Tsisnaajini

　

　

The People were not ancient. A grandfather’s grandfather could remember how they had been born.

Far to the north, there was a big lake surrounded by reeds. Near the lake, a tall rock jutted up over the cold water. The rock looked like a man’s thumb and, at its base, there was a cave. The earth breathed through the cave and made a sound like a man snoring. Within the cave, there were seven cavities or wombs, each domed with rock. The seven clans comprising the People were born in those wombs and, when their men and women were fully formed, they crept out of the earth and dwelt for a time beside the lake. When all the fish were taken, and all the turtles and frogs killed, the people were hungry and so they set out on their long march across the prairies.

At last, the People came to a place where there was a towering rock humped like a bison bull and bearing two pointed horns. This rock stood in the middle of the earth. The People lived between four mountains occupied by the holy ones. These mountains established the boundaries of the People’s land and established the laws that governed them. All things that had meaning and that endured had come from those mountains and dwelt in their shadow. The peaks were named Tsisnaajini, the dawn mountain adorned with white shell, Tsoodizil, the south mountain adorned with turquoise, Dook ‘o ‘ooshid, the sunset mountain, adorned with abalone, and, lastly, Dibe Nitsaa, the north mountain adorned with black jet. The mountains were living beings, the wisest in the Fourth World, and, if one were to walk to these peaks and abide in their shadow, the mountains would give counsel to that pilgrim.

Atsidi was a young man who was a member of the Bitter Water Clan. He came to grief over She Rises, a girl from the Rivers coming Together clan. Atsidi met She Rises at the willow spring, a place that she went each day to draw water. Through her cousins, the girl sent a message to Atsidi that she would meet him at a certain place after dark. She Rise’s brothers learned of this and kept her from leaving the hogan. The next day, Atsidi was exhausted from waiting all night at the place assigned for their meeting. He went to the willow spring and sat by the fountain of clear, cold water all day long, but She Rises did not appear.

A couple days later, while playing the Ball-Stick game with young men from the Rivers coming Together clan, one of She Rises’ uncles lashed Atsidi with his stick. Atsidi hurled himself on the man and threw him to the ground. The other players pulled the two young men apart. After the game, everyone was hot and grimy and, so, the older men built a sweat lodge on the edge of the playing field and lit a fire to heat some rocks. Atsidi went with his brother to the willow spring to haul water back to the lodge. At the spring, he glimpsed She Rises. She pretended not to see him and ran away in haste leaving her water vessel at the edge of the spring. Atsidi took left his pot beside the spring and filled up the vessel that She Rises had abandoned there. He carried that pot back to the sweat lodge.

She Rises’ brother recognized the round water vessel, glazed with the forked pattern of the Rivers coming Together people. But he said nothing. When Atsidi entered the sweat lodge with him, the girl’s brother asked him about the pot. Atsidi lied, boasting about his relations with She Rises. There was a fight and the two men rolled over the hot stones so that they were both burned and, then, knocked down one of the tripod poles holding up the pelts and blankets from which the sweat lodge was made. The fabric snuffed out the fire and lifted a plume of smoke over the wrecked lodge and the two men toppled down the side of the hill and tore their flesh on the sharp spikes of some yucca plants growing there. When the other men finally separated them, She Rises’ brother’s shoulder was dislocated and both of them were cut and bleeding and burned by the hot rocks.

The fight was a scandal because of the things that Atsidi had said and due to the place of the combat, the sweat lodge where men were supposed to be friends and put aside their differences. A very old man whose blood flowed in the veins of both the Bitter Water people and the Rivers coming Together clan met with Atsidi. The old man burned some herbs to purify Atsidi and sang a song to make the malicious spirit in him leave the boy. Then, he said that there was anger among the two clans and that this was unacceptable and caused him physical pain since he was father to both groups of people. The old man said that all of his joints ached with the enmity that Atsidi had made and that amends must be made. Atsidi sat with the very old man in a hogan alone on a hilltop, a place where coyotes came to howl at the moon. The smoke from the old man’s fire spiraled up through the hole in the roof, sweet and aromatic with the herbs that he had burned. The old man pointed to the door, built so that it faced east and the dawn. He said that the dawn was like an arrow fired from a fine bow – it was the day’s intention and that the motives comprising that intention must be carefully aimed and the arrow released in the proper way for it to reach its target. In the east, from which dawn came, there was a white mountain called Tsinaajini, the white shell of the morning. The old man told Atsidi that he should walk to the mountain and burn sage there and peck into a stone a certain image. The old man used a sliver of bone tipped with ocher to sketch the image on a rag of deer skin.

