiguing, scrambling climb, with one piece to be done on foot, alleviated by the increasing growth of jack pine and spruce. At length they trotted along a level, following a winding path under firs. There was a short stretch of broken ground, grey, knobbed rock, oaks whose branches one had to duck, a tumbling little gorge at the left, with the smell of water. They were shut in by trees.

He drew rein, motioning to her to come up beside him. She did so, crowding past the twigs that hemmed in the path. Right before their horses’ feet the cliff fell away, some fourteen hundred feet, and there, under their hands, lay all the North Country. It was red in the late sunlight, fierce, narrow canyons with ribbons of shadow, broad valleys and lesser hills streaked with purple opaque shadows like deep holes in the world, cast by the upthrust mesas. The great, black volcanic core of Agathla was a sombre monstrosity in the midst of colour. Away and away it stretched, jumbled, vast, the crazy shapes of the Monuments, the clay hills of Utah, and far beyond everything, floating blue mountain shapes softer than the skies. She drew back in the saddle.

“When anyone comes here, even if he has been here many times, it hits him in the face. Wait and look, by and by you grow until you can take all this inside of you. Then nothing can make you angry or disturb you.”

They sat in silence, looking, absorbing. He dismounted, added one to a cairn of stones, and squatted, gazing out. There was something about it that made Slim Girl choke. It made her want to cry.

The trail led down over the face of the cliff in an alarming manner, a test for surefooted ponies. Below, it was all thick shadow. Their animals, stepping delicately, were taking them down from sunlight into late evening.

You, too, have your magic, your strong medicine, Laughing Boy, and I think it is greater than mine. This is what I want you for. Some day we shall put our two magics together; some day you will bring me here, to have this always. You will bring me, if it does not take you from me first.

III

At length they were reaching T’o Tlakai, riding down a slope of bald rock into a valley about three miles square, surrounded by moderately high cliffs. Here and there, at their feet, were clumps of scrub oak, peach trees, and the marks of summer cornfields, where water seeped out under the rocks. Along the north cliff was a long ledge, with the rock above it rising in a concave shell of light reflected under shadow. Along the ledge stretched an imposing ruin of the Old People, at one end of which, where there must be a spring, a strip of grass showed very green. Down the middle of the valley spindly cottonwoods marked the course of the wash. The rest was dull and colourless⁠—sand hills, sand, rocks, sagebrush, greasewood, some sheep. Nearly in the centre were five hogans, two square ones of leaves, deserted now that winter was at hand, and three dome-shaped mud ones. The framework of the medicine-lodge for the dance had already been set up. There were a good many horses tethered around the settlement.

It did not look like much, but she found it threatening, inimical. She wanted some sign; it would have been a relief if people had come buzzing out as they appeared over the brow of the rock, if there had been shouts of anger, anything. The houses were more than a mile away still. Would they be clever people or stupid, hostile, friendly, or resigned? Were they able opponents or could she conquer them? The quiet houses fascinated her. Just she against all those, against everything here, these rocks, these underfed trees, those far-off mountains, the little bushes. She had fought against worse, but this meant so much. The horses seemed barely to crawl.

Ahead of her, Laughing Boy was singing a hymn, half aloud:

“Dawn Boy Hill rises,
Jewels Hill rises,
White Corn Hill rises⁠ ⁠…
Those people their fields, my fields, now they rise all beautiful before me!”