with her by the shawl tied around my waist. She put her
hands under her skirt for a moment and then stood up; her
hands were clasped and when she snapped her fingers open a
volley of sparks flew from them.
Piss in your hands, la Gorda whispered through clenched
teeth.
Hub? I said, unable to comprehend what she wanted me
to do.
She whispered her order three or four times with increasing
urgency. She must have realized I did not know what she
wanted, for she squatted again and showed that she was uri-
nating in her hands. I stared at her dumbfounded as she made
her urine fly like reddish sparks.
My mind went blank. I did not know which was more
absorbing, the sight la Gorda was creating with her urine, or
the wheezing of the approaching entity. I could not decide
on which of the two stimuli to focus my attention; both were
enthralling.
Quickly! Do it in your hands! la Gorda grumbled be-
tween her teeth.
I heard her, but my attention was dislocated. With an im-
ploring voice la Gorda added that my sparks would make the
approaching creature, whatever it was, retreat. She began to
whine and I began to feel desperate. I could not only hear but
I could sense with my whole body the approaching entity. I
tried to urinate in my hands; my effort was useless. I was too
self-conscious and nervous. I became possessed by la Gorda’s
agitation and struggled desperately to urinate. I finally did it.
I snapped my fingers three or four times, but nothing flew
out of them.
Do it again, la Gorda said. It takes a while to make
sparks.
I told her that I had used up all the urine I had. There was
the most intense look of despair in her eyes.
At that instant I saw the massive, rectangular shape moving
toward us. Somehow it did not seem menacing to me, although
la Gorda was about to faint out of fear.
Suddenly she untied her shawl and leaped onto a small rock
that was behind me and hugged me from behind, putting her
chin on my head. She had practically climbed on my shoul-
ders. The instant that we adopted that position the shape
ceased moving. It kept on wheezing, perhaps twenty feet
away from us.
I felt a giant tension that seemed to be focused in my mid-
section. After a while I knew without the shadow of a doubt
that if we remained in that position we would have drained
our energy and fallen prey to whatever was stalking us.
I told her that we were going to run for our lives. She shook
her head negatively. She seemed to have regained her strength
and confidence. She said then that we had to bury our heads in
our arms and lie down with our thighs against our stomachs.
I remembered then that years before don Juan had made me
do the same thing one night when I was caught in a deserted
field in northern Mexico by something equally unknown and
yet equally real to my senses. At that time don Juan had said
that fleeing was useless and the only thing one could do was
to remain on the spot in the position la Gorda had just pre-
scribed.
I was about to kneel down when I had the unexpected feel-
ing that we had made a terrible mistake in leaving the cave.
We had to go back to it at any cost.
I looped la Gorda’s shawl over my shoulders and under my
arms. I asked her to hold the tips above my head, climb to
my shoulders and stand on them, bracing herself by pulling
up the ends of the shawl and fastening it like a harness. Years
before don Juan had told me that one should meet strange
events, such as the rectangular shape in front of us, with unex-
pected actions. He said that once he himself stumbled upon
a deer that talked to him, and he stood on his head for the
duration of that event, as a means of assuring his survival and
to ease the strain of such an encounter.
My idea was to try to walk around the rectangular shape,
back to the cave, with la Gorda standing on my shoulders.
She whispered that the cave was out of the question. The
Nagual had told her not to remain there at all. I argued, as I
fixed the shawl for her, that my body had the certainty that
in the cave we would be all right. She replied that that was
true, and it would work except that we had no means what-
ever to control those forces. We needed a special container,
a gourd of some sort, like those I had seen dangling from don
Juan’s and don Genaro’s belts.
She took off her shoes and climbed on my shoulders and
stood there. I held her by her calves. As she pulled on the
ends of the shawl I felt the tension of the band under my arm-
pits. I waited until she had gained her balance. To walk in the
darkness carrying one hundred and fifteen pounds on my
shoulders was no mean feat. I went very slowly. I counted
twenty-three paces and I had to put her down. The pain on
my shoulder blades was unbearable. I told her that although
she was very slender, her weight was crushing my collarbone.
The interesting part, however, was that the rectangular
shape was no longer in sight. Our strategy had worked. La
Gorda suggested that she carry me on her shoulders for a
stretch. I found the idea ludicrous; my weight was more than
what her small frame could stand. We decided to walk for a
while and see what happened.
There was a dead silence around us. We walked slowly,
bracing each other. We had moved no more than a few yards
when I again began to hear strange breathing noises, a soft,
prolonged hissing like the hissing of a feline. I hurriedly helped
her to get back on my shoulders and walked another ten paces.
I knew we had to maintain the unexpected as a tactic if we
wanted to get out of that place. I was trying to figure out
another set of unexpected actions we could use instead of la
Gorda standing on my shoulders, when she took off her long
dress. In one single movement she was naked. She scrambled
on the ground looking for something. I heard a cracking
sound and she stood up holding a branch from a low bush.
She manoeuvred her shawl around my shoulders and neck and
made a sort of riding support where she could sit with her legs
wrapped around my waist, like a child riding piggyback. She
then put the branch inside her dress and held it above her
head. She began to twirl the branch, giving the dress a strange
bounce. To that effect she added a whistle, imitating the pe-
culiar cry of a night owl.
After a hundred yards or so I heard the same sounds coming
from behind us and from the sides. She changed to another
birdcall, a piercing sound similar to that made by a peacock.
A few minutes later the same birdcalls were echoing all
around us.
I had witnessed a similar phenomenon of birdcalls being
answered, years before with don Juan. I had thought at the
time that perhaps the sounds were being produced by don
Juan who was hiding nearby in the darkness, or even by some-
one closely associated with him, such as don Genaro, who was
aiding him in creating an insurmountable fear in me, a fear
that made me run in total darkness without even stumbling.
Don Juan had called that particular action of running in dark-
ness the gait of power.
I asked la Gorda if she knew how to do the gait of power.
She said yes. I told her that we were going to try it, even
though I was not at all sure I could do it. She said that it was
neither the time nor the place for that and pointed in front
of us. My heart, which had been beating fast all along, began
to pound wildly inside my chest. Right ahead of us, perhaps
ten feet away, and smack in the middle of the trail was one
of don Genaro’s allies, the strange glowing man, with the long
face and the bald head. I froze on the spot. I heard la Gorda’s
shriek as though it were coming from far away. She frantically
pounded on my sides with her fists. Her action broke my fixa-
tion on the man. She turned my head to the left and then to
the right. On my left side, almost touching my leg, was the
black mass of a giant feline with glaring yellow eyes. To my