Spider Woman

THE Story of Navajo Weavers and Chanters is self-explanatory as to characters and circumstances. The only distortion of which I am conscious is a slight one of time and sequence. There is no twisting of facts; if there is of interpretation it is because of lack of understanding rather than of the will to understand. 


WHITE-SANDS lay silent and motionless in the dead light of mid-afternoon. Here and there a soft, capricious wind stirred up a tiny whirl of dust. A muffled lazy cluck came from a contented huddle of feathers where a hen leisurely gave herself a dust bath. Even the decrepit horde of mongrel dogs was scattered, asleep, or at least indifferent. The few houses with their covering of clay merged into the dull background of the clearing apparently devoid of life. A few yards north of the largest hut was a queer structure. An indeterminate arrangement of odds and ends of sticks and boards from packing boxes was stuck upright in the ground, forming an uncertain circle beginning at the trunk of a gnarled and northward-leaning pinon which served as a roof to this thing. For want of a better name it must be called a shade, because it served as such; but it is strictly individualistic: there was never a structure like it before, it would be impossible to duplicate it. Across the entrance of this affair two boards were laid as a barrier—against what, it is hard to say, for animals could gain ingress at almost any crack. If one crack were too small, a larger one could be found with ease, or the boards could be nosed farther apart at their loose upper ends. The barrier showed, however, that the people who used the shade were elsewhere.