The Quest

Tayo is on a quest to find the mountain, the stars, the cattle, and the woman.  The mountain helps Tayo with his PTS, the stars help Tayo connect to the sprits, the cattle give Tayo recollection of Josiah, and the woman represents Ts’eh.  Tayo first runs into Ts’eh while riding his horse across a field.  Ts’eh seems to look different than many other women.  She has light brown skin, ocher eyes (earthy color) that slant up with her cheekbones “like the face of an antelope dancer’s mask”(Silko 164) and “she is wearing a man’s shirt tucked into a yellow skirt that hung below her knees”(Silko 164).  She did not seem to care what she looked like, unlike many other women who dress and put makeup on to fit in with society.  She wears her hair down and has moccasins with rainbirds carved into the silver buttons on the side.  The rain triggers Tayo’s PTS, but the birds help him connect back to Nature and heal him.  Tayo has dinner at Ts’eh place as the sunsets and the stars come out.  “He got up from the table and walked back through the rooms.  He pushed the porch screen door wide open and looked up at the sky: Old Betonie’s stars were there”(Silko 166).  As Tayo observes the stars, he becomes at one peace with himself.  He is able to recognize his surroundings and appreciate what he has.  Tayo sleeps with Ts’eh that night and then voyages out to the mountains the next morning to find Josiah’s cattle.  Tayo wakes up looking at the morning stars, smelling the distinct kinds of snow, and lastly, smelling the horses from the corral.  “Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time”(Silko 168).  Tayo is now recognizing the present and using his senses with his current surroundings, instead of flashbacking to past memories.  Tayo saw the sunrise as a new beginning, to be able to start over.

Tayo takes a mare up to the mountain to find Josiah’s cattle.  Tayo already found the stars and “Betonie’s vision was a story he could feel happening-from the stars and the woman, the mountain and the cattle would come”(Silko 173).  Tayo is skeptical about this journey at first, but he is now coming to terms with it.  He follows a steep mountain trail that is too narrow to even turn around.  He reaches the top of a sand rock mesa and looks out towards the vast country.  Tayo observes the river below is cut off by a deep arroyo, and the valley land is full of cities. White civilization controlled the land below, but the mesa was untouched; “But from this place there was no sign the white people had ever come to this land; they had no existence then, except as he remembered them”(Silko 171).  The mesa is untouched by the destroyers, however, as Tayo continues up the trail, the land becomes fenced off by white ranchers.  Tayo did not understand how Josiah’s cattle ended up inside a white man’s property, “only brown-skinned people were thieves; white people didn’t steal, because they always had the money to buy whatever they wanted”(Silko 177).  Tayo then realizes the lies and the witchery of society. “He cut into the wire as if cutting away at the lie inside himself.  The liars had fooled everyone, white people and Indians alike; as long as people believed the lies, they would never be able to see what had been done to them or what hey were doing to each other”(Silko 177).  The lie is that some races are more superior to other races.  Tayo grew up learning that white people are the most civilized, because of their wealth and great technology, but they are truly no better than any other race.  They like to contain everything they can get their hands on.  They built their nation off stolen land and take things that are not theirs to own.  The misdoings of white people are then blamed on Mexicans or Indians because of transferred oppression.  For example, Tayo hesitated when accusing a white person from stealing Josiah’s cattle, but didn’t hesitate when accusing a Mexican or Indian.  Tayo cut a twenty-foot gap in the fence and began his search.  As Tayo walks up and down ridges and through vast clearings, he realizes that, “He had been so intent on finding the cattle that he had forgotten all the events of the past days and past years.  Hunting was good for that. Old Betonie was right.  It was a cure for that, and maybe for other things too”(Silko 178).  That was the true reason to find the cattle, to take his mind off the past.  Tayo eventually finds the cattle, but loses them when he falls of his horse and passes out on the lava rock of the mountain.  Two white ranchers approach Tayo to arrest him for trespassing, but soon leave him to hunt the mountain lion that helped Tayo find the cattle in the first place.  He lied in the rock lost and with great pain, “but lying above the center that pulled him down closer felt more familiar to him than any embrace he could remember, and he was sinking into the elemental arms of mountain silence…He could secure the thresholds with molten pain and remain; or he could let go and flow back.  It was up to him”(Silko 187).  Tayo finds the mountain.  He is able to connect to the nature of the mountain and control his PTS.  He can now go through pain and suffering without triggering past memories of pain and suffering.  Tayo eventually comes down the mountain to find the cattle at corralled at Ts’eh place.  Tayo has found the stars, the cattle, the mountain, and is about to find the woman, Ts’eh.