Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell Page A

There were the same number of tents among the trees and the same number of horses tethered on the riverbank.
Our hogans were deserted. No smoke rose from the ovens or the fire pits. There was no sound of sheep bells.
    The camp of the Long Knives was quiet until the sun was halfway up the morning sky. Men strolled about as if they had nothing to do. Two were even fishing in the river with long willow poles. Then—while Running Bird and I watched a squirrel in the pinon tree, trying to coax him down with a nut—I saw from the corner of an eye a puff of smoke rise slowly from our village. It seemed no larger than my hand. A second puff rose in the windless air and a third.
    "Our homes are burning!"
    The word came from the lookout who was far out on the mesa rim, closest to the village. It was passed from one lookout to the other, at last to me, and I ran with it back to our camp and told the news to my father.
    "We will build new homes," he said. "When the Long Knives leave we will go into the forest and cut timber. We will build hogans that are better than those the soldiers burned."
    "Yes," people said when they heard the news, "we will build a new village."
    Tall Boy said nothing. He sat working on his
lance, using his teeth and one hand, and did not lookup.
    I went back to the piñón and my father went with me. All our homes had burned to the ground. Only gray ashes and a mound of earth marked the place where each had stood. The Long Knives were sitting under a tree eating, and their horses cropped the meadow grass.
    My father said, "They will ride away now that they have destroyed our village."
    But they did not ride away. While we watched, ten soliders with hatchets went into our peach orchard, which still held its summer leaves. Their blades glinted in the sunlight. Their voices drifted up to us where we were huddled among the rocks.
    Swinging the hatchets as they sang, the soldiers began to cut the limbs from the peach trees. The blows echoed through the canyon. They did not stop until every branch lay on the ground and only bare stumps, which looked like a line of scarecrows, were left.
    Then, at the last, the Long Knives stripped all the bark from the stumps, so that we would not have this to eat when we were starving.
    "Now they will go," my father said, "and leave us in peace."
    But the soldiers laid their axes aside. They spurred their horses into a gallop and rode through the cornfield, trampling the green corn. Then they rode through the field of ripening beans and the melon patch, until the fields were no longer green but the color of the red earth.
    "We will plant more melons and corn and beans," my father said.
    "There are no seeds left," I said. "And if we had seeds and planted them they would not bear before next summer."
    We watched while the soldiers rode back to their camp. We waited for them to fold their tents and leave. All that day and the next we watched from the rim of the mesa. On the third day the soldiers cut alder poles and made a large lean-to, which they roofed over with the branches. They also dug a fire pit and started to build an oven of mud and stones.
    It was then we knew that the Long Knives did not plan to leave the canyon.
    "They have learned that we are camped here," my father said. "They do not want to climb the cliff and attack us. It is easier to wait there by the river until we starve."

16
    C LOUDS BLEW UP next morning and it began to rain. We cut brush and limbs from the piñón pines and made shelters. That night, after the rain stopped, we went to the far side of the mesa where our fires could not be seen by the soldiers and cooked supper. Though there was little danger that the soldiers would attack us, my father set guards to watch the trail.
    We were very careful with our jars of water, but on the sixth day the jars were empty. That night my father sent three of us down the trail to fill the jars at the river. We left soon after dark. There was no moon to