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Momaday's idea of the past as a journey is consciously expressed in The journey of Tai-me. This work relates the story of the Sun Dance—a ceremony for spiritual guid­ance and power performed by many Plains Indian groups that his grandmother Aho saw outlawed in the late 1800s—to his revelatory memory on journeying to Oklahoma to see the sacred Tai-me bundle: "I became more keenly aware of myself as someone who had walked through time and in whose blood there is something inestimably old and undying. It was as if I had remembered something that happened two hundred years ago. I meant then to seek after the source of my memory and myself." In The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Momaday undertakes this search, collecting, with his father as translator, Kiowa tales and myths and clustering them with brief, loose historical commentaries and personal family stories. What seem to be fragments come together in a complex structure—twenty-four "quintessential novels," divided into three sections, framed by poems and prose pieces—that follow the Kiowa from emer­gence through maturity to decline as a Plains Indian culture. Central to Rainy Moun­tain, and to all of Momaday's writing, is the land, the focal point of memory, the defining place for Kiowa culture. The same rootedness that defines Momaday's ances­tors gives his work its conjuring power, a power that comes from distilling in words and pictures, as Momaday writes, "the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk."

The text is from The Way to Rainy Mountaiti (1969).

From The Way to Rainy Mountain

Headwaters

N o o n in the intermountain plain: T h e r e is scant telling of the m a r s h — A log, hollow and weather-sta ined, An insect at the m o u t h , and m o s s — Yet waters rise against the roots , 5 Stand br imming to the stalks. What moves? What moves on this archaic force W a s wild and welling at the source .

(I , A i • '• i ' .

Introduction

A single knoll rises out of the plain in O k l a h o m a , north and west of the Wichita Range . For my people , the Kiowas, 1 it is an old landmark, and they gave it the n a m e Rainy Mounta in . T h e hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in sum­mer the prairie is an anvil's edge. T h e grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts a long the rivers and creeks , linear groves of hickory and pecan , willow and witch hazel. At a d i s tance in July or August the s teaming foliage s e e m s a lmost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow gras shoppers are everywhere in the tall gras s , popp ing up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of t ime. Lonel iness is an a spec t of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confus ion of ob jects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man . T o look upon that l andscape in the early morning,

1. The Kiowa were a mobile hunting and gathering people of the Southern Plains.

T H E W A Y TO R A I N Y M O U N T A I N / 2 5 0 5

with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proport ion. Your imaginat ion comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creat ion was begun .

I returned to Rainy Mounta in in July. My grandmother had died in the spring, and I wanted to be at her grave. S h e had lived to be very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her when she died, and I was told that in death her face was that of a child.

I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas were living the last great moment of their history. For more than a hundred years they had controlled the open range from the Smoky Hill River to the Red, from the headwaters of the C a n a d i a n to the fork of the Arkansas and C imarron . In al l iance with the C o m a n c h e s , they had ruled the whole of the southern Plains. W a r was their sacred bus iness , and they were a m o n g the finest horsemen the world has ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was pre­eminently a matter of disposit ion rather than of survival, and they never understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U . S . Cavalry. W h e n at last, divided and ill-provisioned, they were driven onto the S taked Plains in the cold rains of a u t u m n , they fell into panic . In Palo Duro C a n y o n 2 they aban­doned their crucial s tores to pillage and had nothing then but their lives. In order to save themselves , they surrendered to the soldiers at Fort S i l l ' and were imprisoned in the old s tone corral that now s tands as a military m u s e u m . My grandmother was spared the humil iat ion of those high gray walls by eight or ten years , but she mus t have known from birth the affliction of defeat , the dark brooding of old warriors.

Her n a m e was Aho, and she belonged to the last cul ture to evolve in North America . Her forebears c a m e down from the high country in western Mon­tana nearly three centur ies ago . They were a mounta in people , a myster ious tribe of hunters whose language has never been positively classif ied in any major group. In the late seventeenth century they began a long migration to the south and east . It was a journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age . Along the way the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows , who gave them the cul ture and religion of the Plains . They acquired horses , and their ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They acquired Tai-m e , 4 the sacred S u n D a n c e doll, from that m o m e n t the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun . Not least , they acquired the sense of destiny, therefore courage and pride. W h e n they entered upon the southern Plains they had been transformed. N o longer were they slaves to the s imple necessity of survival; they were a lordly and dan­gerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun. Accord­ing to their origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow log. From one point of view, their migration was the fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.

Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mounta in , the i m m e n s e l andscape of the continental interior lay like mem­ory in her blood. S h e could tell of the Crows , whom she had never seen , and of the Rlack Hills , where she had never been. I wanted to see in reality what

2. On the Staked Plains, or the Texas Panhandle, that part of the state jutting north between New Mexico and Oklahoma. 3. U.S. cavalry fort in Oklahoma and site of the

Kiowa-Comanche Agency. 4. The sacred being who aids the Kiowa in times of trouble; this being is embodied in the holy doll central to Kiowa ritual.

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she had seen more perfectly in the mind's eye, and traveled fifteen hundred miles to begin my pi lgr image.

Yellowstone, it s e e m e d to m e , was the top of the world, a region of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls . But , beautiful as it is, one might have the sense of conf inement there. T h e skyline in all directions is c lose at hand, the high wall of the woods and deep c leavages of s h a d e . There is a perfect freedom in the mounta ins , but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. T h e Kiowas reckoned their s tature by the dis­tance they could see , and they were bent and blind in the wilderness .

Descend ing eastward, the highland m e a d o w s are a stairway to the plain. In Ju ly the inland s lope of the Rockies is luxuriant with flax and buckwheat , s tonecrop and larkspur. T h e earth unfolds and the limit of the land recedes . C lus ter s of trees , and animals grazing far in the d i s tance , c a u s e the vision to reach away and wonder to build upon the mind. T h e sun follows a longer course in the day, and the sky is i m m e n s e beyond all compar i son . T h e great billowing c louds that sail upon it are shadows that move upon the grain like water, dividing light. Farther down, in the land of the Crows and Blackfeet , the plain is yellow. Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends upon itself to cover and seal the soil. There the Kiowas p a u s e d on their way; they had c o m e to the p lace where they mus t change their lives. T h e sun is at h o m e on the plains . Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god. W h e n the Kiowas c a m e to the land of the Crows , they could see the dark lees of the hills at dawn across the Bighorn River, the profusion of light on the grain shelves , the oldest deity ranging after the solst ices . Not yet would they veer southward to the caldron of the land that lay below; they mus t wean their blood from the northern winter and hold the m o u n t a i n s a while longer in their view. They bore Ta i -me in process ion to the eas t .

A dark mist lay over the B lack Hills , and the land was like iron. At the top of a ridge I caught sight of Devil's Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of t ime the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man ; Devil's Tower is one of them. Two cen­turies ago , b e c a u s e they could not do otherwise , the Kiowas m a d e a legend at the base of the rock. My grandmother said:

Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Sud­denly the boy was s truck d u m b ; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers b e c a m e claws, and his body was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. T h e sisters were terrified; they ran, and the bear after them. They c a m e to the s t u m p of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It b a d e them c l imb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. T h e bear c a m e to kill them, but they were ju s t beyond its reach. It reared aga inst the tree and scored the bark all a round with its c laws . T h e seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they b e c a m e the stars of the Big Dipper .

F r o m that moment , and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas have k insmen in the night sky. Whatever they were in the m o u n t a i n s , they could be no more . However tenuous their well-being, however m u c h they had suffered and would suffer again , they had found a way out of the wi lderness .

