The sound of drums and then the drummers themselves emerged from the kiva. The four old men took their position at the edge of the plaza and propped their huge drums on their knees without missing a beat. They began a soft chant. A second line of men with blankets draped over their shoulders climbed down from the kiva, also singing, and took their places behind the old drummers.
Then deer arrived, from everywhere. They were men and boys with black shirts and leggings, white kilts, and deer antlers. Their human features disappeared behind a horizontal band of black paint across the eyes. They moved like deer. They held long sticks in front of them, imitating the deer’s cautious, long-legged grace, and they moved their heads anxiously to the side: listening, listening. Sniffing the wind. The woman in black stepped forward shaking her gourd rattle, and they followed her. They became deer. They looked exactly as deer would look if you surprised them in a secret rite in the forest, moving in unison, following the irresistible hiss of a maiden’s gourd rattle.
I was entranced. More people climbed down out of the kiva. Some were dressed and armed as bow hunters who stalked the deer with patience. One man, who didn’t seem to have any realistic function in the drama, was nearly naked and bizarrely painted. His body was ringed with black and white horizontal stripes, he had black rings painted around his eyes and mouth, and his hair was pulled up into a pair of corn-tassel horns. He bounced around like a hysteric, possibly in the interest of keeping warm.
“Who’s the striped guy?” I asked Loyd.
“Koshari,” he said. “A kachina. He has to do with fertility. His home’s in the East.”
This struck me as humorous. “The East, as in New York? Area Code 212?”
“The East as in where the sun rises.”
“That’s all part of his job description?”
“All the kachinas have whole histories and families and live in one of the important places.”
“I thought a kachina was a little doll.”
“That’s right.”
“And also a person dressed up?”
“Yep. And a spirit.”
“A spirit with a family and a mailing address.”
“That’s right. When the person dresses up a certain way, the spirit comes into him. And into the doll, if it’s made right.”
“Okay,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing, just okay. I understand.”
He smiled at me sideways. “You think it sounds voodoo?”
“All right, I’m narrow-minded. It sounds kind of voodoo.”
We both paid attention to the dancers for a while. I needed to keep a little distance from Loyd.
“Anglos put little dolls of Santa Claus around their houses at Christmas,” Loyd said without looking at me.
“Yeah, but it’s just a little doll.”
“And does it have a wife?”
“Yes,” I conceded. “A wife and elves. And they live at the North Pole.”
“And sometimes one guy will dress up like Santa Claus. And everybody acts a certain way when he comes around. All happy and generous.”
I’d never been put in a position to defend Santa Claus. I’d never even believed in Santa Claus. “That’s just because he stands for the spirit of Christmas,” I said.
“Exactly.” Loyd seemed very pleased with himself.
One of the hunters had drawn his bow and shot an invisible arrow into a deer. It gave an anguished shiver, and then the other hunters lifted its limp carcass onto their shoulders.
“I’ve seen Jesus kachinas too,” Loyd said. “I’ve seen them hanging all over people’s houses in Grace.”
Now there was a thought to ponder.
Koshari must also have been the spirit of nuisance, or a good belly laugh. The other deer dancers still followed the maiden, ignoring the hunters and their own fallen brother, but Koshari clowned and cut between them, getting in their way and generally interfering with their solemnity. But when one of the youngest dancers lost his antlers, Koshari picked up the headdress and carefully reattached it by its buckskin laces. The boy kept dancing, eyes front, paying no attention to the hobgoblin who was putting his costume back together.
At some later point, I noticed, Koshari had acquired a new-looking straw cowboy hat, which he cocked ridiculously on one of his horns. I had a feeling it wasn’t the Navajo he was aping here. He walked duck-footed with a John Wayne swagger and was using a length of two-by-four as a gun. He knelt and fired repeatedly at the dancing deer, grandly falling over backward each time. Later he stalked them, trailing his gun in the snow and tripping over it with admirably practiced body comedy.
The deer eventually retreated to the cliff, and the plaza filled with two lines of new dancers-a row of black-clad women and a row of men in white kilts-whose bodies beat a loud rhythm as they walked. Their chests were crisscrossed with lines of seashell bells. The two rows of dancers faced one another and stamped their feet, shaking the bells, crowding the air above the plaza with a loud, hollow clicking like summer insects. The men wore crowns of eagle feathers and the women wore spectacular wooden headdresses painted with stylized clouds and slanting blue lines of rain and green blades of corn. This was the corn dance, officially a summer prayer but danced at every important occasion, Loyd said, because you couldn’t pray it often enough.
“Most of the dances have to do with rain,” he said. “Here, that’s what everything hangs on.”
Santa Claus kachinas and the beauty of the spectacle notwithstanding, I still felt outside of it. “So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.” Prayer had always struck me
