He was larger when he paddled with other children at the edge of the slough; but still very small as he first remembered himself seeing the great, stretching river that drew by with mysterious, swirling noises in its red eddies. He and his little brother were put into a huge pot which his father and another man pushed before them across stream: their hair as it coiled high on their heads was just visible over the edge as they swam. And then followed an interminable trudge somewhere through the dust, relieved only by rides on his father’s back, and on his grandmother.
He was older when he shot his first bow; when at dusk he caught a woodpecker in its hole and would not let go though it hacked desperately at his clasped hands, until a half-grown cousin took it from him to imprison under a turned jar for the night. His father wove a cage the next day, and the captive was installed, but remained wild, and one morning was dead. And then came the time when the boys of Mesquite-water challenged those of his settlement on a hot, summer day after the inundation had half dried, and they slung lumps of mud at each other from the ends of long willow poles.
There were other events that must have fallen soon after this period, but which he did not remember: when he rolled his hair into long, slim cylinders, began to measure how nearly it reached his hip, and made his first advances to girls.
Even before this he had dreamed of Mastamho, gigantic on the peak Avikwa’me in the great, dark, round house full of peoples; of the two Ravens singing of dust whirls and war and of the far away clumps of cane waiting to be cut into flutes; and of the river, drawn from its source to wash away the ashes and bones of Matavilya where the pinnacles stand in the gorge at House-post-water. He knew later that he had dreamed these things as a little boy, even while he was still in his mother; he did not yet think about them, except when the old man his grandfather, and his father and uncles, sang of them.
One day a runner came up the valley and shouted pantingly that strangers had appeared from the east at dawn and killed a woman and two children at Sand-back, besides wounding a man and his younger brother. The men leaped for their weapons; the women called in their children, loaded themselves with property, and soon began to track northward in a straggling, excited stream. Earth-tongue pulled down his bow and raked among the roof thatch for such arrows as he could assemble. Then he joined his kinsmen and male neighbors who stood in a group in front of one of the shades, exclaiming and pointing at a smoke that rose down the valley. Bundles of crude, blunt arrows projected behind their hips, shoved under cord belts; and many had clubs dangling from their wrists. Earth-tongue did not own a club: he had never seen battle; and he hung about the outside of the cluster of seasoned men.