T H E W A Y TO R A I N Y M O U N T A I N / 2 5 0 7

My grandmother had a reverence for the sun , a holy regard that now is all but gone out of mankind. There was a wariness in her, and an ancient awe. S h e was a Chris t ian in her later years, but she had c o m e a long way about , and she never forgot her birthright. As a child she had been to the S u n D a n c e s ; she had taken part in those annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration of her people in the pre sence of Ta i -me . S h e was about seven when the last Kiowa S u n D a n c e was held in 1887 on the Washi ta River above Rainy Mounta in Creek. T h e buffalo were gone . In order to con­s u m m a t e the ancient sacr i f ice—to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the medic ine t r e e — a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas , there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. S h e was ten when the Kiowas c a m e together for the last t ime as a living S u n D a n c e cul ture . They could find no buffalo; they had to hang an old hide from the sacred tree. Before the dance could begin, a company of soldiers rode out from Fort Sill under orders to d i sperse the tribe. Forbidden without c a u s e the essentia l act of their faith, 5 having seen the wild herds s laughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed away forever from the medic ine tree. Tha t was Ju ly 2 0 , 1890 , at the great bend of the Washi ta . M y grandmother was there. Without bit terness , and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide.

Now that I can have her only in memory, I see my grandmother in the several pos tures that were pecul iar to her: s tanding at the wood stove on a winter morning and turning meat in a great iron skillet; sitting at the south window, bent above her beadwork, and afterwards, when her vision failed, looking down for a long time into the fold of her hands ; going out upon a cane , very slowly as she did when the weight of age c a m e upon her; praying. I r emember her most often at prayer. S h e made long, rambl ing prayers out of suffering and hope , having seen many things. I was never sure that I had the right to hear, so exclusive were they of all mere c u s t o m and company . T h e last t ime I saw her she prayed s tanding by the s ide of her bed at night, naked to the waist , the light of a kerosene lamp moving upon her dark skin. Her long, b lack hair, always drawn and braided in the day, lay upon her shoulders and against her breas t s like a shawl. I do not speak Kiowa, and I never unders tood her prayers , but there was something inherently sad in the sound, s o m e merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow. S h e began in a high and descending pitch, exhaust ing her breath to s i lence ; then again and a g a i n — a n d always the s a m e intensity of effort, of someth ing that is, and is not, like urgency in the h u m a n voice. Transpor ted so in the danc ing light a m o n g the shadows of her room, she s eemed beyond the reach of t ime. But that was il lusion; I think I knew then that I should not see her aga in .

H o u s e s are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of the weather watch . There , in a very little while, wood takes on the a p p e a r a n c e of great age . All colors wear soon away in the wind and rain, and then the wood is burned gray and the grain appear s and the nails turn red with rust. T h e windowpanes are black and o p a q u e ; you imagine there is nothing within, and indeed there are many ghost s , bones given up to the land. They s tand here and there

5. From the 1880s on, the U.S. government sought to ban all "heathenish" practices among Native Amer­ican peoples in a continuing effort to Christianize and "civilize" them.

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against the sky, and you approach them for a longer t ime than you expect . They belong in the d i s tance ; it is their domain .

O n c e there was a lot of sound in my grandmother ' s house , a lot of c o m i n g and going, feast ing and talk. T h e s u m m e r s there were full of excitement and reunion. T h e Kiowas are a s u m m e r people ; they abide the cold and keep to themselves , but when the season turns and the land b e c o m e s warm and vital they cannot hold still; an old love of going returns upon them. T h e aged visitors who c a m e to my grandmother ' s house when I was a child were m a d e of lean and leather, and they bore themselves upright. They wore great b lack hats and bright ample shirts that shook in the wind. They rubbed fat upon their hair and wound their braids with strips of colored cloth. S o m e of them painted their faces and carried the scars of old and cher i shed enmit ies . They were an old counci l of warlords, c o m e to remind and be reminded of who they were . Their wives and daughters served them well. T h e women might indulge themselves ; goss ip was at once the mark and compensa t ion of their servitude. They m a d e loud and elaborate talk a m o n g themselves , full of j e s t and gesture , fright and false a larm. They went abroad in fringed and flowered shawls , bright beadwork and G e r m a n silver. They were at h o m e in the kitchen, and they prepared meal s that were b a n q u e t s .

T h e r e were frequent prayer meet ings , and great nocturnal feasts . W h e n I was a child I played with my cous ins outs ide , where the lamplight fell upon the ground and the s inging of the old people rose u p around us and carried away into the darkness . T h e r e were a lot of good things to eat , a lot of laughter and surprise . And afterwards, when the quiet returned, I lay down with my grandmother and could hear the frogs away by the river and feel the motion of the air.

