Shaman Winter

by Rudolfo Anaya

  These were the cloud people, the rain people, bringing the moisture in the snow down from the peaks of the mountain. The spirits of the mountain had risen and were walking down Frijoles Canyon toward the pueblos of the Río Grande. It was the time of ceremony, a time of blessing.

  Sonny heard a moan escape his lips; he shuddered. Owl Woman, his grandmother, had brought the vision, as sharp as the vision he had when he attended the peyote ceremony with don Eliseo! Brighter than his dreams in color! So this was the ancient secret the ancestors had guarded. The spirits did live here on this mountaintop! They came to bless the earth of the valley, to bless the people.

  In their masks they came, in colorful costumes and feathers and buckskin. Kachinas for rain and bounty. Kachinas for the sick and for the old. Kachinas for the seeds. Kachinas for the water that flowed down the river into the fields. Kachinas that made the sky rumble and the clouds form on the peaks of the Jemez Mountains. Kachinas for every blessing.

  In that final burst of light from the winter sun, they came, their rattles sounding like falling rain, their breath the breath of life, cold and invigorating, filling Sonny with so much beauty he felt tears run down his cheeks. These were the Lords and Ladies of the Light that don Eliseo prayed to. The sunlight descended to earth. Sunlight blessed the earth.

  They moved past him, leaving in their wake only the swish of their skirts, the rattle of the gourds that contained the seeds, the distant thunder of the drum on the mountain. Each giant figure moving toward the ceremony of thanksgiving, moving down the mountain to bless the pueblos. Around them the rumble of the storm broke and rolled through the peaks. Dark clouds of swirling snow filled the sky. Now the sun dropped behind the canyon wall and instantly the canyon grew dark, and the visions were gone.

  “Beware!” Owl Woman cried, and Sonny turned in time to see the Bringer of Curses, the evil spirit who soiled the path of the kachinas. He came tumbling from the sky to strike at him.

  “Raven!” Sonny cried, and braced himself to meet Raven’s blow. Raven’s attack sent Sonny flying out of his chair, and together they rolled down the incline into the cold water of the creek.

  Two objects tore loose from Raven as they tumbled into the icy water. One was a nickel-coated sphere, about the size of a large grapefruit, the other was Owl Woman’s bowl.

  Sonny remembered Paiz’s warning. In water the core could go critical. He reached for it, but Raven was quicker. He grabbed the shiny plutonium pit and thrust it at Sonny.

  “Fire!” Raven cried, gasping for breath, his scarred face twisted with hate.

  “Where’s Consuelo?” Sonny cried out, pushing back into the mud of the creek, holding Raven’s wrist to keep the pit from smashing his face.

  “The women are mine!” Raven laughed, straddling Sonny and pushing the spherical core down on him. The shiny metal glistened, dripping with water. At any moment Sonny expected the thing to explode.

  “This, too, is mine!” Raven shouted, ripping at Sonny’s shirt and exposing the gold Zia medallion. He tore it from Sonny’s neck and held it up.

  He held Sonny pinned, holding the gold medallion high in one hand, the plutonium core in the other. Now he was in complete control. The Zia sun symbol and the plutonium core were his.

  “Time’s up!” he shouted.

  “Not yet.” Sonny groaned, and mustering all the strength he could, he struck, sending Raven sprawling into the creek. Both plutonium and gold medallion fell from his hands. Sonny struggled to rise, to continue to fight, but it was no use, his legs wouldn’t lift him up.

  “Damn you!” Raven cursed as he scooped up the plutonium core. He was fumbling for the medallion when Lorenza’s cry ripped through the air.

  Sensing Raven, she had returned and scooped up the pistol from where it had fallen by the wheelchair.

  “Raven!” she called.

  He turned to look at her. “Witch!” he replied.

  “Try this,” she answered calmly, pointing the pistol and firing. The bullet tore through Raven’s hand, barely missing the plutonium core.

  Raven cried in pain, gathered the pit into his body, turned, and disappeared into the thick forest.

  The echo of the shot rolled down the canyon, like summer thunder before a rain. Frantically cawing crows rose from a nearby tree and flew away.

