A Telling Of The Salt Trail, Of Tse-Tse-Yote And The Delight-Makers
by
TOLD BY MOKE-ICHA
Oliver was so interested in his sister’s account of how the corn came into the country, that that very evening he dragged out a tattered old atlas which he had rescued from the Museum waste, and began to look for the places named by the Corn Woman. They found the old Chihuahua Trail sagging south across the Rio Grande, which, on the atlas map, carried its ancient name of River of the White Rocks. Then they found the Red River, but there was no trace of the Tenasas, unless it might be, as they suspected from the sound, in the Country of the Tennessee. It was all very disappointing.. “I suppose,” suggested Dorcas Jane, “they don’t put down the interesting places. It’s only the ones that are too dull to be remembered that have to be printed.”
Oliver, who did not believe this was quite the principle on which atlases were constructed, had made a discovery. Close to the Rio Grande, and not far from the point where the Chihuahua Trail, crossed it, there was a cluster of triangular dots, marked Cliff Dwellings. “There was corn there,” he insisted. “You can see it in the wall cases, and Cliff Dwellings are the oldest old places in the United States. If they were here when the Corn Woman passed, I don’t see why she had to go to the Stone Houses for seed.” And when they had talked it over they decided to go that very night and ask the Buffalo Chief about it.
“There was always corn, as I remember it,” said the old bull, “growing tall about the tipis. But touching the People of the Cliffs–that would be Moke-icha’s story.”
The great yellow cat came slipping out from the over-weighted thickets of wild plum, and settled herself on her boulder with a bound. Stretching forth one of her steel-tipped pads toward the south she seemed to draw the purple distance as one draws a lady by her scarf. The thin lilac-tinted haze parted on the gorge of the Rio Grande, between the white ranges. The walls of the canon were scored with deep perpendicular gashes as though the river had ripped its way through them with its claws. Yellow pines balanced on the edge of the cliffs, and smaller, tributary canons, that opened into it, widened here and there to let in tall, solitary trees, with patches of sycamore and wild cherry and linked pools for trout.
“That was a country!” purred Moke-icha. “What was it you wished to know about it?”
“Ever so many things,” said Oliver promptly–“if there were people there, and if they had corn–“
“Queres they were called,” said Moke-icha, “and they were already a people, with corn of four colors for the four corners of the earth, and many kinds of beans and squashes, when they came to Ty-uonyi.”
“Where were they when the Corn Woman passed? Who were the Blanket People, and what–“
“Softly,” said Moke-icha. “Though I slept in the kivas and am called Kabeyde, Chief of the Four-Footed, I did not know all the tales of the Queres. They were a very ancient people. On the Salt Trail, where it passed by Split Rock, the trail was bitten deep into the granite. I think they could not have been more than three or four hundred years in Ty-uonyi when I knew them. They came from farther up the river where they had cities built into the rock. And before that? How should I know? They said they came from a hole in the ground, from Shipapu. They traded to the south with salt which they brought from the Crawling Water for green stones and a kind of white wool which grew on bushes, from which they made their clothes. There were no wandering tribes about except the Dine and they were all devils.”