Now there is a funeral s i lence in the rooms , the endless wake of s o m e final word. T h e walls have c losed in upon my grandmother ' s house . W h e n I returned to it in mourning , I saw for the first t ime in my life how small it was . It was late at night, and there was a white m o o n , nearly full. I sat for a long time on the s tone steps by the kitchen door. From there I could see out across the land; I could see the long row of trees by the creek, the low light upon the rolling pla ins , and the stars of the Big Dipper . O n c e I looked at the moon and caught sight of a s trange thing. A cricket had perched upon the handrail , only a few inches away from m e . My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil . It had gone there, I thought , to live and die , for there, of all p laces , was its small definition m a d e whole and eternal . A warm wind rose up and purled like the longing within me .

T h e next morning I awoke at dawn and went out on the dirt road to Rainy Mounta in . It was already hot, and the gra s shopper s began to fill the air. Still, it was early in the morning, and the birds s a n g out of the shadows . T h e long yellow grass on the mounta in shone in the bright light, and a scissortai l hied above the land. There , where it ought to be , at the end of a long and legendary way, was my grandmother ' s grave. Here and there on the dark s tones were ancestral n a m e s . Looking back once , I saw the mounta in and c a m e away.

T H E W A Y T O R A I N Y M O U N T A I N / 2 5 0 9

IV

They lived at first in the mounta ins . They did not yet know of Ta i -me , but this is what they knew: There was a man and his wife. They had a beau­tiful child, a little girl whom they would not allow to go out of their sight. But one day a friend of the family c a m e and asked if she might take the child outs ide to play. T h e mother g u e s s e d that would be all right, but she told the friend to leave the child in its cradle and to p lace the cradle in a tree. While the child was in the tree, a redbird c a m e a m o n g the branches . It was not like any bird that you have seen ; it was very beautiful , and it did not fly away. It kept still upon a l imb, c lose to the child. After a while the child got out of its cradle and began to c l imb after the redbird. And at the s a m e t ime the tree began to grow taller, and the child was borne up into the sky. S h e was then a woman , and she found herself in a s trange p lace . Instead of a redbird, there was a young m a n s tanding before her. T h e m a n spoke to her and said: "I have been watching you for a long t ime, and I knew that I would find a way to bring you here . I have brought you here to be my wife . " T h e woman looked all a round; she saw that he was the only living man there. S h e saw that he was the sun.

There the land itself ascends into the sky. These mountains lie at the top of the continent, and they cast a long rain shadow on the sea of grasses to the east. They arise out of the last North American wilderness, and they have wilderness names: Wasatch, Bitterroot, Bighorn, Wind River.

I have walked in a mountain meadow bright with Indian paintbrush, lupine, and wild buckwheat, and I have seen high in the branches of a lodgepole pine the male pine gros­beak, round and rose-colored, its dark, striped wings nearly invisible in the soft, mottled light. And the upper­most branches of the tree seemed very slowly to ride across the blue sky.

XIII

If an arrow is well m a d e , it will have tooth marks upon it. Tha t is how you know. T h e Kiowas made fine arrows and straightened them in their teeth. Then they drew them to the bow to see if they were straight. O n c e there was a man and his wife. They were alone at night in their tipi. By the

The old men were the best arrow-makers, for they could bring time and patience to their craft. The young men—the fighters and hunt­ers—were willing to pay a high price for arrows that were well made.

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light of the fire the m a n was making arrows. After a while he caught sight of something . There was a small opening in the tipi where two hides were sewn together. S o m e o n e was there on the outs ide , looking in. T h e man went on with his work, but he said to his wife: " S o m e o n e is stand­ing outs ide . D o not be afraid. Let us talk easily, as of ordinary things . " H e took up an arrow and straightened it in his teeth; then, as it was right for him to do, he drew it to the bow and took a im, first in this direction and then in that. And all the while he was talking, a s if to his wife. But this is how he spoke: "I know that you are there on the outs ide , for I can feel your eyes upon m e . If you are a Kiowa, you will unders tand what I am saying, and you will speak your n a m e . " But there was no answer , and the man went on in the s a m e way, pointing the arrow all a round. At last his a im fell upon the p lace where his enemy stood, and he let go of the string. T h e arrow went straight to the enemy's heart.

