Dance of the Bones

IN THE EVENING WHEN BRAIDING Woman awakened, she found a tiny baby, a girl, crawling on a mat—-the same mat she had been weaving when the dust ball appeared, the dust ball that belonged to Tash.

The baby girl who had once been a dust ball grew very fast. Every four days she was bigger and bigger, until finally she was as large as any of the other children in the village. She had very long, sharp fingernails. When she played with the other children, she scratched them. She would make them bleed by tearing their skin. This happened many times. At last the mothers in the village grew angry. They took their sticks and beat the girl until she lay senseless.

That night, when Braiding Woman went to look for the girl, she could not find her, although she had been told exactly where the child lay.

The next day, this strange girl--child had grown to be a giantess. She went away from the village and into the mountains. There she moved some great rocks and made herself a house. She lived in the house all alone. She killed deer and lions and rabbits and other animals for food. She used their skins to make clothes. The bones and claws of the animals she killed she used for ornaments.

She came to be called Ho’ok O’oks, which means Evil Giantess. She came to be feared by all the Tohono O’odham, and that, nawoj, my friend, is still true, even to this day.

A WAVE OF DESPAIR WASHED over Lani as the stubborn boy turned his back and walked away. She knew then that she had failed. Gabe was beyond her reach—-too angry and arrogant to listen. Hot tears stung her cheeks. For a moment she was tempted to call and beg him to come back, but she didn’t. She simply let him go, reaching instead for the comfort of her medicine basket.

She slipped the crystals back into their pouch and dropped that into the basket. Then, in the flickering firelight, she examined the basket’s other contents. First out were two separate shards of -pottery—-a reddish one with an almost invisible tortoise drawn on it and the other one coal black. The red one had once belonged to Nana Dahd’s grandmother, S’Amichuda O’oks—-Understanding Woman—-while the black one had come from Betraying Woman’s cave, deep in this very mountain.

Tradition dictated that a woman’s pots must always be broken upon her death in order to release the pot maker’s spirit. Lani was sure that Understanding Woman’s pots had been broken by her grieving relatives in just that way upon the old woman’s death. Betraying Woman, however, had died alone in the cavern, abandoned and unmourned. Her spirit had remained trapped in her long-unbroken pots until Lani herself had smashed them. And these two pieces of pottery, one red and one black, were the only reminders of either of those two long--ago elders.

Next came a tiny bone—-as small as a baby’s finger. That was the tiny piece of bat wing skeleton that Lani had brought with her out of the cavern. The bone served as a reminder that Nanakumal—-Bat—-had helped see Lani through one terrible fight, and maybe he would do so again in this battle for Baby Fat Crack’s soul.

The next items in the basket were Nana Dahd’s basket-makng awl and the leather tobacco pouch Fat Crack the elder had given her. She had gone out in the fall and collected the green wild tobacco leaves—-wiw. She had dried the leaves and broken them into small pieces just the way the legend of Little Lion and Little Bear said it must be done. She had brought the tobacco along with her today in hope that, before the night was over, she and Gabe would share the Peace Smoke.