Zuni Folktales

success. “Well, there is one left, anyway,” said he. He tied the feet of the last one together, and was about to place the strap over his forehead, when he heard a mighty and thundering tread and great shouting and a terrible noise altogether, for the people were already gathering about his den. He made for the mouth of it with all possible speed, but the people were there before him; they closed in upon him, they clutched at his stolen garments, they pulled his earrings out of his ears, slitting his ears in doing so, until he put up his hands and cried: “Death and ashes! Mercy! Mercy! You hurt! You hurt! Don’t treat me so! I’ll be good hereafter. I’ll take the clothing off and give it back to you without making the slightest trouble, if you will let me alone.” But the people closed in still more angrily, and pulled him about, buffeted him, tore his clothing from him, until he was left nude and bruised and so maimed that he could hardly move.

Then the old priests gathered around, and said one of them: “It will not be well if we let this beast go as he is; he is too large, too powerful, and too crafty. He has but to think of destruction; forsooth, he destroys. He has but to think of overreaching; it is accomplished. It will not be well that he should go abroad thus. He must be roasted; and thus only can we rid the world of him as he is.”

So the people assembled and heaped up great quantities of dry firewood; and they drilled fire from a stick, and lighted the mass. Then they cast the struggling Tarantula amid the flames, and he squeaked and sizzled and hissed, and swelled and swelled and swelled, until, with a terrific noise, he burst, and the fragments of his carcass were cast to the uttermost parts of the earth. These parts again took shape as beings not unlike Old Tarantula himself.

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Thus it was in the days of the ancients. And therefore today, though crooked are the legs of the tarantula, and his habit of progress backward, still he is distributed throughout the great world. Only he is very, very much smaller than was the Great Tarantula who lived below the two rocky columns of Thunder Mountain.

Thus shortens my story.

Átahsaia, the Cannibal Demon

In the days of the ancients, when the children of our forefathers lived in Héshokta (“Town of the Cliffs”), there also lived two beautiful maidens, elder and younger, sisters one to the other, daughters of a master-chief.

One bright morning in summertime, the elder sister called to the younger, “Háni!”

“What sayest thou?” said the háni.

“The day is bright and the water is warm. Let us go down to the pool and wash our clothes, that we may wear them as if new at the dance to come.”

“Ah, yes, sister elder,” said the háni; “but these are days when they say the shadows of the rocks and even the sage-bushes lodge unthinkable things, and cause those who walk alone to breathe hard with fear.”

“Shtchu!” exclaimed the elder sister derisively. “Younger sisters always are as timid as younger brothers are bad-tempered.”

“Ah, well, then; as you will, sister elder. I will not quarrel with your wish, but I fear to go.”

“Yaush! Come along, then,” said the elder sister; whereupon they gathered their cotton mantles and other garments into bundles, and, taking along a bag of yucca-root, or soap-weed, started together down the steep, crooked path to where the pool lay at the foot of the great mesa.

Now, far above the Town of the Cliffs, among the rocks of red-gray and yellow⁠—red in the form of a boulder-like mountain that looks like a frozen sandbank⁠—there is a deep cave. You have never seen it? Well! to this day it is called the “Cave of Átahsaia,” and there, in the times I tell of, lived Átahsaia himself. Uhh! what an ugly demon he was! His body was as big as the biggest elk’s, and his breast was shaggy with hair as stiff as porcupine-quills. His legs and arms were long and brawny⁠—all covered with speckled scales of black and white. His hair was coarse and snarly as a buffalo’s mane, and his eyes were so big and glaring that they popped out of his head like skinned onions. His mouth stretched from one cheek to the other and was filled with crooked fangs as yellow as thrown-away deer-bones. His lips were as red and puffy as peppers, and his face as wrinkled and rough as a piece of burnt buckskin. That was Átahsaia, who in the days of the ancients devoured men and women for his meat, and the children of men for his sweetbread. His weapons were terrible, too. His fingernails were as long as the claws of a bear, and in his left hand he carried a bow made of the sapling of a mountain-oak, with two arrows ready drawn for use. And he was never seen without his great flint knife, as broad as a man’s thigh and twice as long, which he brandished with his right hand and poked his hair back with, so that his grizzly forelocks were covered with the blood of those he had slaughtered. He wore over his shoulders whole skins of the mountain lion and bear clasped with buttons of wood.

Now, although Átahsaia was ugly and could not speak without chattering his teeth, or laugh without barking like a wolf, he was a very polite demon. But, like many ugly and polite people nowadays, he was a great liar.

Átahsaia that morning woke up and stuck his head out of his hole just as the two maidens went down to the spring. He caught sight of them while his eyes travelled below, and he chuckled. Then he muttered, as he gazed at them and saw how young