Ceremony

Tayo and Betonie finish the Scalp Ceremony. Betonie tells him that in order to truly complete the ceremony, he must find a woman, a mountain range, and certain constellations. Tayo realizes he needs to find his uncle’s stolen cattle to set himself right again. He sets out to find his cattle and the remainder of his ceremony.

Harley and Leroy waylay Tayo and convince him to go drinking with a woman they recently met, Helen Jean. Tayo wants to leave but can’t resist his friends, so he accepts. In the bar, the narrative perspective shifts to Helen Jean. She is disillusioned with the Indigenous veterans and their inability to move on from their glory days. She reflects on her time as a sex worker scraping a living for herself and her family. She grows fed up with the veterans’ behavior and leaves the bar with another group of men.

The perspective switches back to Tayo, who has passed out drinking and comes to when the bartender shakes him. He learns Harley and Leroy got into a fight with the other men over Helen Jean and were hurt badly. Tayo drives them home and then walks back to his own place.

A verse section details the story of the Gambler, a witchery practitioner who dupes people into gambling away everything they own. The Gambler steals the rain clouds and locks them in his house so that the Sun must gamble with him to restore rain to the world. Thought-Mother gives Sun advice before he engages in the Gambler’s rigged game, and the Sun wins the rain clouds back, ending a drought.

Tayo sets off to find his cattle in earnest. While tracking them, he encounters a woman named Ts’eh. She invites him inside for the night and feeds him, and the two have a sexual encounter. He realizes that he can see Betonie’s constellation from her window.

Meanwhile, Hummingbird and Fly visit Caterpillar to acquire tobacco for Buzzard. With the tobacco in hand, they only need to visit Buzzard once more to save their town.

Tayo sets off the next morning and realizes the mountain, stars, and woman have led him to the right place. Tayo spots his cattle herd on the ranch of a white man named Floyd Lee. Floyd has an expensive, hi-tech fence designed to keep people off his property. Tayo cuts open the fence to rescue his cattle while ruminating on the destruction of Mount Taylor by white people in the name of profit. He illegally enters Floyd’s property and begins hunting for his cattle.

Panic and hunger cause Tayo to fall off his horse, where he meets a mountain lion (who is a legendary hunter in his animal form). Tayo speaks briefly to him before he disappears and then honors Mountain Lion by leaving pollen in his tracks. Tayo spots the cattle and herds them back to the cut he made in the fence. Before he can escape, he’s captured by patrolmen who begin to haul him away for trespassing. However, when the patrolmen spot Mountain Lion, they jump at the opportunity to hunt the animal. They race off, forgetting about Tayo and allowing him to escape.

Once back outside the fence, Tayo meets Mountain Lion in his human form, carrying a deer he has hunted. Tayo follows him back to Ts’eh’s home.