ved was not worth living ... so I changed it."
     "But  I  am happy with my life, don Juan. Why should  I have to  change
it?"
     He began to sing a Mexican song, very softly, and then hummed the tune.
His head bobbed up and down as he followed the beat of the song.
     "Do you think that you and I are equals?" he asked in a sharp voice.
     His question  caught me off guard.  I experienced a peculiar buzzing in
my ears as though he had actually shouted his words, which  he had not done;
however, there had been a metallic sound in his voice that was reverberating
in my ears.
     I scratched the inside of my left ear with the small  finger of my left
hand. My ears  itched  all the time and I had developed a rhythmical nervous
way of rubbing the inside of them with the  small finger of either hand. The
movement was more properly  a shake of my  whole arm.  Don  Juan watched  my
movements with apparent fascination.
     "Well . . . are we equals?" he asked.
     "Of course we're equals, " I said.
     I  was,  naturally,  being  condescending. I felt very warm towards him
even though at times I did not know what to do with him; yet I still held in
the  back of my  mind, although I would  never voice it, the belief  that I,
being  a university student,  a man of the sophisticated Western world,  was
superior to an Indian.
     "No, " he said calmly, "we are not."
     "Why, certainly we are, " I protested.
     "No, " he said in a soft voice. "We are not equals. I am a hunter and a
warrior, and you are a pimp."
     My mouth fell open. I could not believe that don Juan had actually said
that. I dropped  my notebook  and stared at him dumbfoundedly  and  then, of
course, I became furious.
     He looked at me with calm and collected eyes. I  avoided his gaze.  And
then he began to talk.  He enunciated  his  words  clearly.  They poured out
smoothly and deadly. He said that I was pimping for someone else. That I was
not fighting my  own battles but the battles of  some unknown people. That I
did not want  to learn  about plants or about hunting or about anything. And
that his world of  precise acts and  feelings and  decisions  was infinitely
more effective than the blundering idiocy I called "my life."
     After  he  finished  talking   I  was   numb.  He  had  spoken  without
belligerence or conceit but with such power, and  yet such  calmness, that I
was not even  angry  any more.  We remained silent. I  felt  embarrassed and
could not think  of anything appropriate to  say. I  waited for him to break
the silence. Hours went by. Don Juan became motionless by degrees, until his
body had acquired a  strange,  almost frightening  rigidity;  his silhouette
became  difficult to make out  as it got dark, and finally when it was pitch
black around us he seemed to have merged into  the  blackness of the stones.
His state of motionlessness was so  total that it was as if he did not exist
any longer. It was midnight when I finally realized that he could  and would
stay motionless there in that wilderness, in those rocks, perhaps forever if
he had  to. His world of precise acts and feelings and decisions  was indeed
superior. I quietly touched his arm and tears flooded me.

     BEING INACCESSIBLE

     Thursday, June 29, 1961

     Again don  Juan, as he had done every  day for nearly  a week,  held me
spellbound  with his knowledge of specific  details  about  the  behavior of
game. He first explained and then corroborated a number  of hunting  tactics
based on what he called "the quirks of quails." I became so utterly involved
in  his  explanations that  a whole  day went by  and I had not  noticed the
passage of  time. I even forgot to eat  lunch.  Don Juan made joking remarks
that it  was quite unusual for me to miss  a meal. By the end  of the day he
had caught five  quail  in a most ingenious trap,  which he had taught me to
assemble and set up.
     "Two are enough for us, " he said and let three of them loose.
     He then taught  me how to roast quail. I had wanted to  cut some shrubs
and make a barbecue pit, the way  my grandfather used to make it, lined with
green branches and leaves and sealed with dirt, but don Juan said that there
was no need to injure the shrubs, since we had already injured the quail.
     After we finished eating we walked very leisurely towards a rocky area.
We  sat on  a sandstone hillside and I  said jokingly that if  he would have
left the matter up to me I would have cooked all five of the quail, and that
my barbecue  would have tasted much better  than his roast. "No doubt,  " he
said.  "But if you would have done all  that we might have never  left  this
place in one piece."
     "What do you mean?" I asked. "What would have prevented us?"
     "The shrubs, the quail, everything around would have pitched in."
     "I never know when you are talking seriously, " I said.
     He made a gesture of feigned impatience and smacked his lips.
     "You have a weird notion of what it means to talk seriously, " he said.
"I laugh a great deal because I like to laugh yet everything I say is deadly
serious, even if you don't  understand it. Why should the  world be only  as
you think it is? Who gave you the authority to say so?"
