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The great cat flattened herself along the ground to spring, put back her ears, and showed her teeth with a snarly whine, almost too wicked to be pretended. "I was very good at that," said Moke-icha. "'The Delight-Maker was for you, Tse-tse, said the turkey girl next morning. 'Kokomo cannot prove that you gave it to Kabeyde, but he will never forgive you.
Tse-tse talked to the girl, of all things, about the love-gift she had put in the cave for me. 'Moke-icha had eaten it before I found her, he insisted, which was unnecessary. I lay looking at the Dine I had killed and licking my wound till I heard, around the bend of the Gap, the travel song of the Queres. "It was the Salt Pack coming back, every man with his load on his shoulders.
I had forgot there were three Dine at Ty-uonyi; the third had been under the rock drinking. He came crawling now with his knife in his teeth toward Tse-tse. Me he had not seen until he came round the singing rock, face to face with me... "When it was over," said Moke-icha, "I climbed up the black roof of Lasting Water to lick a knife cut in my shoulder.
When they passed to the floor below a very remarkable change had come over the landscape. The Buffalo Chief and Moke-icha had disappeared. A little way ahead the trail plunged down the leafy tunnel of an ancient wood, along which the children saw the great elk trotting leisurely with his cows behind him, flattening his antlers over his back out of the way of the low-branching maples.
"Fire and a dog!" said the Blackfoot, adding a little pinch of sweet-grass to his smoke as a sign of thankfulness, "Friend-on-the-Hearth and Friend-at-the-Back! Man may go far with them." Moke-icha turned her long flanks to the sun. "Now I thought the tale began with a mention of a Talking Skin " "Oh, that!" The Coyote recalled himself.
Trails spidered up its broken steep, and were lost in the cloud-drift or dipped out of sight over the edge of the timbered mesa. "We would go over the trail to hunt," said Moke-icha. "There were no buffaloes, but blacktail and mule deer that fattened on the bunch grass, and bands of pronghorn flashing their white rumps. Quail ran in droves and rose among the mesas like young thunder.
Yellow pines balanced on the edge of the cliffs, and smaller, tributary canons, that opened into it, widened here and there to let in tall, solitary trees, with patches of sycamore and wild cherry and linked pools for trout. "That was a country!" purred Moke-icha. "What was it you wished to know about it?"
There were no wandering tribes about except the Dine and they were all devils." "Devils they may have been," said the Navajo, "but they did not say their prayers to a yellow cat, O Kabeyde." "I speak but as the People of the Cliffs," said Moke-icha soothingly.
It is the Underworld from which the Twin Brothers led them when the mud of the earliest world was scarcely dried, and they seem to have gone wandering about until they found Ty-uonyi, where they settled. The stone puma, which Moke-icha thought was carved in her honor, can still be seen on the mesa back from the river, south of Tyuonyi.
We were a tree whose roots were in the desert and whose branches were over all the north, and there is no Telling of the Queres, Cochiti, or Ty-uonyi, O Kebeyde," he turned to the puma, "which I cannot match with a better of those same Dine." "There were Dine in this Telling," purred Moke-icha, "and one puma.
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