The old man said that the image was Mother Buffalo Woman, a stick figure with her legs spread to give birth to the good things that human beings needed in order to live. Above her outspread arms, her head was a circle round as the sun bearing a crest of horns like a crescent moon turned on its side. The old man said that he had gone to each of the four holy mountains during his life-time and that the mountains had not disappointed him but, instead, had always been true and honest and of good counsel and he said that White Shell mountain was the most beautiful of them all because it was adorned with the dawn and represented all righteous intentions.

Atsidi asked: "Grandfather, how do I get there?"

The old man told Atsidi to walk to Filthy Ghost canyon and find the house of the great gambler. Then, he was to climb to the rim of the gorge and take the great north road to Pots for Heads. At Pots for Heads, a big river rolled across the green plain with its source in the high mountains. Atsidi should follow the river to a fork near its headwaters and, then, go over the peaks walking due east until he came to a long misty lake with rafts of snow floating in it and, then, another river flowing down from the lake and the high country. When the river reached its basin, he would see far away a place where snow seemed to have been shed from a mountain top and lay draped over the desert – this was the big sand place, white as a dove. The tall peak behind the big sand was Tsinaajinni. "Then you must be very careful," the old man told him, "because it is sacrilege to climb too high on the mountain, although you must, nevertheless, ascend the peak to a certain distance, just the right height where you will stop, and contemplate what you have done in your life. Don’t tarry on the plains below the mountain because this is the home of the Fierce People and you should avoid them at all costs. When you have formed true and honest intentions, come down from the mountain and return to the people."

"How far away is the mountain?" Atsidi asked.

"Thirty sleeps," the old man said, "unless a thunderbird carries you in his beak."

Atsidi went to his hogan and said goodbye to his mother and father and brothers. Then, he packed away some dried juniper berries and corn and, before dawn, left for the white mountain.

The morning was chilly and Atsidi walked rapidly, proud of the strength in his legs. Shadows accompanied him – figures at his rear and side that he glimpsed from the corners of his eyes. He walked among fields freshly planted and hoed, giving distance to the scattered hogans so that the dogs would not be aroused and bark at him. After a couple of hours, when the sun was in the sky, he came to a watchtower built from mud and clay at the edge of the wilderness. The tower was empty, although there was a fire-pit and circle of stones for a lodge by its side. Once, soldiers had occupied the tower, watching for ghosts coming across the barren land from the canyon – but it had been a long time since the last spirit invasion and the tower was no longer needed. Atsidi climbed to the parapet and looked across the plateau. The figures that had been following him approached. Atsidi greeted his uncle and grandfather and they handed him a sharp knife with an obsidian blade and a sack filled with smoked meat. "We watched," his grandfather said, "to be sure that no one would ambush you before you left home."

From the crumbling parapet of the watchtower, Atsidi looked across the wasteland to the Filthy Canyon, an opening in the grey and brown plain twisting like a snake across the featureless plateau. Little clouds were drifting past the sun overhead and their shadows skittered across the plain like fat black flies crawling over a carcass.

Although he could see the Filthy Canyon from the watchtower, it took Atsidi a day and a half to cross the plain to reach its rim. The canyon was not very deep. From its rim, Atsidi could see the dry, white sand of the stream bed cutting through the bottomlands. The Ancient Enemy had made dams at the places where the creek bed turned sharply, low piles of flat, stacked rock intended to impound the water, and there were small irrigation canals cut into the river banks, tracts of cultivated land where a stalk of corn or a squash plant still survived in the cracked gravel and parched dirt.

Atsidi skidded down a gulch eroded in the canyon’s side and, then, followed the dry river, walking over its paths of smooth stones, toward the high, dark butte at the head of the watercourse. Black thunderclouds were butting at the scalloped tops of the mountain and fringes of rain hung in the sky.

