Great River - Paul Horgan

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life and its origin. The power of the koshare was absolute when they took charge. They called the girls and men and boys to the hunt, telling them the time and place to assemble. Woe to them if they were late. What happened to them was the worst kind of punishment—they were made objects of derision. The koshare watched for those who came late, had them lined up in the presence of all the other hunting men and girls, and ordered them to show their sexual parts to everyone. The victims were half-ashamed, half-satisfied at making a sensation, and all went on the hunt in high spirits.

      The men were armed with throwing sticks with which to kill rabbits. The girls did not kill. They all walked to the hunting place. Girls brought food along for lunch. When a man killed a rabbit, all the girls broke loose in a run and each tried to be first to pick up the dead game. Whoever touched it first could keep it, and take it home. At lunchtime she was the one who had to feed the man who killed the rabbit. The koshare watched to see that all was properly conducted. After lunch the hunt was resumed. The party spread out and drove the rabbits within an always contracting circle. Now and then someone, a man, a girl, would be far out on the circle, and might disappear together behind a protecting bush or rock. If they were certain they had not been noticed, they had forgotten the koshare, who came to see what they were doing. If they were coupled together carnally, the koshare broke them apart, and took them back to the party in captivity for the rest of the day. News of the arrest, and what for, would spread, and everyone with amusement would wait for what came next, for all knew what must follow. At the day’s end, when the hunt was over, and the whole party gathered together to return to the pueblo, the koshare produced their prisoners and had them resume and complete before everyone the act which had been interrupted. After this, all went home. The girls took their trophy rabbits with them, and cooked them for their families to eat.

      On the hunts they encountered members of the reptile creation, but did not fear them. The rattlesnake was the only poisonous snake in that part of the river world, and though the people knew of its dangerous nature, they did not regard it with horror. Some of them used the murderous snake in ceremonies as messenger to the cardinal points of the world. The swift, a little gilded lizard, was the supernatural of the sixth, or downward, point of direction. Turtles sometimes lay in their path. They saw many of the harmless horned lizard, or horned toad, and blue and green racer snakes, brown bull snakes, little water snakes with black and gold stripes running the length of their bodies. Deep and dim was the memory of past life which came stepping down the generations in talk; the people knew of a curious mixture in nature between snake and bird, each of whom was born in an egg. They made prayers to their image of the feathered serpent, and believed prodigies of a bird that could crawl and a snake that could fly. Land and sky with all their separate mysteries were brought together in that god, and in thread and paint the people made his picture again and again.

      To find certain game the hunters had to go far away from home. For the big bear they went deep into the mountains to the north, and for the bison whose robe was so rich, whose meat was so good, and whose head and horns were such mighty ornaments for the dance, the men of the pueblos went to the eastern plains. Out of their own valley of the Rio Grande, they followed a pass eastward to the valley of another river, the Pecos, which began its life between high mountain walls. But the eastern wall ended more or less due east from the central Rio Grande world, and the hunters came up a grand escarpment to the plains not long after crossing the Pecos. They had to go carefully in some years, for the plains people sometimes came that far west, and not always for peaceful purposes. But with care and good fortune, the Pueblo men could advance to the immensity of flat land and hunt the buffalo. They could see, it seemed, forever, if time and distance there became one. The horizon was clear and flat and the light was stunning. Stiff grass grew everywhere, and in dry years was brittle and yellow. From time to time they would see far away what looked like a grove of trees. But there were no trees on that plain. Those tree trunks, rising to dark blurs of joined treetops were actually the legs of buffalo against the white lower sky, and the heavy tree crowns were their bodies—all optically enlarged in the shining air. The buffalo at first were not afraid. Sometimes they moved off in answer to scents on the wind. Sometimes they watched the hunters approach. When the attack came they would heave and run away together. The hunters had their plans. They set great snares and then as in the rabbit and deer hunts they separated and began to drive the buffalo inward to the trap. They set fires around the circle they made and the big herds ran against them in confusion and were turned back as the burning circle narrowed. In high weather, the sky was blinding blue and the sunlight white. Strenuous buffalo-colored smoke blew upward in rolling clouds. Fire in daylight at the edge of the hunt showed yellow and red and brighter than the air. There were yells and commotion. Silvery waves of heat arose. The buffalo stormed from side to side. Their eyes glared sidewise in terror as they fled to their doom. Behind them came the naked hunters shining with sweat and triumph, making calls and motions of menace. Blue, black, straw, curly smoke and pelt, running flame and figure—the picture ended with the capture and the kill.

      It was a different picture when they hunted buffalo in the winter. They found the great herds black against the snow and searched until they found deep drifts piled up on unseen obstacles by the hard north wind that made storm on those plains. Spreading out on the white flat land, in a thin line of dark dots, the hunters began to drive the herd toward the drifts of snow. In the end, the buffalo got in deeper and deeper, until at last they could flounder no more and were caught for red slaughter on the white drift.

      There were years when plains people, the Comanches, came west bringing buffalo furs and horns to the river people to exchange for corn, corn meal and other precious things. Products and stories, habits and words, beliefs and wonders—there was much to trade.

      The Rio Grande pueblo world had corridors to other worlds. Mountain passes to the east gave upon the great prairies. Deserts and mountain parallels to the west finally led to the sea. The river’s own valley led south to Mexico through a pass which opened on a vast plain just as the river turned southeastward on the course which finally took it to the sea. With these roads open, the people yet did not travel them very far, and only the hunt took them away from their pueblo world. The river towns knew one another, and exchanged visits, and took part in one another’s dances, and showed, and sometimes traded, curious rare objects that had come from nobody knew just where, or by what crawling pace, through what perilous distance. A stranger now and then appeared, walking, moving into the sight at first like a fleck of dust that bobbed on the glaring distance and seemed to come hardly nearer. He would be noticed. Someone saw him and told. Without seeming to, many people watched, as they went on with their work. Where was he from. What would he want. What did he bring. Was he alone. Perhaps he finally arrived half a mile away and sat down and stared at the pueblo for a while and rested. And then moving gradually so as not to be noticed, he came closer, and was at last where people could hear him, and see his ingratiating nods, as he unpacked his pouch and revealed bits of color.

      Perhaps he came from northern Mexico, where he obtained from another man who got it from another farther south who in turn had it from a hunting party in the jungle a bundle of macaw feathers—sunflower yellow, scarlet, sky blue, copper green. For their rarity, beauty and sacred meaning, they were wanted for ceremonial use on masks, headdresses, robes. Sometimes the trader brought with him a live macaw with its feathers still in place. That was a treasure. The bird changed hands and after an honored lifetime of yielding its blazing feathers to the needs of ritual, was buried in the pueblo with ceremony, prayers and fetishes.

      Perhaps he came from the deserts to the west, bringing a rare red paint, chips of agate, and fine baskets which had come to him through many hands.

      If he came from the plains, the trader might have with him not only the useful products of the buffalo, but also worked buckskin, moccasins, odd foods.

      The pueblos were a thousand miles from the sea, with every danger of weather, distance, time, human and animal conflict, desert and mountain between. Yet the trader, walking, for there was no other way to travel, might have with him a pouch of little sea shells that came either from the ocean to the west or the gulf to the southeast. The trader may never have seen the sea; but others had, and what they found came slowly and through many relays to the upper river whose origin and whose end, in relation to its populated

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