Voyage By Dhow by Norman Lewis Page B

to find a quiet place to be alone, while others crowded to the front to submit themselves to the same shattering experience. From this time on the children rarely left us alone.
    In the meantime the shaman had found two adult Huichols at work on the foundations of a building on the outskirts of the compound, and had gone off to enquire from them what were the possibilities of our witnessing any interesting ceremonies in this part of the sierra. He had already assured us that they were slight. People who live off the land, the world over, can best find the resources and the spare time for celebrating when the harvests are newly in—and in the Sierra Madre this is in the months of October and November. After that, food supplies begin slowly to diminish, and the arid season arrives when no rain falls in the mountains and the grass withers away. The Huichols, always semi-nomadic, leave the ranchos where they cultivate their patches of maize and squash, and take their few animals to explore the remote valleys in search of pasture. In bad seasons—and this had been one—the maize soon runs out, and the family eats once a day, and then every second day, and the active young men and women leave their families and trek down to the Pacific coastline to grow a cash crop of tobacco.
    Ramon had shown himself as anxious as we were that we should see all we could of the life of his people, and in our presence and without the slightest embarrassment he had prayed long and earnestly to the Sun god for the success of our journey. Now, coming back, he announced that his prayers had been answered. Unpropitious though the season was, it turned out that the people living within two days of the village of San Andres—near the airstrip where we had landed—would hold a fiesta there that Sunday, with archery, music performed on ancient instruments, dancing, great quantities of tesguiño (ceremonial beer) and possibly a bull-sacrifice, if an animal could be spared. We pointed out that we were bound to miss all this, as the mission plane was due to fly in early on the Sunday morning to take us off. For a moment the shaman’s face fell, but he brightened to assure us that even if we missed the fiesta itself, there would be plenty to interest us in the preparations for it, which would certainly begin on the previous day.
    He now produced a disquieting piece of information. He had just learned that four days before—on the Monday—bandits had broken into a Huichol rancho just out of sight in the fold of the hills from where we stood, robbed the owner, and then murdered him by hanging.
    The degree of deliberation that had gone into the atrocity shocked us. To hang a man seemed more barbarous than to shoot or knife him—but why kill at all? I had been told that bandits were still common enough off the beaten track in Mexico, but had always assumed that, in an encounter with them, to offer no resistance would be to ensure that one’s life would be spared. In the sierra, the shaman said, bandits were not like that. They were cruel men. They robbed and they killed, and hanging—which called for practice and expertise—was the preferred method. I now recalled Padre Ernesto’s story of coming across a woman hanging from a tree on one of his photographic jaunts, and I also remembered that besides his Hasselblad camera he always carried a .306 repeating rifle.
    It came as a pleasant surprise when a little later one of the boys came to summon us to supper. The shaman excused himself, saying that he never took food after midday, and we followed the boy to a deserted dining hall where he served us bowlfuls of atole—a sweet, cornflour gruel—followed by tortillas and bean-stew; all of it delicious.
    The night was cold and we slept in our clothes under what we could find in the way of blankets, drowsing off in the end to a soporific background mutter of the shaman’s prayers. After three in the morning the strengthening chill made it impossible to sleep