A CLIFF DWELLER RETURNS?**
by
Don Watson.

**(Ed. Note) This article and "Mesa Verde Airways, Inc." on page 10, written and illustrated in a lighter vein are incorporated in this issue as no doubt pleasing and welcome to many of our readers.

Seven centuries have passed since the Cliff Dweller left his Mesa Verde Home, and any possibility of his returning has never been considered. But this spring the impossible has happened; one of the old Cliff Dwellers has returned and is making his home in Cliff Palace, where he may be seen at any time. There on the upper ledge he sits, dreaming of the glory of bygone days.

"Why that is only an owl!" the unlearned observer will say, but not so the Navajos. Through centuries of close association with Nature they have grown wise in her ways, and are able to read strange meanings in seemingly commonplace things, that escape the ordinary individual. To the Navajo the owl is not a bird at all, but the spirit of some dead person, returned to its former home. And to prove this they point out the fact that the owl is active only at night, when none but the spirits should be about.

So the great owl in Cliff Palace, they insist, is the spirit of an old Cliff Dweller that has returned to the haunts its mortal body once knew. All day long it sits there in the midst of the crumbling walls, dreaming of those glorious days of long ago. Once again Cliff Palace is a teeming city of many hundreds of happy people. Once again the walls take on their former shapes. The cooking fires send up their wreaths of smoke; the patient squaws resume their household tasks. Once more the same ageless cliffs echo to the joyous laughter of playing children, and to the singing of the girls as they work in the grinding rooms.

When twilight comes the old fellow sails forth on silent wings; up over the trails he once so laboriously climbed, out over the little cornfield he once so patiently tilled, over the mesa top where he hunted, and down to the spring where once he planted his prayer-sticks to the Great Water God. Then a sweet memory and he soars to the cliff-top and alights in the sheltered nook where long ago, under the same ageless moon, he wooed and won a dusky maiden.

As the moon drops behind the mesa-top, and the white light of dawn streaks the eastern sky, he slips back into the crumbling ruin, to brood silently through another day.

Only an owl? Who is to question these children of the wilds, whose centuries of close communion with Mother Nature has given them an insight into her mysterious ways that shall never be the white man's privilege.