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WHIRLWINDS

by Elizabeth Ann Scaroborough

The old woman had carried Dezbah when she could no longer walk. The same one had told the frightened child stories of their people, of Monster Slayer, Born-for-Water, and Changing Woman, to make her heart strong. The same one had been the one to calm her when Dezbah was torn from the bodies of her murdered parents. This grandmother, this same one who had helped Dezbah on the twenty day forced march from Fort Defiance to Hweeldi, or Bosque Redondo as the soldiers called it, now ran naked and screaming toward the fort. The soldiers gathered outside their adobe houses to watch and mock and throw things.

Dezbah was frightened, for herself as well as the grandmother. The soldiers weren't shooting yet, instead they made bets and tried to hit the old lady with clods of horse dung. The dung of their horses.

All the tame horses of the Dine' were dead. Dezbah, who was more commonly called Horses Talk to Her, had heard them screaming, and the wild ones too—wondering why? The Dine' treated them like brothers, like the valuable beings they were. Why had they died, and the other animals? Men who would do that to the animals, to babies, to elders, who would shoot a woman going into labor because she slowed the progress of the march, that sort of man would do anything.

"Awww, for the luvva Jaysus, wouldja lookit yez!" It was a funny sounding voice that rang out so suddenly, from within the group of soldiers. Dezbah should not have been able to understand what it said, but she did. A man with hair as black as her father's and skin almost as dark, pushed his way through the other men and stood with both fists on his hips. A blanket dangled from one hand and he turned almost absently and threw it to Dezbah.

She caught a thought with it. The man's face was a mask of disgust but his thought, urgent as it was, was kind. "Wrap it round her, girl, and away with you both." Ah! She knew him now, though she did not think she had heard him speak aloud before he began scolding the soldiers. She had heard his thoughts before, but this was the first time she knew who the thinker was. Perhaps it was because she saw, as much as heard, what he thought, that she could understand him though he spoke none of her tongue and she had learned only some of the English the soldiers spoke during the Long Walk. He had been on the walk too. She had seen him before and taken no notice. When she heard his thoughts before, she realized she mistook them for those of a Navajo. Only the first time, she realized now, she would have known the thought for what it was, had she not been so sick from all of the other disasters striking like lightening into the canyon. Through all of the dying, his thought had fallen like a dead pine needle from among the soldiers lining the rim of the canyon like a dead lrsf. "My God, what are we doing to these people?"

Dezbah picked up the blanket from the ground while the soldier made big movements with his hands and walked back and forth between the soldiers and the grandmother and her. He was yelling at the other men and said he would tell the white leader that the soldiers didn't have anything to do, that they made sport over some naked old granny. Better send away for their wives quick, he said. Better send them to town soon, because they were pretty bad off to act that way. She knew, somehow, that he was being funny as he said it, making himself look sillier than the grandmother, so the men would listen to him and let Dezbah take the old woman away. Dezbah ran after the grandmother, who was stumbling now on feet that had become very bad during the walk. Dezbah caught her and folded the ranting old woman in the plain green wool blanket. With one hand she tried to tuck the grandmother's straggling, dirty gray and black hair up into the traditional bumblebee hairdo at the back of her head. She was afraid to look at the soldiers but heard the man still scolding them in a lewdly humorous way about their own mothers and grandmothers.

"Go!" his voice said in her head and she didn't need to be told again.

Keeping her arms around the grandmother to hold the blanket in place, Dezbah bundled the old woman as deeply among their people as she could. Most made their houses, which were nothing more than holes dug into the ground, covered with whatever they could find, in the Pecos River Basin, on the eastern side of the river. Since the soldiers controlled all food except for the scarce amount the people could hunt or grow themselves in this desolate place, the people needed to stay closer to the Fort than they would have liked. The soldier's compound squatted in the middle of the forty mile square of desert imprisoning the Navajos.

Bosque Redondo was far from their own lands and within that of the Comanche. The Comanche raided the unprotected Navajos, taking children and women since there were no horses to take, and those raids made living on the outskirts of Hweeldi even worse than living within constant sight of the soldiers, who forced the people to build adobe houses that were supposed to have been for themselves, but in reality were built so that only the soldiers could use them.

