The Hopi play their ancient ritual for real, especially if it shocks the visitors
The Ogre Lady was out, eating children in Shungopavi and Mishongnovi. Aware that we were tolerated interlopers, we parked the car among the ancient adobes that made up this Hopi village in north-eastern Arizona.
The spectators who stood on the flat rooftops turned their heads: here came the toothed and staring Ogre Lady, a basket on her back to carry off bad children. With her were three monsters with bulbous snouts and crocodile mouths, and a straggling retinue of deformed mudhead clowns. From a cautious distance we watched the pre-Columbian drama.
With high coyote hoots, the creatures approach a doorway. The Ogre Lady and Ogre Man make a low, nasty, groaning Huunhh! Have the children of the house behaved well? No?
The parents drag the miscreant, kicking and screaming, to the door. The Ogre Lady grabs the kid's legs and pulls. The kid shrieks a fit. The ogres have hatchets and saws: you know what they do to bad kids. The child screams, he claws and clings. The mother at last relents: if the child will be good (Yes, yes I will, please, Mama, really!), she will ransom him.
She brings out piles of food: bread, canned goods, pies, legs of mutton. The ogres hoot and groan, demand more. When at last they are mollified, they let the child go.
The show is guarded by black-and-yellow kachinas (Hopi dressed as spirit deities) who carry whips and lassos. Fanged, expressionless they wear sheepskins hung with rattles made from dry hoofs. If the spectators get too close – which they always do – the Whip man runs at them, whirling his lasso. Everybody runs like hell: grown men, screaming kids, terrified tourists, Hopi policemen. It's a heart-stopping race through the narrow, mud streets, nowhere to hide. Even the people on the rooftops stampede.
Suddenly we weren't observers but part of a primal panic. We ran like rabbits. We blundered and stumbled and were chivvied into a cul-de-sac with the Whip at one end and a big black rooster at the other. The rooster laid into my companion's ankles; he didn't know where to look. The Whip dashed on past the alley and two Hopi guys nearly fell off the roof laughing.
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