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The day began much like the day before it — and the day before that — and the day before that. Leaf, youngest son of the Papago's leader, stared at the rising sun and belabored his fate. Tomorrow was the festival of fall. The People came together to celebrate their accomplishments and honor Earth Mother with a feast. (A time for reflection and acknowledgment, gratitude and story telling.) He fingered his father's story beads. He was too young to participate in the hunt and as a male, would not gather. He could only bring the wood to fuel the many cook fires of women preparing the feast.
As the youngest son of the leader (all his brothers were warriors) he still sat by his mother's fire. But Leaf was not a baby! He was not! And to prove it, the young prince angrily tossed the woven belt of story beads across the fire. In his anger, he misjudged the distance, his throwing arc too shallow. The precious object failed to clear the flames, and, with a pop and a sizzle, the voracious fire consumed the rawhide strands that held the beads in place. With a shout of dismay, Leaf sprang from his seat and reached into the greedy flames in an attempt to save the story. The fire burned his hand to punish him for trying to take back the treasure. Helplessly, the young prince watched as his clan's tale turned to ash.
This story had been given to him for safekeeping to be told at the festivities tonight. This was a special story, his responsibility to keep safe. Suddenly, today was not like the day before, or like any other. This day was beginning all wrong . . .
"Ah! Such a stench!" his mother exclaimed as she drew near, carrying her cooking pot. "What's in my fire?"
"I didn't mean to," Leaf said sadly.
She put the pot down next to the hot embers and began to poke their depths with her fire stick. "Didn't mean to what?" she asked, just as a charred shell rolled near her feet.
"I'll make them right, Mother," the young prince assured her.
She lifted the scorched remains of the story from her fire. "What was this, my son?"
He hung his head. "A story."
"The one for the festival?" she lowered the burned skeleton.
Another sad nod.
"Why is it in my cook fire?"
The young man's look of misery increased, but he made no attempt to answer.
His mother waved the singed mess in front of his nose. "What will you do?"
"I'll make it right. Better than right."
Her lips thinned. "Do you remember the legend they tell?"
The young prince stared at the mangled clutter on the end of his mother's fire stick. This was a special story, one told only at special times. The prince could not remember the tale well enough to see the words much less weave the shells into them. "No," he said sadly. "Can't you remember, Mother?"
His mother dropped the ruined story into a wooden bowl by her feet. "No," she said sadly. "It is a story passed from your father's family. You must ask him if he remembers how they were set."
The young prince shook his head once. "Perhaps I will ask Grandfather first. Surely he would remember."
His mother clicked her tongue. "Your father entrusted the story to you, my son. It would be wrong not to tell him it was lost."
The boy stood, picking the bowl up as he straightened. "I'll ask Grandfather first, then I'll tell Father."
The mother returned to her cooking, shaking her head at his decision, but holding her tongue as the boy headed off towards the rise of the sun.
The sun had reach the tips of the trees before the young prince had made his way to the small clearing that nestled his grandfather's house. His grandmother had already joined the other older women in the fields. His grandfather sat outside their hut, smoking on his pipe by the cooking fire and watching the sunrise in the sky.
"Grandfather!" the young prince called out in greeting.
"Grandson." The old man smiled. "Come. Share the fire." He pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders. "I fear winter will be soon on us. What brings you away from your mother's fire this early?"
The young prince joined his father's father on his great bearskin and began to warm his hands.
"Leaf, shouldn't you be helping with the feast?" the old man asked after a time.
"There's nothing for me to do," the prince answered, "the men haven't returned from the hunt."
"And your mother has enough wood?"
"For now. I'll gather more when I get back." The boy began to dig in the dirt with the toe of his shoe.
His grandfather waited patiently.
"You remember the story?" the boy began shyly.
The old man chucked softly. "I remember many stories, Leaf."
"Do you remember the story you gave to my father?"
"Our clan story? The one he will tell at the feast?"
The young prince nodded.
"It is a great story. It was of my father's father's father. It tells of our beginnings. One of great pride."
Leaf looked up timidly. "Then, if you had to, you could reweave the tale?"
"Reweave?" Grandfather asked slowly. "Why should I? It is already woven in the story beads."
The boy glanced at his grandfather, but unable to hold the older man's gaze, looked swiftly away. "But, if something were to happen to the story beads, you could reweave the tale," he said, more a statement than a question.
"Reweave the tale from memory?" He shook his head sadly. "No."
The young man looked back. "But, Grandfather! You've told the tale many times . . ."
"You don't understand, child. The design held a story from long ago, when the earth was new and her children young, and all prospered, a story that took place one way and no other. The beads were a record of that story. If the arrangement is confused, even a little bit, so is the story along with it. And that makes the new tale false, not ours to tell."
Leaf closed his eyes and tried to picture the beaded belt as it was, but the patterns shifted in his mind. He couldn't return to the moment when they had been right, when the story that they remembered had still matched the tale told.
"It was a fantasy, Grandfather," the boy told the older man in his defense, "just a fiction to entertain children. It shouldn't be given such importance. It isn't true."
His grandfather's face hardened. "You've listened to this 'fiction' since you were a baby. It's been handed down from the dark times. Who are you to say it isn't true?"
"Grandfather," Leaf said gently as if speaking to a small child, "the story is of talking animals. Animals don't speak."
The old man made his eyes wide. "They don't?"
"No."
"How do you know this is the truth?"
"Have you ever heard an animal speak?"
"Yes. Why haven't you?"
Leaf let his breath out in a puff of frustration. Arguing with the old man wasted precious time. " If you can't remember, Grandfather," he whispered sadly, "then the story is lost."
"Lost?"
The boy nodded as he held out the wooden bowl he held in his hands. "This morning. I dropped them in my mother's cook fire."
The old man's grey bush eyebrows rose almost to his hairline. "Dropped them?"
"It was accidental, Grandfather." The boy hung his head. "I counted on you to make it right again."
The old man looked down at the bowl, slowly reaching out to take it from his grandson's hands. He shook it several times, causing the charred bits of bone to jump and dance inside, making a clicking sound against the wood's smooth sides. Finally, he sighed. "They are once again just carved shells," he said. "All those years I've seen them without seeing them. I should have paid more attention."
"But it's not your fault!" the youth cried. His grandfather seemed so disappointed in himself, and it wasn't fair. "I lost our story." He didn't want to think about what he had done, but not thinking about it made him think about nothing else.
Grandfather nodded. He looked up at Leaf, his face serious. "Now you owe us a story, child," he said.
"What kind of a story?" the young prince asked. He owned no interesting stories to share with the entire tribe. There was nothing special about what he ate or what he saw or where he went or what he did when he got there.
"How should I know?" he asked. "It could be anything, but you must hurry and find one before the great feast. Just make sure it's worth the work it will take for someone to fashion story shells together in a new way."