"If I built the fire on the rug it would bum a hole in it," she said. "Right? So we build the fire on sand, on dirt... Things are woven together. So we call the weaver the Grandmother." She whistled four notes, looking up the smokehole. "After all," she added, "maybe all this place, the other places too, maybe they're all only one side of the weaving. I don't know. I can only look with one eye at a \ time, how can I tell how deep it goes?"

Lying that night rolled up in a blanket in Chickadee's back | yard, the child heard the wind soughing and storming in the cottonwoods down in the draw, and then slept deeply, weary from the long night before. Just at sunrise she woke. The eastern mountains were a cloudy dark red as if the level light shone through them as through a hand held before the fire. In the tobacco patch—the only farming anybody in this town did was to raise a little wild tobacco— Lizard and Beetle were singing some kind of growing songor blessing song, soft and desultory, huh-huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh, and as she lay warm-curled on the ground the song made her feel rooted in the ground, cradled on it and in it, so where her fingers ended and the dirt began she did not know, as if she were dead, but she was wholly alive, she was the earth's life. She got up danc­ing, left the blanket folded neatly on Chickadee's neat and already empty bed, and danced up the hill to Bide-A-Wee. At the half-open door she sang

"Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking And her knees kept a knocking and her toes kept a rocking, Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking, Danced by the light of the moon!"

Coyote emerged, tousled and lurching, and eyed her nar­rowly. "Sheeeoot," she said. She sucked her teeth and then went to splash water all over her head from the gourd by the door. She shook her head and the water-drops flew. "Let's get out of here," she said. "I have had it I don't know what got into me. If I'm pregnant again, at my age, oh, shit Let's get out of town. I need a change of air."