Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
The lost shaman in Carlsbad Caverns
December 21, 2005
Every few years a person of Mescalero Apache heritage asks the rangers at Carlsbad Caverns if they have heard any strange sounds in the cavern. A shaman or a medicine man, or in Apache a dijin, once disappeared into the cavern and never came out. I do not remember the name of the ranger that told me that story twenty years ago, but I have since seen mention of the story in print.
As I was flipping through John Stilgoe’s "Landscape and Images" I found mention of how in earlier times people would create stories about a person or being that was the spirit of a particular place. Putting the book down, and relaxing on the recliner next to the fire, I lost myself in imagining the dijin’s story.
As his band trailed east to hunt pronghorn on the Llano Estacado, the dijin turned to the caves. He had spent the previous summer discovering some of the wonders of the caves. He had found needle sharp aragonite crystals, stalactites that rang with different tones when struck with metal, cave pearls (perfect spheres of calcium carbonate), a wall covered with helactites (twisted snakelike formations), and a skull of a bear much larger than any alive in his time.
The stories of White Painted Woman had originated in the caves of the mountains centuries before – the coming of age celebration still celebrated to this day at Mescalero, just west of Ruidoso, a familiar tourist destination of skiers and horse fanciers.
His grandmother, a Pueblo woman captured in war, had told him the stories about how Pueblo people believed this was the fourth world created, and that the Pueblo people emerged from the underworld to the fourth world long ago. The dijin believed he might enter the third world, if he explored the caves as a religious pilgrimage, inventing prayer songs for each of the wonders, and opening his mind to the unknown.
He returned to the cave with the skull of the giant cave bear skull. He had no idea that such creatures had died ten thousand years before – the dijin was convinced that the third world was full of living giant bears. He decided that the bones of stone that he found were from recently living creatures trying to enter the present world. Would he turn to stone if tried to cross into the other world? The fear did not stop him.
The dijin might be able to unleash the power of the underworld, to turn the underworld’s power on the hair-faced invaders, and return his people to a more joyous time. His people now called themselves the Indeh, the dead ones, instead of knowing themselves as the Indah, the people. His people were confined to a reservation, and their children taken far away and taught the ways of the whites. A few of his people were with the Mimbreno Apache leader Victorio, still waging war on the whites, preferring death to confinement.
The dijin fasted in the dark for four days, until weak and delirious. His dream vision taught him the song of the cave bear, and possessed by the desperation of a conquered people, he began to believe that he now possessed the power of the bear. When he neared the entrance to the cave as he returned, he stopped at the pool of water on a ledge of the wall. It had a gauzy curtain travertine cascading to the floor. As the dijin bent his head over the water to splash his face, he noticed a bat at the water’s edge. It was a mother, with a suckling baby, upside down and helpless. Had the people left behind in the underworld become these creatures, small and ugly and only able to enter the fourth world when no sun shone?
Returning to his camp, the dijin filled his bags with dried meat, water bags made of buffalo stomachs, and grabbed a big bundle of torches. He transported the load in as far as half of the torches lasted. Over the next few days the dijin returned to the surface more than a dozen times for much bigger bundles of torches, until he had supplies for many days. Just beyond the cave bear was a large passageway that he was convinced was "calling" to him.
When he began exploring beyond the cave bear, the dijin found a room where the stalactites swayed with the vibrations of his voice. Marveling at that strangeness, he sang all of his songs to watch his words dance in stone, believing that was another step in learning the power of the underworld. In another room he found dozens of skeletons of modern animals – rabbits, skunks, ringtails, porcupines, and others – all with varying thickness of a crust of calcium carbonate. Far above, the dijin could make out a glimmer of light from the fourth world, through the hole that had sent the owners of the bones to their death.
Feeling close to a resolution of the ideas that had come as a result of his pilgrimage, the dijin began to go long periods without sleep or food. He spent many hours in the dark, the ideas feverishly simmering – he was so close to learning how to save his people! In the next room, an underground stream cascaded across the uneven floor. The echoes of the lively water were full of voices. The dijin, again in the delirium of fasting and sleeplessness, understood the voices, or so he believed. He died, believing he’d found the power to return to the past, when his people were powerful.
He is still there, now in mummified form. Modern spelunkers have yet to find him, but a few have had encounters with his trapped forever spirit, and later returned to the surface with the wounds to prove it.