  Lorenza hurried down the incline to Sonny, who clutched at a cottonwood sapling near him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Just barely,” he replied. “Cold.”

  He was wet and shaking from the freezing creek water. She helped him up. Holding on to the tree, he could stand on his wobbly legs.

  “Gracias,” he said.

  “Can you make it to the chair?”

  “You hit him,” Sonny said, catching his breath.

  “He didn’t get what he came for,” she said, and reached for the Zia medallion in the water. “This is what he wanted.”

  “The bowl,” Sonny said, pointing.

  She lifted the black pot from the water and handed it to Sonny. He held it up and whistled softly.

  “Owl Woman’s bowl, the bowl I saw in my dream!”

  He looked at Lorenza, puzzled. Raven had been in his dream! And if he could bring something back from the dream, then anything was possible.

  “Now it’s yours.”

  “But he has Owl Woman, and the girl.”

  “Come on. Let’s see if we can get you back to the chair. Gotta dry you, get you warm.”

  Sonny was wet and trembling. She knew hypothermia could set in quickly. Straining under his weight, she helped him up the slope. He struggled, commanding his legs to carry him and not buckle. If he fell, he knew he wouldn’t have the strength to get up again.

  They got to the chair, and he sat down heavily, exhausted and shivering from the water and cold, clutching the pot. Flakes of snow began to fall. Large wet snowflakes that quickly turned the ground white.

  “You’re going to catch cold,” she whispered, removing her black leather coat and putting it around him. She turned the chair and pushed him down the trail to the van.

  The ranger came out of the visitors’ center to meet them. “Heard a shot,” he said, looking at a wet and muddy Sonny.

  “Sounded like someone shooting a rifle up the canyon,” Lorenza said, not bothering to explain as she got Sonny into the van and covered him with the serape.

  “Ah, God, don’t the natives know better,” the ranger complained. “Probably poachers. If I catch those sonsofbitches …” He paused, looked up the canyon.

  It lay shrouded in an eerie white light created by the falling snow. He knew better than to chase a poacher in the oncoming darkness.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “We got too near the creek, the chair slipped. We’re okay,” Lorenza said, getting into the driver’s seat. She gunned the van, hoping the motor would warm quickly. The ranger shrugged and hurried back to the office.

  “What would have happened if the bullet had hit the plutonium?” Sonny asked through chattering teeth.

  “I guess Bandelier National Park and the entire top of the mountain would have been blown off the face of the earth,” Lorenza replied. “But what do I know?”

  7

  Lorenza gathered the canvases in the rear of the van and handed them to Sonny.

  “Take off the wet clothes,” she commanded.

  Sonny stripped and pulled the dry canvases around him. They smelled fresh, the way painter’s oils smell. Some poor artist in a wheelchair had once driven around the state in the van, stopping here and there to capture the stark beauty of the arid land, the majesty of mountains. Sonny wondered if he had abandoned his efforts or, like many an artist, just ran out of money.

  Where is he now? Sonny thought as Lorenza drove out of the parking lot. Sonny was chilled, shivering, but thankful that he was alive. And he had the bowl.

  He held it up and looked at it carefully, admiring the symmetry, the shape, and the mysterious glyphs carved in an anci
ent language, a language whose signs he couldn’t decipher.

  The Bowl of Dreams, Owl Woman’s Calendar of Dreams. At least this much had come from the encounter; the ancient bowl was in his possession. It was an artifact of classical beauty, but more important, it was also a source of power.

  “La Nueva México,” he muttered, his teeth chattering.

  “Need to get you something warm to drink,” he heard Lorenza say, but he was concentrating on the bowl.

  Sonny turned on the desk lamp. The light shone on the shiny black surface, revealing the finely raised glyphs. Eric said it was a pre-Toltec piece. One obvious engraving was the plumed serpent thrashing upward along the side of the bowl. The Toltecs had made their covenant with Quetzalcóatl.

  “What do you see?” Lorenza asked. She was studying him out of the rearview mirror, his face illuminated by the soft glow of the lamp, revealing the shaman eyes.

  “A few of the symbols are pretty obvious. Quetzalcóatl. There’s a circle, or spiral, of glyphs from the bottom of the bowl, around the bowl, up to the lip. Like Jacob’s ladder.”

