his laughter was no longer offensive and insidious, as it had been in the past. I did not think that it was different, from the point of view of its pitch, or its loudness, or the spirit of it; the new element was my mood. In view of my impending death my fears and annoyance were nonsense. "Let me talk to plants then, " I said. He roared with laughter. "You're too good now, " he said, still laughing. "You go from one extreme to the other. Be still. There is no need to talk to plants unless you want to know their secrets, and for that you need the most unbending intent. So save your good wishes. There is no need to see your death either. It is sufficient that you feel its presence around you." ASSUMING RESPONSIBILITY Tuesday, April, 1961 I arrived at don Juan's house in the early morning on Sunday, April 9. "Good morning, don Juan;" I said. "Am I glad to see you!" He looked at me and broke into a soft laughter. He had walked to my car as I was parking it and held the door open while I gathered some packages of food that I had brought for him. We walked to the house and sat down by the door. This was the first time I had been really aware of what I was doing there. For three months I had actually looked forward to going back to the "field." It was as if a time bomb set within myself had exploded and suddenly I had remembered something transcendental to me. I had remembered that once in my life I had been very patient and very efficient. Before don Juan could say anything I asked him the question that had been pressing hard in my mind. For three months I had been obsessed with the memory of the albino falcon. How did he know about it when I myself had forgotten? He laughed but did not answer. I pleaded with him to tell me. "It was nothing, " he said with his usual conviction. "Anyone could tell that you're strange. You're just numb, that's all." I felt that he was again getting me off guard and pushing me into a corner in which I did not care to be. "Is it possible to see our death?" I asked, trying to remain within the topic. "Sure, " he said, laughing. "It is here with us." "How do you know that?" "I'm an old man; with age one learns all kinds of things." "I know lots of old people, but they have never learned this. How come you did?" "Well, let's say that I know all kinds of things because I don't have a personal history, and because I don't feel more important than anything else, and because my death is sitting with me right here." He extended his left arm and moved his fingers as if he were actually petting something. I laughed. I knew where he was leading me. The old devil was going to clobber me again, probably with my self importance, but I did not mind this time. The memory that once I had had a superb patience had filled me with a strange, implicit euphoria that had dispelled most of my feelings of nervousness and intolerance towards don Juan; what I felt instead was a sensation of wonder about his acts. "Who are you, really?" I asked. He seemed surprised. He opened his eyes to an enormous size and blinked like a bird, closing his eyelids as if they were a shutter. They came down and went up again and his eyes remained in focus. His maneuver startled me and I recoiled, and l laughed with childlike abandon. "For you, I am Juan Matus, and I am at your service, " he said with exaggerated politeness. I then asked my other burning question: "What did you do to me the first day we met?" I was referring to the look he had given me. "Me? Nothing, " he replied with a tone of innocence. I described to him the way I had felt when he had looked at me and how incongruous it had been for me to be tongue tied by it. He laughed until tears rolled down his cheeks. I again felt a surge of animosity towards him. I thought that I was being so serious and thoughtful and he was being so "Indian" in his coarse ways. He apparently detected my mood and stopped laughing all of a sudden. After a long hesitation I told him that his laughter had annoyed me because I was seriously trying to understand what had happened to me. "There is nothing to understand, " he replied, undisturbed. I reviewed for him the sequence of unusual events that had taken place since I had met him, starting with the mysterious look he had given me, to remembering the albino falcon and seeing on the boulder the shadow he had said was my death. "Why are you doing all this to me?" I asked. There was no belligerence in my question. I was only curious as to why it was me in particular. "You asked me to tell you what I know about plants, " he said. I noticed a tinge of sarcasm in his voice. He sounded as if he were humoring me. "But what you have told me so far has nothing to do with plants, " I protested. His reply was that it took time to learn about them. My feeling was that it was useless to argue with him. I realized then the total idiocy of the easy and absurd resolutions I had made. While I was at home I had promised myself that I was never going to lose my temper or feel annoyed with don Juan. In the actual situation, however, the minute he rebuffed me I had another attack of peevishness. I felt there was no way for me to interact with him and that angered me. "Think of your death now, " don Juan said suddenly. "It is at arm's length. It may tap you any moment, so really you have no time for crappy thoughts and moods. None of us have time for that. "Do you want to know what I did to you the first day we met? I saw you, and I saw that you thought you were lying to me. But you