LITMIR.BIZ

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past was one smoke tree with a ghostly crown of innumerable gray, leafless twigs, and when Havek reached the smoke tree, the first bat of the evening came circling over his head. Havek immediately swallowed the meat he was chewing on and began to sing:

      “Over our house

      The night bat

      Rising, flies . . .”

      That was the first song in the long dream-singing called “The Ravens.”

      Now there is something to think about, said South Boy to himself. This business of dream-singing.

      About two years before, Havek had begun singing “The Ravens.” When South Boy asked him how he learned it Havek said: “I dreamed it. It was given to me, just so, because my shadow stood outside the Sacred House and heard the Ravens singing. I was unborn, but I was there. So now I have dreamed what I heard and saw.”

      That’s tougher to understand than Christian Instruction, thought South Boy. It didn’t seem likely to him that anybody could go to sleep and dream two hundred songs in their proper meter and rhythm, not to mention complicated melody and long meandering story—for the songs only gave outline and emphasis to the tale.

      “How can he dream all that when it takes him two nights to sing and tell all of it?”

      In camp Havek would intersperse his tale between his songs. Now he just sang. About two semi-embodied spirits who woke up in the Sacred House. They heard bats squeaking overhead, so they sang about bats. Then, being children, they reached for their toys. So Havek sang:

      “We reach,

      And there is a rattle

      In each hand . . .”

      So sang the spirits as they danced towards the door of the Sacred House, and so Havek sang as he trudged up the arroyo to the mesa top—about rattles and cane buzzers, and what the world would look like when it was completed.

      When they reached the door, the Ravens looked out across the valley of the Colorado where the Mojaves, yet to be created, were going to live. They saw something out of the future: the dust of a war party returning from a successful raid to the east, over in the Apache country. Painted men, mallet-headed clubs dangling from their wrists by leather thongs, bound slaves, the whole skin of a man’s head waving like a flag atop a tall pole, the dance of triumph and the smoking of those made unclean by blood and death.

      Havek sang on as he came out of the wash and turned due north across the flat top of the mesa where traveling was good over a matrix of fine firm gravel. He broke into a trot. Up here the little greasewood bushes grew in even spacings, twelve yards apart and no more than three feet high. Nothing else grew here but an occasional cholla cactus.

      South Boy was saying to himself: “His grandfather sang ‘The Ravens.’ Havek may have dreamed it, but I’ll bet he learned it from the old man first.”

      The moon came up over Arizona mountains, fifteen miles across the mesa—very red, very large, very bright. The little greasewoods cast long, pale, spindling shadows towards the now distant river. The breeze began blowing stronger. It was still hot, but the breeze made it pleasant.

      Havek’s song grew a little monotonous. The Raven brothers went name-traveling after they left the Sacred House. Havek’s song became an unending recital of the names of mountains, canyons, springs, and streams that they saw as they wandered west to the San Bernardino Mountains where they looked upon the distant sea, then south and east to the mouth of the Colorado and east and north through Pima and Apache country.

      An easy way to get your geography, if you could dream all that. Suppose I could go to sleep and dream the whole of Tarr and McMurry’s . . . South Boy was thinking when he saw the lights of Fort Mojave over to the left, where the mesa pushed a projecting peninsula right down to the river.

      The Fort looked like a city to South Boy, with its dozen big buildings, two of them monsters—two stories high. There were very few lights tonight. He had seen it one night last winter, when school was in session—lights blazing from every window. A stupendous sight. Breath-taking. Counting the Indian children there were three hundred people in those buildings! Even now when there was only maintenance staff and a half-dozen lighted windows, the sight of the Fort was thrilling enough to make him forget the glory of the night and his haphazard speculations on dream singing.

      A little farther north was a row of three lights close together—the trader’s store. From there came the faint screech of a phonograph playing that new song “Redwing.” He was too far away to see, but he knew the phonograph would be on a cracker box just outside the door. Young Mojaves would be perched in a long row on the hitching rail; old people, sitting on the ground; a white man or two from the Fort; maybe even a white lady sitting in the trader’s rocking chair.

      Havek stopped singing to listen. South Boy wished he would turn aside, but he went trotting on.

      Suddenly the phonograph was drowned out by a chorus of strong voices.

      “Oh the moon shines bright on pretty Redwing,

      The breezes sighing, the night bird crying,

      For far beneath his star her brave is sleeping,

      While Redwing’s weeping

      Her heart away.”

      Havek threw back his head and joined in with the distant singers. Nothing could be more different from the Raven singing than this tin-pan-alley product. But Havek proved the saying, “A Mojave can sing anything.”

      South Boy just listened with throbbing pleasure and a little melancholy, partly because of the sad plight of Redwing and partly because he had long since learned he could not sing.

      The song faded, the lights grew dim and mingled with the lower stars. Before long they came to the place where the mesa dropped off again. Below them the mesquite floor stretched north as far as their eyes could see. Here and there were barren, alkali-encrusted playas that shone pale silver in the moonlight. A narrow, snaky lagoon began a mile away and wiggled off into the distance, its gray water showing a darker silver. There was a faint flicker of fire at the near end of it.

      By that fire the hota would be holding the sing.

      Havek stopped and leaned on his bow. South Boy stopped and looked at him expectantly.

      Havek spat into the dark shadow that fringed the foot of the cliff.

      “Nebethee’s down there, if he came up-river tonight.”

      “Uh-huh,” said South Boy, speculatively. He walked to the very edge of the cliff and spat reflectively into the void, peering into the depth of the shadow, not anxiously, but with a certain sharp interest.

      “Nebethee caught Pahto-shali-la and ate him, bones and all, and Pahto-shali-la was a full-sized man and a good fighter.”

      South Boy could have given Havek an argument on that. White people maintained that the Mojave got drunk and fell into the river at flood time. But South Boy’s mind was too busy for arguments. He was swiftly reviewing the Mormonhater’s ideas on the cannibalistic monster that the white people called the “Mojaves’ devil.”

      “Are you afraid to go down here?” asked Havek.

      South Boy shook his head. The time had been when he would have cringed with terror at the mention of Nebethee’s name. When he was very small a big Indian girl had taken him to the brink of an old well and made him look down into the dark at their mingled reflections on the water. “Nebethee!” she said. “He will eat you!” That had scared him into a fit.

      He was still too young to know better than to take tales of Indian doings to his mother—so he ran bellowing to her and had his first impression of Nebethee pretty well shaken out of him. Nebethee was just heathen nonsense. It was wicked to be afraid of him, because he was a heathen lie. By way of comfort he received the first of several lectures on the real or Presbyterian devil. A very different creature, indeed. South Boy had since acquired a shadowy, uneasy understanding of a complex of white or Christian

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