swept clean before the corn was brought through the streets from the fields. Everyone, men, women and children, took part in the harvest, which lasted for several days. It was a happy time, full of social exchange and pleasure. Neighbors helped one another. The storage bins were ready. The year’s hard work was over for a spell. Peace and plenty repaid virtue. The winter was coming when nothing would grow. The days would be bright, the nights cold, sometimes there would be ice on the river. The cottonwoods would turn golden and keep their dried leaves. The stalks and grasses by the water would be rods of rusty brown and black and pink and pale gold. In the fields, the corn husks would dry and crackle in the wind. The ditches would be clogged with withered weeds. Vegetation did not rot. It dried up. A seed planted then would be lost. But it did not matter, for now in harvesttime there was enough food to last through the coming months, and people could live.
If the summer was the man’s season, then winter was the woman’s. For the harvest was hers, and she knew what to do with it to make all its produce into good dishes to eat. There were two meals a day to prepare, the first in midmorning, when everyone had already been at work for several hours; the second in late afternoon, when smoke from cooking fires stood plain against the setting sunlight. The mother and her girls prepared the food. They had to have enough on hand in case anyone appeared at mealtime. This often happened. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, felt free to go visiting and to take a meal in the family at any time. Friends sometimes came, too, with the unspoken question, What do you suppose she is going to serve this evening? They would find out, and whatever it was, they would know it represented the best the family could offer, for the news would travel fast if the guest found any evidence of poverty, carelessness or clumsiness in the meal. The company sat in a circle on the floor. The tone was one of gaiety and good humor, for it was not good manners to be gloomy or disagreeable while dining. The room was small, the air smoky, the floor hard, but with much to say, and plenty to taste, they all enjoyed themselves.
The staff of life was maize. It was prepared in many ways. It was boiled in the whole ear, or the ear was toasted over charcoal fire, and the corn was eaten off the cob. It was ground into meal and cooked as a mush and eaten hot. For anniversaries and dances and weddings, corn bread was made in fancy shapes called flowers, with fluted designs, or shell-coils, or petals, or little hunks pinched out into spikes. Thin large wafers of corn dough mixed with fine cottonwood ashes were baked into tortillas. Corn meal, ground fine, and toasted three times, was carried by travelers, who needed only to add water to it to have a nourishing dish called pinole.
Roots of wild onion and mariposa lily were cooked for green vegetables. Milkweed was eaten raw or boiled. Seed pods were boiled, and seeds often made into dumplings with corn dough. The berries of the ground-tomato and nuts from the oak and pine were eaten raw. Pumpkins were given as presents, and served uncooked, and also could be preserved. The housewife cut off the rind, opened one end of the pumpkin and scraped out seeds and pithy fibres, and put the pumpkin to dry overnight. The next day she tore it carefully into long, spiral strips, and hung each strip to dry on a cottonwood sapling which she had trimmed as a drying rack. When the pumpkin meat was dry, it could be bundled together and stored, until it was wanted for stewing and making into pies.
The people had meat on special occasions. They liked mountain sheep, deer, squirrel, prairie dog, mountain lion, badger, fox and the fat field mouse. Meat was cut into little strips and, unsalted, hung out in the sun to dry, after which it could be stored without spoiling. Fresh meat was cooked on sticks held over a fire of coals, or included in a stew with vegetables. Fat and marrow were the tastiest parts. When the ducks came down the river in the fall, or went back up in the spring, they snared them and cooked them between hot stones. They did not eat fish, for this reason: they said that two pueblos faced each other across the Rio Grande near the confluence of the Chama and the main river. The towns belonged to two groups of the same ancestry. Desiring intercourse, they said they would see that a bridge was built over the river between them. Their medicine men built it, reaching out from one bank with parrot feathers, and magpie feathers from the other. When the feather spans met, people used the bridge until evil witches one day overturned it, causing people to fall into the river, where they became fishes. The people said they must not eat their own bewitched relations.
They made tea from the leaves of coyote plant, coreopsis, mistletoe, and thelesperma, and if they wanted the bitter brew sweetened, they used corn syrup. Young girls whose mouths were pure were chosen to make the sweet syrup. For days before they worked, they kept spurge root in their mouths to clear their breaths. Then they chewed fine corn meal until it became a paste. This was added to a mixture of water and corn meal, and the cornstarch and the saliva of the maidens combined to make sugar. There was no alcoholic drink.
The people took much of their food from wild nature. After the corn harvests they went to the mountains to gather the little sweet nuts from the piñon tree, and crops of acorns and wild plum. Men and women, young and old, went on the expeditions, and for the young, these were occasions of love-making and courtship. To the children who stayed home in the pueblo the elders would bring back sticky juniper boughs loaded with frost-purple berries.
The pueblos never domesticated animals for food. One pueblo did not even have a word meaning animal. Each kind of animal had a specific name, and each creature had its own identity, like a living person. The dogs they lived with, perhaps the domestic mouse, the turkeys they kept for feathers, could no more be eaten than a person (for it was a long time since human sacrifice had taken place among them, even though to the south in Mexico it still was performed daily in untold numbers). But the wild animal was fair game, and the hunt was one of a man’s glories. It made him not only a provider, proud to bring home that which kept life going. It gave him a challenge, and it told him of his own animalhood which he must use with all his craft and power if he was to succeed over other creatures. The mountain lion was his hunting god, a symbol of the killer who saw with a piercing yellow stare, who moved as softly as cloud, and who killed with claws like lightning. On a mountain top above one abandoned plateau city, hunters had long ago carved two stones into the likenesses of the mountain lion, and later hunters carried little images of him in clay or stone when they went out.
Some useful animals were found near home—the prairie dog, whose bark the men could imitate to perfection, the beaver along the river, whose meat was good to eat, whose fur was needed in dance costumes. All the animals they hunted had many uses—food, hides and fur for clothes, bone for instruments, sinew for stitching and for bowstrings, leather for drumheads, pouches, bags. They said in one of the towns to the north that the animals of the hunt lived together far off to the west in a great kiva, and when the people needed them, they were sent out to be hunted. They were clever, and every skill had to be shown by the people, and by their dogs. Before a good hunting dog went out with his master, he was given food containing powdered bumblebees which would buzz and sting inside him and give him power.
Some hunts took place far away and lasted several days, some just for a day, near-by.
The deer hunt was often sacred if the meat was to be used in a ceremony. The deer was hunted by many men, who scattered until they could surround him. They closed toward him. They forced him to a trap, made of a great snare of yucca fibres, sometimes over two hundred feet long. They took him alive, and smothered him to death, so that his blood would not be spilled and his meat contaminated and made useless in the rites for which they took him. If the deer was captured for food and other use, he was killed with a knife. So with other animal victims too. When they came back dead with the hunting parties, they were received in the pueblo with great respect. Many more animals would be needed for food, and if they heard from the spirits of those already taken and killed how gentle the people were, how respectful of the loved creatures whom they had killed out of need, then when the hunters went out again, the wild quarry would be kind and come to be captured and killed and given honor. So they laid the bodies of the deer, and the other animals, on fur rugs; and covered them with blankets, and hung precious ornaments on them of turquoise and shell. The animal dead lay for a little while in pathetic splendor before being put to many uses.
Deer hunts were held in fall