weren't, not really." I told him that his explanation confused me even more. He replied that that was the reason he did not want to explain his acts, and that explanations were not necessary. He said that the only thing that counted was action, acting instead of talking. He pulled out a straw mat and lay down, propping his head up with a bundle. He made himself comfortable and then he told me that there was another thing I had to perform if I really wanted to learn about plants. "What was wrong with you when I saw you, and what is wrong with you now, is that you don't like to take responsibility for what you do, " he said slowly, as if to give me time to understand what he was saying. "When you were telling me all those things in the bus depot you were aware that they were lies. Why were you lying?" I explained that my objective had been to find a "key informant" for my work. Don Juan smiled and began humming a Mexican tune. "When a man decides to do something he must go all the way, " he said, "but he must take responsibility for what he does. No matter what he does, he must know first why he is doing it, and then he must proceed with his actions without having doubts or remorse about them." He examined me. I did not know what to say. Finally I ventured an opinion, almost as a protest. "That's an impossibility!" I said. He asked me why, and I said that perhaps ideally that was what everybody thought they should do. In practice, however, there was no way to avoid doubts and remorse. "Of course there is a way, " he replied with conviction. "Look at me, " he said. "I have no doubts or remorse. Everything I do is my decision and my responsibility. The simplest thing I do, to take you for a walk in the desert, for instance, may very well mean my death. Death is stalking me. Therefore, I have no room for doubts or remorse. If I have to die as a result of taking you for a walk, then I must die. "You, on the other hand, feel that you are immortal, and the decisions of an immortal man can be canceled or regretted or doubted. In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions." I argued, in sincerity, that in my opinion that was an unreal world, because it was arbitrarily made by taking an idealized form of behavior and saying that that was the way to proceed. I told him the story of my father, who used to give me endless lectures about the wonders of a healthy mind in a healthy body, and how young men should temper their bodies with hardships and with feats of athletic competition. He was a young man; when I was eight years old he was only twenty seven. During the summertime, as a rule, he would come from the city, where he taught school, to spend at least a month with me at my grandparents' farm, where I lived. It was a hellish month for me. I told don Juan one instance of my father's behavior that I thought would apply to the situation at hand. Almost immediately upon arriving at the farm my father would insist on taking a long walk with me at his side, so we could talk things over, and while we were talking he would make plans for us to go swimming, every day at six a.m. At night he would set the alarm for five-thirty to have plenty of time, because at six sharp we had to be in the water. And when the alarm would go off in the morning, he would jump out of bed, put on his glasses, go to the window and look out. I had even memorized the ensuing monologue. "Uhm ... A bit cloudy today. Listen, I'm going to lie down again for just five minutes. O.K.? No more than five! I'm just going to stretch my muscles and fully wake up." He would invariably fall asleep again until ten, sometimes until noon. I told don Juan that what annoyed me was his refusal to give up his obviously phony resolutions. He would repeat this ritual every morning until I would finally hurt his feelings by refusing to set the alarm clock. "They were not phony resolutions, " don Juan said, obviously taking sides with my father. "He just didn't know how to get out of bed, that's all." "At any rate, " I said, "I'm always leery of unreal resolutions." "What would be a resolution that is real then?" don Juan asked with a coy smile. "If my father would have said to himself that he could not go swimming at six in the morning but perhaps at three in the afternoon." "Your resolutions injure the spirit," don Juan said with an air of great seriousness. I thought I even detected a note of sadness in his tone. We were quiet for a long time. My peevishness had vanished. I thought of my father. "He didn't want to swim at three in the afternoon. Don't you see?" don Juan said. His words made me jump. I told him that my father was weak, and so was his world of unreal acts that he never performed. I was almost shouting. Don Juan did not say a word. He shook his head slowly in a rhythmical way. I felt terribly sad. Thinking of my father always gave me a consuming feeling. "You think you were stronger, don't you?" he asked in a casual tone. I said I did, and I began to tell him all the emotional turmoil that my father had put me through, but he interrupted me. "Was he mean to you?" he asked. "No." "Was he petty with you?" "No." "Did he do all he could for you?" "Yes." "Then what was wrong with him?" Again I began to shout that he was weak, but I caught myself and lowered my voice. I felt a bit ludicrous being cross examined by don Juan. "What are you doing all this for?" I said. "We were supposed to be talking about plants." I felt more annoyed and despondent than ever. I told him that he