| These
days they were walking across a desert. Coyote knew, sometimes,
where to find the secret streams, and the hollows in the rocks that
held the rain. But Jasper had fashioned a large flask out of
deerhide, sealed with beeswax and corked with a carven stopper of oak,
for the times when the spirit could not lead them to water. He
would have carved a bowl from oak, as well, for the spirit to drink
from, but Coyote the master of disguise just laughed at him and changed
into a manlike being when he needed to drink from the flask. "Where are we going?" Jasper asked him one day, as they hurried from the shade of one creosote bush to the shade of the next one. They sat down in the sand. Jasper unslung his flask and took a small drink. The deerhide felt wet; it always sweated a little. It worried him that they were losing water to evaporation. But it did make the remaining water delightfully cool. We are going to see Kokopelli, said the spirit. He lives in the dry places, although he loves water. "Why doesn't he live by a lake, then? Or a river?" When he wants to be wet, he just does his rain dance and plays his flute. Actually, that is what I want to show you. He knows the rain dance because of a trick I played on him. Remembering what he had read of Southwestern Indian legends, Jasper knew that Kokopelli was a kachina, a powerful spirit, whose province was fertility and rain. He was also said to be something of a trickster. He was always depicted dancing and playing his flute. They found Kokopelli in a dry canyon, sleeping in the shade of a cottonwood tree. He was human in form, tall and skinny and rather ugly, and completely naked. A curious thing about him was that he seemed to be having a very pleasing dream, because his phallus, which was well over a foot long, stuck straight up from his body. Jasper coughed a little. "Maybe we should come back later?" No. That won't go away. Just pretend you're not impressed. "I'm not impressed," Jasper said firmly. "Just... it's like going to the zoo and looking at the elephants." |