     "There is no proof that the world is otherwise, " I said.
     It was getting dark. I was wondering if  it was time to  go back to his
house, but he did not seem to be in a hurry and I was enjoying myself.
     The  wind  was cold. Suddenly he stood  up  and  told me that we had to
climb to the hilltop and stand up on an area clear of shrubs.
     "Don't be afraid, " he said. "I'm your friend and I'll see that nothing
bad happens to you."
     "What do you mean?" I asked, alarmed.
     Don  Juan had  the most insidious  facility  to  shift  me  from  sheer
enjoyment to sheer fright.
     "The world is very strange at this time of the day, " he  said. "That's
what I mean. No matter what you see, don't be afraid."
     "What am I going to see?"
     "I don't know  yet, " he said, peering into  the  distance  towards the
south.
     He  did not seem to be worried.  I  also  kept on looking in  the  same
direction.
     Suddenly he  perked  up and  pointed with his  left hand towards a dark
area in the desert shrubbery.
     "There it is,  " he said, as if he had been waiting for something which
had suddenly appeared.
     "What is it?" I asked.
     "There it is, " he repeated. "Look! Look!"
     I did not see anything, just the shrubs.
     "It is here now, " he said with great urgency in his voice.
     "It is here."
     A sudden  gust of wind hit me at  that instant and made my eyes burn. I
stared towards the area in question. There was absolutely nothing out of the
ordinary.
     "I can't see a thing, " I said.
     "You just felt it, "  he replied. "Right now. It got into your eyes and
kept you from seeing."
     "What are you talking about?"
     "I have deliberately  brought you to a hilltop, " he said. "We are very
noticeable here and something is coming to us."
     "What? The wind?"
     "Not just the  wind, " he said sternly. "It may seem to be wind to you,
because wind is all you know."
     I  strained my  eyes  staring into the  desert  shrubs.  Don Juan stood
silently  by me for a  moment  and then walked into the nearby chaparral and
began to tear some big  branches  from the surrounding shrubs;  he  gathered
eight of  them  and made  a bundle.  He ordered  me to  do  the same and  to
apologize to the plants in a loud voice for mutilating them. When we had two
bundles  he  made me  run with them to the hilltop  and lie down on my  back
between two large rocks.
     With tremendous speed he arranged the branches of my bundle to cover my
entire  body, then  he  covered himself  in  the  same manner  and whispered
through the leaves that I should watch how the so-called wind would cease to
blow once we had become unnoticeable.
     At one moment, to my utter amazement, the wind  actually ceased to blow
as don Juan had predicted. It happened so gradually that I would have missed
the change had I not been deliberately waiting for it. For a while the  wind
had hissed through  the  leaves over my  face and  then gradually  it became
quiet all around us.
     I whispered to don Juan that the wind had stopped and he whispered back
that I  should not  make any  overt noise or movement,  because what  I  was
calling  the  wind was not wind at all but something  that had a volition of
its own and could actually recognize us. I laughed out of nervousness.
     In a muffled voice don Juan called my attention to the quietness around
us  and  whispered that he was going to stand  up and I  should  follow him,
putting the branches aside very gently with my left hand.
     We stood up at the  same  time. Don Juan stared  for a moment into  the
distance towards  the  south  and then turned around-abruptly and  faced the
west.
     "Sneaky. Really sneaky, " he muttered, pointing to  an area towards the
southwest.
     "Look! Look!" he urged me.
     I  stared with all the intensity  I was  capable  of.  I wanted  to see
whatever  he  was referring to,  but  I did not notice anything at  all.  Or
rather I  did not  notice anything I  had not  seen before; there were  just
shrubs which seemed to be agitated by a soft wind; they rippled.
     "It's here, " don Juan said.
     At that  moment I felt  a  blast of air in my face. It  seemed that the
wind had actually begun to blow after we stood up.  I could not  believe it;
there had to be a logical explanation for it.
     Don Juan  chuckled  softly and  told me not to  tax my brain  trying to
reason it out.
     "Let's go gather the shrubs once more, " he said. "I hate to do this to
these little plants, but we must stop you."
     He  picked up  the branches we  had  used to cover ourselves  and piled
small rocks  and dirt  over them.  Then, repeating the same movements we had
made before,  each of  us gathered  eight new branches.  In the meantime the
wind kept on blowing ceaselessly. I could  feel it ruffling the  hair around
my ears.
