by Alfred Ávila
His thoughts disappeared as he slowly fell asleep. The old Yaqui lay there sleeping, shivering from the cold, wrapped only in a thin deerskin.
But soon he was awake again. A cold chill ran down his back. His whole body shuddered. He heard howling and barking coming from the bottom of the darkened hillside. He could make out countless shadows leaping over the rocks and boulders in the distance. The shadows seemed to be heading up the hill toward him.
He now knew! The strong odor that he had smelled among the rocks and boulders—he remembered well now the dreaded wild dogs of the valley floor! The leaders of the tribe were aware that those who chose to starve on the hill would not suffer for long. They had known about the dogs all along!
He had no choice now. The dogs had been waiting for the darkness to set in the valley, for they only hunted at night. They sensed when a human was brought down from the mountains. If he had headed for the village of the mestizos, he might have lived! He sat there waiting, trembling.
“I want to live!” he whispered to himself as tears ran down his cheeks.
The elders had been merciful to him and the others before him. They had given them a chance to save themselves by giving them a choice between the mestizo village and maybe life or the hill with its sure death.
He had waited too long to make his decision and had sentenced himself to death. He would be silenced forever. He could hear the dogs closing in. It would only be a matter of minutes. There was nowhere to go, to hide, or escape!
“The dogs, the hungry dogs!”
Heavy tears clouded his eyes. They were getting closer. The gods of the mountains had sealed his fate. He stood and looked up at the glittering stars in the sky. The snarling and barking of the dogs filled the air. He could hear them jumping on the rocks, over the dark boulders, on the hill known as the Bones of Death.
THE CAVES OF DEATH
THE CAVES OF DEATH
In the small towns of Chihuahua, the people speak in hushed tones of the treasures hidden in the dry hills out in the surrounding desert. They say the treasures are precious jewels, and objects of gold and silver taken by Pancho Villa during his sacking of Mexico City. They tell of the secret mule trains that moved during the night and headed north with hordes of treasure taken from the rich and the churches. In the caves that go deep into the earth, Pancho Villa buried his booty of treasure. He would take three or four men with him and travel for one or two days, find a cave, unload the mules of their heavy burdens, and hide the treasure. Then he would shove the bewildered peasant soldiers against the cave walls and execute them with a machete or shoot them with his pistols, leaving their corpses to guard the treasure forever.
Only Pancho Villa would know where the treasure was hidden. No maps were ever made. He kept the location of his booty buried in his mind. No one else would ever know where the treasure-filled caves were.
According to the Indians of the region, it is bad luck if you try to find the Caves of Death; that it is smart to walk away if you happen to find one of these caves. They say that if you decide to go into one of them, you will first hear the voices of the dead, of the soldiers who were killed by Pancho Villa once they hid his treasure; that if you go deeper into the cave, the voices become louder and you can hear what was said when the treasure was hidden; and that if you are brave enough to keep on going, you will hear the screams of the soldiers as they were hacked or shot by Pancho Villa. As far as wandering any further than that, the Indians say to you, “Beware!” They warn that no one who has ventured that far has ever returned.
The caves are like a spider web. They let you go in like a careless fly. Then you find yourself trapped, struggling and becoming more entangled in the web. When this happens, the spider hurries over to toy with you while it weaves a shroud around you. Finally, it destroys you. And this is what happened to Polito when he accidentally wandered into the Caves of Death.
Polito, the old prospector, had endlessly searched the dry desert hills looking for gold and silver. Ever since he was a young man, he had been hoping for one rich strike. But it had always eluded him. Polito’s only companions were his mule and his dog Mocos. In the villages where he occasionally stopped for supplies, the people thought of him as a crazy old man.
“Crazy old man, where is your treasure?” they would yell at him. But Polito paid them no mind. He would leave the village and return to his beloved desert and his hills.
One particular evening after returning to the desert, Polito decided to camp out on a nearby hill because it was chilly. Just when the breeze was beginning to blow, he happened to find a cave and decided to shelter himself and his animals inside. This, he thought, would be his home for the night.
Polito unloaded his mule, started a fire, and cooked his food. After eating, the prospector fed his mule and gave Mocos the scraps left from his supper. (The dog’s bony frame testified to the fact that Polito’s fare was not too abundant.) Just inside the mouth of the cave, Polito’s fire crackled and sent sparks of light into the darkness.
Because the wind began to blow harder, Polito moved deeper into the cave, where he lay on his humble bed. Mocos came over, stretched himself out alongside the mat, and watched the old man moving about. Finally, the dog rested his head between his paws.
The wind sounded like people whispering as it blew across the mouth of the cave, and Mocos raised his ears to better catch the sound, his head moving from side to side trying to determine the source. Polito also heard it. “Such an eerie sound,” he said to himself. There was something strange about this cave, he thought.
Grabbing a burning piece of wood from the fire to use as a torch, the old prospector moved deeper into the cave to investigate. Mocos followed him.
As he advanced, the noise grew louder; the whispers became moans, the moans of people in despair, moans of suffering; sorrowful moans that made Polito tremble and his skin tingle with fear.
Still the prospector moved onward, deeper and deeper into the cave. Mocos began to whimper. The moans became voices. Suddenly, the voices stopped, and an overpowering silence was felt in the cave. Polito’s torch sputtered, sending dancing shadows all over the cave walls.
“I hope the flame doesn’t go out,” Polito muttered. He was uneasy. He stood there in the eerie silence, listening and looking into the far reaches of the perimeter of light, and wondered what his next move should be.
The moaning suddenly started again. The moans echoed and re-echoed throughout the cave-long sad mournful moans, moans of despair. Polito stopped in his tracks after a few steps. He could feel the evil in the air. It wasn’t a destructive evil; it was more like an evil that was trying to repel him, a feeling that he had entered a dimension of the supernatural, a place where he did not belong. He hesitatingly moved forward. He could not stop moving forward.
The cave was leading him downwards. He was becoming confused. He felt a spasm shoot through his old body. He stopped and raised his torch higher. There, in the flickering light of the torch, way deep in the cavern, he saw a dark shadow moving away from him. He quickened his pace in order to catch up with the shadowy figure. Moans could still be heard throughout the cave.
Mocos stopped. The dog did not want to follow, but his loyalty was stronger than his fear. He quickly moved and caught up to his master. His tail was between his legs; his hair bristled from fear.
Polito came close enough to the shadow to yell, “Hello! Who are you?” The shadowy figure stopped and stood there for awhile without turning around to answer.
Polito said again, “Hello!” but received no answer. The prospector stared at the back of the dark-robed figure. The cave had become quiet again. There was no sound. Polito stepped toward the figure, but it started moving again into the depths of the cave.
The old prospector followed. He could hear only the sounds of his leather sandals hitting the floor as he hiked further and further into the cavern. He lost track of time. He was beginning to perspire. It was becoming harder and harder to breathe. But his c
uriosity and fear kept him moving forward.
His dog Mocos walked alongside him in a scared, crouching manner. Fear showed in the dog’s wide-open eyes. The animal’s survival instinct warned him that they were moving in the direction of destruction. He sat upright, arched his back, raised his muzzle toward the roof of the cave, and let out a loud mournful howl.
“WOOOOOO! WOOOOOOOO!” he howled. The dog could not stop howling. He felt a loneliness in his breast, a deep sad loneliness.
Polito called out to him, “Quiet! Be quiet, dog!” But the howls kept coming. They were heavy-hearted, long and eerie. The dog would not stop howling.
The mysterious figure turned around suddenly and walked toward Polito. Howling filled the cave as the figure drew closer, its black robe dragging along the floor. The torch in Polito’s hand quaked strongly. Mocos stopped howling then and stared in the direction of the phantom. The dog’s eyes opened wider, and his trembling grew stronger. He could not move toward his beloved master.