had no business or the remotest qualifications to pass judgment on my behavior, and he exploded into a belly laugh. "When you get angry you always feel righteous, don't you?" he said and blinked like a bird. He was right. I had the tendency to feel justified at being angry. "Let's not talk about my father, " I said, feigning a happy mood. "Let's talk about plants." "No, let's talk about your father, " he insisted. "That is the place to begin today. If you think that you were so much stronger than he, why didn't you go swimming at six in the morning in his place?" I told him that I could not believe he was seriously asking me that. I had always thought that swimming at six in the morning was my father's business and not mine. "It was also your business from the moment you accepted his idea, " don Juan snapped at me. I said that I had never accepted it, that I had always known my father was not truthful to himself. Don Juan asked me matter-of-factly why I had not voiced my opinions at the time. "You don't tell your father things like that, " I said as a weak explanation. "Why not?" "That was not done in my house, that's all." "You have done worse things in your house, " he declared like a judge from the bench. "The only thing you never did was to shine your spirit." There was such a devastating force in his words that they echoed in my mind. He brought all my defenses down. I could not argue with him. I took refuge in writing my notes. I tried a last feeble explanation and said that all my life I had encountered people of my father's kind, who had, like my father, hooked me somehow into their schemes, and as a rule I had always been left dangling. "You are complaining, " he said softly. "You have been complaining all your life because you don't assume responsibility for your decisions. If you would have assumed responsibility for your father's idea of swimming at six in the morning, you would have swum, by yourself if necessary, or you would have told him to go to hell the first time he opened his mouth after you knew his devices. But you didn't say anything. Therefore, you were as weak as your father." "To assume the responsibility of one's decisions means that one is ready to die for them." "Wait, wait!" I said. "You are twisting this around." He did not let me finish. I was going to tell him that I had used my father only as an example of an unrealistic way of acting, and that nobody in his right mind would be willing to die for such an idiotic thing. "It doesn't matter what the decision is, " he said. "Nothing could be more or less serious than anything else. Don't you see? In a world where death is the hunter there are no small or big decisions. There are only decisions that we make in the face of our inevitable death." I could not say anything. Perhaps an hour went by. Don Juan was perfectly motionless on his mat although he was not sleeping. "Why do you tell me all this, don Juan?" I asked. "Why are you doing this to me?" "You came to me, " he said. "No, that was not the case, you were brought to me. And I have had a gesture with you." "I beg your pardon?" "You could have had a gesture with your father by swimming for him, but you didn't, perhaps because you were too young. I have lived longer than you. I have nothing pending. There is no hurry in my life, therefore I can properly have a gesture with you." In the afternoon we went for a hike. I easily kept his pace and marveled again at his stupendous physical prowess. He walked so nimbly and with such sure steps that next to him I was like a child. We went in an easterly direction. I noticed then that he did not like to talk while he walked. If I spoke to him he would stop walking in order to answer me. After a couple of hours we came to a hill; he sat down and signaled me to sit by him. He announced in a mock dramatic tone that he was going to tell me a story. He said that once upon a time there was a young man, a destitute Indian who lived among the white men in a city. He had no home, no relatives, no friends. He had come into the city to find his fortune and had found only misery and pain. From time to time he made a few cents working like a mule, barely enough for a morsel; otherwise he had to beg or steal food. Don Juan said that one day the young man went to the market place. He walked up and down the street in a haze, his eyes wild upon seeing all the good things that were gathered there. He was so frantic that he did not see where he was walking, and ended up tripping over some baskets and falling on lap of an old man. The old man was carrying four enormous gourds and had just sat down to rest and eat. Don Juan smiled knowingly and said that the old man found it quite strange that the young man had stumbled on him. He was not angry at being disturbed but amazed at why this particular young man had fallen on top of him. The young man, on the other hand, was angry and told him to get out of his way. He was not concerned at all about the ultimate reason for their meeting. He had not noticed that their paths had actually crossed. Don Juan mimicked the motions of someone going after something that was rolling over. He said that the old man's gourds had turned over and were rolling down the street. When the young man saw the gourds he thought he had found his food for the day. He helped the old man up and insisted on helping him carry the heavy gourds. The old man told him that he was on his way to his home in the mountains and the young man insisted on going with him, at