It was the third week in August and the snake gatherers had been out for four days gathering the snakes, garter snakes bull snakes and the famous rattlers. The priests had left their kivas before dawn wearing only a loin cloth and moccasins, carrying digging sticks and a snake whip adorned with eagle feathers and a buffalo-skin bag to put the snakes in. Each day the gatherers would go in a different direction, first north, then west, then south and then east. They would look for the snakes under rocks and down in holes and if they caught a rattler they would stroke him with an eagle feather until he straightened out of his dangerous coil. Then they dropped the snakes into the buffalo-skin bag and took them back to the kivas.
The first day of the gathering of the snakes Kendall sent Walt, one of the Hopi government employees, out to Oraibi, a village on third mesa, to get a sheep count. Five o'clock came and went and there was no sign of Walt1 although it was only a two-hour round trip to Oraibi. Finally at seven Walt drove up and if Kendall had been worried before he was really shook up when he saw the truck1 especially the left rear wheel.
"What happened Walt, for God's sake? Look at that left rear wheel!"
"I didn't take the main road to Oraibi," Walt said.
"Why not?"
"The Snake Priests are out there gathering snakes today and if they catch you have to join the Snake Society. So I went north, thirty miles north.
"But there's no road there."
"I know it. That's why the lugs came out of the wheel."
"And you kept on driving?"
"It's better to lose a wheel than to have to dance with a snake in my mouth every August for the rest of my life." Walt said. "Some years the roads are closed for forty miles in every direction while the Snake Priests are out gathering the snakes. The government has to close them; it's in their contract. Either close the roads at snake gathering time or don't build the road. That's what the snake priests told the government and that's why they did."
Three o'clock on the day of the snake dance found us trudging up the rocky trail to Shimopovi on second mesa. People were coming from all directions, tourists, government employees, Navajos. The plain below was sprinkled with cars, trucks, busses and wagons as this was a world-renowned event. All cameras had to be left behind by order of the village priest.
We pushed our way through the crowd and found a spot by a doorway just as the Antelope priests, each one wearing white kilts and sashes, with a fox skin hanging from his waist at the back, feathers in his hair and zigzags of white lightening painted on his body, filed into the plaza shaking gourd rattles. Each one paused in front of the kisi, the miniature tepee-like bower of cottonwood boughs wherein the snakes reposed. As he paused each antelope priest stamped his right foot on a board above a hole in front of the kisi, the sipapu, where the spirits of the underground dwelt. Their attention must be captured as it is to these spirits that the snakes will carry the Hopi~ prayers for rain.
Now a big Hopi came into the plaza swinging a bullroarer, imitating the voice of the desert wind, or perhaps thunder. At the same moment a whirlwind swept across the plaza, scattering dust and sand. I looked up at the sky, gray now with thunderheads beginning to form.
Now the snake priests entered the plaza and they were an awesome sight to behold. Their upper bodies were painted black with lightening signs of white; their hair was long and wild, crowned with red feathers and their eyes were outlined in red and their mouths with a circle of thick white paint. They too wore kilts with fox skins dangling from their belts in the back. Turtle shell rattles were fastened below their right knees. Each time they passed the kisi they too stamped on the board. They formed a line opposite the antelope priests and a chant began. The crowd shifted and murmured and then was quiet, waiting for the climax of the ceremony and they were not disappointed.
The snake priests broke into twos and with a stamping of their feet in a sort of dance they went to the kisi and the man on the right plunged his arm into the bower and brought out a snake and put it in his mouth. His companion with his arm thrown across the dancer's shoulders danced with him, his feather whip distracting the head of the snake. The pair danced around the plaza and then dropped the snake. A third man called a gatherer who had been following them picked up the snake from the ground, unless the snake was a rattler. Then the gatherer enticed the snake to strike at his feathered whip. He left it there for a few seconds and then just as the snake started to wriggle toward the mesa's edge causing pandemonium among the spectators who had no place to run as every square inch of ground and housetop was occupied - the gatherer amidst screams of delighted horror, retrieved the snake.
The entire ceremony takes only twenty minutes and when all the snakes have been danced with the gatherers take them to a large circle outlined with sacred cornmeal. For a few seconds the snakes rest and then, once again they are seized by the priests who run with them down the trail to the desert where they are set free to go home and take the prayers of the priests for rain to the underground spirits.
The wind started to blow again, the sky darkened and small rain drops began to spatter in the dust of the plaza. The hundreds of tourists jostled each other to get off the mesa and back down to their vehicles and out toward civilization. They had heard stories of how the desert washes had flooded in the past after a snake dance and others, like themselves, were marooned and forced to camp out in the desert or take refuge with a Hopi family (for a fee. of course) until the waters subsided and the government could repair the roads.
We waited until most of the crowd had left and then sought out our friend Walt. "Does it always rain for a Snake Dance, Walt?" I asked him.
"Most always"
"How do they know when to have it? The exact day, I mean. Do they, the Snake Priests, have some ancient Hopi signs they read or does the behavior of the snakes tell them something about the rain?"
Walt looked at me and grinned, "We just look it up in the Farmer's Almanac," he said.
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©2002 - Dorothy Cumming