XVII

Bad women are thrown away. O n c e there was a h a n d s o m e young m a n . H e was wild and reckless , and the chief talked to the wind about him. After that , the m a n went hunting. A great whirlwind p a s s e d by, and he was blind. T h e Kiowas have no need of a blind m a n ; they left him alone with his wife and child. T h e winter was c o m i n g on and food was s ca rce . In four days the man's wife grew tired of car ing for him. A herd of buf­falo c a m e near, and the m a n knew the sound . H e asked his wife to hand him a bow and an arrow. "You m u s t tell m e , " he sa id , "when the buffalo

When my father was a boy, an old man used to come to Mammedaty's6

house and -pay his respects. He was a lean old man in braids and was impressive in his age and bearing. His name was Cheney, and he was an arrowmaker. Every morning, my father tells me, Cheney would paint his wrinkled face, go out, and pray aloud to the rising sun. In my mind I can see that man as if he were there now. I like to watch him as he makes his prayer. I know where he stands and where his voice goes on the rolling grasses and where the sun comes up on the land. There, at dawn, you can feel the silence. It is cold and clear and deep like water. It takes hold of you and will not let you go.

•

In the Kiowa calendars7 there is graphic proof that the lives of women were hard, whether they were "bad women" or not. Only the captives, who were slaves, held lower status. During the Sun Dance of 1843, a man stabbed his wife in the breast because she accepted Chief Dohasan s invitation to ride with him in the ceremonial procession. And in the winter of 1851—52, Big Bow stole the wife of a man who was away on a raiding expedition. He brought her to his father's camp and made her wait outside in the hitter cold while he went in to collect his things. But

6. Momaday's paternal grandfather. 7. The Kiowa recorded their history in pictures that functioned as calendars.

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are directly in front of m e . " And in that way he killed a bull, but his wife said that he had mis sed . H e asked for another arrow and killed another bull, but again his wife said that he had mis sed . Now the m a n was a hunter , and he knew the sound an arrow makes when it strikes home , but he said nothing. T h e n his wife helped herself to the meat and ran away with her child. T h e m a n was blind; he ate grass and kept himself alive. In seven days a band of Kiowas found him and took him to their c a m p . There in the firelight a woman was telling a story. S h e told of how her husband had been killed by enemy warriors. T h e blind man lis­tened, and he knew her voice. Tha t was a bad w o m a n . At sunrise they threw her away.

XXIV

East of my grandmother ' s house , south of the pecan grove, there is buried a w o m a n in a beautiful dress . M a m m e d a t y used to know where she is buried, but now no one knows. If you stand on the front porch of the house and look eastward towards Carneg ie , you know that the woman is buried somewhere within the range of your vision. But her grave is unmarked . S h e was buried in a cab­inet, and she wore a beautiful dress . How beautiful it was ! It was one of those fine buckskin dres ses , and it was decorated with elk's teeth and beadwork. That dress is still there, under the ground.

8. Momaday's great-great grandmother.

his father knew what was going on, and he held Big Bow and would not let him go. The woman was made to wait in the snow until her feet were frozen.

Mammedaty's grandmother, Kau-au-ointy,8 was a Mexican captive, taken from her homeland when she was a child of eight or ten years. I never knew her, but I have been to her grave at Rainy Mountain.

KAU-AU-OINTY

BORN 1834

DIED 1929

AT REST

She raised a lot of eyebrows, they say, for she would not play the part of a Kiowa woman. From slavery she rose up to become a figure in the tribe. She owned a great herd of cattle, and she could ride as well as any man. She had blue eyes.

Aho's high moccasins are made of softest, cream-colored skins. On each instep there is a bright disc of beadwork—an eight-pointed star, red and pale blue on a white field— and there are bands of beadwork at the soles and ankles. The flaps of the leggings are wide and richly orna­mented with blue and red and green and white and lavender beads.