least part of the way. The old man took the road to the mountains and as they hiked he gave the young man part of the food he had bought at the market. The young man ate to his heart's content and when he was quite satisfied he began to notice how heavy the gourds were and clutched them tightly. Don Juan opened his eyes and smiled with a devilish grin a said that the young man asked, "What do you carry in these gourds?" The old man did not answer but told him that he was going to show him a companion or friend who could alleviate his sorrows and give him advice and wisdom about the ways of the world. Don Juan made a majestic gesture with both hands and said that the old man summoned the most beautiful deer that the young man had ever seen. The deer was so tame that it came to him and walked around him. It glittered and shone. The young man was spellbound and knew right away that it was a "spirit deer." The old man told him then that if he wished to have that friend and its wisdom all he had to do was to let go of the gourds. Don Juan's grin portrayed ambition; he said that the young man's petty desires were pricked upon hearing such a request. Don Juan's eyes became small and devilish as he voiced the young man's question: "What do you have in these four enormous gourds?" Don Juan said that the old man very serenely replied that, he was carrying food: "pinole" and water. He stopped narrating the story and walked around in a circle a couple of times. I did not know what he was doing. But apparently it was part of the story. The circle seemed to portray the deliberations of the young man. Don Juan said that, of course, the young man had not believed a word. He calculated that if the old man, who was obviously a wizard, was willing to give a "spirit deer" for his gourds, then the gourds must have been filled with power beyond belief. Don Juan contorted his face again into a devilish grin and said that the young man declared that he wanted to have the gourds. There was a long pause that seemed to mark the end of the story. Don Juan remained quiet, yet I was sure he wanted me to ask about it, and I did. "What happened to the young man?" "He took the gourds, " he replied with a smile of satisfaction. There was another long pause. I laughed. I thought that this had been a real "Indian story." Don Juan's eyes were shining as he smiled at me. There was an air of innocence about him. He began to laugh in soft spurts and asked me, "Don't you want to know about the gourds?" "Of course I want to know. I thought that was the end of the story." "Oh no, " he said with a mischievous light in his eyes. "The young man took his gourds and ran away to an isolated place and opened them." "What did he find?" I asked. Don Juan glanced at me and I had the feeling he was aware of my mental gymnastics. He shook his head and chuckled. "Well, " I urged him. "Were the gourds empty?" "There was only food and water inside the gourds," he said. "And the young man, in a fit of anger, smashed them against the rocks." I said that his reaction was only natural-anyone in his position would have done the same. Don Juan's reply was that the young man was a fool who did not know what he was looking for. He did not know what "power" was, so he could not tell whether or not he had found it. He had not taken responsibility for his decision, therefore he was angered by his blunder. He expected to gain something and got nothing instead. Don Juan speculated that if I were the young man and if I had followed my inclinations I would have ended up angry and remorseful, and would, no doubt, have spent the rest of my life feeling sorry for myself for what I had lost. Then he explained the behavior of the old man. He had cleverly fed the young man so as to give him the "daring of a satisfied stomach, " thus the young man upon finding only food in the gourds smashed them in a fit of anger. "Had he been aware of his decision and assumed responsibility for it, " don Juan said, "he would have taken the food and would've been more than satisfied with it. And perhaps lie might even have realized that the food was power too." BECOMING A HUNTER Friday, June 23, 1961 As soon as I sat down I bombarded don Juan with questions. He did not answer me and made an impatient gesture with his hand to be quiet. He seemed to be in a serious mood. "I was thinking that you haven't changed at all in the time you've been trying to learn about plants, " he said in an accusing tone. He began reviewing in a loud voice all the changes of personality he had recommended I should undertake. I told him that I had considered the matter very seriously and found that I could not possibly fulfill them because each of them ran contrary to my core. He replied that to merely consider them was not enough, and that whatever he had said to me was not said just for fun. I again insisted that, although I had done very little in matters of adjusting my personal life to his ideas, I really wanted to learn the uses of plants. After a long, uneasy silence I boldly asked him, "Would you teach me about peyote, don Juan?" He said that my intentions alone were not enough, and that to know about peyote-he called it "Mescalito" for the first time-was a serious matter. It seemed that there was nothing else to say. In the early evening, however, he set up a test for me; he put forth a problem without giving me any clues to its solution: to find a beneficial place or spot in the area right in front of his door where we always sat to talk, a