I have this complete collection "The Gourd Dancer"
is composed of four sections one of which has been published.
The first section from which I've been reading
is entitled "The Gourd Dancer."
The second section is called "The Strange and True Story
of My Life with Billy the Kid."
The third section is called "Anywhere
is a Street Into the Night."
And the fourth and final section,
which has been published is called "Angle of Geese."
I'll read one or two things from "The Strange and True Story
of My Life with Billy the Kid."
It is again as a section composed
of both prose and poetry.
The first section is a piece in prose.
It is called "Riding is an Exercise of the Mind."
"One autumn morning in 1946, I woke up at Jemez Pueblo.
I had arrived there in the middle of the night
and gone to sleep.
I had no idea of the landscape, no sense of where in the world
I was.
Now, in the bright New Mexican morning,
I began to look around and settle in.
It was the last best home of my childhood.
When my parents and I moved to Jemez I was 12 years old.
The world was a different place than,
and Jemez was the most exotic corner within it.
The village and the Valley, the canyons and the mountains
had been there from the beginning of time
waiting for me, so it seemed.
Marco Polo in the court of Kublai Khan had nothing on me.
I was embarked upon the greatest adventure of all,
I had come to the place of my growing up.
The landscape was full of mystery and of life.
The autumn was in full bloom.
The sun cast a golden light upon the adobe walls
and the cornfields, it set fire to the leaves of willows
and cottonwoods along the river, and a fresh cold wind
ran down from the canyons and carried the good scents
of pine and cedar smoke, of bread
baking in the beehive ovens, and of rain in the mountains.
There were horses in the plain and angles of geese in the sky.
One November, on the Feast of San Diego,
Jemez took on all the colors of a Renaissance Fair.
I lived on the Southwest corner of the village,
on the Wagon Road to San Ysidro.
I looked southward into the plains--
there a caravan of covered wagons
reached as far as the eye could see.
These were the Navajos coming in from Torreon.
I had never seen such a pageant--
it was as if that whole, proud people, that Dine,
had been concentrated into one endless migration.
There was a great dignity to them, even in revelry.
They sat tall in the wagons and on horseback,
going easily with laughter and singing their riding songs.
And when they set up camp in the streets
they were perfectly at home, their dogs about them.
They made coffee and fried bread and roasted mutton
on their open fires.
Gradually and without effort I entered into the motion of life
there.
In the winter dusk I heard coyotes
barking away by the river, the sound of the drums in the kiva,
and the voice of the village crier ringing at the rooftops.
And on summer nights of the full moon
I saw old men in their ceremonial garb,
running after witches.
And sometimes I thought I saw the witches themselves
in the forms of bats and cats and owls on fence posts.
I came to know the land by going out upon it in all seasons,
getting into it until it became the very element in which I
lived my daily life.
I had a horse named Pecos, a fleet-footed roan gelding,
which was my great glory for a time.
Pecos could outrun every other horse in the village
and wanted always to prove it.
We two came to a good understanding of each other,
I believe.
I did a lot of riding in those days,
and I got to be very good at it.
My Kiowa ancestors, who were centaurs,
should have been proud of me.
Riding is an exercise of the mind.
I dreamed a good deal on the back of my horse,
going out into the hills alone.
Desperados were everywhere in the brush.
More than once I came upon roving bands of hostile Indians
and had, on the spur of the moment,
to put down an uprising.
Now and then I found a wagon train in trouble,
and always among the settlers there
was a lovely young girl from Charleston or Philadelphia
who needed simply and more than anything else in the world
to be saved.
I saved her.
After a time Billy the Kid was with me
on most of those adventures.
He rode on my right side and a couple of steps behind.
I watched him out of the corner of my eye,
for he bore watching.
We got on well together in the main,
and he was a good man to have along in a fight.
We had to be careful of glory-seeking punks.
Incredibly, there were those in the world who
were foolish enough to cross us for the sake of gaining
a certain reputation.
When it came time for me to leave home and venture out
into the wider world, I sold my horse to an old gentleman
at Vallecitos.
I like to think that Pecos went on with our games
long afterwards, that in his old age
he listened for the sound of bugles
and of gunfire and for the pitiful weeping of young ladies
in distress and that he heard them as surely as I do now."