Down through the broad fields they rode, noting here the dam that spread a somewhat broken wing to scoop the creek to the level of the fields, there an irrigation ditch that needed mending, until they reached the family fields. These were Sinyella’s and had been Sinyella’s father’s and grandfather’s, and one day would go to Lanso.
Turning out the horses to graze at the foot of the rocky slope, they climbed to the storage houses set high above the reach of devastating floods, plastered like swallows’ nests in a crevice at the base of the cliff. The seed corn secured, Sinyella knelt in the field and scratched a hole with his pointed digging-stick. Then he prayed, “Grow good, corn; when your stalk grows, grow tall; grow like the ancient corn up there,” and dropping some kernels in the hole, he chewed another and blew it toward the “corn,” two white rocks high on the canyon wall. Then two short steps forward and he knelt to dig again. Lanso watched, and then followed; first a few kernels, a deft sweep to fill the hole, and then the next hill. Row after row they planted together under the white morning sun that rose to flood the canyon with its light and heat....
Back in the deep shade of the huge cotton-wood he saw his grandfather playing with his little brother—a toddling fellow not yet worthy of a name. Now he was searching for his mislaid arrows for he heard a twittering from a nearby bush. “Yes,” Sinyella teased the baby, “that bird is calling to you, ‘You are not a boy; you have no arrow to kill me; you are a girl.’” Grandfather knew everything: he made fine bows and arrows, and he told long stories in the winter evenings. “Next winter,” Lanso thought, “I will track rabbits in the snow when it lies in the cedar glades where our other home is; now I must hunt down here....”
The bushes spawned boys, Lanso among them. There were birds to be shot, dogs to be worried, deadfalls to be looked to, horses to be watered, sprawled over, and raced. They all ran down the canyon to Coyote’s, where there was that curious Navaho visitor to watch. Mornings are short when there are cliffs to scale, tanning to watch, flat cactus to roll for arrow-marks, food to beg from some friend—and relatives lived everywhere; Wooden-leg to listen to as he told of his trip to the Walapai people to fetch a bride, mock ambushes in the willows, and the creek, with its cooling embrace as it closes overhead....