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 lived 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 he had begun
to teach me how to hunt I also had begun to reassess my actions. Perhaps the
most dramatic discovery for me was that I liked don Juan's ways. I liked don
Juan as a person.
     There  was something  solid  about his  behavior; the way  he conducted
himself left no doubts about his mastery, and yet He had never exercised his
advantage  to demand anything from me. His interest in  changing  my way  of
life,  I felt, was akin to an impersonal suggestion, or perhaps it was  akin
to an authoritative commentary on my failures. He had made me very aware  of
my failings, yet I could not see how his ways would remedy anything in me. I
sincerely believed  that,  in light of what  I wanted  to do in my life, his
ways would have only brought me misery and hardship, hence the impasse.
     However,  I had learned to respect  his mastery, which had  always been
expressed in terms of beauty and precision.
     "I have decided to shift my tactics, " he said.
     I asked  him to explain; his statement was  vague  and  I  was not sure
whether or not  he  was referring to me. "A good hunter  changes his ways as
often as he needs, " he replied. "You know that yourself."
     "What do you have in mind, don Juan?"
     "A hunter must not only know about the habits of his prey, he also must
know  that  there  are powers  on this earth that guide men  and animals and
everything that is living."
     He stopped talking. I waited  but  he seemed to have come to the end of
what he wanted to say.
     "What kind of  powers  are you talking  about?"  I  asked after a  long
pause.
     "Powers that guide our lives and our deaths."
     Don Juan stopped talking and  seemed to be having tremendous difficulty
in deciding what to say. He rubbed his hands and shook his head, puffing out
his  jaws. Twice he  signaled  me to  be  quiet  as I started to ask him  to
explain his cryptic statements.
     "You won't be able to stop yourself easily, " he finally said.
     "I  know that  you're stubborn,  but  that  doesn't  matter.  The  more
stubborn you  are the better it'll be when  you finally succeed in  changing
yourself."
     "I am trying my best, " I said.
     "No. I disagree.  You're  not trying  your  best.  You  just said  that
because it sounds good to you;  in  fact, you've been saying  the same thing
about everything you do. You've been trying your best for years to no avail.
Something must be done to remedy that."
     I felt compelled, as usual, to  defend myself. Don Juan  seemed to aim,
as  a rule, at my  very weakest points. I remembered  then that every time I
had attempted to defend myself against his criticisms I had ended up feeling
like a fool, and I stopped myself in the midst of a long explanatory speech.
     Don Juan examined me with curiosity and laughed. He said in a very kind
tone that  he had already  told me  that all of us were  fools. I was not an
exception.
     "You  always feel  compelled to explain your acts, as  if you were  the
only man  on earth who's  wrong,  " he  said.  "It's  your  old  feeling  of
importance.  You  have too  much  of  it; you  also have too  much  personal
history.  On the other hand, you don't assume responsibility for  your acts;
you're  not  using  your death as  an adviser,  and  above all, you  are too
accessible. In  other words,  your life is  as messy  as it was before I met
you."
     Again I had  a genuine surge of pride  and wanted  to argue that he was
wrong. He gestured me to be quiet.
     "One must assume  responsibility for being in a weird world, " he said.
"We are in a weird world, you know."
     I nodded  my  head affirmatively.  "We're not  talking  about the  same
thing,  " he said. "For you  the world is weird because  if you're not bored
with  it you're at odds  with it. For me the  world is  weird because it  is
stupendous,  awesome, mysterious,  unfathomable;  my  interest has  been  to
convince  you that  you must assume  responsibility for being  here, in this
marvelous world, in this marvelous desert,  in this marvelous time. I wanted
to convince you that you  must learn to make every act count,  since you are
going to be here  for only a short while, in fact, too  short for witnessing
all the marvels of it."
     I insisted that to be bored with the world or to be at odds with it was
the human  condition. "So,  change it, " he  replied  dryly.  "If you do not
respond to that challenge you are as good as dead."
     He dared  me to name an issue, an item in my life  that had engaged all
my thoughts. I said art. I had always wanted to be an artist and for years I
had tried my hand at that. I still had the painful memory of my failure.
     "You have never taken the responsibility for being in this unfathomable
world, " he said in an indicting tone. "Therefore, you were never an artist,
and perhaps you'll never be a hunter."
     "This is my best, don Juan."
     "No. You don't know what your best is."
     "I am doing all I can."
     "You're wrong again. You can do better. There is one simple thing wrong
with you-you think you have plenty of time."  He  paused and looked at me as
if waiting for my reaction.
     "You think you have plenty of time," he repeated.
     "Plenty of time for what, don Juan?"
     "You think your life is going to last forever."
     "No. I don't."
     "Then, if  you don't think your life is going to last forever, what are
you waiting for? Why the hesitation to change?"
     "Has it ever occurred to you, don Juan, that I may not want to change?"
     "Yes, it has occurred to me. I did not want to change either, just like
you. However, I didn't like my life; I was tired of it, just like you. Now I
don't have enough of it."
     I vehemently asserted that his insistence about changing my way of life
was  frightening and arbitrary.  I said that I really agreed  with him, at a
certain level, but the mere fact that he was always the  master that  called
the shots made the situation untenable for me.
