The Way to Rainy Mountain

Story I. The ancestral voice tells how the Kiowas came into the world through a hollow log and took the name Kwuda, meaning “coming out” (16). The tribe is small in number because not all of them escaped the log. A pregnant woman got stuck inside, trapping those behind her. The historical voice traces how the name evolved from Kwuda and Tepda to Gaigwu, for the uneven appearance of Kiowa warriors’ hair, cut short in line with the ear lobe on the right side of the head, and then to Kiowa from a Comanche form of Gaigwu. Momaday closes with a personal reflection of “coming out” on the plains and experiencing a sense of revelation (17).

Story II. The ancestral voice shares one of the “oldest memories of the tribe” (19) of how a quarrel over the udders of an antelope caused a schism in the tribe, with one discontented group traveling off never to be seen again. The historical voice corroborates the memory with reports of a similar language to Kiowa spoken in the Northwest. It also recalls an antelope drive in the winter of 1848-1849 when Kiowas used an ancient method to respond to hunger—encircling and killing game on the plain. Momaday closes with a description of personal encounters with antelope, noting how they at first seem as if they will never be set in motion, but leap when frightened.

Story III. The ancestral voice tells of the first union between dogs and humans, when a mother dog leads a man away from danger in exchange for his caring for her pups. The historical voice recruits testimony from the Comanche Ten Bears to share the Comanches’ memory of a time when the Kiowas had only dogs and sleds. It also notes that the primary warrior society of the Kiowas, the “real dogs” was named after its founder dreamed of a dog. Momaday closes with memories of the dogs that were always present around his grandmother’s house.

Story IV. The ancestral voice tells the story of a beautiful girl who is left in a tree. A redbird arrives, and the tree grows with her into the sky, where she is to become the wife of the sun. The historical voice describes the mountains rising out of the plains as “ascend[ing] to the sky” (23) and Momaday’s voice describes a male pine grosbeak in a lodgepole pine whose branches move against the sky.

Story V. The ancestral voice continues the story of the sun’s wife. She becomes lonely and digs up a root from a forbidden bush, which allows her to see her people far below. She begins to lower herself and her child to earth. The sun finds them gone and throws his gaming wheel, killing the woman and leaving her child alone. The historical voice shares that the plant was pomme blanche, which has a history of Indigenous use, and quotes an anthropologist, Mooney, who asserts that, unlike other Plains tribes, who had been farmers before the horse came to the plains, the Kiowas had always been hunters. Momaday concludes with a reflection on how his grandfather, Mammedaty, tried with little success to grow wheat and corn. He expresses the belief that “it is not in [the Kiowa] to be farmers” (23). He then shares a childhood memory of seeing another boy eating the raw liver of a freshly butchered calf—just as the old Plains hunters had.

Story VI. The ancestral continues the story. The sun’s orphaned child walks into the camp of a grandmother spider, who snares him and sings to him until he falls asleep. The historical voice recalls an incident in 1874 when the Kiowas were driven south to Elk Creek and surrounded by troops. It began to rain, and at evening the earth was covered by tarantulas. Momaday ends with observations of the angular motion of tarantulas on the dirt roads of the plains.

Story VII. In the ancestral voice’s story, the boy throws the sun’s gaming ring at the sky, despite the grandmother spider’s warnings. Falling back to earth, the ring cuts him in two, and he becomes a pair of identical twins, each with his own gaming ring. The historical voice shares that Mammedaty owned horses, and the Kiowas had more horses per capita than any other tribe. Lastly, Momaday shares a childhood memory of swimming in the Washita River and seeing his reflection in the water.

Story VIII. One day, the twins throw their rings, inadvertently causing them to roll into a giant’s cave. The giant and his wife usually kill visitors by filling the cave with smoke, but the twins save themselves with a word the grandmother spider taught them. When they say thain-mom, “above my eyes,” the smoke does not descend to choke them (32). The historical voice discusses the importance of language in Kiowa culture: Words have power and sacredness. Until recently, the Kiowas would not use the names of the dead. In the personal reflection, Momaday recalls that his grandmother Aho used the word zei-dl-bei, meaning frightful, when encountering evil in the world.

Story IX. One day, the twins kill a snake in their tipi, not knowing the snake is their grandfather. Grandmother spider weeps and dies. The twins bury her and live to be respected members of the Kiowa tribe. The historical voice discusses another version of the story, in which a porcupine instead of a redbird represents the sun. In this version, one twin transforms himself into 10 bundles of talyi-da-i, boy medicine. Momaday recalls that his father visited the shrine of one of these bundles with his grandmother, Keahdinekeah. He himself recalls visiting Keahdinekeah once, taking away an impression of her holiness, gladness, and great age.

Story X. The ancestral voice tells how Tai-me came to belong to the Kiowas. During a famine, a father walked for four days looking for food. On the fourth day, in a great canyon, amidst thunder and lightning, he saw a being covered in feathers but with the feet of a deer. The being asked him why he was following him. The man explained that the Kiowas were hungry, and Tai-me told the man to take him with him and he would give him whatever he wanted. The historical voice is a passage from the early 20th-century ethnographer James Mooney, describing the Tai-me figure. It is two feet high, of dark green stone painted with black designs of the moon and sun and clothed in a white feather robe. The figure is only exposed during the Sun Dance, and was last exposed in 1888. The personal voice shares Momaday’s sense of awe when taken by his father and grandmother to see the Tai-me bundle.

Story XI. The ancestral voice tells of two brothers who awake one hungry winter morning to find a pile of fresh meat in front of their tipi. One brother thinks it too strange to eat, but the other eats it anyway and turns into a beaver. He asks his brother to visit him sometimes at the water’s edge. The historical voice describes the peyote ritual of distributing and consuming four peyotes around a fire and sharing sacred songs to the music of rattle and drum, interrupted only by a midnight baptism. The personal reflection discusses Mammedaty’s role as a peyote man and how it causes him to see things others cannot. It finishes with an encounter Mammedaty had with an unseen huge animal while swimming in Rainy Mountain Creek. After getting out of the water, he saw its enormous tracks.