At first Dezbah had tried to stay farther away, but when the grandmother had begun acting in this way, the girl could not stay away from her long enough to make trips to the fort to collect their rations, take water from the river or gather droppings for a fire.

When she returned with the grandmother to the miserable pit house she had dug from the ground with her own hands, she sat down outside it with the old woman, who began picking up sand and flinging it hard at Dezbah berating her and calling her a killer.

People came out of their houses and looked at them.

"You should tie her up, maybe." The suggestion came from Blue Bead Woman, who had been relieved of the beads she was named for, along with her man and her two oldest sons, before she took the younger children to Fort Defiance. Three of them had perished on the great journey and Blue Bead Woman, once prettily plump, was now wasted so that you could see sunlight through the flesh between her arm bones.

Dezbah said nothing, just shook her head. She ducked another handful of sand.

"I wish I had tied up that boy I had," Blue Bead Woman said. Dezbah nodded. They all knew how, during the seige in Canyon de Chelly, her younger son had gone crazy from the thirst and heat and had suddenly run out of their hiding place in full view of the soldiers. They had cut him down, wounded him real bad, and when his father and brother tried to go out there and save him, the soldiers got them too.

They'd had lots of practice with their guns, killing the people's horses and sheep, their cows, even the dogs. And then they had chopped down and burned the beautiful peach orchard. It was that Kit Carson told them to do it, Dezbah had heard someone say. He used to be friends with the Dine' but the soldiers paid him a lot of money to betray the People. Because he knew all about them, he was able to cut the heart from them, their horses and trees. And their relatives.

Several other people were standing around watching and the children with enough energy left to play began making fun of the grandmother too. Dezbah threw sand at them.

"Don't be mad at them, little one," Hastin Yellow Horse told her. He was still young and handsome when they left the Fort but the soldiers shot his leg when he tried to protect his wife and baby and now he could only walk with help. He looked old enough to be married to the grandmother now. "This woman is not the one who helped you. A dark wind has blown through her and taken her away. It makes her do these dumb-ass things—the children are right to mock her. She is going to make more trouble for you and all of the rest of us if she keeps this up."

"She needs a sing," said a woman called Her Yarn Has Lumps. She was not from the canyon, but by now Dezbah knew almost everyone as if they were her own relatives. But no one knew the grandmother and it was not polite to ask names. Names gave you power over people. That's why she was never called Dezbah by anyone but her own family, who were now dead. No one would speak her name again, she realized suddenly, and tears began falling.

"Who will sing for her with our singer dead?" said Many Goats Woman, whose now had only one skinny goat. Her others had been killed and rotted in the sun while she watched from her hiding place during the seige.

"Barboncito could ask Manuelito if maybe a singer could get himself caught," Blue Bead Woman said. She knew that the chiefs were in contact with each other, something the People were able to keep from the soldiers. Barboncito had purposely allowed himself to be taken so he might help his people and he had helped a lot. During the long walk he got the soldiers to sometimes let the little ones and the elders ride in the wagons. He had a good way of talking to the white men, and found whatever heart they had in them and appealed to it to get help for the people. Maybe the man who thought in Navajo was like that too, Dezbah thought. Maybe he could think at her Old One and get her to act right again. Someone with the magic to make others hear his thoughts, even in a different language, who knew what such a one could do?

It didn't occur to her that she and many of the children she knew could understand perfectly well what the animals said and make themselves understood as well. She didn't like to think about the animals now, poor things.

She dressed the grandmother in the rags the old woman had worn on the trail, dirty and torn like everyone else's clothes. It was time to collect the rations then, and everyone had to walk to where the soldiers stood giving out the pound of beef, pound of cornmeal, pinch of salt that was supposed to last two days. The meat was maggoty, the cornmeal also afflicted with insects, but it was all that they had. They were to become farmers, the soldiers said, but the land was poor, there was no water except for the mud of the Pecos, and that was very scarce.

