The children turned to look once more at the narrow rift of Ty-uonyi as
it opened from the canon of the Rio Grande between two basalt columns to
allow the sparkling Rito to pass where barely two men could walk
abreast. Back from the stream the pale amber cliffs swept in smooth laps
and folds like ribbons. Crowded against its sheer northern face the
irregularly terraced heaps of the communal houses looked little as ant
heaps at the foot of a garden wall. Tiers and tiers of the T-shaped
openings of the cave dwellings spotted the smooth cliff, but along the
single two-mile street, except for an occasional obscure doorway, ran
the blank, mud-plastered wall of the kivas.

Where the floor of the canon widened, the water of the Rito was led out
in tiny dikes and ditches to water the garden patches. A bowshot on the
opposite side rose the high south wall, wind and rain washed into tents
and pinnacles, spotted with pale scrub and blood-red flowers of nopal.
Trails spidered up its broken steep, and were lost in the cloud-drift or
dipped out of sight over the edge of the timbered mesa.

"We would go over the trail to hunt," said Moke-icha. "There were no
buffaloes, but blacktail and mule deer that fattened on the bunch grass,
and bands of pronghorn flashing their white rumps. Quail ran in droves
and rose among the mesas like young thunder.

"That was my cave," said the Puma, nodding toward a hole high up like a
speck on the five-hundred-foot cliff, close up under the great
ceremonial Cave which was painted with the sign of the Morning and the
Evening Star, and the round, bright House of the Sun Father. "But at
first I slept in the kiva with Tse-tse-yote. Speaking of devils--there
was no one who had the making of a livelier devil in him than my young