The Beginning of Sorrows

by Gilbert, Morris

  The U.S. Man and Biosphere Executive Council decided to leave the Indian reservations intact for a period of another ten years, without redistributing the inhabitants, as they began doing with the population at large, particularly in the western half of the U.S. The MAB Project executives saw an opportunity to make the best of the “misuse” of the lands that the Indians owned: they designated most of the Indian reservations’ casinos and hotels as Diversionary Facilities, and most of the working population in the West rarely got to go to any other part of the country. That way, the populace at large were receiving their two-week designated vacation under the Worker’s Perquisites Act—and the Indians were getting enormous amounts of tourism in their casinos.

  These factors were fated to be tragic for the Native Americans. The interbreeding of relatively small tribal populations resulted in a weakening of the genetic strains, much as happened in European royal families. And once again, Caucasians, coming in huge droves to their lands, carried a disease to them that Indians could not overcome.

  The first wave of the plague struck without warning in the Nez Perce reservation in the panhandle of Idaho, in the summer of 2028. An Indian child was stricken with a mysterious liver ailment and died within a week. His mother and father, and then his sister, contracted the same disease and died within a month. That spring the plague swept the Nez Perce reservation, with a mortality rate of 68 percent; as always, children and the very old were more likely to die than the young and strong.

  On the Nez Perce reservation, the illness (which later came to be called by the medical community hepatitis-X, or hep-X) peaked in April, then diminished. But before the end of May, hep-X had made an appearance at three other reservations. The national health authorities, who had assumed that the liver disease was localized within the Nez Perce tribe, now frantically tried to find a genetic shift, such as a common-denominator trauma to Indians for some difference in their melanin (which is the pigment that produces the particular color of each race’s skin). They did thousands of tests on Indian blood (such sweeping and meticulous analysis of this race had never been done before), hoping to find a racial defect similar to blacks’ susceptibility to sickle-cell anemia.

  But they were looking at the wrong end of things. The explanation was much simpler. Caucasians had developed a peculiar antibody resulting from generations of vaccination for hepatitis. Indians, secure in their isolated culture, scorned the vaccination program that was mandatory for all other Americans. This antibody, slowly and unnoticeably, mutated very slightly. The antigen shift was unnoticeable in Caucasians, and the only physiological result to them was a slight change in the bacterial composition of excretions. However, it proved highly contagious and infectious to Indians when exposed to saliva or sweat or even the oxygen molecules expelled in breathing. Most of the initial cases literally caught it from breathing the same air as white people. Then they caught it from one another.

  Because of the heavy tourist traffic at all of the Indian reservations, the plague swept through the Native American populations quickly, causing initial high mortality; later, because of the decline in infectious population, the mortality rate slowed down but the disease itself thrived. Finally in 2032 a successful vaccine was discovered, but by that time America no longer had enough “indigenous peoples” to rate a population percentage in the census. Though the fittest survived, almost the entire population of children and infants died, and because of simple mathematics the Indians never regained their numbers.

  The MAB Executive Council, expressing great sorrow at the tragedy, offered to integrate all Indians into the co-op cities, in the finest homes, and stipulated that in deference to their terrible loss, no pure-blooded Native American would ever have to work again. America would support them, give them homes, food, luxuries.

  That killed most of the rest of them off.

  Some of the Indians of the northern forests and high, cold deserts managed to settle into American mainstream life and lived, usually marrying and integrating with whites. Many of the Indians of the hot deserts (the Hopi, the Navajo, the Apache) could never seem to adjust to the cold glass and steel of the co-op cities, and many of them died out. But some of them wandered the deserts, living a nomadic existence; generally even the commissars left them alone. There were so few of them, and they were a lost and forlorn people.

  Most Indians, because of the high rate of death among the elderly, lost all sense of heritage in the plague. Some of them weren’t even certain of their tribal designation any longer, for since the numbers were so small, the tribes who stubbornly stayed on their native lands huddled together and intermixed. They were still a race, but they had no history.

