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day, Sensei had cooled off and treated me just as before. So I decided to stay. What with the ripped muscles, the stitches, and the loss of body tone with being laid up, it took me six months to work back to brown belt. By the time I graduated from high school and left for college, I’d earned a first-degree black belt and learned twelve of the thirteen katas in our style.
    Sensei Kan always said the belt didn’t matter, but just then it was the most important thing in my life.

Chapter 3
     
    Billy Birdsong: Sand
     
    [Library of Congress Transcript, Catalog No. 679-8851-03-2037F, N$49.95]
     
    It was sand that stopped us. Sand and a Sun like hate that never left the sky to gentler lights, except for the cold and watchful Moon or a gritty scattering of stars.
    Twenty-five thousand years ago my people had come out of the lava fields, the thunder mountains and the Big Rainy. They passed down California’s flat Central Valley, which was hot and dry and not good for much. Not until the white man dug his wells, built dams and canals, and made chemicals to help the white crops grow. And those grow in straight lines.
    The great wetlands where Two Rivers came together were a paradise of hunting and fishing. There my people might have stayed forever, except the tule fogs discouraged them and rumor of the grizzly, the shaggy man-thing standing taller than a young tree, frightened them.
    So they picked up their skins, their fishing baskets, and throwing sticks and moved south, into the drylands again. As more and more sand mixed with the black soil under their feet, some of my people probably thought about turning back to the wetlands in spite of the fogs and the grizzlies. But the greater number of them were hard and stubborn: They would as soon try their luck with a place they had never seen as go back to what they had known and rejected.
    At the end of the valley, the only thing to do was climb the Barren Mountains, the Tehachapis. Today those hills are good only to fly over and look down into, dreaming what it would be like to crash and have to walk out of them. Beyond the mountains, my people crossed the rolling sandy desert, the Mojave, with its dry lakes and praying cactus plants. The desert was worse than the mountains. Finally, they came to the Big Red, now the Colorado, the river of swelling, muddy waters which so blinded the fish that they leapt into our baskets.
    There my people camped and, unlike any of the bands before them, they sent out scouts, pathfinders. They were smart redskins.
    Six months, a year later these young men came back and said that all beyond was the stony deserts of Sonora. The news just about broke the spirit of the squaws and boy children, but the older men conferred solemnly among themselves. Then the traveling chiefs put aside their skins and laces and went off to fish. The camp chiefs sat down to meditate their circles in correct proportion with the Sun and the Earth, and they sent the women to see what grew nearby and was good to eat.
    So, my people, the Mohave, settled beside the river. They were still there twenty-five thousand years later when I was born. Except they were on different land, a poorer piece that was mostly sand, granted to them by the white man for no reason they could understand.
    The valley that had been ours was now crowded with casinos, condominiums, trailer parks, and snowbird nests. Flashing neon by night and glaring aluminum siding by day. All straight lines, hard edges, fast words, and brassy music. Money. Dams and power stations and taco stands and gas stations. The white man’s world hurts the eyes and nose and ears.
    The river was still there, too, but it was a poorer river. Instead of rolling on to the ocean, the Big Red was so throttled by the white man’s dams that it wandered off and died in Mexican sand before it could reach the Sea of Cortez. So it lost its true purpose as a river.
    I was not born in a sagebrush wickiup covered with skins and standing as part