Dezbah's rations had run out two days ago and she was hungry but she didn't want to leave the grandmother when she was in such a state. Dezbah tried to tie their wrists together with her sash and get the old one to walk with her, but the grandmother slapped and scratched her and tried to bite her. Dezbah's stomach rumbled as she gazed sadly into those cloudy dark eyes, trying to find a trace of the wise and gentle woman who had saved her life and soothed her mind when none of her own relatives were alive to do it. Neither of them had anyone anymore, she guessed. It was one of the worst criticisms you could say of one of the Dine', "He acts as if he has no relatives." That was how the old woman was acting, as if there was no one who would be shamed by her behavior—but from its craziness, Dezbah feared the the old one would be dead soon. And somehow that was even more terrible than the way she was now, when maybe, there was a chance she might come back.

The others returned. They looked away from her, and hurried into their houses. Dezbah knew the people were ashamed that they could not bring her rations to her as well but the soldiers kept very tight control over them. When the grandmother was not calm enough to go for her own, the soldiers would not give Dezbah both portions, even if she had two ration chits.

Many Goats Woman, Blue Bead Woman and the rest made their meals but each of them had children of their own to feed and the old woman sometimes threw food away. One child brought her a bit of corncake with a bite mark at the edge. She broke it to give some to the grandmother but the old lady knocked it out of her hand into the dirt, and it crumbled so badly that she couldn't separate the crumbs. By the time everyone disappeared into their hole houses to sleep, the sky changed from coral and deep pink to turquoise and indigo. The old woman would not go inside and Dezbah could not leave her. There was nothing to make a fire with now and they shivered, but at least they had the soldier's blanket to wrap around them both.

Her stomach growled again and she tried to sleep with her head on her knees and her arms wrapped around them. The old one fell away from her, taking the blanket with her, and snored right there in the open on the ground. Dezbah covered the old one with the part of the blanket she wasn't laying on. Her own belly felt stuck to her backbone.

And then she heard footsteps—not like the ones the people made, but boots, cavalry boots, and a man's heavy tread. She was on her feet at once but the thought-voice of the man who had distracted the soldiers spoke to her. "Aha! Didn't see you in the ration line and I figured you'd be hungry. Brought a bit of something for you and your granny. Couldn't get rations without a chit so I saved this from the mess hall."

He handed her a bundle and she unwrapped two good sized pieces of mutton and 2 ears of roasted corn. He had a bag over his shoulder and from it he took two more items, which he gave to her-a can of peaches and even a knife to open the can with. "I'll need that back though," he said of the opener.

"I will have one peach and give one to the Grandmother," she said. "The rest we will save for the other people."

He shook his head and started to open his mouth then thought, "Better not. Word may get around and someone might think you stole them. When actually, I stole them. I'm riding picket at the northern perimeter for a spell, so I won't be here to catch."

"You aren't like the other soldiers," she said in Navajo. He seemed to hear it in his own tongue, as she did, catching the words from the thought.

"I'm entirely like them, except that I've been on the receivin' end of a great deal of the kind of trouble your folks are in and I didn't like the feel of it."

"Can you bring more?" she asked—thought.

"Not for awhile. I'll be up at the outpost. Can you keep your granny from getting you both killed until I get back?"

She sighed. "I am trying. They say that a dark wind has taken over her body now. It's very strong."

"Is that so? And what kind of wind would that be?"

She made a circle with her finger to show him the whirlwind, then pictured it in her mind.

He smiled, and she could see his teeth in the darkness. "Are you some kind of Indian yourself?" she asked.

"Me? No. Look it though, don't I? I'm from County Galway originally, in Ireland," and he showed her a picture in his mind of a small green country over a great water, an island country. "but me mam was widowed soon after I was born and remarried a man from Roscommon. When the Great Hunger came, I was seven years old and she and all my kin died."

"Just died? They didn't get shot?"

"No, but they were starved to death by the blackhearted devil of a landlord." And now she saw from him fields of blackened crops, people being put out of burning houses, much as her people had been.

"Lots of my people starved too," she said in her mind. "We're starving now, mostly."

"I know," he answered in the same way and though his face was lost in shadow she felt the clenching of his jaw and heard the bitterness in his tone. "I can see that. I've not enough rank to do much about it. At least your granny looked after you on the trail and though she's not much good to you now, you've each other."

"Yes," she said. "All of her people were killed too, she said. She's not from our canyon."

"Is she not? Just took you under her wing did she and now you're repaying the favor?"

