were thirsty.
They were starving.
The hills and mesas around Laguna
were a second home for my father
when he was growing up.
He ran away from school for the hills
where he found less trouble.
When we were growing up
he took my sisters and me hiking and exploring
those same hills the way he had done when he was a boy.
He is still most at home in the canyons and sandrock
and most of his life regular jobs
have been a confinement he has avoided.
He used to wait for the cumulus clouds to come give him the sky
he needed for his photographs.
When I was a girl
I could tell by the clouds
whether I’d find him working at the store
or if he had grabbed his cameras
and told my grandpa he’d be right back
meaning he’d be gone all afternoon.
Sometimes I was there when the clouds came
and he’d tell me I could go but to hurry
get into the pickup
the clouds move through so fast.
His landscapes could not be done
without certain kinds of clouds—
some white and scattered like river rock
and others
mountains rolling into themselves
swollen lavender before rainstorms.
As I got older
he said I should become a writer
because writers worked their own hours
and they can live anywhere and do their work.
“You could even live
up here in these hills if you wanted.”
Up North
around Reedleaf Town
there was this Ck’o’yo magician
they called Kaup’a’ta or the Gambler.
He was tall
and he had a handsome face
but he always wore spruce greens around his head, over his eyes.
He dressed in the finest white buckskins
his moccasins were perfectly sewn.
He had strings of sky blue turquoise
strings of red coral in his ears.
In all ways
the Gambler was very good to look at.
His house was high
in the peaks of the Zuni mountains
and he waited for people to wander
up to his place.
He kept the gambling sticks all stacked up
ready for them.
He walked and turned around
to show off his fancy clothes and expensive beads.
Then he told them he would gamble with them—
their clothes, their beads for his.
Most people wore their old clothes
when they went hunting in the mountains;
so they figured they didn’t have much to lose.
Anyway, they might win all his fine things.
Not many could pass up his offer.
They ate the blue cornmeal
he offered them.
They didn’t know
he mixed human blood with it.
Visitors who ate it
didn’t have a chance.
He got power over them that way,
and when they started gambling with him
they did not stop until they lost
everything they owned.
And when they were naked
and he had everything
he’d say
“I tell you what.
Since I’m so good and generous
I’ll give you one last chance.
See that rawhide bag hanging
on the north wall over there?
If you can guess what is in that bag
I’ll give you back all your clothes and beads
and everything I have here too—
these feather blankets
all these strings of coral beads
these fine white buckskin moccasins.
But if you don’t guess right
you lose your life.”
They were in his power.
They had lost everything.
It was their last chance.
So they usually said “okay”
but they never guessed
what was in the bag.
He hung them upside down in his storeroom,
side by side with the other victims.
He cut out their hearts
and let their blood run down
into the bins of blue cornmeal.
That is what the Ck’o’yo Kaup’a’ta did,
up there
in the Zuni mountains.
And one time
he even captured the stormclouds.
He won everything from them
but since they can’t be killed,
all he could do
was lock them up
in four rooms of his house—
the clouds of the east in the east room
the clouds of the south in the south room
the clouds of the west in the west room
the clouds of the north in the north room.
The Sun is their father.
Every morning he wakes them up.
But one morning he went
first to the north top of the west mountain
then to the west top of the south mountain
and then to the south top of the east mountain;
and finally, it was on the east top of the north mountain
he realized they were gone.
For three years the stormclouds disappeared
while the Gambler held them prisoners.
The land was drying up
the people and animals were starving.
They are his children
so he went looking for them.
He took blue pollen and yellow pollen
he took tobacco and coral beads;
and he walked into the open country
below the mesas.
There, in a sandy place by a blue flower vine,
Spider Woman was waiting for him.
“Grandson,” she said.
“I hear your voice,” he answered
“but where are you?”
“Down here, by your feet.”
He looked down at the ground and saw a little hole.
“I brought you something, Grandma.”
“Why thank you, Grandson,
I can always use these things,” she said.
“The stormclouds are missing.”
“That Ck’o’yo Kaup’a’ta the Gambler has them locked up,”
she told him.
“How will I get them back?”
“It won’t be easy, Grandson,
but here,
take this medicine.
Blow it on the Gambler’s black ducks
who guard his place.
Take him by surprise.
The next thing is:
don’t eat anything he offers you.
Go ahead
gamble with him.
Let him think he has you too.
Then he will make you his offer—
your life for a chance to win everything:
even his life.
He will say
“What do I have hanging in that leather bag
on my east wall?”
You say “Maybe some shiny pebbles,”
then you pause a while and say “Let me think.”