     Don Juan whispered that  once he  had covered  me I should not make the
slightest movement or sound. He very quickly  put the branches over my  body
and then he lay down and covered himself.
     We stayed  in that position  for about twenty  minutes and  during that
time a most extraordinary phenomenon occurred; the wind again changed from a
hard continuous gust to a mild vibration.
     I  held my breath, waiting for  don Juan's signal. At a given moment he
gently shoved off the branches. I did the same and  we stood up. The hilltop
was very quiet.  There was only  a  slight, soft vibration of leaves in  the
surrounding chaparral.
     Don Juan's eyes were fixedly staring at an area in the  shrubs south of
us.  "There it is again!"  he  exclaimed in  a loud  voice.  I involuntarily
jumped, nearly  losing my  balance, and he ordered me in  a  loud imperative
voice to look.
     "What am I supposed to see?" I asked desperately.
     He said that it, the wind or whatever, was like a cloud or a whorl that
was quite a  ways above the shrubs, twirling its way to the hilltop where we
were. I saw a ripple forming on the bushes in the distance.
     "There it comes, " don Juan said  in my ear.  "Look how it is searching
for us."
     Right then  a strong  steady gust of wind hit my face, as it had hit it
before. This time, however, my  reaction was different.  I  was terrified. I
had not seen what don  Juan had described, but I had seen  a most eerie wave
rippling the shrubs.
     I  did not want to succumb to my fear and deliberately sought any  kind
of suitable explanation. I said to myself that there must be continuous  air
currents  in  the area, and  don Juan, being thoroughly acquainted with  the
whole region, was  not  only  aware  of that but  was  capable  of  mentally
plotting their occurrence. All he had to do was to lie down, count, and wait
for the wind to taper off;  and once  he stood  up he had only to wait again
for its reoccurrence.
     Don  Juan's  voice shook me  out  of  my mental deliberations.  He  was
telling me that it was time to leave.  I stalled; I  wanted to  stay to make
sure that the wind would taper off.
     "I didn't see anything, don Juan, " I said.
     "You noticed something unusual though."
     "Perhaps you should tell me again what I was supposed to see."
     "I've already  told you, " he said. "Something that hides in  the  wind
and looks like a whorl, a cloud, a mist, a face that twirls around."
     Don Juan made  a  gesture with his hands to depict a  horizontal  and a
vertical motion. "It moves in a specific direction, " he went on. "It either
tumbles  or  it  twirls. A  hunter must know  all  that  in  order  to  move
correctly."  I wanted to  humor him, but he seemed to be  trying so hard  to
make his point that I did not dare. He looked at me for a moment and I moved
my eyes away.
     "To believe that the  world is only as you think it is, is stupid, " he
said. "The world is a mysterious place. Especially in the twilight."
     He pointed towards the wind with a movement of his chin.
     "This can follow us, " he said. "It  can make us tired or it might even
kill us."
     "That wind?"
     "At this time of the day, in the twilight, there is no wind.
     At this time there is only power."
     We sat on the  hilltop for an  hour. The wind blew hard and  constantly
all that time.

     Friday, June 30, 1961

     In the late afternoon, after  eating,  don Juan and I moved to the area
in front of his door. I sat  on my "spot" and began working  on my notes. He
lay down on  his back  with his hands folded over his stomach. We had stayed
around the  house all day on account of the "wind."  Don Juan explained that
we had disturbed the wind deliberately and  that it was better  not to  fool
around with it. I had even had to sleep covered with branches.
     A sudden  gust  of wind made don Juan get up in  one  incredibly  agile
jump. "Damn it, " he said. "The wind is looking for you." "I can't buy that,
don  Juan, " I said, laughing. "I really can't." I was not being stubborn, I
just found it impossible to  endorse  the  idea  that  the wind had its  own
volition  and was looking  for me, or  that it  had actually  spotted us and
rushed  to  us on top of the hill. I said that the idea  of a "willful wind"
was a view of the world that was rather simplistic.
     "What is the wind then?" he  asked  in a challenging tone.  I patiently
explained  to him  that  masses  of  hot  and  cold air  produced  different
pressures and  that  the pressure made the masses of air move vertically and
horizontally. It took  me a long while  to explain all the details  of basic
meteorology.
     "You mean that all there is to the wind is  hot and cold air?" he asked
in a tone of bafflement.
     "I'm afraid so, " I said and silently enjoyed my triumph.
     Don Juan seemed to be dumbfounded. But  then he looked at me  and began
to laugh uproariously.
     "Your opinions are  final  opinions, " he said  with a note of sarcasm.
