Ceremony (28 page)

 

The voice faded in and out, sometimes muffled or lost in the wind. He recognized phrases of the song; he had heard the hunters sing it, late in October, while they waited for the deer to be driven down from the high slopes by the cold winds and the snow. He waited until the hunter saw him before he spoke. He was carrying a small fork-horned buck across his shoulders, steadying the load by gripping the antlers in one hand and the hind legs in the other. He smiled when he saw Tayo.

He wore his hair long, tied back with white cotton string in the old style the men used to wear. He had long strings of sky-blue turquoise in his ears, and silver rings on four fingers of each hand. His face was wide and brown, and the skin was smooth and soft like an old woman’s. Instead of a jacket, he was wearing a long fur vest sewn with gray rabbit pelts. The fur was old, and there were small bald patches where the bare skin showed through. The elbows of the brown flannel shirt were worn thin, as if his elbow bone might poke through anytime. But the cap he wore over his ears was made from tawny thick fur which shone when the wind ruffled through it; it looked like mountain-lion skin.

“You been hunting?” he asked, sliding the carcass down from his shoulders into the snow. Tayo noticed that he had already tied delicate blue feathers to the tips of the antlers.

“I was looking for some cattle.”

“They are probably down below by now,” he said, gesturing at the snow around them and the flakes still falling from the sky. Tayo nodded; he was looking at the old rifle slung across the hunter’s back.

“That’s an old one,” he said, helping the hunter lift the deer up on his shoulders again.

“But it works good,” he answered, starting down the trail ahead of Tayo, “it works real good. That’s the main thing.” He started singing again, this time it wasn’t a Laguna song; it sounded like a Jemez song or maybe one from Zuni. He didn’t want to interrupt the hunter to ask, but he was wondering where he was from, and where he had learned the Laguna song.

All he could see as he walked down the trail was snow, blurring the boundaries between the earth and the sky. At the bottom of the trail he stopped and kicked away the snow until wet sand was exposed. He was looking for some trace of the cattle, manure or some sign they had been there. The hunter shook his head.

“You better come inside first and have something to eat. You can look for them later.” Tayo followed him to the yard. The leaves of the apricot tree were solid with snow. He looked toward the corral for the mare and the cattle, but it was snowing too hard to see anything. He smelled piñon smoke. The hunter motioned for him to step inside.

They stood side by side in front of the corner fireplace. The flames crackled and hissed when they shook the snow from their clothes. The wet leather of Tayo’s boots and the hunter’s elkskin leggings made steam rise around them like mountain fog after a storm. Tayo looked into the flames for a long time, feeling stronger and more calm as he got dry. When he finally turned around, they were together, the hunter kneeling beside the woman, placing pinches of cornmeal on the deer’s nose, whispering to it.

They sat across from him at the table. When they had finished eating, the hunter stood up and pointed out the window.

“The tree,” he said to her, “you better fold up the blanket before the snow breaks the branches.”

“I’m going out. I’ll shake the snow off the branches,” Tayo said, remembering how one spring when a late snow fell he had helped Josiah and Rocky shake the budded apple trees. She nodded, and walked into the bedroom. The black storm-pattern blanket was spread open across the gray flagstone. He watched her fold it.

He walked to the tree. It was a dome of snow with only the edges and tips of the leaves scattered green across the white. The early storm had caught the tree vulnerable with leaves that caught the snow and held it in drifts until the branches dragged the ground. He slipped his gloves out of his jacket pocket and took hold of the boughs gently, remembering that it was an old tree and the limbs were brittle. He shook the snow off carefully, moving around the tree from the east to the south, and from the west to the north, his breath steaming out in front of him. By the time he had shaken a circle of snow in a pile around the tree, the storm had passed. The mesas to the east were obscured by veils of falling snow, and the sky above them was dark blue. But overhead the snowflakes became sparse and floated down slowly on their own weight, now that the wind was gone. To the west the sky was opening into a high gray overcast, and where the clouds were rubbed thin, the streaks of sky were almost blue.

The mare whinnied, and he smiled at the way horses remember those who feed them. She was leaning against the corral gate with her ears pointed at him, alert. She pawed the snow impatiently and pushed her warm nose into his hands. There was a brown crust of blood on the raw skin of her forelegs where she had fallen. Tayo walked her to see how she moved, if she was lame. She followed him eagerly.

“Do you expect me to feed you after the way you dumped me up there?” He scratched her neck, feeling the thick winter hair; a few days before, it had been a summer coat and now suddenly the winter preparations had been made. He pushed her back from the gate and closed it.

She was combing her hair by the window, watching the sky. He watched her take sections of long hair in her hand and comb it with a crude wooden comb. There was something about the way she moved her arms around her head, and the soft shift of her breasts with each stroke of the comb, even her breathing, which was intimate. His face felt hot, and he looked away quickly before the hunter walked in.

“Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“About what?” He tried to keep his voice calm and soft, but he was afraid she was referring to the night they slept together.

“You didn’t even ask me what I thought when your horse came back to the corral without you.”

“Oh.”

“You haven’t asked me about your spotted cattle either.” She was smiling at him now, as if she had guessed the source of his embarrassment.

“I was going to ask you, but I didn’t know if—ah, I mean, I wasn’t sure if your husband—” She dropped the comb in her lap and clapped her hands together, laughing. The hunter came in from the back room.

“She’s giving you a bad time, huh?” he said. He smiled too, but Tayo felt sweat between each of his fingers.

“She’s got your cattle, you know.” Tayo nodded and glanced at her; she was grinning at him and watching his face while the hunter spoke.

“Which way did they come down?”

He wanted to sound casual, but all he could think about was how the hunter seemed to know that he and the woman had met before.