  But heroic figures at times spring from unlikely roots. A crude, homely rail-splitter can become the greatest of presidents, born or fated to be the hinge on which history ponderously swings. A simple village maiden can hear the voice of God and become a warrior followed by generals and kings. True enough, at times these roots out of barren ground who transform history can be dangerous. A paperhanger named Hitler can almost destroy the world and a French corporal named Napoleon can fill the earth with graves.

  During the darkest hour of Native Americans, whispers of a full-blooded Apache named Cody Bent Knife began to be heard. He had no honor among his own people, for he was not a descendant of famous chiefs. Born in 2031 in Las Vegas, his father was a blackjack dealer and his mother a cocktail hostess. According to reports, both were shallow and greedy, drinking and abusing the now-legal recreational drugs and trading “partners” with monotonous regularity.

  They named their son Cody Tabor, but when he was still in his teens the boy appropriated his own Indian name—Cody Bent Knife. He was what Herman Melville called an “isolato,” one who isolates himself from others. By the time the boy passed out of adolescence, he had come to believe that he was one of the last true Apaches, one of the last warriors, and as the weapons of his people had disappeared, so he was flawed and mocked—hence the name Bent Knife.

  When Cody was sixteen, he abruptly left home to go on a vision quest as the ancients had done. Wandering the desert, he fasted almost to the point of starvation, drank very little water, and stared into the heat-shimmers and dreamed. Cody Bent Knife, the lost and last Apache, finally had a startling vision. He saw an empty land, with no people, no children, no life at all, except animals and cactus. A magnificent jaguar, the fiercest predator of all, dominated Cody’s vision. He saw that this killer cat, though it once had almost been driven to extinction, had multiplied and grown numerous, with no predators and an unlimited food supply. But in Cody’s dream ugly green worms grew plentiful, and grew stronger, and began to kill the jaguar’s meat: the prairie dogs, the gophers, and finally even the elk and antelope. So the jaguar, brought down by the meanest of creatures, died, and the land was overrun by green worms and noxious rats and beetles and spiders.

  Cody Bent Knife made that vision the center of his life. As he explained it to his followers, “The jaguar, he is the Indian, and the worms are white people. We cannot win a war against the whites. Just as the jaguar couldn’t kill and eat poison, so we can’t hope to erase the white men from the earth. It is a warning; we must find another way to survive.”

  After more meditation, Cody Bent Knife began to see his destiny, and that of his lost people. His message, and his deliverance, was simple: “The whites have grown to fear the spirits of the earth. They have run from them, hidden from them, tried to separate themselves from them. They will eventually die, for no man can live apart from his land and the love of it. But we, the true people of this land, will live and love the earth again. We will flourish and one day, as in the old times, we will rule the plains and mountains and deserts.”

  The gathering of Cody Bent Knife’s followers was as simple and as complex as the source of a wind. Although Cody Bent Knife made no appeals, one by one or in small groups, they came to the Four Corners, so called because it was the only spot in America where the borders of fou
r states meet. This conjunction is marked by a circular plaque, and if one got down on all fours, he could be in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona at the same time.

  Most of those who filtered into the desert to join Cody Bent Knife were refugees from a world they had not made and which they despised. Nor did any of them understand what force it was that drew them to Four Corners. The first lesson that Cody greeted newcomers with was this: “The white people, they have tried to put this vast and unknowable desert into squares, and they name it Four Corners, as if it were a little room. But I say to you that it is a circle, an ancient and mystic circle, as our ancestors, the Anasazi, lived and breathed and flourished here. Here we will learn to live, and watch the whites die.”

