Summary
Tayo tells Betonie about Emo, suggesting that maybe Emo
is right: maybe the whites have taken everything from the Indians.
But Betonie explains that first of all the whites only think they
own the land, but in fact no one can own the land. Then he explains
that the whites are only the invention of Indian witchcraft and
tells the story of how at a great conference of witches white people
were created and let loose on the earth like a plague.
Tayo, Betonie, and Shush ride to the foothill of the Chuska Mountains
to spend the night in a small hogan. Looking around, Tayo realizes
that he is in the highest spot in the world, measured not in miles
but in importance.
Betonie tells the story of a young man who goes off to
hunt deer and is captured by Coyote. His family goes after him and
finds him, but he has been almost completely taken over by Coyote.
They take him to the Bear People, who help them to perform a ceremony
to save the young man. As he tells the story of the ceremony, Betonie performs
the same ceremony for Tayo, painting a picture of the ceremony of
which he tells, with Tayo sitting in the middle of it. Shush and
Betonie chant prayers of Tayo as they cut his scalp, and they sing
about his journey away and their hopes for him to come back. After
that first portion of the ceremony, they bring him into the hogan
for the night and feed him Indian tea. Tayo dreams about Josiah's
speckled cattle.
Tayo awakens, and Betonie sits near him and tells him
a story of long ago. The Indians knew something was wrong and rode
around, until a group of young men found a light-skinned Mexican
girl with hazel eyes tied up in a tree. They took her down and,
knowing that they should not, brought her home. Then they realized
they had to send her back but did not know how, so they brought
her to the medicine man, Betonie's grandfather Descheeny. He told
her he would not touch her and would send her home, but she replied
that her people would not accept her back, so he took her as a wife.
His other wives were upset because their traditions dictated that
they should not touch "alien things," so Descheeny moved with her
to a winter house below the mountains.
Descheeny knew she would come before she arrived, and
he decided that he needed to work together with her in order to
create a ceremony that could cure the world of the whites, who were
working to end the world. Descheeny realized that now they all needed
to work together, even making use of things from the whites. The
Mexican girl also had come to work with Descheeny. She was the daughter
of a Spaniard and Root Woman. When they saw the color of her eyes,
they left her to die on a trash pile and made Root Woman leave the
village. Root woman left, but she took the girl with her.
Fly and Hummingbird come back to the people for tobacco
for old Buzzard, but there is no tobacco, so they go back to the
fourth world below and ask their mother where they can get tobacco.
She tells them to go ask caterpillar.