"They are the  last  word, aren't they? For a hunter, however, your opinions
are pure crap. It makes no difference whether  the pressure is one or two or
ten; if you would live out here in the wilderness you would know that during
the twilight  the wind becomes power. A hunter that is worth  his salt knows
that, and acts accordingly."
     "How does he act?"
     "He uses the twilight and that power hidden in the wind."
     "How?"
     "If  it  is  convenient to  him,  the  hunter hides from  the  power by
covering himself and remaining motionless until the twilight is gone and the
power has sealed him into its protection."
     Don Juan made a gesture of enveloping something with his hands.
     "Its protection is like a ..."
     He paused in search of a word and I suggested "cocoon."
     "That is right, " he said. "The protection of the power seals  you like
in a cocoon. A hunter  can  stay  out  in the open and no  puma or coyote or
slimy bug could bother him. A  mountain  lion  could come up to the hunter's
nose and sniff him, and if the hunter does not move, the lion would leave. I
can guarantee you that.
     "If the hunter, on the other hand, wants to be noticed all he has to do
is to stand on a hilltop at the time of the twilight and the power will  nag
him and seek him all night. Therefore, if a hunter  wants to travel at night
or if he wants to be kept awake he must make himself available to the wind.
     "Therein lies  the  secret  of  great  hunters.  To  be  available  and
unavailable at the precise turn of the road."
     I felt a bit confused and asked him to recapitulate his point.
     Don Juan very patiently explained that he had used the twilight and the
wind to point out the crucial importance of the interplay between hiding and
showing oneself.
     "You must learn to become deliberately  available and unavailable, " he
said. "As your life goes now, you are unwittingly available at all times."
     I protested. My feeling was that my life was becoming increasingly more
and more secretive. He said I had not  understood his  point, and that to be
unavailable did not mean to hide or to be secretive but to be inaccessible.
     "Let  me put it in another way, " he  proceeded patiently. "It makes no
difference to hide if everyone knows that you are hiding.
     "Your problems right now  stem from that. When you are hiding, everyone
knows  that  you are hiding,  and  when you are not,  you  are available for
everyone to take a poke at you."
     I  was beginning  to  feel threatened  and  hurriedly  tried to  defend
myself. "Don't explain yourself, "don Juan said dryly. "There is no need. We
are fools, all of us, and you cannot be different. At one time in my life I,
like you, made myself available over and over again  until there was nothing
of  me left for anything except perhaps  crying. And  that  I did, just like
yourself."
     Don Juan sized me up for a moment and then sighed loudly.
     "I  was  younger than you, though,  "  he went  on,  "but one day I had
enough and I changed. Let's say that  one day, when I was becoming a hunter,
I learned the secret of being available and unavailable."
     I  told  him  that  his point  was  bypassing  me.  I  truly  could not
understand what he meant by being  available. He had used the Spanish idioms
"ponerse al alcance" and  "ponerse en el  del camino, "to put oneself within
reach, and to put oneself in the middle of a trafficked way.
     "You  must  take  yourself  away,  " he explained.  "You must  retrieve
yourself from  the  middle of a trafficked way.  Your whole  being is there,
thus it is of no  use to hide; you  would only  imagine that you are hidden.
Being in the middle of the road means that  everyone passing by watches your
comings and goings."
     His metaphor was interesting, but at the same time it was also obscure.
     "You are talking in riddles, " I said.
     He stared at me fixedly for a long moment and then began to hum a tune.
I straightened my back and sat attentively. I knew that when don Juan hummed
a Mexican tune he was about to clobber me.
     "Hey, " he said, smiling, and peered at  me. "Whatever happened to your
blond friend? That girl that you used to really like." I must have looked at
him like a confounded idiot.  He laughed with great  delight. I did not know
what to say.
     "You told me about her, " he said reassuringly.
     "But I did not remember ever telling him about anybody, much less about
a blond girl.
     "I've never mentioned anything like that to you, " I said.
     "Of course you have, " he said as if dismissing the argument.
     I wanted to protest, but he  stopped me, saying that it  did not matter
how he knew about her, that the important issue was that I had liked her.
     I sensed a surge of animosity towards him building up within myself.
     "Don't stall,  " don Juan said dryly.  "This is a time when  you should
cut off your feelings of importance.
     "You  once had a woman, a  very dear woman, and  then one day  you lost
her."
     I  began  to  wonder if I had  ever talked  about her  to  don. Juan. I
concluded that there had never been an opportunity.
