brought out a great handful of jerky which he thrust into Havek’s hand.
When the rim of the sun sat down on the white scar where Beale’s Trail crossed the ridge of the Dead Mountains over in Nevada, they came to a place called Ahavelpah where the river bottom ended at the mesa’s cliff. Nobody lived there. There had been a rancheria there at one time, but someone had died and been cremated there, and his house and goods burned, of course; so it was a ghost place and would remain so for a generation—just a damp swale near the foot of the dun cliff where three big cottonwoods grew by a water hole.
At the third cottonwood, Havek said, “Wait here,” and he climbed the face of the cliff and under the low branches of a mesquite that clung to it ten feet up. Directly, he came sliding down the gravelly face of the mesa carrying a five-pound salt bag bulging full.
“Traveler’s rations,” he said, stuffing the bag into his shirt.
Then South Boy knew for certain Havek was intending to travel far, for no one would bother carrying a bag of parched corn and pumpkin seeds if he were only going as far as the northern valley, just above the Fort.
This he thought little of at the time. He was more impressed with the fact that Havek had disclosed the location of his secret cache. That was usually concealed from one’s closest friend, for it was a great honor to keep something cleverly concealed. South Boy hugged the gun against his belly and laughed to himself. He would show that to Havek some time and tell him triumphantly, “All this time I was traveling with you and you didn’t know I had it.”
That would be a triumph indeed. Almost a Great Thing.
They were jogging along at the foot of the cliff over ground made hard by the black alkali. Havek began to sing:
“Name-traveling, I travel,
Name-finding, a new name.”
So he goes traveling with Apache arrows, thought South Boy. Well . . .
It was likewise unusual for a Mojave boy to go traveling to find himself a man’s name before he was through school, that is if he went to school. Havek was setting out a year or two early. Havek hated his boy’s name, which was really a baby name. Because it was a joke name, it had stayed with him in his youth. It was such a good joke name that he was called Havek even by people who habitually spoke English and should have called him by his government name, which was Rutherford Hayes.
The joke was Havek’s mother’s. She was a huge woman, always laughing. When she carried Havek, she grew so large she thought she was going to have twins. When Havek came alone, she laughed and laughed, and called him Havek, which means simply “Two.”
Soon they came to a wide mouth of a wash, and Havek turned up the sandy bed of the arroyo that came out of it. He slowed his pace down to a walk, for the bed was sand and the going was heavy.
South Boy stopped once to look back over his shoulder. The sun was gone, and the west was as red as a shirt of China silk. A lovely thing to see.
This, he told himself, I’ll remember a long time. This is the night I was happy, after a bad day.
He thought of something he heard an old man say: “The white man’s forehead is wrinkled because he is always asking, ‘Will tomorrow be bad?’ He never has time to smile because it is very good right now.”
It is very good right now, thought South Boy. I’ll let tomorrow be.
Up ahead Havek trudged on past a paloverde tree, green of trunk, branch, and stem, and very beautiful against the white sand of the wash. He was going slower because the sand pulled at his heels. He passed the first greasewood bush—a dozen gray-green stems springing out of a common center and tipped with twigs bearing tiny, crinkly, greasy-green leaves.
On past was one smoke tree with a ghostly crown of innumerable gray, leafless twigs, and when Havek reached the smoke tree, the first bat of the evening came circling over his head. Havek immediately swallowed the meat he was chewing on and began to sing:
“Over our house
The night bat
Rising, flies . . .”
That was the first song in the long dream-singing called “The Ravens.”
Now there is something to think about, said South Boy to himself. This business of dream-singing.
About two years before, Havek had begun singing “The Ravens.” When South Boy asked him how he learned it Havek said: “I dreamed it. It was given to me, just so, because my shadow stood outside the Sacred House and heard the Ravens singing. I was unborn, but I was there. So now I have dreamed what I heard and saw.”
That’s tougher to understand than Christian Instruction, thought South Boy. It didn’t seem likely to him that anybody could go to sleep and dream two hundred songs in their proper meter and rhythm, not to mention complicated melody and long meandering story—for the songs only gave outline and emphasis to the tale.
“How can he dream all that when it takes him two nights to sing and tell all of it?”
In camp Havek would intersperse his tale between his songs. Now he just sang. About two semi-embodied spirits who woke up in the Sacred House. They heard bats squeaking overhead, so they sang about bats. Then, being children, they reached for their toys. So Havek sang:
“We reach,
And there is a rattle
In each hand . . .”
So sang the spirits as they danced towards the door of the Sacred House, and so Havek sang as he trudged up the arroyo to the mesa top—about rattles and cane buzzers, and what the world would look like when it was completed.
When they reached the door, the Ravens looked out across the valley of the Colorado where the Mojaves, yet to be created, were going to live. They saw something out of the future: the dust of a war party returning from a successful raid to the east, over in the Apache country. Painted men, mallet-headed clubs dangling from their wrists by leather thongs, bound slaves, the whole skin of a man’s head waving like a flag atop a tall pole, the dance of triumph and the smoking of those made unclean by blood and death.
Havek sang on as he came out of the wash and turned due north across the flat top of the mesa where traveling was good over a matrix of fine firm gravel. He broke into a trot. Up here the little greasewood bushes grew in even spacings, twelve yards apart and no more than three feet high. Nothing else grew here but an occasional cholla cactus.
South Boy was saying to himself: “His grandfather sang ‘The Ravens.’ Havek may have dreamed it, but I’ll bet he learned it from the old man first.”
The moon came up over Arizona mountains, fifteen miles across the mesa—very red, very large, very bright. The little greasewoods cast long, pale, spindling shadows towards the now distant river. The breeze began blowing stronger. It was still hot, but the breeze made it pleasant.
Havek’s song grew a little monotonous. The Raven brothers went name-traveling after they left the Sacred House. Havek’s song became an unending recital of the names of mountains, canyons, springs, and streams that they saw as they wandered west to the San Bernardino Mountains where they looked upon the distant sea, then south and east to the mouth of the Colorado and east and north through Pima and Apache country.