Then guess again,
say “Maybe some mosquitoes.”
He’ll begin to rub his flint blade and say
“This is your last chance.”
But this time you will guess
“The Pleiades!”
He’ll jump up and say “Heheya’! You are the first to guess.”
Next he will point to a woven cotton bag
hanging on the south wall.
He will say
“What is it I have in there?”
You’ll say
“Could it be some bumblebees?”
He’ll laugh and say “No!”
“Maybe some butterflies, the small yellow kind.”
“Maybe some tiny black ants,” you’ll say.
“No!” Kaup’a’ta will be smiling then.
“This is it,” he’ll say.
But this is the last time, Grandson,
you say “Maybe you have Orion in there.”
And then
everything—
his clothing, his beads, his heart
and the rainclouds
will be yours.”
“Okay, Grandma, I’ll go.”
He took the medicine into the Zuni mountains.
He left the trail and walked high on one of the peaks.
The black ducks rushed at him
but he blew the medicine on them
before they could squawk.
He came up behind the Gambler
practicing with the sticks
on the floor of his house.
“I’m fasting,” he told Kaup’a’ta,
when he offered him the blue cornmeal
“but thanks anyway.”
Sun Man pulled out his things:
four sets of new clothes
two pairs of new moccasins
two strings of white shell beads
Kaup’a’ta smiled when he saw these things
“We’ll gamble all night,” he said.
It happened
just the way Spider Woman said:
When he had lost everything
Kaup’a’ta gave him a last chance.
The Gambler bet everything he had
that Sun Man couldn’t guess what he had
in the bag on the east wall.
Kaup’a’ta was betting his life
that he couldn’t guess
what was in the sack hanging from the south wall.
“Heheya’! You guessed right!
Take this black flint knife, Sun Man,
go ahead, cut out my heart, kill me.”
Kaup’a’ta lay down on the floor
with his head toward the east.
But Sun Man knew Kaup’a’ta was magical
and he couldn’t be killed anyway.
Kaup’a’ta was going to lie there
and pretend to be dead.
So Sun Man knew what to do:
He took the flint blade
and he cut out the Gambler’s eyes
He threw them into the south sky
and they became the horizon stars of autumn.
Then he opened the doors of the four rooms
and he called to the stormclouds:
“My children,” he said
I have found you!
Come on out. Come home again.
Your Mother, the Earth is crying for you.
Come home, children, come home.”
The purple asters are growing in wide fields around the red rocks past Mesita clear to the Sedillo Grant. This year there has been more rain here than I have ever seen. Yesterday at Dripping Springs I saw a blue flower I had never seen before, something like an orchid, growing from a succulent leafless bulb. So many of these plants had never bloomed in my lifetime and so I had assumed these plants did not bloom; now I find that through all these years they were only waiting for enough rain.
I remember the stories they used to tell us about places that were meadows full of flowers or about canyons that had wide clear streams. I remember our amazement at these stories of lush grass and running water because the places they spoke of had all changed; the places they spoke of were dry and covered with tumbleweeds and all that was left of the streams were deep arroyos. But I understand now. I will remember this September like they remembered the meadows and streams; I will talk about the yellow beeweed solid on all the hills, and maybe my grandchildren will also be amazed and wonder what has become of the fields of wild asters and all the little toads that sang in the evening. Maybe after they listen to me talking about this rainy lush September they will walk over the sandrock at the old house at Dripping Springs trying to imagine the pools of rainwater and the pollywogs of this year.
From a letter to Lawson F. Inada
September 1975
Simon J. Ortiz is a wonderful poet from McCartys (Acoma Pueblo) not far from Laguna. I owe a great deal to him for his encouragement when I was first beginning to write. Through the years we’ve had to depend a lot on the telephone and letters because whenever he was in New Mexico I was in Arizona or Alaska and whenever I was in New Mexico he was in California. “Uncle Tony’s Goat” is from a story Simon told me when he called one morning about 4 A.M. and we had a long discussion about goats.
Uncle Tony’s Goat
We had a hard time finding the right kind of string to use. We knew we needed gut to string our bows the way the men did, but we were little kids and we didn’t know how to get any. So Kenny went to his house and brought back a ball of white cotton string that his mother used to string red chili with. It was thick and soft and it didn’t make very good bowstring. As soon as we got the bows made we sat down again on the sand bank above the stream and started skinning willow twigs for arrows. It was past noon, and the tall willows behind us made cool shade. There were lots of little minnows that day, flashing in the shallow water, swimming back and forth wildly like they weren’t sure if they really wanted to go up or down the stream; it was a day for minnows that we were always hoping for—we could have filled our rusty coffee cans and old pickle jars full. But this was the first time for making bows and arrows, and the minnows weren’t much different from the sand or the rocks now. The secret is the arrows. The ones we made were crooked, and when we shot them they didn’t go straight—they flew around in arcs and curves; so we crawled through the leaves and branches, deep into the willow groves, looking for the best, the straightest willow branches. But even after we skinned the sticky wet bark from them and whittled the knobs off, they still weren’t straight. Finally we went ahead and made notches at the end of each arrow to hook in the bowstring, and we started practicing, thinking maybe we could learn to shoot the crooked arrows straight.
