The Lovely Giants

The little girl who lived here with her family had lived on the land for many years, hundreds of years in fact. She lived very happily with her many cousins and her grandparents who loved her, just as they had loved their home and everyone who lived there.

The little girl was called "Shanii", although no one really knows what her name means because her name is not known among her people.

It was in the little house in the desert that she lived with her Grandpa Sam and Grandma Ruth who had adopted her when she was very small and raised her themselves. The little house they lived in was called a "hogan" but there were other houses as well, such as "The Big House" which stood right behind a rickety wooden gate and the big wood and tin windmill that stood close by. The other hogans were for other relatives who had come to visit or stay. Shanii had never liked staying in The Big House. The floors would creak and groan all the time, making scary noises in the middle of the night, almost as though it were waking up.

So Shanii would sleep in the hogan.

All around this sprawling place was the deep red rock of the desert and the huge cliffs that loomed into the skies above. The dirt and soil was a brilliant blend of yellows, reds and light browns. Grandma Ruth had said that the colors of the earth and the colors of the sky were sacred to their people, for you see, Shanii and her family had belonged to the Dine or the Navajo people.

Not too far from The Big House and the little village of family hogans was another set of rickety, falling apart fences where the cattle and sheep would graze. Oh the noise they made during the day! They "baa-ed" and "moo-ed" all the live long day, noisy little things that often nibbled at Shanii's long blue-grey skirt and sniffed her brown cowgirl boots. One of the naughty little sheep had chewed on the long, raven black hair that reached poor Shanii's waist, earning the sheep a stiff scolding from the girl.

But she didn't care. The land had taught her many things, even at her young age of eight and a half.

Maybe......she thought one day, sitting on the fence of the sheep pasture, swinging her legs over the splintery posts. I'll find the magic in this land that Grandma and Grandpa always talked about.....

Sometimes Shanii really did wonder if there was magic in the land where she and her family lived. She could see the colors changing at night from bright to dark and the stars that streaked across the sky. Shanii would sometimes lie awake at night, wondering what it must have been like to fly high on the back of an eagle, just like some of the Holy People in Grandma's stories.

It was one of those nights where the air was cool and Shanii rested under a wool blanket. The bright light of the moon spilled through the tiny window in her hogan and a cool breeze blew across the desert. Something woke her from her sleep, a strange sound in the distance that she couldn't quite hear. Voices of men and women that were as wispy as the wind.

It sounded like singing and drumming.

On and on it went like that, the singing seeming to come from nowhere. Where was it coming from?

Shanii scrambled from her bed and raced to the window, her long and straight black hair flying behind her. She felt the ground shaking a bit under the house and running into her feet. Shanii had remembered what her Uncle Willie had told her about an earthquake he had lived through when he went to California to auction off some of the cattle and the shaking, quaking nightmare it had been. Had Uncle Willie's stories come back to haunt the family?

Shanii trembled at the thought, racing from the window and jumping right back in her bed. But there was no more shaking. How did it stop? Why did it stop? Shanii tried to think of an answer, but none ever came to her.

She lay in her bed, listening to that beautiful music as it thundered across the land like horses' hooves. She listened until she felt her eyes growing terribly heavy and could stay awake no more.