spot where I could allegedly feel perfectly happy and invigorated. During the course of the night, while I attempted to find the "spot" by rolling on the ground, I twice detected a change of coloration on the uniformly dark dirt floor of the designated area. The problem exhausted me and I fell asleep on one of the places where I had detected the change in color. In the morning don Juan woke me up and announced that I had had a very successful experience. Not only had I found the beneficial spot I was looking for, but I had also found its opposite, an enemy or negative spot and the colors associated with both. Saturday, June 24, 1961 We went into the desert chaparral in the early morning. As we walked, don Juan explained to me that finding a "beneficial" or an "enemy" spot was an important need for a man in the wilderness. I wanted to steer the conversation to the topic of peyote, but he flatly refused to talk about it. He warned me that there should be no mention of it, unless he himself brought up the subject. We sat down to rest in the shade of some tall bushes in an area of thick vegetation. The desert chaparral around us was not quite dry yet; it was a warm day and the flies kept on pestering me but they did not seem to bother don Juan. I wondered whether he was just ignoring them but then I noticed they were not landing on his face at all. "Sometimes it is necessary to find a beneficial spot quickly, out in the open, " don Juan went on. "Or maybe it is necessary to determine quickly whether or not the spot where one is about to rest is a bad one. One time, we sat to rest by some hill and you got very angry and upset. That spot was your enemy. A little crow gave you a warning, remember?" I remembered that he had made a point of telling me to avoid that area in the future. I also remembered that I had become angry because he had not let me laugh. "I thought that the crow that flew overhead was an omen for me alone, " he said. "I would never have suspected that the crows were friendly towards you too." "What are you talking about?" "The crow was an omen, " he went on. "If you knew about crows you would have avoided the place like the plague. Crows are not always available to give warning though, and you must learn to find, by yourself, a proper place to camp or to rest." After a long pause don Juan suddenly turned to me and said that in order to find the proper place to rest all I had to do was to cross my eyes. He gave me a knowing look and in a confidential tone told me that I had done precisely that when I was rolling on his porch, and thus I had been capable of finding two spots and their colors. He let me know that he was impressed by my accomplishment. "I really don't know what I did, " I said. "You crossed your eyes, " he said emphatically. "That's the technique; you must have done that, although you don't remember it." Don Juan then described the technique, which he said took years to perfect, and which consisted of gradually forcing the eyes to see separately the same image. The lack of image conversion entailed a double perception of the world; this double perception, according to don Juan, allowed one the opportunity of judging changes in the surroundings, which the eyes were ordinarily incapable of perceiving. Don Juan coaxed me to try it. He assured me that it was not injurious to the sight. He said that I should begin by looking in short glances, almost with the corners of my eyes. He pointed to a large bush and showed me how. I had a strange feeling, seeing don Juan's eyes taking incredibly fast glances at the bush. His eyes reminded me of those of a shifty animal that cannot look straight. We walked for perhaps an hour while I tried not to focus my sight on anything. Then don Juan asked me to start separating the images perceived by each of my eyes. After another hour or so I got a terrible headache and had to stop. "Do you think you could find, by yourself, a proper place for us to rest?" he asked. I had no idea what the criterion for a "proper place" was. He patiently explained that looking in short glances allowed the eyes to pick out unusual sights. "Such as what?" I asked. "They are not sights proper, " he said. "They are more like feelings. If you look at a bush or a tree or a rock where you may like to rest, your eyes can make you feel whether or not that's the best resting place." I again urged him to describe what those feelings were but he either could not describe them or he simply did not want to. He said that I should practice by picking out a place and then he would tell me whether or not my eyes were working. At one moment I caught sight of what I thought was a pebble which reflected light. I could not see it if I focused my eyes on it, but if I swept the area with fast glances I could detect a sort of faint glitter. I pointed out the place to don Juan. It was in the middle of an open unshaded flat area devoid of thick bushes. He laughed uproariously and then asked me why I had picked that specific spot. I explained that I was seeing a glitter. "I don't care what you see, " he said. "You could be seeing an elephant. How you feel is the important issue." I did not feel anything at all. He gave me a mysterious look and said that he wished he could oblige me and sit down to rest with me there, but he was going to sit somewhere else while I tested my choice. I sat down while he looked at me curiously from a distance of thirty or forty feet away. After a few minutes he began to laugh loudly. Somehow his