We left the river each of us with a handful of damp, yellow arrows and our fresh-skinned willow bows. We walked slowly and shot arrows at bushes, big rocks, and the juniper tree that grows by Pino’s sheep pen. They were working better just like we had figured; they still didn’t fly straight, but now we could compensate for that by the way we aimed them. We were going up to the church to shoot at the cats old Sister Julian kept outside the cloister. We didn’t want to hurt anything, just to have new kinds of things to shoot at.
But before we got to the church we went past the grassy hill where my uncle Tony’s goats were grazing. A few of them were lying down chewing their cud peacefully, and they didn’t seem to notice us. The billy goat was lying down, but he was watching us closely like he already knew about little kids. His yellow goat eyes didn’t blink, and he stared with a wide, hostile look. The grazing goats made good deer for our bows. We shot all our arrows at the nanny goats and their kids; they skipped away from the careening arrows and never lost the rhythm of their greedy chewing as they continued to nibble the weeds and grass on the hillside. The billy goat was lying there watching us and taking us into his memory. As we ran down the road toward the church and Sister Julian’s cats, I looked back, and my uncle Tony’s billy goat was still watching me.
My uncle and my father were sitting on the bench outside the house when we walked by. It was September now, and the farming was almost over, except for bringing home the melons and a few pumpkins. They were mending ropes and bridles and feeling the afternoon sun. We held our bows and arrows out in front of us so they could see them. My father smiled and kept braiding the strips of leather in his hand, but my uncle Tony put down the bridle and pieces of scrap leather he was working on and looked at
each of us kids slowly. He was old, getting some white hair—he was my mother’s oldest brother, the one that scolded us when we told lies or broke things.
“You’d better not be shooting at things,” he said, “only at rocks or trees. Something will get hurt. Maybe even one of you.”
We all nodded in agreement and tried to hold the bows and arrows less conspicuously down at our sides; when he turned back to his work we hurried away before he took the bows away from us like he did the time we made the slingshot. He caught us shooting rocks at an old wrecked car; its windows were all busted out anyway, but he took the slingshot away. I always wondered what he did with it and with the knives we made ourselves out of tin cans. When I was much older I asked my mother, “What did he ever do with those knives and slingshots he took away from us?” She was kneading bread on the kitchen table at the time and was probably busy thinking about the fire in the oven outside. “I don’t know,” she said; “you ought to ask him yourself.” But I never did. I thought about it lots of times, but I never did. It would have been like getting caught all over again.
The goats were valuable. We got milk and meat from them. My uncle was careful to see that all the goats were treated properly; the worst scolding my older sister ever got was when my mother caught her and some of her friends chasing the newborn kids. My mother kept saying over and over again, “It’s a good thing I saw you; what if your uncle had seen you?” and even though we kids were very young then, we understood very well what she meant.
The billy goat never forgot the bows and arrows, even after the bows had cracked and split and the crooked, whittled arrows were all lost. This goat was big and black and important to my uncle Tony because he’d paid a lot to get him and because he wasn’t an ordinary goat. Uncle Tony had bought him from a white man, and then he’d hauled him in the back of the pickup all the way from Quemado. And my uncle was the only person who could touch this goat. If a stranger or one of us kids got too near him, the mane on the billy goat’s neck would stand on end and the goat would rear up on his hind legs and dance forward trying to reach the person with his long, spiral horns. This billy goat smelled bad, and none of us cared if we couldn’t pet him. But my uncle took good care of this goat. The goat would let Uncle Tony brush him with the horse brush and scratch him around the base of his horns. Uncle Tony talked to the billy goat—in the morning when he unpenned the goats and in the evening when he gave them their hay and closed the gate for the night. I never paid too much attention to what he said to the billy goat; usually it was something like “Get up, big goat! You’ve slept long enough,” or “Move over, big goat, and let the others have something to eat.” And I think Uncle Tony was proud of the way the billy goat mounted the nannies, powerful and erect with the great black testicles swinging in rhythm between his hind legs.
Storyteller Page 13