Long ago, even before the time of the Ancestors, there was a monstrous child born, with a taste for the flesh of babies. After being cast out to wander the land, Ho'ok returns to exact her revenge upon the village. With the help of I'itoi, one of the creator-gods, the villagers try to kill her, but everything they do makes her stronger. Her uncle, the one person who ever cared for her, must make a heartbreaking choice if he is to save his people.
(SHORT STORY)
The Hohokam Indians of the Valley of the Sun (now Phoenix) built an irrigation empire in the desert, with hundreds of miles of canals, multistory buildings, and ceremonial mounds the size of our football fields. They smelted metals, developed advanced etching and dyeing processes, and wove cotton into cloth. They traded with peoples hundreds of miles away and even traveled to the ocean far to the west to collect exotic shells, coral, and salt.
For a thousand years they turned the sweltering Valley of Two Rivers into a green oasis. Then they vanished. What happened to these technologically advanced people, so at-home in their cruel environment?
Some say they ruined their fields and farmland and sank into obscurity along the rivers; others think an environmental cataclysm struck and they died off or left; while still others believe they were invaded and conquered.
And indeed, archaeological evidence survives to support each of these theories.
But there is another source from which to learn about this magnificent culture and try to understand the mystery of its collapse.
The Pima Indians who lived in the valley when the first Euro-American explorers and settlers arrived tell stories, known as "witch tales," about the people some called Hohokam (the name means "all used up," or Those Who Are Gone) and others called the Vipiset ("great-grandfathers," the Ancestors).
This is one of those witch tales.
Excerpt
In the long-ago time of the First People, there was a young woman who vowed she would never settle on only one man. “I’ll go my own way for the rest of my life,” she told everyone. She was pretty enough that the youths who caught her eye had to be more pleasing to look on than she, or notable hunters, or able to treat her with fine gifts she would be unable to acquire herself.
Not far from her lived a man who tried to earn her favor, but he had none of these advantages. He fancied himself quite in love with her.
One day as he was practicing for the kickball races, he noticed her watching him. He gave the ball a mighty kick that sent it sailing over to her clanholding. He went to her and asked, “Have you seen my ball? I kicked it, and it flew all the way over here. But now I can’t find it. May I have my ball back?”
She smiled demurely up at him from where she was sitting, plaiting a reed mat. “I haven’t seen your ball,” she told him.
But the moment he was out of sight, she rose and tried to take the ball from where she had hidden it under her dress, for she was just teasing him, you see. To her dismay, the ball would not release from her nether parts, and nine moons later, she bore a girl-baby.
“Ai!” she cried. “Look at this horrible creature!”
No one had ever seen a newborn that looked like this one, for it had claws and a mouthful of sharp teeth. They named this monstrous baby Ho’ok, after the plant with two long, curved claws on each pod, which basket makers use for its obsidian-black strips.
“Who is the father?” They asked the mother over and over, but she would not answer. For to tease her admirer, she had stolen the ball and lied, and she suspected that Mother Ge had sent her that hideous baby as punishment.
The child had a taste for raw meat from the first day she left the womb. That might seem bad, but in a way it was good, too, because her mother wanted nothing to do with her. “I am not going to suckle a beast with such sharp teeth!” exclaimed the selfish mother, and pushed her away.
Her uncle began to take her with him when he went hunting. He would put the cradleboard on his back alongside his quiver, made from the spotted skin of an ocelot. The baby never cried at the wrong time to frighten away his prey. Indeed, game seemed to be more plentiful when Ho’ok was with him.
At first, he could shoot a pocket mouse and give it to her, and that would content her for the whole day of hunting. But as she grew, she needed larger animals, like rabbits or marsh-rats, to fill her up. These pitiful carcasses she would rend with her teeth and claws and smile a bloody smile at her uncle.
The sight distressed him, but he had a sympathy for the baby, unclaimed by her father and rejected by her mother. And he was gaining quite a reputation as a hunter, for the animals seemed to be drawn to her.
When she began to toddle about on her own two legs, though, the people of the village noted that babies were disappearing, and each time, Ho’ok was nearby.
The people went to the mother. “You must kill this monster you brought into the world,” they demanded.
“She is none of my making,” the woman told them. “Mother Ge made her the way she is, and she belongs to the goddess. See how the All-Mother brings the animals right to her for my brother the hunter!”
So they decided not to kill the child, but they could not have her eating their babies, either. To her uncle, the hunter, they said, “You must take her into the desert and leave her there, as we do with any witches who are dangerous to us.”
“But she will die, the poor thing,” he answered.
“Better her than our own children. Besides, Mother Ge will surely provide for her.”
Reluctantly he did as they bade him. He took her far, far away, to Sun-Meets-Mountain, farther than they had ever walked before, and left her there napping while he returned home. His fortunes turned for the worse after that, though, for the animals no longer came right up to him to be pierced by his arrows. (But he later remembered some of the songs the little Ho’ok used to sing when they were out together, and he sang them, and the prey returned to him.)
For many summers, there was no word of Ho’ok, and everyone thought she surely was dead. But then the Long-Traders brought news from the southland that a fearsome monster had lived there, killing and eating babies, until driven out a few moons earlier by the angry people.
The villagers of the place she was born thought, “Ho! She is doing it again.” They waited for her to return to them to wreak her revenge, but day after day passed, moon after moon, without bringing them any sign of Ho’ok.
Then they heard of a monster among the people of the Mountains of Sunrise, and babies being stolen out of homes in the middle of the night. “Surely this time she will come to us,” they said to each other. Ho’ok was soon driven from that place, too, and the villagers waited for her, but still there was no sign of her.
To the north she went, for a while, up by where Mother Ge’s breath issues from a hole in the ground. “She is circling us,” her uncle the hunter thought. He was concerned because she had learned from him to circle her prey.
She traveled to the west then, to the Sand People, but left there very shortly. He suspected it was because their lives on the dunes were difficult, and their babies were not fat and sweet.
“Ho’ok will be here soon,” said her uncle to the rest of his people. They were doubtful, for they had prepared themselves many times for her return, and their vigilance had so far proven unnecessary.
“Perhaps she will not come,” they told him.
But then a baby disappeared right from a house, in the middle of the night.
Autumn 1940. Germany invades Britain. Newport is blitzed. Danny O’Shea’s house is bombed, his wife is killed. While taking his young son Adam to neutral Ireland, they witness an attack on a German convoy. The result is brutal.
Based on the memoirs of a Pearl Harbor survivor. Letters from two pen pals take the reader on a journey into the past, a past where nightmares came true, and when hatred reigned.
Autumn 1940. Germany invades Britain. Newport is blitzed. Danny O’Shea’s house is bombed, his wife is killed. While taking his young son Adam to neutral Ireland, they witness an attack on a German convoy. The result is brutal.