“Yesterday afternoon,” she said, “early. They came running down the big arroyo which comes down from the high canyon.”

“But how did you catch them?”

“They went just like the run-off goes after a rainstorm, running right down the middle of the arroyo into the trap. That’s why it’s there. Livestock come down off the mountain that way. All I had to do was go down and close the gate behind them.” She twisted her hair around her fingers and pinned it into a knot again. “We catch our horses the same way.” She stood up.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

He followed her down the steep trail into the big arroyo. He traced it back into the canyon with his eyes; the gray banks cut a winding track, its curves and twists the print of a snake’s belly across the sand. It was only a continuation of the deep canyon orifice that revealed the interior layers of the mountain plateau. The gray clay was slippery, and it stuck to the soles of his boots. The trap for livestock was simple. The people had made such traps for a long time because they were easy to build and because they enable one or two people alone to corral many horses or cattle. The trap took advantage of the way horses and cattle, once they had been driven into a dry arroyo bed, would usually continue following the course of the arroyo because the sides of the banks were steep and difficult to escape; they could be driven deep into an arroyo that way until the banks were fifteen or twenty feet high, making it impossible for horses or cattle to escape. Arroyos might be dry for years, but when heavy rains did come, the run-off carried boulders and logs down the arroyo, where they snagged weeds and sticks and other debris. With a little work the debris could be shifted, small logs and dry limbs placed between boulders to form a barrier that only flood water could pour through.

He couldn’t see the barrier to this trap, because it had been carefully built around a curve in the bank where the animals could not see it until after they had gone through the opening. Almost anything could be used for a gate, but, here, unskinned juniper poles had been strung together with baling wire, making them almost indistinguishable from the other driftwood and dry brush collected around the boulders and logs on either side of the gate. Once the animals were inside the trap, it was easy to drag the gate across the opening.

The storm left the sky thin and dappled gray, like a molted snakeskin. “An early snow,” he said, “maybe it will be a wet winter. A good year next year.”

She didn’t say anything; she was stepping carefully over the snow, which had drifted in some places deeper than the tops of her moccasins. The clay and snow were churned into a muddy trench along the gate where the cattle had milled around, pushing their bony heads against the juniper poles, working for another escape.

He followed her inside and pulled the gate closed behind them. She walked close to the arroyo bank to avoid the manure and mud. The cattle backed into the far left corner of the barrier; their eyes were wide and frightened, and some were pawing the mud. Their breathing formed a single cloud of steam that drifted up, floating away over the banks of the arroyo. As they walked closer, the cows crowded closer together, and some of them lowered their heads and snorted as if they were fending off coyotes. He didn’t like being on foot in the corral with them, because he suspected that human beings mattered very little to them, and it was only the size of the horse, not the rider, which they respected. But the woman was not afraid. She stepped closer to the cattle, bending down to inspect their bellies and legs, walking a half circle in the muddy snow, looking at all of them. They watched her tensely.

The snow had melted into their hides, washing out the dirt and manure, leaving them silky white; the spots were golden brown. The butterfly brand and Auntie’s rafter 4 were barely visible through the heavy new growth of winter hair. Josiah had wanted something more than the stupid drooling Herefords the white ranchers had, something more than animals that had to be driven to water like sheep, and whose bellies shrank around their ribs before they would eat cactus or climb the ridges for brush and bark.

“My uncle was looking for cattle that could survive drought and hard years.”

She stepped back from them and nodded her head. Her moccasins were muddy.

“It’s a wonder you got this many back again,” she said. “Look.” She pointed at the necks of the cows closest to her. Rope burns left dark scabby welts in half circles. Strips of hide were missing around their fetlocks.

“Texas roping,” she said. “They wanted these Mexican cattle because they are fast and tough. And no loss to them when they happen to break the legs or the neck.”

He had never heard it called Texas roping before; he knew it as steer roping, because they used old stringy Mexican steers rather than more expensive cows or calves. It had come from Texas with the cowboys, and it was almost too simple: they rode massive powerful roping horses that were capable of jerking down a steer running full speed, knocking the animal unconscious and frequently injuring or killing it. It was the sport of aging cowboys, too slow and heavy to dismount to wrestle down and tie the animal as they did in calf roping and team tying. He had seen it only once. At the rodeo grounds in Grants. The steer had to stay down for ten seconds before the roper’s time could be recorded. The jackpot had been three hundred dollars that day, and the red-faced white man who took it turned in a record time: six seconds; but when the men loosened the rope on the steer’s neck, it did not move. They dragged it away behind two horses, one of the forelegs dangling in the hide, shattered. The anger made him lightheaded, but he did not talk about this other dimension of their perversion which, like the hunting of the mountain lion, was their idea of “sport” and fun.

They walked back to the corral. She watched him shake the snow off the saddle blanket and lead the mare to drink at the spring. He looked up at the sky; the sun was in the center of the south sky, covered with high gray clouds.

“I wonder if they’ll come looking for the cattle?”

She shrugged her shoulders, unconcerned.

“They won’t come down here,” she said.

“Why not?”

She gave him a look that chilled him. She must have seen his fear because she smiled and said, “Because of all the snow up there. What else?” She was teasing again. He shook his head.

“I’ll get back here and get them as soon as I can,” he told her. He took a long time tightening the cinch and checking the leather lacing in the stirrups. He wanted to say something to let her know how good it felt to have her standing close to him. But the hunter was still in the house, so he said nothing. As he stepped over to tie the bedroll behind the saddle, he brushed against her side gently, and she smiled. She knew. She walked close to him as he led the mare out of the corral gate. She pointed at the dusky clouds in the northeast sky.