     Yet I  might  have. Every time he  drove with  me we had always  talked
incessantly about everything.  I  did not remember everything  we had talked
about because I could not take notes  while driving. I felt somehow appeased
by  my conclusions.  I  told him  that he was  right. There had  been a very
important blond girl in my life.
     "Why isn't she with you?" he asked.
     "She left."
     "Why?"
     "There were many reasons;"
     "There were not so many reasons. There was only one.
     You made yourself too available."
     I earnestly  wanted to know what he meant. He again had touched me.  He
seemed to be cognizant  of the effect of his touch and puckered up his  lips
to hide a mischievous smile.
     "Everyone knew about you two, " he said with unshaken conviction.
     "Was it wrong?"
     "It was deadly wrong. She was a fine person."
     I expressed the sincere feeling that his fishing in the dark was odious
to me,  especially the  fact  that  he  always made his  statements with the
assurance of someone who had been at the scene and had seen it all.
     "But that's true,  " he said with a disarming candor.  "I have  seen it
all. She was a fine person."
     I knew  that it was meaningless to  argue, but I was angry with him for
touching that sore spot in my life and  I said that the girl in question was
not such a fine person after all, that in my opinion she was rather weak.
     "So are you, "  he said calmly. "But that is not important. What counts
is that you have looked for her everywhere; that makes her a  special person
in your world, and for a special person one should have only fine words."
     I felt embarrassed; a great sadness had begun to engulf me.
     "What  are you doing to me, don Juan?" I asked. "You always  succeed in
making me sad. Why?"
     "You are now indulging in sentimentality, " he said accusingly.
     "What is the point of all this, don Juan?"
     "Being inaccessible is the  point,  " he  declared. "I  brought up  the
memory of this person only as  a means to show you directly what I  couldn't
show you with the wind.
     "You lost her because you were accessible; you  were  always within her
reach and your life was a routine one."
     "No!" I said. "You're wrong. My life was never a routine."
     "It was and it  is a routine, " he said dogmatically. "It is an unusual
routine and that  gives you the impression that  it  is not a routine, but I
assure you it is."
     I wanted to sulk and get lost in  moroseness, but somehow his eyes made
me feel restless; they seemed to push me on and on.
     "The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible, " he said. "In the case
of that blond  girl  it would've meant that you  had  to become a hunter and
meet her sparingly. Not the way  you did. You stayed with her day after day,
until the only feeling that remained was boredom. True?" I did not answer. I
felt I did not have to. He was right.
     "To  be  inaccessible  means  that  you  touch  the  world  around  you
sparingly.  You  don't  eat five quail; you  eat one.  You don't  damage the
plants  just to make a barbecue pit. You  don't expose yourself to the power
of the wind unless  it is mandatory. You don't  use and squeeze people until
they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people you love."
     "I have never used anyone, " I said sincerely.
     But don Juan maintained that I had, and thus I could bluntly state that
I became tired and bored with people.
     "To  be  unavailable  means  that  you  deliberately  avoid  exhausting
yourself  and others,  " he continued. "It means that you are not hungry and
desperate,  like  the  poor bastard that  feels he will never  eat again and
devours all the food he can, all five quail!"
     Don Juan was definitely hitting me below the belt. I laughed  and  that
seemed to please him. He touched my back lightly.
     "A hunter knows he will  lure  game into his traps over and over again,
so  he  doesn't  worry.  To  worry  is  to  become  accessible,  unwittingly
accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of desperation; and
once  you  cling  you  are  bound to get exhausted or to  exhaust whoever or
whatever you are clinging to."
     I told him  that  in my  day-to-day  life  it  was inconceivable to  be
inaccessible.  My  point  was  that in order to function I had to  be within
reach of everyone that had something to do  with me. "I've told you  already
that to be inaccessible does not mean to hide or to be  secretive, " he said
calmly. "It doesn't mean  that you cannot deal with people either.  A hunter
uses his  world sparingly and with tenderness,  regardless  of  whether  the
world might be things, or plants, or animals, or people, or power.  A hunter
deals  intimately with his world  and yet  he is inaccessible  to that  same
world."
     "That's a contradiction, " I said. "He cannot be inaccessible if  he is
there in his world, hour after hour, day after day."
     "You did not understand, " don Juan said patiently. "He is inaccessible
because he's not squeezing his world out of shape. He taps it lightly, stays
for as long as  he  needs to, and then  swiftly moves away  leaving hardly a
mark."

