J. JANCE - Hour of the Hunter

“Dancing Quail says nothing. It is her grandmother who has sent me. We who have no eyes have other ways of knowing.”

“I will quit the priesthood,” Father John declared. “I will quit and marry her.”

“No!” Looks At Nothing was adamant. “You will not see her again. She is going far away from here. It is already arranged with the outing matron. She will go to a job in Phoenix. You are not to stop her.”

“I’ll speak to Father Mark, I’ll. .”

“You will do nothing. A man who would break one vow would as easily break another.” An undercurrent of both threat and contempt permeated Looks At Nothing’s softly spoken words. “Besides,” he added icily, “Father Mark has already been told.”

“You want her for yourself!” The accusation shot from Father John’s lips before he had time to think.

Looks At Nothing recoiled as though he’d been slapped. In his earlier, hotheaded days, such an insult might have merited a fight to the death. The man he had killed in Ajo had died for much less, but now the medicine man simply stepped back, putting a yard or so of distance between them.

“I am mahniko, ” Looks At Nothing said slowly and with great dignity, “a cripple, marked by I’itoi as a holy man. You would do well to be the same.” With that, he turned and walked away.

Determined to plead his case to his superior, Father John left at once for San Xavier. Father Mark refused to consider the idea of the younger priest renouncing his vows to marry the girl.

“What’s done is done,” he said. “She’s gone. Forget about her. You have a vocation.”

Father John returned to Topawa to find that both Dancing Quail and Understanding Woman had disappeared from the mission compound. He heard that the old woman died the following year, alone in her hut in Ban Thak. Father John didn’t see Dancing Quail again for almost thirty years, but he prayed for her daily, for her and for her child as well.

Looks At Nothing pulled a cigarette and lighter from the cracked leather pouch he wore around his waist. Father John watched with some admiration as the blind man, with steady hands, used a Zippo lighter to fire the ceremonial cigarette, the Peace Smoke, as the Papagos called it.

The medicine man took a long drag and then passed it to the priest. “ Nawoj ,” he said.

“ Nawoj ,” Father John returned. He had never learned to appreciate the sharp, bitter taste of Indian tobacco, but he inhaled without betraying his opinion. He passed the cigarette along to Fat Crack, who took his turn.

“We are here to talk about the boy,” Looks At Nothing announced.

“What boy?” Father John asked, confused by the medicine man’s statement. Who was he talking about?

“His name is Davy Ladd,” Looks At Nothing continued. “He is the son of the woman Dancing Quail lives with.”

Rita Antone’s old name spun out of the past in a whirlwind of memory that gathered both old men into its vortex while Fat Crack was left temporarily mystified. Dancing Quail? Who was that? It was a name he’d never heard before.

Father John caught himself. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Davy Ladd. I remember now. What about him?”

“He is unbaptized,” Looks At Nothing answered. For a moment, nothing more was said as the cigarette once more made the rounds. “Unbaptized in both the Mil-gahn way and the O’odham way. He is a danger to himself, to his mother, and especially to Dancing Quail.”

“Why do you tell me this?” Father John asked. “What does this have to do with me?”

“His mother was once a child of your church, your tribe. She has fallen away and has never taken her baby to the church. You must fix this.”

Father John’s first impulse was to laugh, but he had long since learned to suppress those inappropriate inclinations.

“ Siwani ,” the priest said placatingly. “Baptism is a complicated issue. I can’t just fix it, as you say.”

Looks At Nothing rose, and for a moment stood over the other two men, leaning on his cane like a strange three-legged bird.

“You must,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone that brooked no argument. “You must, or Dancing Quail will die.”

With that the old medicine man turned and made his way out of the room, while Fat Crack followed closely behind.

They say it happened long ago that some quail were out eating during the harvest, Coyote crept up on them and ate them all except for one small quail who hid himself under the thick flat leaves of Ihbhai, of Prickly Pear. The frightened quail waited while Coyote ate up all his brothers and sisters. When it was safe, Quail ran home crying, “Coyote has eaten us all. He has eaten all my brothers and sisters.”

One wise old quail heard this and decided to get even. He waited until one day when Coyote was sound asleep. He cut Coyote open and took out some of his tail fat, then Quail sewed him back up, filling the empty space with rocks. After that, Quail flew off somewhere, started a fire, and began roasting the fat.

Coyote woke up and sniffed the air. “I smell something good,” he said. He started to follow the smell, but as soon as he moved, all the rocks inside him began to rattle. The sound made Coyote very proud. “That is the sound of my medicine drum,” he said.

Rattling all the way, Coyote walked until he found the place where the quail were having their feast. “Your food smells good, Little Brothers. Let me have a taste.”

They gave him some, and Coyote liked it. “Where did you get this meat?” he asked.

“Way over there,” Quail said. “Beyond the mountains. Baskets are traded for it.”

Coyote set off to go get some meat of his own, but as soon as he left, he heard the quail laughing and saying, “Look, Coyote has eaten his own tail fat.”

Coyote came back. “What did you say?” he asked, but the quail wouldn’t answer. Just then a cottontail came running by. “What did the quail say?” Coyote asked.

“They said, ‘Coyote has eaten his own tail fat.’ ”

As soon as he heard this, Coyote knew he had been tricked, and he was very angry. He chased after the quail, who disappeared down a hole in which they had hidden a cactus all wrapped in feathers.

Coyote dug in the hole after them. When he pulled out the first quail, he asked, “Did you do this to me?”

“No,” the quail answered. “It wasn’t me.”

Coyote dug further and pulled out another quail.

“Did you do this to me?”

“No,” the second quail answered. “It wasn’t me.” And so it went until he pulled out the very last one.

“Did you do this to me?”

But the last quail didn’t answer. “Ah-ha,” said Coyote, “since you don’t answer me, you must be the one,” and he bit hard on the quail, but he only hurt himself because that last quail was really the cactus.

And that, nawoj, is the story of how Quail tricked Coyote.

Andrew Carlisle was in no hurry to get home. Avoiding the freeway, he drove up the back way from Tucson to Tempe, coming into town through Florence junction and Mesa. He stopped at the Big Apple for a late breakfast. As usual, the previous night’s exertions left him feeling wonderfully alive and ravenously hungry.

He had been out of prison for only two days. Already two people were dead. One a day, sort of like multiple vitamins, he thought. It was only fair. He’d been saving up for a long time, but Margie Danielson and Johnny Rivkin had been mere appetizers, something to hold him until the main course came along.