Lanso leaves his creekside home, worms his way among the slender cotton-woods, and emerging on the race course, drops into a dogged trot through the deep sand. The race course—but that is a place for a mad, scrambling dash; perched with brothers, and sisters too, on the bare back of father’s horse. What need to run afoot: foot races come at dance time, and that will have to wait until the harvest is in. Dance time—Lanso hums the songs. “Yes, I know them all; next time I, too, will dance....”
It is lighter when Lanso turns back: all the Havasupai are astir. Acrid smoke begins to drift over the willow thickets; ethereal strata that rest in the still air against the towering rock walls; walls that stretch to the winter home high on the plateau above. There in the clearing is his home; the willow-thatched dome for rainy days, the branch-covered, dirt-roofed, box-like shade for refuge from the midday sun, and Hat’s sand-drifted hut merging in the swell of the creek bank.
Lanso scents breakfast in the bubbling clay pot, the inexhaustible pot that stands day-long with open-mouthed hospitality extended to all comers. But even a cold-whetted appetite will not tempt him to a sidelong foray on the mess; no, there was bravery needed for the sharp reproach and unbearable ridicule meted out to unmannerly pilferers. Better to wait until Round-one, Hat’s wife, should call the family, Lanso, her nephew, not last among them, to the stew of ground corn and big-horn meat, little loaves of corn meal tied in the husks and baked in the embers, sweet mescal juice, and salt from the cave far down the canyon. Then he would creep up to the elders grouped on the ground around the pots and baskets, and from the side of Fox, his favorite uncle, beg for tasty bits fished out with sharpened twigs, and to take his turn at the brimming, horn ladles.
“Now,” said old Sinyella, “the brush is burned and our fields are cleared: to-day we will plant.” So, off the whole family trooped; men and children on horses, the women, their babies strapped to the cradle board in their arms, trudging along beside them. Lanso, clutching hard at his grandfather’s back, rocked to the easy canter of their horse. Here was business afoot he understood: next to the victims that fell before his arrows—very small creatures, indeed—this would be his chief contribution to the family larder. Yesterday he had watched them playing shinney, gambling for the future crops, and he had guessed they would begin to-day.