Summary

As Chapter 1: “The Moon Seasons” continues, the author writes that each night Elder Uncle takes Ishi to sleep in the watgurwa with the men. In the watgurwa, Ishi has his first sweatbath. One evening, while sitting around the fire in the watgurwa, Ishi asks Grandfather if it is true what Grandmother says about the coming of the saldu from the inside of Waganupa. Grandfather asserts that it is good for Ishi to sleep with the men and not hear the half-truths of the Old Woman, and tells Ishi how the saldu really came to be.

One winter it snowed and snowed despite the arrival of spring. The People at Bushki, Timawi’s village, sent a lookout to Three Knolls Village to say that fifteen or twenty saldu had come out of the desert at the far edge of the Eastern Meadows of...