He did not want to be trapped in the Filthy Canyon after nightfall because that was when the spirits of the dead came forth from their ruined cities and, so, Atsidi trotted along as fast as he could, following the meanders of the dry stream bed that, in turn, followed the twists of the gorge. Long shadows were flung from the cliff-sides and Atsidi heard voices singing in the hollows of the side-canyons. He thought that if he did not come upon the Great Gambler’s house very soon, he would have to flee from the canyon – if need be, scaling one of its crumbling reddish cliffsides. But, at a crook in the gorge, he saw the house, a maze of chest-high rooms, all roofless, like the inside of a cave full of interlocking chambers and passageways exposed to the sky. Some high walls still stood, fortifications and round towers, and a great kiva opened downward in the dusty, packed earth of the plaza like a socket from which an eye has been gouged. Other kivas, miraculously round and deep, wounded the earth between mounds of bricks and stone where outbuildings had once stood. As if in judgement upon the audacity of the Great Gambler’s house with its five-hundred rooms, a part of the canyon rim had split away and crashed down onto the ruin, an immense dull-club of stone taller than a tree that had pounded flat a dozen chambers in the structure.

Atsidi gave the ruined city a wide berth. He walked on paths trampled into the edge of fields, once irrigated but now bone-dry. In niches in the canyon heights, he saw granaries, small walls of stacked stone sealing off caves in the cliff-side. Atsidi knew that the place was infested with ghosts and that the ghosts were unclean and carried every kind of infection and sickness in their rotting flesh and, so, he made haste to a muddy abscess at the base of the cliff – an ooze of water from a spring. Pecked into the cliff-wall were hand and foot holds. Atsidi knew that the Ancient Enemies had occupied houses on the flat plateau overlooking the Filthy Canyon as well and that their women had come down to the spring to carry water and that, therefore, he could climb out of the gorge at this place.

The holes chipped in the rock were placed at exactly the right intervals to make it easy to ascend the cliff and, if you didn’t look behind you, it was not hard to make your way upward and out of the gathering shadows to the sun-drenched prairie on the rim. Scrambling upward, over the crumbling edge of the canyon, Atsidi saw another ruined city, this one knocked flat so that not a stone was standing upon another stone, kivas indenting the plain here and there, but half-filled with sand. Next to the city, there was a ghost-road – it was straight as an arrow, as wide as a man is tall, and neatly curbed with flat slabs of stone. Thunder sounded behind him, high on the shoulders of the black butte.

Atsidi walked on the ghost-road toward the distant mountains. The road ran without deviating to the right and left across the flat plain – if there was a boulder in the way of the road too big to be shoved aside, the path led straight up and over the rock, toe and finger holds neatly chiseled in the stone. Where there were stream beds or ravines, the ghost-road crossed them as if they did not exist; it was a line incised into the plain that was purely abstract, like something that children might mark in the sand as a starting line or finishing place.

The way was hot and a little dangerous because the level road was easy walking and encouraged Atsidi to a pace that was impossible to sustain. At night, he went aside from the road and camped near seeps of water, places marked by side-trails branching off next to cairns of chalk white stones. He did not want to be near the ghost-road in the darkness because Atsidi could hear in the night the armies of dead men marching on it.

After a week, Atsidi reached Pots for Heads. The tangle of low walls were burned, the tops of the ramparts covered with soot and the kiva at this place, broad as a waterless lake, was half-filled with immense charred timbers. In the midst of the heaps of rubble and grey, dusty thorn plants, Atsidi saw bones, a skull with yellow teeth, a scatter of white fingers and toes like dice thrown down while gaming. The air smelled of sulphur and Atsidi was gripped with a terrible despair.

A half-dozen ghost-roads, each of them flat and straight and curbed with long, chipped slabs of stone, radiated away from the ruins. Atsidi wondered which road he should take to reach the river and the mountains. Shadows gathered and burned tops of the mud-brick towers gestured at him as if they were dying men. It was too late to leave the place and, so, Atsidi picked one of the ghost-roads and walked down it far enough to reach a point where there was a distance between the curbed paths about the length that an arrow could be shot. He camped midway between the roads and, in the darkness, the dead warriors who had lost their skulls and had pots placed on their shoulders for heads rose from the ruins and danced in their wrecked kiva – the giants with pots for heads were blind and danced very slowly and ponderously and the earth shook under them.

The ghosts danced all night and, only when the breezes freshened before the dawn, did they return to their graves. Atsidi set out before the first light, picking the ghost-road that seemed to point most exactly at the range of mountains lit like torches at their snowy summits by a sun that had not yet risen over the plain.

