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The Swastika

Dispersion of the Swastika

Page 90

place was desert, game scarce, and they moved up the river farther into the mountains. The father made incantations to enable his two sons to capture and kill game; he sent them hunting each day, directing them to go to the east, west, or north, but with the injunction not to the south. The elder son disobeyed this injunction, went to the south, was captured by a war party of Utes and taken to their home far to the south. He escaped by the aid of Yáybichy (Qastcéëlçi) and divers supernatural beings. His adventures in returning home form the body of the ceremony wherein these adventures are, in some degree, reproduced. Extensive preparations are made for the performance of the ceremony. Lodges are built and corrals made for the use of the performers and the convenience of their audience. The fete being organized, stories are told, speeches made, and sacred songs are sung (the latter are given by Dr. Matthews as "songs of sequence," because they must be sung in a progressive series on four certain days of the ceremony). Mythological charts of dry sand of divers colors are made on the earth within the corrals after the manner of the Navajo and Peublo Indians. These dry sand paintings are made father a given formula and intended to be repeated from year to year, although no copy is preserved, the artists depending only upon the memory of their shaman. One of these pictures or charts represents the fugitive's escape from the Utes, his captors, down a precipice into a den or cave in which burnt a fire "on which was no wood." Four pebbles lay on the ground together --- a black pebble in the east, a blue one in the south, a yellow one in the west, and a white one in the north. From these flames issued. Around the fire lay four bears, colored and placed to correspond with the pebbles. When the strangers (Qastcéëlçi and the Navajo) approached the fire the bears asked them for tobacco, and when they replied they had none, the bears became angry and thrice more demanded it. When the Navajo fled from the Ute camp, he had furtively helped himself from one of the four bags of tobacco which the council was using. These, with a pipe, he had tied up in his skin robe; so when the fourth demand was made he filled the pipe an lighted it at the fire. He handed the pipe to the black bear, who, taking but one whiff, passed it to the blue bear and immediately fell senseless. The blue bear took two whiffs and passed the pipe, when he too fell over unconscious. The yellow bear succumbed after the third whiff, and the white bear in the north after the fourth whiff. Now the Navajo knocked the ashes and tobacco out of his pipe and rubbed the latter on the feet, legs, abdomen, chest, shoulders, forehead, and mouth of each of the bears in turn, and they were at once resuscitated. He replaced the pipe in the corner of his robe. When the bears recovered, they assigned to the Navajo a place on the east side of the fire where he might lie all night, and they brought out their stores of corn meal, teiltein, and other berries, offering them to him to eat; but Qastcéëlçi warned him not to touch the food, and disappeared. So, hungry as he was, the Indian lay down supperless to sleep. When he awoke in the

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