     DISRUPTING THE ROUTINES OF LIFE

     Sunday July 16, 1961

     We  spent  all  morning  watching  some  rodents that looked  like  fat
squirrels;  don Juan called them water  rats. He pointed out that  they were
very  fast in getting out of  danger, but after they had outrun any predator
they had the terrible habit  of stopping, or even  climbing a rock, to stand
on their hind legs to look around and groom themselves.
     "They  have very good  eyes, " don Juan said. "You must move only  when
they are on  the run, therefore, you must learn  to  predict when  and where
they will stop, so you would also stop at the same time."
     I  became engrossed in observing them and I had  what would have been a
field day  for hunters  as  I spotted so  many of them. And finally I  could
predict their movements almost every time.  Don Juan then  showed me  how to
make  traps  to catch  them. He explained that a hunter had  to take time to
observe their eating  or their nesting places in order to determine where to
locate his traps; he would then set them during the night and all he had  to
do the next day was to scare  them off so  they would scatter away  into his
catching devices.
     We   gathered   some  sticks  and   proceeded  to   build  the  hunting
contraptions. I had mine almost finished and was excitedly wondering whether
or  not it would work when suddenly don Juan stopped and looked at  his left
wrist, as if he were  checking a watch which he had never had, and said that
according to  his  timepiece it was  lunchtime. I was  holding a long stick,
which I  was trying  to make  into  a  hoop  by bending it  in  a circle.  I
automatically put it  down with  the  rest of  my hunting paraphernalia. Don
Juan looked at me with an expression of curiosity.
     Then  he made the  wailing  sound of a factory siren at  lunch  time. I
laughed.  His siren sound was perfect. I walked towards him and noticed that
he was staring at me. He shook his head from side to side.
     "I'll be damned, " he said.
     "What's wrong?" I asked.
     He again made the long wailing sound of a factory whistle.
     "Lunch is over, " he said. "Go back to work."
     I felt confused for an instant, but then I thought that he was  joking,
perhaps because  we  really had nothing to  make lunch with.  I had been  so
engrossed with the  rodents that  I  had forgotten we had  no provisions.  I
picked up the stick again  and tried to  bend it.  After  a moment  don Juan
again blew his "whistle."
     "Time to go home, " he said.
     He examined his imaginary watch and then looked at me and winked.
     "It's  five  o'clock,  "  he said  with an  air of someone revealing  a
secret. I thought that  he had suddenly become fed  up with  hunting and was
calling the whole thing  off.  I simply put everything down and began to get
ready to leave. I did not look at him. I presumed that he also was preparing
his gear.
     When I was through I looked  up and saw  him sitting crosslegged a  few
feet away.
     "I'm through, " I said. "We can go anytime."
     He got up and climbed a rock. He  stood  there, five or six  feet above
the ground, looking at me.  He put his hands on either side of his mouth and
made  a very prolonged and piercing sound.  It was like a  magnified factory
siren. He turned around in a complete circle, making the wailing sound.
     "What are you doing, don Juan?" I asked.
     He said that he was giving the signal for the whole world to go home. I
was  completely  baffled. I  could  not figure out whether he was  joking or
whether he had simply flipped his lid.  I watched him  intently and tried to
relate what he was doing to something he may have said before. We had hardly
talked at all during the  morning  and  I could  not  remember  anything  of
importance. Don Juan was still standing on top of the rock. He looked at me,
smiled and winked again. I suddenly became alarmed.
     Don  Juan put his hands on both sides of  his mouth and let out another
long whistle-like sound.
     He said that  it was eight o'clock in the morning and that I had to set
up my gear again because we had a whole day ahead of us.
     I  was completely confused  by  then. In  a  matter of minutes my  fear
mounted to an irresistible  desire to run away from the scene. I thought don
Juan was crazy. I was about to flee when he slid down from the rock and came
to me, smiling.
     "You think I'm crazy, don't you?" he asked.
     I  told  him  that  he  was frightening  me out of  my  wits  with  his
unexpected behavior.
     He said that  we were even. I did not understand what he  meant. I  was
deeply preoccupied with the thought that his acts seemed thoroughly  insane.
He explained that he had deliberately tried to scare me out of my  wits with
the heaviness of his unexpected behavior because I myself was driving him up
the  walls with the heaviness  of my  expected behavior. He  added  that  my
routines were as insane as his blowing his whistle.
     I was shocked and asserted that  I did not  really have any routines. I
told  him that I believed my life was in fact a mess because  of my lack  of
healthy routines. Don Juan laughed and signaled me  to sit down by  him. The
whole situation had mysteriously changed again. My fear had vanished as soon
as he had begun to talk.