laughter made me nervous. It put me on edge. I felt he was making fun of me and I got angry. I began to question my motives for being there. There was definitely something wrong in the way my total endeavor with don Juan was proceeding. I felt that I was just a pawn in his clutches. Suddenly don Juan charged at me, at full speed, and pulled me by the arm, dragging me bodily for ten or twelve feet. He helped me to stand up and wiped some perspiration from his forehead. I noticed then that he had exerted himself to his limit. He patted me on the back and said that I had picked the wrong place and that he had had to rescue me in a real hurry, because he saw that the spot where I was sitting was about to take over my entire feelings. I laughed. The image of don Juan charging at me was very funny. He had actually run like a young man. His feet moved as if he were grabbing the soft reddish dirt of the desert in order to catapult himself over me. I had seen him laughing at me and then in a matter of seconds he was dragging me by the arm. After a while he urged me to continue looking for a proper place to rest. We kept on walking but I did not detect or "feel" anything at all. Perhaps if I had been more relaxed I would have noticed or felt something. I had ceased, however, to be angry with him. Finally he pointed to some rocks and we came to a halt. "Don't feel disappointed, " don Juan said. "It takes a long time to train the eyes properly." I did not say anything. I was not going to be disappointed about something I did not understand at all. Yet, I had to admit that three times already since I had begun to visit don Juan I had become very angry and had been agitated to the point of being nearly ill while sitting on places that he called bad. "The trick is to feel with your eyes, " he said. "Your problem now is that you don't know what to feel. It'll come to you, though, with practice." "Perhaps you should tell me, don Juan, what I am supposed to feel." "That's impossible." "Why?" "No one can tell you what you are supposed to feel. It is not heat, or light, or glare, or color. It is something else." "Can't you describe it?" "No. All I can do is give you the technique. Once you learn to separate the images and see two of everything, you must focus your attention in the area between the two images. Any change worthy of notice would take place there, in that area." "What kind of changes are they?" "That is not important. The feeling that you get is what counts. Every man is different. You saw glitter today, but that did not mean anything, because the feeling was missing. I can't tell you how to feel. You must learn that yourself." We rested in silence for some time. Don Juan covered his face with his hat and remained motionless as if he were asleep. I became absorbed in writing my notes, until he made a sudden movement that made me jolt. He sat up abruptly and faced me, frowning. "You have a knack for hunting, " he said. "And that's what you should learn, hunting. We are not going to talk about plants any more." He puffed out his jaws for an instant, then candidly added, "I don't think we ever have, anyway, have we?" and laughed. We spent the rest of the day walking in every direction while he gave me an unbelievably detailed explanation about rattlesnakes. The way they nest, the way they move around, their seasonal habits, their quirks of behavior. Then he proceeded to corroborate each of the points he had made and finally he caught and killed a large snake; he cut its head off, cleaned its viscera, skinned it, and roasted the meat. His movements had such a grace and skill that it was a sheer pleasure just to be around him. I had listened to him and watched him, spellbound. My concentration had been so complete that the rest of the world had practically vanished for me. Eating the snake was a hard reentry into the world of ordinary affairs. I felt nauseated when I began to chew a bite of snake meat. It was an ill founded queasiness, as the meat was delicious, but my stomach seemed to be rather an independent unit. I could hardly swallow at all. I thought don Juan would have a heart attack from laughing so hard. Afterwards we sat down for a leisurely rest in the shade of some rocks. I began to work on my notes, and the quantity of them made me realize that he had given me an astonishing amount of information about rattlesnakes. "Your hunter's spirit has returned to you, " don Juan said suddenly and with a serious face. "Now you're hooked." "I beg your pardon?" I wanted him to elaborate on his statement that I was hooked, but he only laughed and repeated it. "How am I hooked?" I insisted. "Hunters will always hunt, " he said. "I am a hunter myself." "Do you mean you hunt for a living?" "I hunt in order to live. I can live off the land, anywhere." He indicated the total surroundings with his hand. "To be a hunter means that one knows a great deal, " he went on. "It means that one can see the world in different ways. In order to be a hunter one must be in perfect balance with everything else, otherwise hunting would become a meaningless chore. For instance, today we took a little snake. I had to apologize to her for cutting her life off so suddenly and so definitely; I did what I did knowing that my own life will also be cut off someday in very much the same fashion, suddenly and definitely. So, all in all, we and the snakes are on a par. One of them fed us today." "I had never conceived a balance of that kind when I used to hunt, " I said. "That's