  It would seem that Cody Bent Knife had borrowed his symbolism from one of the old ones, Black Elk, an eloquent martyr. But Black Elk’s words had been lost and forgotten for generations, and Cody Bent Knife only spoke from his heart, as had the warrior of old:

  The white man made us to live in little square houses, which is bad, for there is no power in a square. All of our lives once were formed by a circle, because the Great Spirit never works in squares, but always in circles. Everything in nature is round, for it is the way of life. The sun is round and the moon and the stars. The seasons move in a circle, as does the life of every man. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood. In the days of our fathers, all our power came from the sacred hoop of the nation. As long as the hoop was unbroken, we flourished. All of life was good as long as we observed the sacred hoop. We lived in round tepees and always in our camps we set them in a circle. In those days we were strong, but now we have been forced to live in square boxes. The Great Circle has been broken, our power is gone . . .

  EIGHT

  THE SMALL BROOK BEGAN WITH a mere trickle from a hidden spring higher in the sandstone hills. It wound in a serpentine fashion, leisurely feeling its way to lower levels, gently wearing down the soft, sandy rock. In a country blistered by the sun and baked by torrid summers, the stream created a green passageway sought out by animals both day and night. It was a winding oasis that clashed with the heat-baked desert and one that Zoan had learned to love. Often he found himself at a small pool that had been formed where the brook banked against a rising crest of ready stone that doubled back and changed directions. In this rock elbow was the hidden pool. When he put his hand into it, the water leaped over his knuckles with a delicious coolness.

  The sun was dropping down into the west, sending dusky crimson slants of light down into the narrow gorge. The pool itself was still, so clear that Zoan, as he knelt and peered down, could see the silvery minnows as they moved in unison like a tiny flotilla. He was fascinated at how they could remain motionless—then suddenly, as if at the alarm of some sort of unseen trumpet, could all wheel instantly and shoot away in perfect order. It was as if a single brain were connected to every one of the argentine bodies and Zoan never ceased to marvel and delight in this spectacle. What Zoan didn’t realize was that all of it—the pool, the stream, and especially the fact that fish had somehow been transplanted into it—was a mighty miracle in the midst of a barren land. To Zoan the minnows’ organizational cleverness was phenomenal enough for childlike wonder.

  Though he glanced at the minnows, his attention was riveted on the shadowy form of a large fish that lurked underneath a shelving bank, a darkly shadowed crevice worn by the patient passage of the water. Only the sharpest eye could have seen the trout, and Zoan, who had remained in the same position for over forty-five minutes, did not so much as flicker an eyelash.

  He had learned that stillness was the essential quality for this sort of fishing. Now he knelt, his body immobile as a statue. Zoan moved no more than did the impastoed rocks that formed a semicircle around the elbow of the creek. A thought flitted through his intense concentration on the fish: I wonder if men fished here long ago when there was life in this place?

  Zoan often mused about the past, for since he had come to Chaco Canyon he had been alone, and in his stream-of-time-and-consciousness way of thinking, the shadows of the past were much the same as the reality of the day. To him, ghosts had the same reality as the living, for neither was with him, yet all had left an imprint. For now, Zoan mentally shifted to pay strict attention to the fish. At the same time, however, his heightened instincts made him totally aware of everything that went on about him. The four vultures that circled above him were mere dots in the inverted bowl of the sky, yet he knew they were there. Deep down, he even had reflected that the great birds were actually the dramatic California condors, not the half-crow, half-buzzard types of common vultures that were so plentiful in the deserts. If Zoan had so chosen, he could have placed himself, made himself into a condor, in the inexplicable way he had of becoming like an animal. He could have soared lightly on the hot wind, staring down at the seared land below, hungrily assessing the still figure of the human beside the stream.

  Zoan also, in this deep sublevel of knowledge, was aware that by his left knee a group of red ants was struggling to convey the carcass of a dead grasshopper. There were only four ants; one had evidently been to the wars for he lacked one feeler and one of his legs was sheared off at the joint. Moving the dead grasshopper was a monumental task for these tiny creatures, but for the past half hour they had succeeded in dragging the grasshopper along over a slight rise. They labored without rest and evidently without weariness. Zoan wondered what it would be like to be trapped in the tiny body of an insect.