     "What are my routines?" I asked.
     "Everything you do is a routine."
     "Aren't we all that way?"
     "Not all of us. I don't do things out of routine."
     "What prompted all this, don Juan? What did I do or what did I say that
made you act the way you did?"
     "You were worrying about lunch."'
     "I did  not say anything to you;  how did  you know that I was worrying
about lunch?"
     "You  worry  about eating every  day around noontime, and around six in
the evening, and around eight in the morning, "
     He  said with a  malicious grin. "You worry about eating at those times
even if you're not hungry.
     "All I  had to do to show your  routine spirit  was to blow my whistle.
Your spirit  is  trained to  work  with  a  signal." He stared  at me with a
question in his eyes. I could not defend myself.
     "Now you're getting ready to make hunting into a routine, " He went on.
"You have already set your pace in hunting, you talk  at a certain time, eat
at a certain time, and fall asleep at a certain time."
     I had nothing to say. The  way don Juan  had described my eating habits
was the pattern I used for everything in my life.
     Yet  I strongly felt that my life was less routine than that of some of
my friends and acquaintances.
     "You know a great deal about hunting now, "  don Juan continued. "It'll
be easy for you to realize that a  good  hunter knows one thing above all-he
knows the routines of his prey. That's what makes him a good hunter.
     "If  you  would  remember  the  way  I have proceeded  in teaching  you
hunting, you would perhaps understand what I mean. First I taught you how to
make and set up your  traps, then  I taught you the routines of the game you
were after, and then we tested the traps against their routines. Those parts
are the outside forms of hunting.
     "Now I have to  teach you  the  final, and by far the  most  difficult,
part. Perhaps years will pass before you can say that you understand  it and
that you're a hunter."
     Don Juan paused as if to give me time. He took off his hat and imitated
the  grooming movements of the  rodents we had been observing. It  was  very
funny to me. His round head made him look like one of those rodents.
     "To be a hunter is not just to trap game, " he went on.  "A hunter that
is worth his salt does not catch game  because he sets his traps, or because
he knows the  routines of his  prey, but because he himself has no routines.
This is his advantage.
     He is not at all like the animals he is after, fixed by heavy  routines
and predictable quirks; he is free, fluid, unpredictable."
     What don Juan was saying sounded to me like an arbitrary and irrational
idealization.  I  could not conceive of a life without routines. I wanted to
be very honest with him and not just agree or disagree with him. I felt that
what he had in mind was not possible to accomplish by me or by anyone.
     "I  don't care how you feel,  " he  said. "In order  to be a hunter you
must disrupt the  routines of your life. You have  done well in hunting. You
have learned quickly  and now you can see that you  are like your prey, easy
to predict."
     I asked him to be specific and give me concrete examples.
     "I  am  talking about  hunting, "  he  said  calmly.  "Therefore  I  am
concerned  with the things animals  do; the places  they eat; the place, the
manner, the time they  sleep; where they  nest; how they walk. These are the
routines  I am pointing out to you so you can  become aware  of them in your
own being.
     "You  have observed the habits  of  animals in the  desert. They eat or
drink  at  certain places,  they  nest  at specific spots, they leave  their
tracks  in specific  ways; in fact, everything  they do  can  be foreseen or
reconstructed by a good hunter.
     "As I told you before, in my eyes you behave like your prey. Once in my
life someone pointed out the same thing to me, so you're not unique in that.
All of us behave like the prey  we are after. That, of course, also makes us
prey for something or someone else. Now, the  concern of a hunter, who knows
all this, is to stop being a prey himself. Do  you see what I mean?" I again
expressed the opinion that his proposition was unattainable.
     "It takes  time,  " don Juan said. "You could begin by not eating lunch
every  single  day   at  twelve  o'clock."  He  looked  at  me   and  smiled
benevolently. His expression was  very funny and  made me laugh.  "There are
certain animals, however, that are impossible to track, " he went on. "There
are certain types  of deer, for  instance, which a fortunate hunter might be
able to come across, by sheer luck, once in his lifetime."
     Don Juan paused dramatically  and looked at me piercingly. He seemed to
be waiting for a question, but I did not have any.
     "What do  you think makes them  so difficult to find and so unique?" he
asked.
     I shrugged my shoulders because I did not know what to say.
     "They have no routines, " he said in a tone of revelation.
     "That's  what makes  them magical." "A deer  has to sleep at night, " I
said. "Isn't that a routine?"