Below the mountains, foothills rippled upward, green and pleasant and well-watered. People claimed this area and, so, he walked cautiously, concealing himself whenever he came near a campsite. Flowing between two stony bluffs as through a gate, a wide river adorned with white water emerged from the hills. Atsidi walked beside the river toward the high country.

The Thieving People lived in the mountains, wretched and abject. They came out of the high country each Fall fleeing the deep snow on the peaks. In the Spring, they returned to their haunts among the barren summits. Atsidi followed the trail made by this annual migration, a wide trampled path that ran alongside the river. At intervals, he found campsites, ordinarily where fresh-flowing streams gushed down from the bluffs to join the river rushing down from the mountains. At the campsites, brush had been cleared and heaped neatly as tinder for the next time the Thieving People were at that place. In a couple of the camps, Atsidi even found caches of dried meat and berries in pits faced with river-rock and covered with slabs of stone.

The river valley narrowed and became a gorge and, sometimes, Atsidi had to scale high steep ridges to climb around narrow places where there was room only for the cascading water in the canyon. Once, he ventured too close to a bank undercut by the river and fell in the rushing water. The water was so cold that it numbed him immediately and he wasn’t able to pull himself out of the stream for a couple of miles. In that way, he lost half a day’s walk and had to retrace his steps along the river toward the high peaks.

One afternoon, Atsidi ascended a serpentine path next to a white, thundering wall of falling water. He moved in a haze of rainbows on a kind of goat path slick with moisture. Above the waterfall, a great meadow rolled between snow-capped peaks and the river ran through it, bucking and leaping like a stag. Herds of bison grazed on the slopes and Atsidi could see the ribbon of the river above him, falling like a silver thread through a treeless and stony gash between peaks. Above the trees, the river narrowed to a wild, vertical creek. When the sun came out, the boulders glittered as if sprinkled with mirrors and beaten silver and the river plunging down from above was a ladder of golden light. Atsidi reached the place where a powerful, churning cascade ripped a hole in the side of the mountain wall and crashed into the main course of the river. This was the fork and he had to ford the river to follow the tributary stream steeply uphill. Crossing the swift water, Atsidi fell and cut himself badly, but it was cold on these treeless heights and he didn’t want to be caught in this stony, wet notch after dark. He hustled up to where the river shattered into a hundred rivulets diving downhill from terraces and ledges of ice. A narrow chute led him up to the pass and, then, to a rocky slope leading down to a long and narrow green lake held in the arms of the peaks. After so many days of climbing, Atsidi’s knees were unaccustomed to walking downhill and, so, after a few hours, they locked and he fell forward cutting himself again and leaving a splatter of blood on the sharp stones. Wolves smelled his blood and he saw them creeping through the thickets next to the stream that he followed down to the lake.

The trench that the lake occupied was three sleeps long and it was very cold at night. On the first day, a crow accompanied him, flitting forward as he walked to squawk at him from dead trees tilted over the path. The next day, the crow flew back and forth, leading him downhill but also flapping noisily back to hover behind him. Atsidi thought that he heard something crashing through the brush and that night he made a huge fire and huddled very close to it and didn’t allow the flames to burn down until after dawn. On the third day, the crow was still present and Atsidi knew that the bird was guiding a bear that was hunting him. Sometimes, he could smell the fetid stench of the bear’s matted fur and he heard the heavy creature knocking down branches and shrubs as it followed him. Atsidi gripped his obsidian knife close to his breast and walked so swiftly that his breath came in starts and fits. Sometimes, the crow seemed to tire of its pursuit and it screamed at him, coming so close as to brush his hair with its black wings. The bear-stink made the close thickets and narrow trails almost unendurable.

Atsidi saw something ahead of him. A woman was squatting at the side of the trail relieving herself. He saw that she carried a basket and that it was full of roots and berries. The woman saw him and stood up, covering her face with shame. Then, she darted up a hillside, swift as a big-horned ram and Atsidi scrambled upward after her. She shouted something and, then, men came from between the trees and wrestled Atsidi to the ground.

