Zuni Folktales

head; the winds shrieked through great crevices in the walls; the windows were broken and wide open; sand sifted through on the wind and eddied down into the old, barren room. The rafters, dried and warped with age, were bending and breaking, and pieces of the roof fell now and then when the wind blew more strongly. He raised himself, and clammy bones fell from around him; and when he cast his eyes about him, there on the floor were strewn bones and skulls. Here and there a face half buried in the sand, with eyes sunken and dried and patches of skin clinging to it, seemed to glare at him. Fingers and feet, as of mummies, were strewn about, and it was as if the youth had entered a great cemetery, where the remains of the dead of all ages were littered about. He lifted himself still farther, and where the head of one maiden had lain or the arms of another had entwined with his, bones were clinging to him. One by one he picked them off stealthily and laid them down, until at last he freed himself, and, rising, cautiously stepped between the bones which were lying around, making no noise until he came to the broken-down doorway of the place. There, as he passed out, his foot tripped against a splinter of bone which was embedded in the debris of the ruin, and as a sliver sings in the wind, so this sang out. The youth, startled and terrorized, sprang forth and ran for his life in the direction of the home of the Storks. Shrieking, howling, and singing like a slivered stick in the wind, like creaking boughs in the forest, with groans and howls and whistlings that seemed to freeze the youth as he ran, these bones and fragments of the dead arose and, like a flock of vampires, pursued him noisily.

He ran and ran, and the great cloud of the dead were coming nearer and nearer and pressing round him, when he beheld one of his grandparents, a Badger, near its hole. The Badger, followed by others, was fast approaching him, having heard this fearful clamor, and cried out: “Our grandson! Let’s save him!” So they ran forward and, catching him up, cast him down into one of their holes. Then, turning toward the uncanny crowd and bristling up, with sudden emotion and mighty effort they cast off that odor by which, as you know, they may defile the very winds. Thlitchiii! it met the crowd of ghosts. Thliwooo! the whole host of them turned with wails and howls and gnashings of teeth back toward the City of the Dead, whence they had come. And the Badgers ran into the hole where lay the youth, lifted him up, and scolded him most vigorously for his folly.

Then they said: “Sit up, you fool, for you are not yet saved! Hurry!” said they, one to another. “Heat water!” And, the water being heated, nauseating herbs and other medicines were mingled with it, and the youth was directed to drink of that. He drank, not once, but four times. Ukch, usa!⁠—and after he had been thus treated the old Badgers asked him if he felt relieved or well, and the youth said he was very well compared with what he had been.

Then they stood him up in their midst and said to him: “You fool and faithless lout, why did you go and become enamored of Death, however beautiful? It is only a wonder that with all our skill and power we have saved you thus far. It will be a still greater wonder, O foolish one, if she who loved you still loves you enough after this faithlessness to save the life which you have forfeited. Who would dance and take joy in Death? Go now to the home of your grandparents, the Storks, and there live. Your plumage gone, your love given up, what remains? You can neither descend to your own people below without wings, nor can you live with the people of the Eagles without love. Go, therefore, to your grandparents!”

And the youth got up and dragged himself away to the home of the Storks; but when he arrived there they looked at him with downcast faces and reproached him over and over, saying: “There is small possibility of your regaining what you have forfeited⁠—the love and affection of your wife.”

“But I will go to her and plead with her,” said the youth. “How should I know what I was doing?”

“We told you not to do it, and you heeded not our telling.”

So the youth lagged away to the home of the Eagles, where, outside that great house with high walls, he lingered, moping and moaning. The Eagles came and went, or they gathered and talked on the housetop, but no word of greeting did they offer him; and his wife, at last, with a shiver of disgust, appeared above him and said: “Go back! go back to your grandparents. Their love you may not have forfeited; mine you have. Go back! for we never can receive you again amongst us. Oh, folly and faithlessness, in you they have an example!”

So the youth sadly returned to the home of the Storks. There he lingered, returning ever and anon to the home of the Eagles; but it was as though he were not there, until at last the elder Eagles, during one of his absences, implored the Eagle-maid to take the youth back to his own home.

“Would you ask me, his wife, who loved him, now to touch him who has been polluted by being enamored of Death?” asked she.

But they implored, and she acquiesced. So, when the youth appeared again at the home of the Eagles, she had found an old, old Eagle dress, many of the feathers in it broken; ragged and disreputable it was, and the wing-feathers were so thin that the wind whistled through them. Descending with