Polito sank to his knees. His terror intensified. The torch fell out of his hands and landed at the side of the cave where it continued to burn. Polito placed his trembling hands beside his head, grasping it in sheer fright. He sat there on the floor of the cave. His courage was completely gone. Something was wrong. This was not a treasure cave.
The moaning returned, the sad mournful suffering moans. The dark figure moved closer, raised its bony arm and pointed toward Mocos. A strong command came from the dark, draped figure, “The dog must go! It is but an animal that happened to follow you into this cavern. It does not know any better!
“Go back to the entrance!” it told the dog. Mocos understood. The dog got up and walked away toward the entrance of the cave, then stopped and looked back at his master.
“And, you, sir! It was your fate that you entered the Cave of Death and now you cannot leave!”
“Why? Why?” Polito sobbed loudly, holding his head in his hands. He was a wretched-looking figure on the cave floor.
The phantom spoke on. “You entered the Cave of Death. It is here in this cave that the souls of the dead come to await their judgment. This entrance is but one of several in the world. This cavern, deep in the entrails of the earth, is where all the departed souls gather to be judged according to their deeds in life. The angels are the witnesses, and in the Hall of Judgment, one’s fate is determined—either Paradise or the Deep Pit of Evil. So you see I cannot let you go. You must be executed.”
Polito screamed as Death placed its bone on Polito’s shoulder. Polito sensed his physical body drop as his soul floated away. He could see the moaning souls of the dead drifting into the recesses of the cave. He saw Death standing over his lifeless body and Mocos running away. Polito let out a long mournful moan as he joined the stream of souls moving deeper into the cave.
Mocos the dog was found with Polito’s mule wandering out in the desert. The Indians and mestizos from the villages wondered about Polito’s disappearance. They never found him. The people fed Mocos, who would look at them with deep dark eyes. Only the dog knew what had happened to the old prospector, and he would bark and bark at the people. But he could not tell them about The Caves of Death.
THE ACORN TREE GROVE
THE ACORN TREE GROVE
The river water gleamed and flashed as the young boy waded across with his dog Sapo. The boy hesitated on a small sandbank in the middle of the river. He patted Sapo’s head and rubbed it with his hand. The dog wagged his tail acknowledging his master’s touch.
The boy looked at the opposite bank, at a large grove of acorn trees. “That’s a good place to go into the grove,” he mused. He started again to cross the river toward the acorn grove.
Once he reached the riverbank, the boy took hold of a small branch and pulled himself out of the stream onto dry land, where Sapo was already shaking the excess water off his body.
As the boy and the dog wandered into the grove, they heard a sad, mournful sound from the tree-tops: “Coo, coo, coo!” The sound kept repeating itself as they walked deeper and deeper into the trees. It was the call of a mourning dove.
Beneath Mundo’s (that was the boy’s name) and Sapo’s feet there was a blanket of leaves that made a crushing sound when the boy and the dog walked on it. Near the hillside, Mundo noticed that the trees were larger and the grove was thicker in the area, so that very little sunlight could filter through the branches.
“What a gloomy, dark place,” Mundo said. In the meantime, while a cricket in the shadows made a chirping sound, Sapo was sticking his nose into piles of leaves sniffing and sniffing.
After awhile Mundo realized that he had lost track of time. It was very silent in the grove with no other sound except for the sad call of the mourning dove. Standing in the shadows of the grove, Mundo began to remember the many stories of the river that the old men from the barrio told when they gathered to gossip and exchange tales. He also began to regret that he had not listened to his mother when she warned him to stay away from the Río Hondo because of the strange things that had happened there.
Now it was completely silent. The mourning dove had quit its cooing. Mundo sensed that something was wrong. There was a very strange odor in the air. Sapo’s ears perked up as if listening to something. Worried, Mundo decided to turn back and find his way to the riverbank. But he could not remember how he had come. The only sound now was the crackling of the dry leaves under his feet, and around him it was getting darker and darker.