"Yes," she said, but sharing his thoughts took her away from her own problems and she wanted him to go on. "How did you come here?"

"The landlord had little use for seven year old orphan lads. So he took all of us who couldn't work as hard as he wanted and put us on a rotting ship for America. Not many of us survived that. I was sick for a long time meself but I had to work anyway. As soon as I was old enough, I joined the army because they feed you really regular."

"But they shoot people who haven't done anything wrong!" she said.

"That's not what my recruiter said," he told her, smiling again as if he'd made a joke. "Too bad I couldn't read his mind like I can yours, the bleedin' whore's son of a—the bleedin' liar," he changed his thought because she was a girl, and young, though she didn't feel young anymore. She felt as old as the grandmother.

Poor grandmother. She had lost everything coming here, even herself.

"Maybe she didn't lose it," the soldier said. "Maybe it got taken from her. And I'd better tell you my name so you don't think of me that way . . . "

"Which way?"

"As a uniform with a gun in one sleeve and a torch in the other. I'm Pvt. Liam O'Malley at your service, young lady."

"I'm called Horses Talk to Her," she said. She would not tell a soldier, even this man, her real name. A real name would give him power over her and it was very possible he might be a witch since he could read her thoughts and she had never known any other human who could do that.

"Do they now? And do you talk to them too? As we talk?"

"I did," she said, curling her arms back around her knees. "But your people shot them all."

"Well, I'm very sorry about that, Horses Talk to Her. I'd have done it differently myself if the government put me in charge. If it makes you feel any better, when that was going on my shots went into the ground. No Irishman worth his salt would harm a horse. Too bad this company has a lot of that kind of Irishman. But never mind. You speaking of the wind reminded me of something I was told by me stepda's mam one time. She was a great one for stories, was Mrs. Donnolly. She was what we call a fairy doctor, was she. You'll be wondering what that is. I heard you thinking about witches just now, excuse me for intruding, but I couldn't help overhearing. We have witches in Ireland too but that's nothing compared to what the fairies do to folk sometimes."

"What are fairies?"

His mind produced many strange pictures and she couldn't see what he meant. Then he said, "Well, it's said that one time they lived above the ground until the fought the next race of people to come along and had to go live in the underworld. But they don't much like it, see, so they're always playing tricks on mortal folks."

"Like the Dine'," she said. "Here, living in our holes in the ground."

"No—well, that is, yes, a bit. Except folk in Ireland know better nowadays than to treat the fairies poorly—bad things happen to them as do. And sometimes, people will just be minding their own business and things happen." He showed her a picture of a baby sleeping peacefully in its cradle being stolen away by one of the people he called fairies, and another, crying angry sick baby put in its place."

"Don't the parents know?"

"Well, the fairies change it so it looks like their baby and they only know by its squallin' that it's not normal-like. The new thing put in place of the baby is called a changeling."

The word didn't translate well and he kept showing her pictures. Finally she thought she understood. "Oh, they're shapeshifters. Like witches."

"A bit, yes."

"Do the parents ever get their real babies back?"

"Yes, but you won't like that bit. They have to hold the changeling over a fire until the fairies fear for its life. Then they come and get it and give back the real baby."

She nodded, "Barboncito says that when the white men wanted to trade captives, we gave back ours but they wouldn't give back our people. Maybe we should have held theirs over a fire . . . "

"Now there's an idea you don't want the captain hearing you speak of, young lady. The thing is, a fairy doctor now, like Mrs. Donnolly, they'll know different ways of doing things. And there's different sorts of changelings too. Sometimes the fairies will steal an old person."

"I guess they need their wisdom, huh?"

"It's true. Fairies have been called a great many things but I don't believe wise is one of them. The point is, Horses Talk to Her, that when they take the old people, they also leave changelings—querulous, battlesome, trouble-making things, and an embarrassment to the person they're supposed to be."

Dezbah was afraid. "Do they have to be put over a fire too?"

"No—no, they don't. There's another cure for that and what made me think of it was you and your dark wind. Because we sort of think the opposite, you see. If you want to get an old person back from the fairies, you must go to a crossroad and stand there until a whirlwind comes by, catch the dust in your hand and cast it on them, whereupon the changeling is taken away and the real person returns."