At first, the Thieving People treated Atsidi as a slave and made him haul wood and water. The sister of the woman that he had surprised on the trail took pity on him and several of her kin befriended him. After a year with the Thieving People, hunting in the high country, and, then, migrating down into the valleys in the Fall, Atsidi married the kind woman. They lived together very happily for two years and, then, she became pregnant. The woman died having the baby and the child was sickly. It was early Spring, the hungry month, when the people ate bark and boiled grass for soup and none of the other women in the clan were nursing or had milk for the tiny child. One night, the infant’s piteous crying stopped and Atsidi knew that the baby had died. An old woman bundled up the little corpse and put it high in a tree so that the wolves would not eat the body. But Atsidi knew the cruel cunning of the crows and imagined them stripping the dead baby of its swaddling clothes.

When the snow was gone from the trails, Atsidi left the Thieving People and continued on his way to Tsisnaajini. He walked without thinking, as if his feet knew the way. Some days, the paths were straight and he crossed mountain meadows between peaks pushed up from the green like white hogans. On other days, the way was intricate with canyons criss-crossing one another and making his way forward was like solving a riddle. The mountains were empty and he saw no people. Even the animals seemed to have fled and, for a great distance, he couldn’t even find game-trails crossing the broken country.

Then, he came to a great basin and saw the waves of white sand blown up against the wall of the high, white mountain. Atsidi knew that the sand was a glittering snare and, so, he took care not to come too close to the dunes. At night, winds howled off the sand, driving sage brush tumbling across the prairie and scattering the embers of his fire.

On the south side of the white mountain, little streams flowed down from the peak, watercourses in the folds of the land rising toward the white dome of the summit. Atsidi walked in the creek bed, sometimes wading in the water, or making his way upward through the willows and shrubs beside the stream. A hatch of delicate greenish insects filled the air with swarms whirling over the places where the water paused in its downward descent, ponding between stands of old trees. Fish broke the surface of the smooth water, kissing the air. Sometimes, the banks between the stream pressed close together and the water seemed to gush from between rocks so that Atsidi had to emerge from the bed of the creek. When he climbed up from the stream, he saw that he had come to a place quite high on the flanks of the mountain. Above him, forests dark with green shadow encircled the mountain, making a ring around the peak. On the rolling brown plain below, complex with shimmering mirages, Atsidi saw a little whorl of moving dust – perhaps, this marked one of the caravans of the Fierce People. He hurried up hill, conscious that eyes might be watching him, and, then, descended into the cool gorge again, picking his way around boulders until he came to a place where the stream was overhead, a lacy foam of water falling from pinnacle to pinnacle. The forest was all around, quivering in the wind blowing down from the heights.

Fire had burned in part of the forest, a fast-moving blaze that had left many trees charred but upright. Atsidi knew that it was dangerous to walk among the corpses of the trees – from the edge of the woods, he could hear the dead trees groaning and cracking and, even, crying out like a wounded rabbit when the wind stirred among them. So he moved up the mountain on the edge of the burn. Green shoots were driving their way upward through the ash and dragonflies topheavy with immense iridescent eyes sailed above the cinders, sometimes wafted upward on the wind, other times darting side to side to duck the breezes stirring there. Above the burn, Atsidi saw a bare knob of rock, a fist-shaped prominence that was both part of the mountain, but, also, set aside, it seemed, from the peak. He was mindful that if he ascended much higher, he might inadvertently desecrate the peak and, so, he decided he would make his vigil at that place. He scrambled around the up-thrust wart on the side of the mountain, climbing to a place where he could look up to behold the great white crown of the summit. He cleared pebbles and prickly plants away from a terrace just under the top of the prominence and sat there, looking upward and rejoicing in the mountain, his back against a warm slab of rock. A short distance from him, there was a stony slit into the mountain, a narrow crack the width of his arm that exhaled cool air. This was also a good thing that gladdened his heart.

Atsidi waited without moving. The afternoon lengthened into night. Stars appeared above him and marched solemnly across the dark field of the sky. The white snowfields of Tsinajiini were luminous and seemed to glow with some inner light.

At dawn, Atsidi took a pointed stone and pecked at the rock slab on which he had been leaning. He worked for an hour carefully, taking advantage of the raking light of early morning to assess his work. He chipped into the smooth slab of rock an image of the Mother Buffalo Goddess, her round head crowned with horns. When he had pecked this diagram into the stone, he leaned back against the rock and, although he struggled to stay awake, he was soon asleep in the warm sunlight.

