The Cache Read Online Free PDF

one hand, he swooped downward upon the nest with the other hand. His hand closed upon the birds, squeezed them, cut off their sudden cries and their lives. Their blood went to quench his thirst; their meat stilled the rumblings of his stomach. He spat out the feathers and pin-feathers that had escaped his hasty plucking, and went on.
    The rest of the night, Benoni walked swiftly toward his goal. Toward dawn, he found a dying palo verde and spent some time tearing a branch loose. When he had cut and twisted it off, he sliced off the bumps along its length and sharpened one end.
    He had no trouble finding jackrabbit holes. Down the entrance of over twenty holes, he thrust the sharp end of the stick. Finally, the jabbing stick caught in the body of an animal. Quickly, he twirled the stick; it caught the loose fur of the rabbit and wound tightly around the stick. Benoni pulled the kicking animal out of the burrow and hit it in back of the head with the edge of his palm. He cut its throat and drank its blood. He took more time skinning the creature this time. After he had cut the animal up, he buried part of it deep in the sand and ate the rest.
    He spent several days near the spot where he had caught the jackrabbit. With the animal’s own fat and with his urine he tanned the fur, though it was stiffer than he liked, he was able to make a sun-hat for himself. He also caught two other rabbits with the same technique of the pointed stick, a trick known by the Navaho name of haathdiz. He made himself a loincloth and a belt, found another piece of chert. This he intended to use to make a spearpoint, but he fractured the chert with a blow that was not quite at the right angle.
    At night he moved on. He ate chuckwalla and gecko lizards, pocket mice, ants, an armadillo, a diamond-back rattlesnake, and a ring-tail cat. Once he caught a desert turtle and drank water from the two little sacs it carried under its shell.
    He went up the hills, began climbing up slowly, going up a tall hill or small mountain, then going down again before tackling the next. But he was at a higher level than the Valley even when he was going down, and on the evening of the fifth day he rose from his sleep to see his last sawaro. The fifty-foot cactus stood on the side of a hill and was outlined blackly against the setting sun.
    Straight it stood, a pillar with one outstretched arm and one dropping downward. It looked like a man bidding him farewell.
    Impulsively, Benoni waved good-bye at it. He could not help thinking that, perhaps, this might be good-bye forever, that he would never again see these stately and sometimes weird plants that grew only in the Valley of the Sun.
    Then he continued climbing, came to the ancient trail leading around the sides of the mountains, and decided to follow it for a while. Certainly the chances of Navahos waiting here during the night time seemed remote. Even if they were, they would have a hard time seeing him. He was, he boasted to himself, a ghost. He drifted along in the darkness like a coyote, a lion. Besides, he had heard that the Navaho always stayed close to their camping site at night, that they feared demons and evil gods. On the other hand, his father had told him that was nonsense. The Navahos feared the dark no more than the Fiinishans. Proof was that they had often attacked outlying farms and lone travelers at night.
    All that night, Benoni followed the trail. Now and then, he came to a broken piece of strange rocklike stuff, rotten, crumbling at the touch. This, he supposed, was the stuff the old ones had paved the Pechi Trail with. His father and others had described it and said what they thought it was. Of course, Benoni told himself, their saying so did not necessarily make it so. Whatever the truth, the trail was not a wide road now as it was supposed to have been. It was narrow, sometimes so narrow that he had to stand with his back against the cliff and edge along facing outwards. Other places, it was