"Really?" She got a very clear picture of this from him and wondered if he had tried it before—but she saw then from the picture that he had not. This was just the picture he got from what his Irish old one told him. "But what if you get the wrong kind of whirlwind?"

He shrugged, "Your guess is as good as mine. But herself there could hardly be worse now, could she?"

Dezbah cast a brief glance at the old one who had been her friend and shuddered, lowering her head miserably so that her cheek rested on her knees. The man sighed. He wasn't completely serious, Dezbah knew, just telling her a story to comfort her and because he was lonely. But there was no comfort in anything now. She heard his boots crunch the sand, the old one moan in the dark, and in the stillness of the night, the halt of footsteps, the man's voice speaking to the horse, and the hoofbeats gradually fading to the north.

The hooting of a hunting owl awakened her, and she blinked in a darkness without stars. Her hand found the roughness of the sticks that made her shelter, the rags and mud that covered the sticks. She was alone. She sat up, crawled out. There were the stars, the sand, the scrub, the blanket, but there was no old one.

Dezbah crawled completely out, stood and looked around. She saw the trail of rags leading across the sand, the footprints, all heading moonward, to the west now, and far off, she could see the movement of moonlight on skin that had not seen the sun and hair touched with silver.

She hurried after, scooping up blanket and rags as she ran, her young legs not as strong as they had been, because of exhaustion and poor food, but better than the old one's.

As she ran she realized she was sending her thoughts out, hoping the soldier might hear, "she's doing it again!" but no voice answered at all. He was too far away to hear her, she thought, and she could not hear him.

So she kept running after the old one herself.

Though the soldiers had little outposts scattered around the perimeter and sent pickets out to patrol for fifteen to twenty miles around them each night, they let the Comanches do a lot of their patrolling for them. Fear of those people kept the Dine' inside, close to the fort and the food. But not all of them. Some escaped across the desert. The messengers from Manuelito had reported that two of the ones who escaped made it, both strong boys who joined Manuelito's people in the hills.

The old one would never make it in the desert. She didn't remember what she knew about how to stay alive, Dezbah knew this. She knew that the grandmother's mind was confused, though she could not read it as if it were a horse's, or the soldier's.

She walked all night, it seemed. Sometimes she saw the old one just a little ahead of her. Other times she was afraid she lost her altogether. In the morning, as the sun rose and cast long shadows across the ground, Dezbah stumbled and found it was the old one over whom she had stumbled. She was lying there, face down in the dirt, her hair all straggly and with no clothes on. Dezbah covered her from the sun and did up her hair. She should have brought water, she knew. She found some brush and made a shelter for them with the blanket. Found a saguaro and used another stick to drill a hole in it, get at the juice from the inside. They drank this, she forcing some through the old one's lips.

So they were free of the fort but they were also free to starve, die of hunger, burn under the hot sun if she didn't take care of them. She couldn't hunt for food and leave the old one to wander off. There were not even the berries, grass seeds, yucca fruit, and pinon nuts they used for food at Hweeldi.

She slept till twilight, her arm tethered to the old woman's by a strip of rag from her skirt. She felt the rag twitch and awakened, in time to see the old one running off again. At least this time she was not removing her clothes. Dezbah grabbed the blanket and followed once more, further from the fort, toward the setting sun. She found the grandmother just as the darkness came. The old woman had found the river once more, and was sitting on its western bank. This was the river the soldiers called the Pecos, the same one where, further south, she and the other captives lived beside. Here as further downstream it was during this time of year little more than a collection of muddy pools. The old one yelled nothing, said nothing, didn't move. She was exhausted, despite her long rest.

Dezbah led her down into the river bed and the old one drank. But when Dezbah would have turned her back in the direction of the fort, she took off down the riverbed, heading north, toward the mountains.

Dezbah was heading after her when she felt a sudden pain in her head, as if someone was shouting at her.

She didn't try to answer. The soldier was a soldier and though he had seemed friendly and could thought-talk with her, he had not helped when she needed him.

She caught up with the old one easily this time and following the riverbed, they walked all night.

