Sing Down the Moon (10 page)

"The Long Knives will travel for one day, no
longer," Tall Boy said. "I have been in the canyon where they are going and they cannot get through. They will have to turn back. We can look for them tomorrow."

We finished eating our breakfast. The spring sun was warm. Beaver were working on their dam, cutting brush on the banks and swimming across the pond with it. Tall Boy sat with his son in his lap and watched them for a long time going back and forth.

Then we loaded the old horse with our clothes and some dried deer meat and left Elk-Running Valley before the sun was high. We kept off the trail the soldiers had used.

At the top of the ridge we went north and west. It was in the direction of our canyon, but I was afraid to ask my husband whether we were going there or not. If we were, then it would be better not to ask him. Sometimes, if he was asked too many questions, he would change his mind and do something else.

I was not certain that we were going home until on the evening of the fifth day I saw high ramparts against the northern sky. They were crimson in the setting sun, even the tall trees along their edges were crimson. I felt like shouting and dancing, like running around in circles, as I always did when I was very happy. But I walked quietly through the spring grass as if I saw nothing there in the sky.

Tall Boy was riding in front of me. He spoke and pointed into the north.

"Yes," I said calmly.

"We go because I am tired of hearing about sheep," be said. "And for no other reason. It is a dangerous place to go. There are no sheep left, but still I go. If there is one left it will be shaggy like a buffalo and so wild you will have to catch it in a trap. But I go because I am tired of the sheep talk. Oh, Coyote Brothers in the far and near hills, I am tired of sheep."

He nudged the speckled horse and rode on, out of sight.

My son was strapped to a carrying board slung over my back. I stopped and took him out of the harness and held him in my arms. The crimson ramparts had changed to gold and a gold mist drifted over the sky. I turned his head so that he faced the stone cliffs as they changed to purple and the first star came out.

The next morning Tall Boy left to go into the canyon. He wanted to find out if any of the Long Knives were camped there or if other tribes, the Apaches or the Utes, had come while we were gone. The old horse had grown slow and lame, so he left it behind and went on foot. In two days he returned, carrying a braided rope, which he had picked up somewhere, and two horseshoes.

"I saw no Indians," he said, while we were breakingcamp. "No signs of the Long Knives. Nothing has changed."

After a time, not right away, I asked, "Did you see any of my sheep?"

"One," he said, "on the trail to the mesa. It had more hair than a buffalo. At first I thought it was a buffalo."

"It has not been shorn for a long time," I said.

"Nor will it be shorn soon," my husband answered. "It is wilder than a mountain sheep. You will have to catch it in a trap. But after you catch it, how you will shear it I do not know."

"I have shears," I said. "I hid them in the cave when we left."

"You hid many things," Tall Boy said.

"We will need many things," I answered.

The river ran full. Blue snow water brimmed over the banks and flowed into the meadow. The cornfield was the same field the Long Knives had left. The peach trees, which they had stripped of bark, stood in black rows. Our hogan was still a ring of gray ashes and tumbled weeds. We stopped there and talked, deciding where we would go.

"The high mesa is safe," my husband said. "But if the Long Knives come we will be cut off from water, like we were before."

"From water and from the sheep," I said.

"What sheep?" Tall Boy asked. "The one that looks like a buffalo?"

"There is a small canyon where the river forks," I said. "I have been there with my sheep. It has grass and a spring comes out of a rock. It is hidden from the big canyon so that you can pass by and not know it is there."

"Let us go then to this place," Tall Boy said.

I started off, leading the way along the river, to the big rocks that stood at the entrance to the hidden canyon. The rocks and the gnarled sycamores that grew among them formed a low, winding corridor and Tall Boy had to climb down from the horse to get through.

Hidden Canyon was just as I remembered it. The yellow cliffs rose on all sides. The spring flowed from the rock and made a waterfall that the wind caught and spun out over the meadow. On the far side of the meadow was the grove of wild plums, where I had picked many handfuls of fruit. The trees now were covered with white and pink blossoms.

But I had forgotten the cave. Tall Boy saw it at once.