     "Certainly,  if the deer sleeps every night at  a specific time  and in
one specific  place. But  those magical beings do not behave  like  that. In
fact, someday you may  verify this  for yourself. Perhaps it'll be your fate
to chase one of them for the rest of your life."
     "What do you mean by that?"
     "You like  hunting;  perhaps someday, in some place in the world,  your
path may cross the path of a magical being and you might go after it.
     "A magical being is a sight to behold. I was fortunate enough to  cross
paths with one. Our encounter took place after I had learned and practiced a
great  deal of hunting. Once  I  was  in a forest  of  thick  trees  in  the
mountains of central Mexico when suddenly I  heard a sweet  whistle.  It was
unknown to  me; never in  all  my years  of roaming in the wilderness had  I
heard  such  a sound. I could not place it in the terrain; it seemed to come
from different places. I  thought that perhaps I was surrounded by a herd or
a pack of some unknown animals.
     "I heard  the  tantalizing  whistle once  more; it seemed  to come from
everywhere. I realized then my good fortune. I knew it was a  magical being,
a deer. I also knew that a magical deer is aware of the routines of ordinary
men and the routines of hunters.
     "It  is very  easy to figure out what an  average  man  would  do  in a
situation like that. First of all his fear would immediately turn him into a
prey. Once he becomes  a prey he has two  courses of  action left. He either
flees or  he makes his stand. If he  is not armed he would  ordinarily  flee
into  the open  field to run for his  life. If he  is armed he would get his
weapon ready and would then make his stand either by freezing on the spot or
by dropping to the ground.
     "A hunter, on the  other hand, when he stalks in  the wilderness  would
never  walk into any  place without figuring out his points  of  protection,
therefore he would immediately take cover.  He might drop his poncho  on the
ground  or he might hang it from a  branch as a decoy and then he would hide
and wait until the game makes its next move.
     "So, in the presence of the magical deer I didn't behave like either. I
quickly stood on my head and began to wail softly; I actually wept tears and
sobbed  for such  a long  time that I was about to faint. Suddenly I felt  a
soft breeze; something was sniffing my hair behind my right ear.  I tried to
turn my head  in sec what it was, and I  tumbled  down and sat up in time to
see a radiant creature staring at me. The deer looked at me and I told him I
would not harm him. And the deer talked to me. Don  Juan  stopped and looked
at  me.  I  smiled involuntarily. The  idea  of  a  talking deer  was  quite
incredible, to put it mildly. "He talked to me, " don Juan said with a grin.
     "The deer talked?"
     "He did."
     Don Juan stood and picked up his bundle of hunting paraphernalia.
     "Did it really talk?" I asked in a tone of perplexity.
     Don Juan roared with laughter.
     "What did it say?" I asked half in jest.
     I thought he was pulling my leg. Don Juan was quiet for a moment, as if
he  were trying to remember, then his eyes brightened as he told me what the
deer had said.
     "The magical deer said, 'Hello friend.', don Juan went on.
     "And I answered, 'Hello.' Then he asked me, 'Why are you crying?' and I
said,  'Because  I'm sad.' Then the magical creature came to my ear and said
as clearly as I am speaking now, 'Don't be sad.'"
     Don Juan stared into my eyes. He had a glint of sheer mischievous ness.
He  began to laugh uproariously. I  said that his dialogue with the deer had
been sort of dumb. "What did  you expect?" he asked, still laughing. "I'm an
Indian."
     His sense of humor was so outlandish that all I could do was laugh with
him.
     "You don't believe that a magical deer talks, do you?"
     "I'm  sorry but I just can't believe  things like that can happen,  " I
said.
     "I don't  blame you,  " he said reassuringly. "It's one of the darndest
things."

     THE LAST BATTLE ON EARTH

     Monday, July 24, 1961

     Around mid-afternoon, after we had roamed for hours in the desert,  don
Juan chose a place to rest in a shaded area. As soon as we sat down he began
talking. He said that I had learned a  great deal about  hunting, but I  had
not changed as much as he had wished.
     "It's not enough to know how to  make and  set  up traps, " he said. "A
hunter  must live  as  a  hunter in order to draw the  most out of his life.
Unfortunately, changes  are difficult  and happen very  slowly; sometimes it
takes  years for a man to become convinced of the need to change. It took me
years, but maybe I didn't have a  knack for hunting. I think for me the most
difficult thing was to really want to change."
     I assured him that I  understood his point. In fact, since h