At dawn, in the distance, far across the desert, too far for hoofbeats to be heard or a voice to carry, low gray shadows traveled eastward in a line that lengthened as the sky grew brighter. A rider then. Not a soldier. The rutted track the army traveled ran along the river for much of the way between the last two towns to the north. Dezbah could just make out some of the smoke from the cookfires of Puerto de Luna, the village called Door of the Moon, a bit to the northeast of them.

The dust cloud was coming toward it, directly from the east. One of Manuelito's men, coming to his people with encouragement news of their relatives in hiding.

Dezbah was not cheered by the dust cloud. It was so far away, it might never have been for all the help she would have because of it.

They trudged onward through the heat, and watched the heat lightening in the sky. It brought no rain but occasional hot gusts that stirred the dust and agitated it into the little whirlwinds the soldier had called "dust devils."

At a crossroads, he had said. If you caught the dust of a whirlwind at a crossroads, and threw it on an old one who was witched like the grandmother, the spell would be broken.

Where the Navajos' secret trail came to the soldiers' road, would there be such a crossroad?

It would be dangerous to go to such a place, so near the village, with the soldiers watching for escaped prisoners. But she was not trying to escape. She did not think she could return to her own country so easily. She only wanted the grandmother to regain her own spirit. If the soldiers came, she would tell them she had become lost while following the grandmother. That was true.

One more day they slept and one more night they traveled until they were so close to the town that she could see it. She would never see the hoofprints of Manuelito's rider, she knew, for the ground in most places was too dry. But as the sun was rising once more, she saw something in the riverbed and, looking over her shoulder, could see the smoke curling from the chimneys of the town. The old one was tired and she made her a shelter once more. Then, instead of sleeping, she made her way to the edge of town where the soldier road would have crossed that of the rider. There was little cover there, but she was small and it was very early yet.

As if it knew what she wanted, the wind twisted itself into many cylinders. But one spiraled off to the right, one to the left. One came straight for her but she saw that the rotation went against the movement of the sun and she jumped aside at the last moment.

A dark wind could not hurt the old one, but it could still steal her own spirit.

Time passed and more time. The morning drew on. Three more of the dark twisting winds came whirling in their unnatural way toward her, taunting her by blowing up the dust and sand from the crossroad so that she had to run to keep it from blowing into her face and infecting her with its evil.

They came so quickly, one after another, that she felt evil spirits had been sent to take her. She had not eaten since the night the soldier brought her a meal, except for the few small edible things she could gather while the grandmother slept or was calm. She was shaking with hunger and her vision blurred by the hot shimmer of the Illusion People dancing before her eyes.

Their dance was very subtle, their feet lost in mist, their heads bobbing only a little as their bodies shimmied with the heat. Sweat poured into her own eyes and down her neck and arms. It blurred the sight of the next whirlwind until it came rolling out from behind the dancing Illusion People, and spun so rapidly it was almost upon her. She jumped up to run. But then she saw it was different from the others. This one twisted sunward. But now it was passing her, passing the crossroads.

She dove for it, her hands outstretched, and clutched them into fists. Her fists filled with hot dust and dirt, gritty and too agitated, for a moment, to lie still within her fingers. And then the wind was gone.

Now she had what she needed and she walked quickly back to where she had left the old one. If this Irish magic worked, perhaps they would intercept Manuelito's rider as he returned. Maybe he would even take them home. Dezbah's heart lifted at the thought.

"But I'd be that sorry to lose you," another thought answered. Oh no! Not now, when she was so close. Her thoughts would betray not only themselves but, if she was not careful, the messenger who had been sent to report back to the Navajo leaders.

So she thought instead of the story he had told her, and of the journey she and the old one had just made. "We're very hungry—she's almost worn out, I think," she thought to him. "But I have the dust! The magic dust, just like you said."

And then she saw from his thought that it had only been a story and he didn't believe it himself, and that he was sorry to have encouraged her to have gone to such trouble for its sake.

"No matter," she thought. "I will not let go of this dust until I can throw it onto the old one, so that her spirit may have that chance of returning."

"You're a fine lass and a credit to your people," the thought came back.

But here was the place where the old one should be resting and she was not there. Dezbah wept dust, having no water with which to make tears.

And then she heard the hoofbeats again and saw the tall man in blue and felt strong hands lift her onto the horse. And she could not form the thought to wonder whether to be thankful or worried, but let him follow the trail of clothing and the bare footprints of tired old feet.

