Stargazer

For a while in the 1980s the most popular story on this audio book was "Star Car."  This story was told to me by Jay DeGroat's father, a medicine man on the Navajo reservation.  A tiny automobile that circled the earth as a comet and appeared in the desert as a flare of light.  A small man inside the car drove it all around the sandy arroyos.  The car was only five inches high.  Jay's father also told me about Skinwalkers and how they traveled fast as light, quick as a star car.  He drank the coffee I made from boiled coffee beans cooked over a fire in the old way.  He was a small man in a big black cowbiy hat.  He said a blessing over the house we lived in.  Then he went on his way.  One of the stories I recorded was begun in 1965 and the ending wasn't told to me until 1990.  When I asked Jay (translator of all the stories) why it took so long for his father to tell me about Locust's bow and the arrow that opened up the underworld into the world of light, he said, "Snow on the mountain top."  By which he meant two things -- the white hair I now have on my head and the snow on Mount Blanco (Sisnaajini).  These are winter stories and that is the traditional time to tell them -- after the first frost.  Listen well, you may yet hear the twang of Locust's bow.

Thanks to Ray Griffin for the music and the weird sounds and Kurt Mueller of Speaking-Volumes for bringing these back into circulation.  May you both walk on corn pollen path.