East of my grandmother's house the sun rises out of the plain. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his expe­rience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine

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that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.

Epilogue

During the first hours after midnight on the morning of November 13, 1833 , it s eemed that the world was c o m i n g to an end. Suddenly the sti l lness of the night was broken; there were brilliant f lashes of light in the sky, light of such intensity that people were awakened by it. With the speed and density of a driving rain, stars were falling in the universe . S o m e were brighter than Venus ; one was said to be as large as the moon .

That most brilliant shower of Leonid meteors has a special p lace in the memory of the Kiowa people . It is a m o n g the earliest entries in the Kiowa ca lendars , and it marks the beginning as it were of the historical period in the tribal mind. In the preceding year Ta i -me had been stolen by a band of O s a g e s , and a l though it was later returned, the loss was an a lmost unima­ginable tragedy; and in 1837 the Kiowas m a d e the first of their t reat ies 9 with the United S ta tes . T h e falling stars s eemed to image the sudden and violent disintegration of an old order.

But indeed the golden age of the Kiowas had been short-lived, ninety or a hundred years , say, from about 1740 . T h e culture would persist for a while in decl ine, until about 1 8 7 5 , but then it would be gone , and there would be very little material evidence that it had ever been. Yet it is within the reach of memory still, though tenuously now, and moreover it is even defined in a remarkably rich and living verbal tradition which d e m a n d s to be preserved for its own sake . T h e living memory and the verbal tradition which tran­scends it were brought together for me once and for all in the person of Ko-sahn.

A hundred-year-old woman c a m e to my grandmother ' s house one after­noon in July. Aho was dead ; M a m m e d a t y had died before I was born. There were very few Kiowas left who could r e m e m b e r the S u n D a n c e s ; Ko-sahn was one of them; she was a grown w o m a n when my grandparent s c a m e into the world. Her body was twisted and her face deeply lined with age . Her thin white hair was held in p lace by a cap of black netting, though she wore braids as well, and she had but one eye. S h e was dressed in the m a n n e r of a Kiowa matron, a dark, full-cut dress that reached nearly to the ankles , full, flowing sleeves, and a wide, apron-like sa sh . S h e sat on a bench in the arbor so concentra ted in her great age that she s e e m e d extraordinarily smal l . S h e was quiet for a t i m e — s h e might a lmost have been a s l e e p — a n d then she began to speak and to sing. S h e spoke of many things, and once she spoke of the S u n D a n c e :

My sisters and I were very young; that was a long t ime ago . Early one morning they c a m e to wake us up . They had brought a great buffalo in

9. This treaty provided for the passage of settlers through Kiowa and Comanche lands.

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from the plain. Everyone went out to see and to pray. W e heard a great many voices . O n e m a n said that the lodge was a lmost ready. We were told to go there^ and s o m e o n e gave m e a p iece of cloth. It was very beautiful . T h e n I asked what I ought to do with it, and they said that I must tie it to the Ta i -me tree. There were other p ieces of cloth on the tree, and so I put mine there as well.

When the lodge frame was finished, a w o m a n — s o m e t i m e s a m a n — began to sing. It was like this:

Everything is ready. Now the four societies must go out. They must go out and get the leaves,

the branches for the lodge.

And when the branches were tied in p lace , again there was singing:

Let the boys go out. Come on, boys, now we must get the earth.

T h e boys began to shout . Now they were not ju s t ordinary boys, not all of them; they were those for whom prayers had been m a d e , and they were dressed in different ways. There was an old, old w o m a n . S h e had someth ing on her back. T h e boys went out to see . T h e old w o m a n had a bag full of earth on her back. It was a certain kind of sandy earth. Tha t is what they must have in the lodge. T h e dancers must d a n c e upon the sandy earth. T h e old woman held a digging tool in her hand . S h e turned towards the south and pointed with her lips. It was like a kiss , and she began to sing:

We have brought the earth. Now it is time to play; As old as I am, I still have the feeling of play.

