Mesa Trail ch. 38
Draft 2

"To climb these coming crests one word to you, to
you and your children:
stay together
learn the flowers
go light"
– Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island








What do you do when you witness an ancient sundance exactly?

Well, Bunkledon sure found out a few things at the very moment he reached the crest of the spiny ridge up there on the summit of Flagstaff.  Bunkledon saw the crease to the cave. The sun had just started to trace its rays along the surfaces of the jagged rocks.  What Bunkledon saw was something that not even his own mind had fathomed before.  And, as we remember, he had worked inside the chambers of the coins before. He had his hands on the stuff, all day long some times, and liked to feel it and count it and think about better places for it.

Bunkledon saw the girl, Inuna, and the boy, Josh up there inside the cave and the ancient hand print on the side, illuminated right now, with that flash of sun that had made its way through the sliver of the opening.  When he had looked back out, he felt something of a sinking feeling at first, those bears, four of them now, moving in unison, each up on two feet. Because the bears did not give them a single second look, the three of them moved out the entrance and stood still as though, yes, watching a movie, but a movie that was so much more than a screen, so much more than actors or fake setting.  Bunkledon didn't hardly want to ask if the other two were seeing the same thing.  Josh whispered "what are they doing?" Josh and Inuna had dried by now but Bunkledon was soaked. The core of his shiver was still there.  Inuna handed him a wrap that she carried with her everywhere she went up here in the mountains for just such a reason. "Nobody in the modern world has ever seen it," she said, crouching closer. "Only the ancients.  The sun dance is a celebration of a successful offspring. It is the celebration of the offspring on sun mountain." Bunkledon had forgotten about the mother lode that surrounded him.  The colors of the aqua sky and the deep green of the ponderosa and the jagged glistening gray of the rock around him all awash was mesmerizing.

He asked himself what do I want, and nothing came to him, nothing at all for the first time that he could ever remember in his life, except for that moment, long ago, in the forest, with his aunt and uncle, before he was startled by the presence of the great deer with enormous horns and eyes that looked right through him as if it were he, himself, invisible, part of the forest.  That scared him then, to be part of it, not separate, and he ran never to return.  It was something much more he knew.  The bears chose here, chose them, at the entrance of the great sun cave as hope.  He wondered if the bears were real and thought his thoughts, wondering, wondering, could they hear? I will not come back to the cave.  I will tell no one, he said to himself. The bears settled back down onto all fours.  As quickly as they had appeared onto that little meadow, they disappeared, black ghosts. Behind them, four cubs, flashing paws at each other, tackling and making high pitched cries at each other.  Flashing across this little scene, from one ponderosa pine limb to another, chirping just a little little bit, a sapsucker, eyeing up the luscious bark of a ripe white birch.