Zia Summer, Rio Grande Fall, Shaman Winter, and Jemez Spring by Rudolfo Anaya

Author:Rudolfo Anaya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

Turn the page to continue reading from the Sonny Baca Novels

1

Sonny awakened with a cry tearing from his throat. “Aaaowl W’oooman!”

He reached for her, feeling she was within his reach, just beyond the luminous light of the doorway, but the dream was already fading.

“Híjola,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes and struggling to sit up. A dream, but it seemed so real.

He shivered. His bedroom was cold.

He looked around, half expecting to see the desert scene of the dream; instead, he was enveloped in the soft aura of a December dawn flooding through his window. He had startled Chica. She peered from the blankets where she lay snuggled, looking at him with an understanding expression.

“Qué pasa?” her seal-like eyes seemed to ask.

“It’s okay, Chica, just a dream,” he said, petted her, and lay back into his pillow.

Chica was the red dachshund that had appeared in the neighborhood. Don Eliseo, Sonny’s neighbor, took her in and fed her, but she insisted on making her home with Sonny.

“She’s lost,” the old man said. “I fed her, but she keeps coming to your door.”

“Let her stay,” Sonny said. Don Eliseo had set up a box for her to sleep in, but every night she jumped on the bed and burrowed beneath the blankets.

Sonny reached for the notebook on the bed stand. During the past few months his dreams had been very real, and don Eliseo had suggested that he record them. The old man was teaching Sonny how to construct his dreams.

“A person can actually be in charge of their dreams,” the old man said.

Sonny doubted him at first. Dreams were supposed to be incoherent, random images that came out of nowhere. Symbols that needed to be interpreted. How could one order one’s dreams?

“When you enter the dream, you leave this world,” don Eliseo replied. “The two worlds are connected by a luminous door. You are the master of your life in this world, so you can be the master of your dreams.”

Sonny followed his instructions, and he had become adept at it. Dreams that used to come as jumbled images now came as stories that somehow Sonny began to manipulate even as he dreamed.

“Let’s see,” he whispered, wetting the tip of the pencil with his tongue, and then began to record the dream.

In the dream I was a Spanish soldier named Andres Vaca. I was with Oñate on the banks of the Río Grande just before he started his march into New Mexico in 1598 …

He paused and saw himself again, standing on the sandy banks of the river, staring across the slow-moving, muddy waters. To the north lay the unknown province, that huge expanse of land the earlier Spanish explorers referred to as La Nueva México.

Oñate’s expedition had come north from Mexico to the banks of the Río Bravo, as it was called on some of the early maps, near a place called El Paso del Norte. From the valley of San Bartolomé in Nueva Viscaya, they had traveled, journeying north to

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