“The sun is going down. I must get back to the riverbank before it disappears,” he said to himself.
Mundo did not know how long he had been in the grove, though he thought he had at least a couple of hours before sunset. He did not want to be caught by the river at night. Finally, Mundo thought he could hear the gurgling of the river and he began to make his way toward the sound. It was then that, suddenly, the boy was engulfed by a huge shadow from behind. The loud growling of his dog alerted him. The hair on the animal stood on end while he arched his back and showed his fangs, preparing to attack. Startled, Mundo turned to see what was happening. He stared ahead with Sapo snarling by his side. In front of them was a huge cone of leaves, rising, swirling faster and faster, and on the upper reaches of the swirling, growing pile was the head of the feared one.
Mundo could not speak or scream from the terror he felt; he was covered with goose pimples. He knew who that head belonged to. It was La Llorona, the Wailing Woman. Everybody knew her. It was folly to attempt to run from her. In that moment of terror, he remembered the stories he had heard from his mother and his elders, that whomever is caught in La Llorona’s clutches has but one fate: Death.
“I am doomed to die this day! How foolish I’ve been!” Mundo whimpered.
La Llorona looked down on the boy, smiling viciously. A loud, terrible scream came from her mouth as the swirling column moved forward slowly, very slowly, enjoying the terror of her two victims.
Mundo knew what was about to happen. But although every nerve in his body screamed, “Run! Run” to in his brain, he remained frozen, staring at La Llorona. Her jet-black eyes stared back down at him while her infernal screaming rang over the whirlwind of leaves.
Sapo crouched, snarling, determined to fight for his life, muscles flexed, blood pumping hard through his tense body.
The swirling mass of leaves came closer and closer, and the screams became louder. Mundo clenched his fists. Tears streamed down his cheeks as he stood in the shadowy darkness waiting for the end. His sobs became frightened spasms when he saw through his misty eyes the huge, screaming fang-filled mouth approaching and the jet-black eyes piercing through him. The end was drawing near. Sapo was barking and snarling in a last show of force.
Then, like the sound of a bugle in the height of battle, a loud sad cry of misery and suffering came from a distant acorn tree, filling the grove. “Coo, coo, coo!” It was the call of the mourning dove.
The vicious whirlwind came to a sudden stop. The huge mass of leaves drifted
then tumbled to earth. La Llorona had vanished, dissolving into nothingness.
What had happened? What had driven La Llorona away?
According to the barrio elders, all the birds in Noah’s ark were white. First, Noah chose a white raven to check the waters on the earth and report back to him if they had come down. But the raven did not return. It flew around and landed on the floating corpses of those who had drowned in the flood. It pecked their eyes out. In punishment, its white feathers were made black.
Next, Noah sent a white dove to check the waters. The dove, tired from flying over the waters, decided to rest on a mountain peak and wash its feet. Because it did not return on time to report to Noah, it was also punished. Its white feathers were turned gray and its feet became a bright red color. For this reason, the mourning dove cries so sadly and with such misery and shame. (Noah had to send out another dove to finish the job.)
From that time forward when the mourning dove looks down at its red feet and sees its gray feathers, the memory of the shameful punishment it suffered for its wicked mistake makes it cry. In the same manner, that evening in the acorn tree grove by the banks of the Río Hondo, the sad mourning sound of the dove made La Llorona remember her own wickedness; how she was condemned to roam the rivers of the world for killing her own children. Overpowered by her feeling of guilt, she vanished.
When it was all over, Mundo and Sapo turned and ran toward the sound of the river. They ran through the fallen leaves as if they were rabbits chased by foxes. They jumped into the stream and headed for home running, running without looking back, splashing across the river, across the sandbars, climbing the opposite bank of the river and across the fields. The low mournful cooing of a dove in the dark acorn tree grove and the sound of the churning waters of the Rio Hondo filled the night.