"I thought a kachina was a little doll."

"That's right."

"And also a person dressed up?"

"Yep. And a spirit."

"A spirit with a family and a mailing address."

"That's right. When the person dresses up a certain way, the spirit comes into him. And into the doll, if it's made right."

"Okay," I said.

"What?"

"Nothing, just okay. I understand."

He smiled at me sideways. "You think it sounds voodoo?"

"All right, I'm narrow-minded. It sounds kind of voodoo."

We both paid attention to the dancers for a while. I needed to keep a little distance from Loyd.

"Anglos put little dolls of Santa Claus around their houses at Christmas," Loyd said without looking at me.

"Yeah, but it's just a little doll."

"And does it have a wife?"

"Yes," I conceded. "A wife and elves. And they live at the North Pole."

"And sometimes one guy will dress up like Santa Claus. And everybody acts a certain way when he comes around. All happy and generous."

I'd never been put in a position to defend Santa Claus. I'd never even believed in Santa Claus. "That's just because he stands for the spirit of Christmas," I said.

"Exactly." Loyd seemed very pleased with himself.

One of the hunters had drawn his bow and shot an invisible arrow into a deer. It gave an anguished shiver, and then the other hunters lifted its limp carcass onto their shoulders.

"I've seen Jesus kachinas too," Loyd said. "I've seen them hanging all over people's houses in Grace."

Now there was a thought to ponder.

Koshari must also have been the spirit of nuisance, or a good belly laugh. The other deer dancers still followed the maiden, ignoring the hunters and their own fallen brother, but Koshari clowned and cut between them, getting in their way and generally interfering with their solemnity. But when one of the youngest dancers lost his antlers, Koshari picked up the headdress and carefully reattached it by its buckskin laces. The boy kept dancing, eyes front, paying no attention to the hobgoblin who was putting his costume back together.

At some later point, I noticed, Koshari had acquired a new-looking straw cowboy hat, which he cocked ridiculously on one of his horns. I had a feeling it wasn't the Navajo he was aping here. He walked duck-footed with a John Wayne swagger and was using a length of two-by-four as a gun. He knelt and fired repeatedly at the dancing deer, grandly falling over backward each time. Later he stalked them, trailing his gun in the snow and tripping over it with admirably practiced body comedy.

The deer eventually retreated to the cliff, and the plaza filled with two lines of new dancers-a row of black-clad women and a row of men in white kilts-whose bodies beat a loud rhythm as they walked. Their chests were crisscrossed with lines of seashell bells. The two rows of dancers faced one another and stamped their feet, shaking the bells, crowding the air above the plaza with a loud, hollow clicking like summer insects. The men wore crowns of eagle feathers and the women wore spectacular wooden headdresses painted with stylized clouds and slanting blue lines of rain and green blades of corn. This was the corn dance, officially a summer prayer but danced at every important occasion, Loyd said, because you couldn't pray it often enough.

"Most of the dances have to do with rain," he said. "Here, that's what everything hangs on."

Santa Claus kachinas and the beauty of the spectacle notwithstanding, I still felt outside of it. "So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right." Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.

I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, "No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance."

"In balance."

"Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with us."

"And what is the deal?" I asked.

"We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests."