[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
worker. Revisioning and recounting are much the same, though not quite so hard.
In the host-house I fasted only before the great wakwa; I ate lightly, with some care of which foods I
ate, and drank little wine and watered it. If you are going into vision or revision, you don't want to keep
changing yourself and going in a different way - through starving one time, the next time through
drunkenness, or cannabis, or trance-singing, or whatever. What you want is moderation and continuity. If
one is an ecstatic, of course it's another matter; that is not work but burning.
So the life I led in Wakwaha was dull and peaceful, much the same from day to day and season to
season, and suited and pleased my mind and heart so that I desired nothing else. All the work I did in
those years on the Mountain was revisioning and recounting the vision of the Ninth House that had been
given me; I gave all I could of it to the scholars of the Serpentine for their records and interpretations, in
which our guidance as a people lies. They were kind, true kin, family of my House, and I at last a child of
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
that House again, not self-exiled. I thought I had come home and would live there all my life, telling and
drumming, going into vision and coming back from it, dancing in the beautiful dancing place of the Five
High Houses, drinking from the Springs of the River.
The Grass was late in the third year I lived in Wakwaha. Some days after it ended and some days
before the Twenty-One Days began, I was about to go up the ladder of the Serpentine heyimas when
Hawk Woman came to me. I thought she was one of the people of the heyimas, until she cried the
hawk's cry, "kiyir, kiyir!" I turned, and she said, "Dance the Sun upon the Mountain, Flicker, and after
that go down. Maybe you should learn how to dye cloth." She laughed, and flew up as the hawk through
the entrance overhead.
Other people came where I was standing at the foot of the ladder. They had heard the hawk's cry,
and some saw her fly up through the entrance of the heyimas.
After that I had neither vision nor revision of the Ninth House or any house or kind.
I was bereft and relieved. That terrible grandeur had been hard to bear, to bring back, to share and
give and lose over and over. It had all been beyond my strength, and I was not sorry to cease revisioning.
But when I thought that I had lost all vision and must soon leave Wakwaha, I began to grieve. I thought
about those people whom I had thought were my kinfolk, long ago when I was a child, before I was
afraid. They were gone, and now I too must go, leaving these kinfolk of my House of Wakwaha, and go
live among strangers the rest of my life.
A woman-living man of the Serpentine of Wakwaha, Deertongue, who had taught me and sung with
me and given me friendship, saw that I was downcast and anxious, and said to me, "Listen. You think
everything is done. Nothing is done. You think the door is shut. No door is shut. What did Coyote say to
you at the beginning of it all?"
I said, "She said to take it easy."
Deertongue nodded his head and laughed.
I said, "But Hawk said to go down."
"She didn't say not to come back."
"But I have lost the visions!"
"But you have your wits! Where is the center of your life, Flicker?"
I thought, not very long, and answered, "There. In that vision. In the Ninth House."
He said, "Your life turns on that center. Only don't blind your intellect by hankering after vision! You
know that the vision is not your self. The hawk turns upon the hawk's desire. You will come round home
and find the door wide open."
I danced the Sun upon the Mountain, as Hawk Woman had said to do, and after that I began to feel
that I must go. There were some people living in Wakwaha who sought vision or ecstasy by continuous
fasting or drug taking, and lived in hallucination; such people came not to know vision from imagination
and lived without honesty, making up the world all the time. I was afraid that if I stayed there I might
begin imitating them, as Deertongue had warned me. After all, I had gone wrong that way once before.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
So I said goodbye to people, and on a cold, bright morning I went down the Mountain. A young redtail
hawk circled, crying over the canyons, "kiyir! kiyir!" so mournfully that I cried myself.
I went back to my mothers' household in Telina-na. My uncle had married and moved out, so I had
his small room to myself; that was a good thing, since my cousin had married and had a child, and the
household was as crowded and restless as ever. I went back to work with my father, learning both
theory and practice with him, and after two years I became a member of the Millers Art. He and I
continued to work together often. My life was nearly as quiet as it had been in Wakwaha. Sometimes I
would spend days in the heyimas drumming; there were no visions, but the silence inside the drumming
was what I wanted.
So the seasons went along, and I was thinking about what Hawk Woman had said. I was rewiring an
old house, Seven Steps House in the northeast arm of Telina, and while I was working there on a hot
day, a man of one of the households brought me some lemonade, and we fell to talking, and so again the
next day. He was a Blue Clay man from Chukulmas who had married a Serpentine woman of Telina.
They had been given two children, the younger born sevai. She had left the children with him and left her
mothers' house, going across town to marry a Red Adobe man. I knew her, she was one of the people I
had gambled with as a child, but I had never talked to this man, Stillwater, who lived in his children's
grandmother's house. He worked mostly as a chemist and tanner and housekeeper. We talked and got
on well and met to talk again. I came inland with him, and we decided to marry.
My father was against it, because Stillwater had two children in his household already and so I would
bear none; but that was what I wanted. My grandmother and mother were not heartily for anything I did,
because I had always disappointed them, and they did not want three more people in our house, which
was crowded enough. But that, too, was what I wanted. Everything I wanted in those years came to be.
Stillwater and the little boys and I made a household on the ground floor of Seven Steps House,
where their grandmother lived on the first floor. She was a lazy, sweet-tempered woman, very fond of
Stillwater and the children, and we got on very well. We lived in that house fourteen years. All that time I
had what I wanted and was contented, like a ewe with two lambs in a safe pasture, with my head down
eating the grass. All that time was like a long day in summer, in the fenced fields, or in a quiet house when
the doors are closed to keep the rooms cool. That was my life's day. Before it and after it were the
twilights and the dark, when things and the shadows of things become one.
Our elder son - and this was a satisfaction to my grandmother at last - went to learn with the Doctors
Lodge on White Sulfur Creek as soon as he entered his sprouting years, and by the time he was twenty
he was living at the Lodge much of the time. The younger died when he had lived sixteen years. Living
with his pain and always increasing weakness and seeing him lose the use of his hands and the sight in his
eyes had driven his brother to seek to be a healer, but living with his fearless soul had been my chief joy.
He was like a little hawk that came into one's hands for the warmth, for a moment, fearless and harmless,
but hurt. After he died, Stillwater lost heart, and began longing for his old home. Presently he went back
to Chukulmas to live in his mothers' house. Sometimes I went to visit him there.
I went back to my childhood home, my mothers' house, where my grandmother and mother and
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]