Read "The Sons of Kai" by Henry Beston online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The country of the Navahos lies south and west of the Rocky Mountains on a great tableland lifted up into the sky. It is a country of canyons and deserts, mountains and wild pasture lands arched over by the bluest sky in all the world. The sun there seems bigger than our northern sun, and he treads the sky each day like a proud Indian god in a feather headdress of gold and fire.
When a Navaho falls ill, or has recovered from an illness, his friends and the friends of his friends meet together by night to dance the sacred fire dance. In the open land by some lonely settlement in the ancient hills, they kindle great fires under the starry sky, and dance the sacred dance round and about the flames. The old men sing, the drums resound, and the tread of the dancers shakes the earth till the fires sink and die in the glow of the mountain dawn.