  The sounds of expulsion of breath from a deep hot-blooded chest barely touched his ears. Zoan was intensely conscious of the jaguar that he called simply “Cat.” Without looking up, Zoan knew that the half-hooded green eyes of the beast were fixed on him. Zoan loved Cat. The jaguar had become his constant companion since he had been so completely cut off from humans. He knew that if he looked up he would find the attention of the magnificent animal focused on him in the remotely interested, slightly aloof manner that felines have of communicating affection.

  The silvery shadow underneath the moss green ledge suddenly moved, quicker than thought. Like an arrow the streamlined form of the fish shot out, mouth open, to snap up one of the minnows. At the same moment Zoan’s hand moved. Scarcely ruffling the water, his arm shot under and he felt the scales of the fish as his fingers closed like talons. With a swift motion he threw the fish back so that it landed on the sandy soil.

  Zoan was pleased, as always, that he had achieved a goal, no matter how small. He looked over and smiled. “Supper, Cat.” Picking up a stone he struck one quick blow, and the silvery fish lay still. Zoan had once tried spearfishing with a sharp stick, but somehow he felt it was cruel. Despite his mystical affinity to all animals, Zoan was not a soppy fool; some creatures were food, and that was their reason for being there. No need to grieve, but no need to be cruel, either. A single blow killed the fish quickly and mercifully, and so Zoan had honed the more difficult skill of fishing with his bare hands.

  Proudly Zoan held the big fish up high. The jaguar’s pupils, which were dilated to needle slits, opened fully, then she exhibited a feline grin, grimacing to expose the white, needle-sharp fangs. “Your favorite meal, Cat,” Zoan said with satisfaction. He moved over and pulled a burlap sack that was tied with a leather thong to one of the saplings that grew along the edge of the pool. Opening the mouth of his rucksack, he slipped the fish in with the others, then continued to follow the meandering brook. Cat padded along patiently behind him.

  The sun seemed to drop even as he watched and he picked up his pace a little. Leaving the ribbon of ravine cut by the little stream, he scrambled out onto the crust of one of the jagged hills that brooded over his home. Carefully he worked his way down the sandy, rocky decline, his silent and ominous companion steady at his heels. Soon they arrived on a small plateau that overlooked a generous expanse of golden sand. Zoan and Cat half slid, half jumped down onto the floor of the mesa and turned due east, walking along the base of the crag
gy line of hills.

  The mesa was covered with horses, a great herd of wild mustangs. Alertly, and as cleverly as the minnows, as one they lifted their heads as the man appeared. They did not bolt, however, as they had done when Zoan had first come to this place. First they had become accustomed to him, and now they were familiar with him.

  Zoan could have walked straight through the herd—if he had been alone. He often did mingle playfully with the wild herd. It gave him pleasure to move among the mustangs, to reach out and stroke them, to rub their noses and feel their coarse coats and untamed manes. Zoan had become so familiar to the horses that the small foals, ordinarily fearful of everything that moved, would watch him with curiosity. Once he and one of the yearlings had even played an odd game of tag. Or perhaps it was hide-and-seek. Zoan was not sure, for no one had ever actually played either of the games with him. Dr. Kesteven had just told him about them.

  But now the mustangs realized that the man was not alone. The lead stallion snorted angrily, then uttered a shrill neigh, a warning. Rearing, tossing his head, then wheeling, he led the stampede. The thunder of hooves shook the mesa as the herd swept away from where the man stood watching. Zoan turned to smile. “You scared them, Cat.” The jaguar yawned, bored with the spectacle. Gliding forward, she nuzzled the sack. One broad paw, with the terrible claws sheathed, batted it.

  “Hungry, are you? So am I.”

  Once again Zoan started, this time breaking into a trot. As he moved through the great flat expanse, a slight change, a mixture of feeling and knowing, came over him. He looked up to the darkening sky. It may rain.

  The thought pleased him, for it had rained only twice since he had been in the canyon. He missed the rain; he had always loved to stand out in it and let it run down over him. To Zoan, it was a uniquely cleansing experience, different from bathing. Slowing again to a walk, he looked around speculatively at the flatness of the terrain.