They found her lying face down, an hour or so from the river. At first it seemed she wasn't breathing, and Dezbah was afraid to approach her, lest she be dead. All ghosts were evil and dangerous, but the one that had taken this grandmother before she was dead would be an esepecially bad ghost, Dezbah thought. The soldier put his hand to her neck and said, "She's alive."

Dezbah, still clutching the dust, jumped down from the horse. The soldier, sensing her intention, stood aside and she flung the dust over the old one, adding the precaution of doing it to the four directions, clockwise, east, south, west and north.

The old one's wrinkled back heaved and she coughed out dirt. And saw the soldier and screamed.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," he said, closing his eyes and turning his back.

Dezbah began helping her cover herself with the rags.

"Are we home yet?" the old one asked. "I dreamed we were going home. I was just about to see the peak of the first sacred mountain when that biilaganah woke me up."

"You've been sick, grandmother. But you're better now."

"Now that the Navajo fairies have returned her," the soldier's thought intruded.

But it was overlaid with another thought. This was not a human one. It was the familiar and beloved thinking of a Navajo pony.

The soldier caught the thought entering her mind and looked down at her with one raised eyebrow. "So. That's yer man from Manuelito and his people, is it? The general knew someone was coming in, but they've never caught him."

"Please," she said. "Go away. Just a little way. Don't try to catch him. Don't let him see you. I must speak with him."

"Would be a feather in my cap to take him," he said with a sigh. "But I think I feel a call of nature anyway."

A short time later the messenger arrived. He was traveling fast and light but he could see the old one was all but dead. He took pity on them and held the old one before him while Dezbah rode behind.

It was a long journey, and food was still not plentiful, and the old one faded more and more, though she was always within her own senses. Suddenly she cried out, "There it is! The sacred mountain! Oh spirit of the mountain, I am home!"

She was so excited she fell off the horse. She was never able to climb back on and soon after died, wholly herself and very satisfied. Dezbah and the messenger buried her quickly and the messenger offered to take Dezbah with him back home. But she shook her head.

In a few more days, with the little food she could find on the way, she was near once more to the place where she had captured the whirlwind. A blue clad figure sat tall on a horse. He sat even taller as she approached, and she heard his thinking and knew that he was very glad she had come, and felt some burden that was his lift from his mind like a rock to reveal the happiness below it. He gave her a hand up onto the horse's back.

"I wasn't sure you'd be returning," he said.

"I did," she said. "The grandmother died, but she had her spirit back and she saw the sacred mountain and knew she was home. Your magic was a good one. But this is not your Ireland. Magic works different here. You can't go catching just any whirlwind without danger. I will help you use what you know the right way, to help The People."

"My thought exactly," he said, and she realized that it was.

In the years that followed, the two of them worked with her people, helping them learn that which would benefit them in dealing with the Americans and the New Mexicans. Dezbah herself learned to weave and work silver, and to wear dresses like the few white women at the fort. She helped others learn these skills as well. The soldier showed the men some skills too, and they worked in a way that was pleasing to the soldiers, who thought the Navajo men were doing it for them, when really they were doing it to learn how to improve their crops when they returned home.

And when the time came when the general and the Navajo leaders made a talk about sending the people home, the soldier watched from his duty station and Dezbah watched from among the crowd and both gave a little "push" of their thoughts at the general, who finally agreed to let the people go home.

This time too, the soldier accompanied the Navajos on the long walk. But it was not as a captor but as Dezbah's husband, known to the People as Catches Whirlwinds, though Dezbah had done the true catching, that Liam O'Malley, formerly of the U.S. Cavalry, went with them. He and Dezbah were married and began a trading post specializing in fine horses and with it, they helped her People start another long journey—that of rebuilding their lives, their homes, health and prosperity.

 

AFTERWORD: This is not a true folktale, but a made-up story about made up people set against the true background of the Navajo's Long Walk and captivity at Bosque Redondo. The stories about whirlwinds, both the Navajo belief and the Irish, are found in books of such magical beliefs. I hesitate to call them superstitions, as I have never personally attempted to intercept a whirlwind, so how would I know?

 

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