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didn’t listen to what I was saying,” he chided. “My words were, ‘I can not tell you the story in English because the words are not there. If you can remember the Hopi I taught you, I will tell it that way.”
    “Oh yes!” She hugged her knees and wiggled on her bottom, all the anger swept aside by eager expectation.
    Carefully he began, in the cadences of the old tongue, to tell her the story. The carefully spoken syllables brought rich pictures into her mind even as she struggled to understand the subtleties of meaning in the old Hopi words. As she listened to her grandfather’s voice againstthe soft wailing of the desert wind, she felt as though she were there, in this same village, more than two hundred years before, watching as the kachinas began their last dances.
     
    Dawn. Grey, cold. Frost rimes the adobe, coats the rusty vehicles parked outside the pueblos. December is the season of Wuwuchim, the first of the great cycle of ceremonies. Outside, in the white man’s world, people are engulfed in the frenzy of Christmas shopping. Here too there is excitement, but it is deeper, more controlled.
    The people gather in the plaza, wrapped in blankets. Their breath steams in the cold clear air over the mesas. Children blink, sleepy-eyed, their hair ruffled. They knuckle the scratchiness of sleep from their eyes and force back the yawns. Soon the kachinas will come.
    There will not be very many, the children know. The kachinas are getting tired. Or perhaps they sense that the people of this land no longer need them. Rain is brought by cloud-seeding and climate control. By cash paid to the government or to the Navajo. And still there is not enough to grow corn.
    But still the children wait, wanting to see the magical beings who live in the dolls that hang on pueblo walls. The kachina dolls are set above the reach of little hands, for they are old and too precious to be played with. The cottonwood from which they were carved is depleted. Some are still carved in pine or balsa, or the dense foamed plastic brought from Japan. But the children know that those dolls are not real and the kachinas spurn them. The new kachina dolls are for the visitors that crowd the mesa each summer. But there are no tourists here today. This dance is for the people themselves.
    A distant high jingling brings the thoughts of children back to the approach of the kachinas. They wait, looking across the plaza with solemn eyes as the bells grow louder. But the sound is so weak and so is the tread of dancing feet. Could it be that there is only one kachina coming?
    The dancer emerges into the plaza. His mask is brightly, almost savagely painted. Feathers sweep from top and back, cascading down in a brilliant mix of color, startling in the grayness of dawn and the dull brown of the pueblos. The kachina’s steps are slow and leaden, but as he approaches, his feet pick up tempo, forcing the drumbeat to follow him, instead of dancing to the drum. The people lean forward. The children hear their parents muttering above their beads, hear in-drawn breath. They try to remember. Have the kachinas ever danced like this?
    No. There is anger in his steps and in every shake of his feathers. His feet do not tread the earth, they strike it, they beat it. They force the drumbeat, distort the rhythm. Something is wrong. Never has the kachina’s dance been one of bitterness.
    Yet the older men sigh and look on with a glitter in their hawks’ eyes, as if they knew this would happen and are satisfied that it has. A few babies wail and are carried away by their mothers. The deer-hoof rattles on the kachina’s legs crack sharply, the bells no longer jingling but shrill. Something is terribly wrong, the children think, but do not know what. The older children think that they will leave the pueblo when they grow up.
    And then with an angry leap, the kachina kicks both booted feet against the earth and howls, the sound reverberating inside the wooden cylinder of his