  Or a DNA molecule, he thought as he put his finger on the bowl to trace the route of the glyphs around the belly of the bowl. What he felt shocked him. A magnetic energy coursed through his hand, up his arm, into his chest.

  “It feels alive,” he said softly.

  “Old energies, old dreams,” Lorenza replied. “The bowl represents Mother Earth, the woman. You touch the earth with respect and she vibrates with her power. You touch a woman—” She paused and smiled into the mirror. “But why should I tell you about women.”

  Sonny looked up from the bowl at Lorenza’s eyes in the mirror. Sometimes she reminded him of Rita. He had often thought the two could be sisters. Handsome women, with an inner beauty that shone in their dark eyes. Flashing smiles, full lips, high cheekbones. Real Nueva Mexicana beauties.

  Rita had kept his interest in life alive by caring for him, feeding him, and one night when he was so low he wanted to die, she slipped under the sheets and made love to him. He found salvation in the warmth of her flesh.

  “There’s a sun sign, that’s obvious. Our Zia sun, the sun god of the Toltecs, Tonatiuh. Could this be a companion piece to the Sun Calendar of the Aztecs in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City?”

  “You mean the two might complement each other?” Lorenza said. “And the glyphs on one might lead to the meaning of the other? Intriguing.”

  “Just wild thoughts,” Sonny replied. “I don’t know when the Sun Calendar was carved, or even how it was used. We know nothing of the origin of this bowl—”

  “It originated in your dreams,” Lorenza reminded him.

  “Yes, the Owl Woman was determined to bring it here. Now it’s here, sitting on my lap, and what does it mean?”

  “You mentioned the dream of peace.”

  “If Owl Woman and Andres Vaca did come north, they brought the dream of peace. They raised their family, my ancestors. The bowl has been here all along! Hidden from us!”

  Sonny grew excited, then shook his head. He felt feverish, and the thoughts stirred up by the bowl weren’t clear. He was grasping for straws, something to explain his dream.

  “Hidden from us because we lost the dream,” Lorenza added.

  “And now it’s possible again. The bowl is here. It can be filled with our dream.”

  “Sounds beautiful to me,” Lorenza said, glancing at him, then returning her gaze to the road. In the darkness the thick snow parted as the van sped down the mountain.

  “Raven used my dream to go back into time. He knew Owl Woman and the bowl were there. Now he still has Owl Woman, my great-great Indian grandmother. How do I get her back?”

  The drone of the tires on the highway and the heater’s fan filled the dark space.

  “The answer has to be in the bowl,” Lorenza said.

  Sonny followed the line of glyphs with his finger. “A tree, the Tree of Life.”

  “Go on.”

  “A tiger. Monkey. Bird. Fish. Snake thunder. Wind sign. Around the sun, other figures. Gods or men? An ankh sign? That’s Egyptian. What the hell is it doing on a Toltec bowl?”

  “Some say three thousand years ago the Egyptians crossed the ocean, landed in the Americas. Who’s to say they didn’t travel back and forth.”

  “They both built pyramids,” Sonny said.

  “They were connected, somehow they were connected. So the ankh sign appears on a Toltec bowl. The sign of life.”

  “Mesoamerica as Atlantis,” Sonny murmured. “I never bought the theory. Sure, many a prehistoric boat might have landed on the shores of Mexico, but it was the indigenous people who created their own civilizations.”

  “I agree. People tend to look for connections in the sky, aliens from spaceships, or ships from Atlantis. But as don Eliseo teaches, there is a world consciousness. A collective memory. We are connected. The thoughts of one group affect another across time. Did they need to cross the ocean bodily to communicate with each other? No. At certain times on earth, perhaps affected by sunspot explosions or lack thereof, the minds of the world think the same thoughts. That’s when mankind moves into new levels of consciousness.”

  “A world dream,” Sonny said. “Mind travel, some kind of mental telepathy, long ago. Why not?”

