Leslie Silko - Ceremony

“I was looking for some cattle.”

“They are probably down below by now,” he said, gesturing at the snow around them and the flakes still falling from the sky. Tayo nodded; he was looking at the old rifle slung across the hunter’s back.

“That’s an old one,” he said, helping the hunter lift the deer up on his shoulders again.

“But it works good,” he answered, starting down the trail ahead of Tayo, “it works real good. That’s the main thing.” He started singing again, this time it wasn’t a Laguna song; it sounded like a Jemez song or maybe one from Zuni. He didn’t want to interrupt the hunter to ask, but he was wondering where he was from, and where he had learned the Laguna song.

All he could see as he walked down the trail was snow, blurring the boundaries between the earth and the sky. At the bottom of the trail he stopped and kicked away the snow until wet sand was exposed. He was looking for some trace of the cattle, manure or some sign they had been there. The hunter shook his head.

“You better come inside first and have something to eat. You can look for them later.” Tayo followed him to the yard. The leaves of the apricot tree were solid with snow. He looked toward the corral for the mare and the cattle, but it was snowing too hard to see anything. He smelled piñon smoke. The hunter motioned for him to step inside.

They stood side by side in front of the corner fireplace. The flames crackled and hissed when they shook the snow from their clothes. The wet leather of Tayo’s boots and the hunter’s elkskin leggings made steam rise around them like mountain fog after a storm. Tayo looked into the flames for a long time, feeling stronger and more calm as he got dry. When he finally turned around, they were together, the hunter kneeling beside the woman, placing pinches of cornmeal on the deer’s nose, whispering to it.

They sat across from him at the table. When they had finished eating, the hunter stood up and pointed out the window.

“The tree,” he said to her, “you better fold up the blanket before the snow breaks the branches.”

“I’m going out. I’ll shake the snow off the branches,” Tayo said, remembering how one spring when a late snow fell he had helped Josiah and Rocky shake the budded apple trees. She nodded, and walked into the bedroom. The black storm-pattern blanket was spread open across the gray flagstone. He watched her fold it.

He walked to the tree. It was a dome of snow with only the edges and tips of the leaves scattered green across the white. The early storm had caught the tree vulnerable with leaves that caught the snow and held it in drifts until the branches dragged the ground. He slipped his gloves out of his jacket pocket and took hold of the boughs gently, remembering that it was an old tree and the limbs were brittle. He shook the snow off carefully, moving around the tree from the east to the south, and from the west to the north, his breath steaming out in front of him. By the time he had shaken a circle of snow in a pile around the tree, the storm had passed. The mesas to the east were obscured by veils of falling snow, and the sky above them was dark blue. But overhead the snowflakes became sparse and floated down slowly on their own weight, now that the wind was gone. To the west the sky was opening into a high gray overcast, and where the clouds were rubbed thin, the streaks of sky were almost blue.

The mare whinnied, and he smiled at the way horses remember those who feed them. She was leaning against the corral gate with her ears pointed at him, alert. She pawed the snow impatiently and pushed her warm nose into his hands. There was a brown crust of blood on the raw skin of her forelegs where she had fallen. Tayo walked her to see how she moved, if she was lame. She followed him eagerly.

“Do you expect me to feed you after the way you dumped me up there?” He scratched her neck, feeling the thick winter hair; a few days before, it had been a summer coat and now suddenly the winter preparations had been made. He pushed her back from the gate and closed it.

She was combing her hair by the window, watching the sky. He watched her take sections of long hair in her hand and comb it with a crude wooden comb. There was something about the way she moved her arms around her head, and the soft shift of her breasts with each stroke of the comb, even her breathing, which was intimate. His face felt hot, and he looked away quickly before the hunter walked in.

“Aren’t you going to ask me?”

“About what?” He tried to keep his voice calm and soft, but he was afraid she was referring to the night they slept together.

“You didn’t even ask me what I thought when your horse came back to the corral without you.”

“Oh.”

“You haven’t asked me about your spotted cattle either.” She was smiling at him now, as if she had guessed the source of his embarrassment.

“I was going to ask you, but I didn’t know if — ah, I mean, I wasn’t sure if your husband—” She dropped the comb in her lap and clapped her hands together, laughing. The hunter came in from the back room.

“She’s giving you a bad time, huh?” he said. He smiled too, but Tayo felt sweat between each of his fingers.

“She’s got your cattle, you know.” Tayo nodded and glanced at her; she was grinning at him and watching his face while the hunter spoke.

“Which way did they come down?”

He wanted to sound casual, but all he could think about was how the hunter seemed to know that he and the woman had met before.

“Yesterday afternoon,” she said, “early. They came running down the big arroyo which comes down from the high canyon.”

“But how did you catch them?”

“They went just like the run-off goes after a rainstorm, running right down the middle of the arroyo into the trap. That’s why it’s there. Livestock come down off the mountain that way. All I had to do was go down and close the gate behind them.” She twisted her hair around her fingers and pinned it into a knot again. “We catch our horses the same way.” She stood up.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

He followed her down the steep trail into the big arroyo. He traced it back into the canyon with his eyes; the gray banks cut a winding track, its curves and twists the print of a snake’s belly across the sand. It was only a continuation of the deep canyon orifice that revealed the interior layers of the mountain plateau. The gray clay was slippery, and it stuck to the soles of his boots. The trap for livestock was simple. The people had made such traps for a long time because they were easy to build and because they enable one or two people alone to corral many horses or cattle. The trap took advantage of the way horses and cattle, once they had been driven into a dry arroyo bed, would usually continue following the course of the arroyo because the sides of the banks were steep and difficult to escape; they could be driven deep into an arroyo that way until the banks were fifteen or twenty feet high, making it impossible for horses or cattle to escape. Arroyos might be dry for years, but when heavy rains did come, the run-off carried boulders and logs down the arroyo, where they snagged weeds and sticks and other debris. With a little work the debris could be shifted, small logs and dry limbs placed between boulders to form a barrier that only flood water could pour through.

He couldn’t see the barrier to this trap, because it had been carefully built around a curve in the bank where the animals could not see it until after they had gone through the opening. Almost anything could be used for a gate, but, here, unskinned juniper poles had been strung together with baling wire, making them almost indistinguishable from the other driftwood and dry brush collected around the boulders and logs on either side of the gate. Once the animals were inside the trap, it was easy to drag the gate across the opening.