An icy finger touched his face and his shoulder. Atsidi opened his eyes. Who was touching him? He stood up so quickly that he was dizzy for a moment. A monstrous shadow was cast across the limitless brown plain, darkness like a spider spreading long, jointed legs over the land. Atsidi turned to see the direction from which the shadow had come but the mountain was gone. Clouds the color of a rotting swamp covered the peak and swept down its white flanks. The clouds bulged with breasts, teats on the underside of the storm as on the belly of dog, a half-dozen or more and all of them erupting in flashes of lightning. More cold rain fell, whipping across Atsidi’s face and chest.

A flash blinded him and, then, he was engulfed in a burst of thunder that dropped him to his knees. The side of the mountain trembled and, then, another volley of lightning crashed into the hillside. In the blasts of light, Atsidi saw every crystal in the granite around him, flaring as if it were a torch. The mountain was angry and its fierceness was now all around him. He threw himself upon the slit om tje rock and inhaled its cold breath. Somehow, he had offended the peak and the great white god, adorned with precious shell, was hurling thunderbolts at him.

It was hard to measure the time, but, after a while, the volley of lightning moved elsewhere and, although the mountain still quaked and spit fire, Atsidi was no longer threatened. The air was full of sleet that lashed at him like a whip. He sat up and rubbed at his eyes.

Three thunder-beings stood above him on the sleet-whitened slant of mountain-side. The thunder-beings were taller than men and naked except for reddish clotted hair covering their breasts and shoulders. One of them stood upright while the other two crouched against the hillside. The standing creature was bedraggled and looked at Atsidi with large eyes showing blood at their corners. Atsidi could smell the decay in their matted fur, a stench that made them seem impossibly ancient. It was odd that the thunder-beings had come to this place and, now, seemed to be imploring him to help them in some way. One of the two crouching creatures reached over to touch the hip of the standing thunder-god. Atsidi was not afraid of them – instead, they seemed curiously abject. But gods appear in all kinds of guises and they can shift shape in a heartbeat and, so, Atsidi did not doubt that these were very great beings, dwelling in the highest places where men can not go. As he stretched out his hand to the thunder-beings, the standing creature turned and loped away, running as swiftly as an elk, and the other two rose and followed him so that they were soon lost in the swirling mists of the ice-storm.

The mountain had spoken and Atsidi made haste to descend her long, slippery flank.

After awhile, the sun came out and, behind him, the great peak was draped in dazzling white. Every vein in the mountain’s skin gushed with water. It became warm and Atsidi was tired and wet and, so, he made camp on a hillside overlooking a hollow that was now a slough where flocks of birds rose and fell above the cold, fragrant water.

Sunset lit the very top of the mountain like a torch. The stars sped by. In the dawn, the peak was like fruit ripening in the growing light.

Atsidi heard splashing and looked down to see that a monster had come to drink in the water puddled below his camp. The monster was large as an elk, taller with huge sinewy hind legs and stiff-looking bony forepaws. Atsidi blinked and wondered if he were still asleep. The strange beast approached the pond, paused and, then, stooped so that its foremost head could dip down and drink from the edge of the slough. The monster’s upper head and torso remained upright, fused to the creature’s spine. Atsidi inhaled and held his breath so that he would make no sound at all. The creature’s upper head twisted slightly and Atsidi could see that the thing had man-like arms and hands jointed at shoulders below its skull and eyes. The great flanks of the beast looked shiny and glistened a bit in the light of dawn. Something disturbed the monster and it raised its long snout above the water, snorting and, then, crying out in a high-pitched quivering squeal. Then, the monster raised its front head upward, water drizzling down from its mouth, shaking a little and sniffing at the air. The creature had two sets of eyes – those on the sides of the monster’s cylindrical lower head were big as a man’s fists and black. The eyes on the second head, perched on the torso embedded in the thing’s back were small, piggish, and they rolled in their sockets, showing white around the pupils as the thing looked about. Slowly, the creature backed from the water and, then, cantered away, trotting toward the blaze of light where the sun was rising.



Every creature known to Atsidi had a single nature. But this beast seemed double and had the nature of both man and beast. Atsidi trembled uncontrollably and, later, was sick.

In due time, Atsidi returned to his people. He lived many years and was a great man among them. In the kiva, he often told the men’s societies about the holy mountain and described the thunder gods that he had seen. But he never told anyone about the monster that he watched drinking water from pool of melt-water at the base of Tsinaajini. It had been a bad omen, possibly a hallucination, and no one would have believed him anyhow.