not true. You didn't just kill animals. You and your family all ate the game." His statements carried the conviction of someone who had been there. He was, of course, right. There had been times when I had provided the incidental wild meat for my family. After a moment's hesitation I asked, "How did you know that?" "There are certain things that I just know, " he said. "I can't tell you how though." I told him that my aunts and uncles would very seriously call all the birds I would bag "pheasants." Don Juan said he could easily imagine them calling a sparrow a "tiny pheasant" and added a comical rendition of how they would chew it. The extraordinary movements of his jaw gave me the feeling that he was actually chewing a whole bird, bones and all. "I really think that you have a touch for hunting, " he said, staring at me. "And we have been barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps you will be willing to change your way of life in order to become a hunter." He reminded me that I had found out, with just a little exertion on my part, that in the world there were good and bad spots for me; he added that I had also found out the specific colors associated with them. "That means that you have a knack for hunting, " he declared. "Not everyone who tries would find their colors and their spots at the same time." To be a hunter sounded very nice and romantic, but it was an absurdity to me, since I did not particularly care to hunt. "You don't have to care to hunt or to like it, " he replied to my complaint. "You have a natural inclination. I think the best hunters never like hunting; they do it well, that's all." I had the feeling don Juan was capable of arguing his way out of anything, and yet he maintained that he did not like to talk at all. "It is like what I have told you about hunters, " he said. "I don't necessarily like to talk. I just have a knack for it and I do it well, that's all." I found his mental agility truly funny. "Hunters must be exceptionally tight individuals, " he continued. "A hunter leaves very little to chance. I have been trying all along to convince you that you must learn to live in a different way. So far I have not succeeded. There was nothing you could've grabbed on to. Now it's different. I have brought back your old hunter's spirit, perhaps through it you will change." I protested that I did not want to become a hunter. I reminded him that in the beginning I had just wanted him to tell me about medicinal plants, but he had made me stray so far away from my original purpose that I could not clearly recall any more whether or not I had really wanted to learn about plants. "Good, " he said. "Really good. If you don't have such a clear picture of what you want, you may become more humble. "Let's put it this way. For your purposes it doesn't really matter whether you learn about plants or about hunting. You've told me that yourself. You are interested in anything that anyone can tell you. True?" I had said that to him in trying to define the scope of anthropology and in order to draft him as my informant. Don Juan chuckled, obviously aware of his control over the situation. "I am a hunter, " he said, as if he were reading my thoughts. "I leave very little to chance. Perhaps I should explain to you that I learned to be a hunter. I have not always lived the way I do now. At one point in my life I had to change. Now I'm pointing the direction to you. I'm guiding you. I know what I'm talking about; someone taught me all this. I didn't figure it out for myself." "Do you mean that you had a teacher, don Juan?" "Let's say that someone taught me to hunt the way I want to teach you now, " he said and quickly changed the topic. "I think that once upon a time hunting was one of the greatest acts a man could perform, " he said. "All hunters were powerful men. In fact, a hunter had to be powerful to begin with in order to withstand the rigors of that life." Suddenly I became curious. Was he referring to a time perhaps prior to the Conquest? I began to probe him. "When was the time you are talking about?" "Once upon a time." "When? What does 'once upon a time' mean?" "It means once upon a time, or maybe it means now, today. It doesn't matter. At one time everybody knew that a hunter was the best of men. Now not everyone knows that, but there are a sufficient number of people who do. I know it, someday you will. See what I mean?" "Do the Yaqui Indians feel that way about hunters? That's what I want to know." "Not necessarily." "Do the Pima Indians?" "Not all of them. But some." I named various neighboring groups. I wanted to commit him to a statement that hunting was a shared belief and practice of some specific people. But he avoided answering me directly, so I changed the subject. "Why are you doing all this for me, don Juan?" I asked. He took off his hat and scratched his temples in feigned bafflement. "I'm having a gesture with you, " he said softly. "Other people have had a similar gesture with you; someday you yourself will have the same gesture with others. Let's say that it is my turn. One day I found out that if I wanted to be a hunter worthy of self-respect I had to change my way of life. I used to whine and complain a great deal. I had good reasons to feel shortchanged. I am an Indian and Indians are treated like dogs. There was nothing I could do to remedy that, so all I was left with was my sorrow. But then my good fortune spared me and someone taught me to hunt. And I realized that the way I li