T h a t was the beginning of the S u n D a n c e . T h e dancers treated them­selves with buffalo medic ine , and slowly they began to take their s teps . . . . And all the people were around, and they wore splendid t h i n g s — beautiful buckskin and beads . T h e chiefs wore necklaces , and their pen­dants shone like the sun. T h e r e were many people , and oh, it was beau­tiful! That was the beginning of the S u n D a n c e . It was all for Ta i -me , you know, and it was a long t ime ago .

It was—al l of this and m o r e — a quest , a going forth upon the way to Rainy Mounta in . Probably Ko-sahn too is dead now. At t imes , in the quiet of eve­ning, I think she mus t have wondered, dreaming, who she was . W a s she b e c o m e in her s leep that old purveyor of the sacred earth, perhaps , that ancient one who, old as she was , still had the feeling of play? And in her mind, at t imes, did she see the falling s tars?

Rainy Mountain Cemetery

Most is your n a m e the n a m e of this dark s tone . Deranged in death , the mind to be inheres Forever in the nominal unknown, T h e wake of nothing audible he hears W h o listens here and now to hear your n a m e .

2 5 1 4 / R U D O L F O A . A N A Y A

T h e early sun , red as a hunter 's m o o n , R u n s in the plain. T h e mounta in burns and shines ; And si lence is the long approach of noon Upon the shadow that your n a m e de f ines— And death this cold, b lack density of s tone . 10

1 9 6 9

R U D O L F O A. A N A Y A b. 1 9 3 7

Llano is the Spanish adjective meaning "plain, simple, even, smooth, level"; as a noun, its feminine form (liana) indicates a "mason's trowel," while the masculine, llano, describes the condition of plain, flat ground. It was in the village of Pastura, on the eastern llanos of New Mexico, that Rudolfo Anaya was born on October 30, 1937. This high, arid, windy landscape figures in much of Anaya's fiction, suggesting the way that nature's trowel works incessantly to level out human effort. As a Hispanic American, the author can trace his ancestry back through four centuries of activity in this region. As critic Margarite Fernandez Olmos indicates, his parents' back­grounds combined both sides of the region's rural life: his mother's family were farm­ers growing crops and raising pigs, sheep, and cows in the Puerto de Luna valley, while his father was a free-ranging vaquero, a cowboy whose own family tradition was to work with cattle herds in the open rather than settling the land. After Anaya's father was killed in an accident, his mother married another vaquero, who helped raise his step-son with an understanding of both farming and ranching lifestyles. When still a small child, Anaya moved with his family to the town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico—"the social hub of the surrounding rural communities," as Olmos describes it, where on busy Highway 66 Anaya could witness the transcontinental link between East Coast and West Coast cultures. Yet the nearby Pescos River and its opportunities for hunting and fishing let the author grow up in close proximity to nature, an experience he would appreciate for its spiritual dimensions. By age fifteen, he and his family joined the urban migration that had begun in the years following World War II and moved to a barrio (Hispanic neighborhood) in Albuquerque. Here he learned the ways of big cities, another influence on his subsequent fiction. But it was an accident more typical of rural life that directed his interests to literature: while diving into an irrigation ditch that he and his friends were using as a swimming hole, Anaya fractured two vertebrae in his neck and spent much of his seventeenth year recovering in a world of books and meditation. After a false start in business school, he became an English major at the University of New Mexico, where he began writing fiction (for himself) and went on to earn two M.A. degrees in English and in coun­seling, allowing him to work as a high school teacher and guidance counselor.

Bless Me, Ultima (1972) was Anaya's first novel, published to acclaim within the just-emerging network of the Chicano arts movement that would eventually include recognition of such writers as Rolando Hinjosa, Estella Portillo, Bernice Zamora, and Ricardo Sanchez. As a result of its success, Anaya was appointed to a professorship at the University of New Mexico, where he taught until achieving emeritus status in 1993. In the novel, Ultima is a practitioner of folk-healing arts developed by women who serves as mentor to the boy Antonio, who in the coming-of-age tradition of the bildingsroman (David Copperfield, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Magic