"A good place," he said and went off to explore it.

The cave was on the face of the western cliff, where the morning sun shone first. It was about thirty feet from the ground and twice that many feet
in width. To reach it there were handholds cut into the soft, yellow stone, but some were worn away and I had never tried to use them. Indians had lived there a long time ago and left, no one knew why.

Tall Boy started to chip away at the handholds, using the knife I had found at Bosque Redondo. He dug out four of the holds and tried them. I held my breath, I feared that he would never be able to make his way up the face of the cliff. Even with two good hands it was not easy. But he went up and came down without trouble.

"See," he said to his son, "it is easy. Before long you also will be able to climb. For your mother, we will stretch a rope which she can hold on to."

Clouds were gathering and he started working on the handholds again. While I watched him my black dog pointed his ears and I heard a small noise. It came from the far side of the meadow, near the wild plum trees, and I walked in that direction.

I had not gone far when out of the tall grass I saw a ewe looking at me. She turned away as I reached her, but did not flee. Her coat was thick and full of burrs. Beside her was a lamb, not more than a few days old.

I took my son from his carrying board and held him up so that he could see the lamb. He wanted to touch it, but with both hands he was grasping a toy which
his father had given him, a willow spear tipped with stone. Tall Boy had made up a song about the Long Knives and how the spear would kill many of them. Every night he sang this song to his son.

I took the spear and dropped it in the grass and stepped upon it, hearing it snap beneath my foot.

My son touched the lamb once before the two moved away from us. He looked up at me and laughed and I laughed with him.

Rain had begun to fall. It made a hissing sound in the tall grass as we started toward the cave high up in the western cliff. Tall Boy had finished the steps and handholds and now stood under the cave's stone lip, waving at us.

I waved back at him and hurried across the meadow. I raised my face to the falling rain. It was Navaho rain.

Sing Down the Moon
is based upon two years, 1863 to 1865, in the history of the Navaho Indians. Before this time many treaties were made between the Navahos and the United States. Most of them were broken, some by the whites, some by the Indians.

In June 1863 the United States sent Colonel Kit Carson through the Navaho country, centered in what is now northeastern Arizona, with instructions to destroy all crops and livestock. At the head of 400 soldiers, Carson pillaged the land, pursued fleeing bands of Navahos, and killed those who fought back. He asked help from the Utes, traditional enemies of the Navahos, promising them the livestock, the women, and the children they captured.

Word was sent out that all Navahos were to give themselves up, and early in 1864 they began to surrender. By March they had started on their long journey to Fort Sumner, 180 miles southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico. A total of 8491 reached the fort. A few small groups hid like beasts in the depths of the Grand Canyon, on the heights of the Black Mesa, and other inaccessible places.

This 300-mile journey of the Navahos is known as The Long Walk. To this day, Navaho men and women speak of it with bitterness. And if you talk to a Navaho child for more than a few minutes he will tell you the story. He has heard it in the cradle and learned it at his mother's knee.

The Navahos were held prisoners at Fort Sumner until 1868. Late in that year they were set free, each with a gift of a sheep and a goat. Poorly clothed to meet the coming winter, without horses or wagons, they left on foot. Their new home was a wilderness located in the Four Corners country, a sandy, windswept desert of little rain. It was near the Canyon de
Chelly (pronounced "shay"), where the states of Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico touch.

The massacre that Bright Morning speaks about was led by a preacher named J. M. Chivington. With a company of volunteers he rode out from Denver in 1864 and set upon a sleeping village of Arapahos and Cheyennes, killing everyone—75 men, 225 old people, women, and children.

Some 1500 Navahos died at Fort Sumner from smallpox and other diseases. But the group who survived has grown to more than 100,000. The Navahos wanted to live. Like Bright Morning, they thirsted for life. They still do. You will see girls who look much like her, tending their sheep now in Canyon de Chelly. They are dressed in velveteen blouses, a half-dozen ruffled and flounced petticoats, their hair tied in chignons—a style copied from the officers' wives at Fort Sumner long ago.