  Don Eliseo talked about the interrelatedness of everything. But Sonny had thought only of the material connection, that atoms and molecular structure were connected. Was mind also connected? The Egyptian priests communicated with those of Mesoamerica? A world mind connecting those who could tune into it? You didn’t need to explain historical parallelisms through aliens or travelers from Atlantis, it was simply the great minds of men and women communicating across space and time. Space and time became their thoughts, their ideas.

  During the summer drought don Eliseo had gone to a prayer meeting with his Indian neighbors. “We prayed for rain,” he told Sonny later. “The weatherman said there is great ocean stream of wind and weather in the sky. The jet stream. It is like a giant snake entwined around the earth, and when it slides south, we receive its energy. We get rain. Now it is too far to the north, above Montana maybe. So together we reached up and grabbed the tail of the jet stream and pulled it down. With prayer we pulled it down.”

  The next day it rained. A wonderful steady drizzle that broke the drought. Prayer. Minds connecting.

  The old man believed the earth was alive; it had a spirit, a consciousness. To cut the Amazon forest meant the entire weather patterns of the earth would change. A philosopher coughing in China created hurricanes in the tropics. Thoughts, memories, dreams curved around the earth, like the glyphs on the bowl, and affected other dreamers.

  “We are connected,” Sonny murmured. “Not only in body, but in spirit.”

  Snow driven wild by the wind swirled around the van when Lorenza pulled in front of the Seven-Eleven at White Rock. The earlier feathery stuff had turned into a heavy, wet snow, the kind that would bend the boughs of even the toughest pine trees. Tall ponderosa pines, firs, blue spruces, even the leafless aspens would gather the wet flakes onto their branches and bend with the gift. The trees were old men and women thanking the gods for the gift of snow.

  Behind them the Jemez peaks were hidden in the darkness that hovered over Redondo, covering the mountain. Ancient deities were praying over the sacred mountain, praying and then rising to carry the gift of water down to the pueblos.

  Lorenza went into the store and came out with a large hot coffee, aspirin, and a fleece jogging sweatshirt and pants.

  “Gracias a Dios they stock a few things for campers,” she said. “Put these on. I don’t want to deliver you to Rita in your birthday suit.”

  She helped him slip into the warm cotton shirt and pants. Then she covered him again with the canvases. “Take these.” She handed him three aspirins and he drank them down with coffee. “Try to keep awake,” she said.

  “Why?” Sonny asked, and the minute he asked, the answer f
lashed in front of him. She was afraid that Raven would come again if he fell asleep.

  “Yeah,” he mumbled, and she was on the road again, heading down into the Río Grande valley.

  The hot coffee warmed him, the shivering stopped. He told her how he had seen the kachinas right before Raven attacked him.

  “It’s that time of the year,” she replied. “The solstice is near, the spirits of the mountains come to visit the pueblos. They come to bring winter rain, snow. Raven knew that, so he waited for us.”

  Where the angels gather, the Bringer of Curses appears, Sonny thought. Just what don Eliseo said. The devil always comes to the angels’ convention.

  The snow that minutes ago had covered the road now grew thin. They knew that by the time they descended into the valley, only wisps of the storm would remain. That’s the way it was with a front like this, it would drop snow in the high elevations, but merely dust the lowlands. That’s why in New Mexico during the winter people could ski and golf in the same day. From Jemez to Taos, the high peaks would get snow, in Alburquerque, nada.

  Yes, Sonny thought, the time for the ceremonies was at hand. Already the Matachine dances had been held at Jemez Pueblo on December 12, día de la Virgen de Guadalupe. More dances would be held on Christmas Day and on New Year’s Day. The people remembered their prayers and ceremonies. They still kept the sacred calendar of their ancestors, still survived in the essence of their original dream.

  Sonny hunkered deeper down into the warmth of the canvases and tried to keep his eyes open. But the hum of the motor, the fatigue, and the warmth made it almost impossible. Even the coffee didn’t help. Exhaustion and soreness crept through his bones.

  “Stay awake,” Lorenza reminded him.

  “Tired,” he answered. He had done too much the first day out, he knew that now. But he also knew there weren’t many days left. Raven would strike on the winter solstice, the day the sun stood still. Like the first atomic bomb exploding at Trinity, forty miles southeast of Socorro. The sun standing still.