     "You don't have  time for this display, you fool, " he said in a severe
tone. "This,  whatever you're doing now, may be your last act  on earth.  It
may very well be your last battle.
     There is no power which could guarantee that you are going to  live one
more minute."
     "I know that, " I said with contained anger.
     "No. You don't. If  you knew that you would be a  hunter." I  contended
that I was aware of my impending death but it was  useless to talk  or think
about  it,  since I could not  do anything to avoid it. Don Juan laughed and
said I was like a comedian going mechanically through a routine.
     "If  this were  your  last battle on earth, I would say that you are an
idiot, " he said  calmly.  "You  are wasting your last act on earth  in some
stupid mood."
     We were quiet for a  moment. My thoughts ran rampant. He  was right, of
course. "You have no time, my friend,  no time.  None of us have  time, " he
said. "I agree, don Juan, but-"
     "Don't just agree with me, " he snapped. "You must, instead of agreeing
so easily, act upon it. Take the challenge. Change."
     "Just like that?"
     "That's  right. The  change  I'm  talking  about  never takes place  by
degrees;  it happens suddenly.  And you are not  preparing yourself for that
sudden act that will bring a total change."
     I believed he was  expressing a contradiction. I  explained to him that
if I were preparing myself to change I was certainly changing by degrees.
     "You haven't changed at all, " he said. "That is why you believe you're
changing little by little.  Yet, perhaps you will surprise yourself  someday
by changing  suddenly and without  a single  warning. I know this is so, and
thus  I  don't lose sight  of  my interest  in convincing  you." I could not
persist in my arguing. I was not sure of what I really wanted  to say. After
a moment's pause don Juan went on explaining his point.
     "Perhaps  I  should put  it in  a different  way,  " he said.  "What  I
recommend you to do is to notice that we do not have  any assurance that our
lives will go on indefinitely. I have  just said  that change comes suddenly
and unexpectedly, and so does death. What do you think we can do about it?"
     I thought  he was asking  a rhetorical  question, but he made a gesture
with his eyebrows urging me to answer.
     "To live as happily as possible, " I said.
     "Right! But do you know anyone who lives happily?"
     My first  impulse was  to say yes; I  thought I could use a  number  of
people  I knew  as examples. On second thought, however,  I  knew  my effort
would only be an empty attempt at exonerating myself.
     "No, " I said. "I really don't."
     "I  do,  " don Juan said.  "There are some people who are  very careful
about  the  nature of their  acts. Their happiness  is to act with  the full
knowledge that they don't have time;  therefore, their acts have a  peculiar
power; their acts have a sense of . . ."
     Don Juan seemed to be at a loss for words. He scratched his temples and
smiled.  Then  suddenly  he  stood  up  as  if  he  were  through  with  our
conversation.  I beseeched him to finish what he was telling me. He sat down
and puckered up his lips.
     "Acts have  power, " he said.  "Especially when the person acting knows
that those acts are his last battle. There is a  strange consuming happiness
in acting with the  full knowledge that whatever  one is doing may very well
be  one's last act on  earth. I  recommend that you reconsider your life and
bring your acts into that light."
     I disagreed with him. Happiness  for me was to assume that there was an
inherent continuity to my  acts and that I would be able  to continue doing,
at will, whatever  I  was doing at the moment, especially if  I was enjoying
it. I told him that my disagreement was not a banal one but stemmed from the
conviction that the world and myself had a determinable continuity. Don Juan
seemed to be amused by my efforts to make sense. He laughed, shook his head,
scratched  his  hair,  and  finally  when I  talked  about  a  "determinable
continuity" threw his hat to the ground and stomped on it.
     I ended up laughing at his clowning. "You don't have time, my friend, "
he said. "That is the misfortune of human beings. None of us have sufficient
time, and  your continuity has no meaning in this awesome, mysterious world.
"Your continuity only makes you timid, " he said. "Your acts cannot possibly
have  the flair,  the power, the compelling force of the acts performed by a
man who knows that he is fighting his last battle on earth.  In other words,
your continuity does not make you happy or powerful." I admitted that I  was
afraid of  thinking I was going to  die  and I accused him  of causing great
apprehension in me with his constant talk and concern about death.
     "But we are all going to die, " he said.
     He pointed towards some hills in the distance.
     "There is something out there waiting for me, for sure; and I will join
it, also for sure. But perhaps you're different and death is not waiting for
you at all."
     He laughed at my gesture of despair.
     "I don't want to think about it, don Juan."
     "Why not?"
     "It is  meaningless.  If it is out there waiting  for  me  why should I
worry about it?"
     "I didn't say that you have to worry about it."
     "What am I supposed to do then?"
     "Use it. Focus your attention  on the link between you and  your death,
without remorse or sadness or worrying. Focus your attention on the fact you
don't have time and let your acts flow accordingly. Let each of your acts be
your last battle on  earth. Only under those conditions  will your acts have
their rightful power.  Otherwise  they will be, for as long as you live, the
acts of a timid man."
     "Is it so terrible to be a timid man?"
     "No. It  isn't if you are going to be immortal, but if you are going to
die there is  no time  for timidity, simply because timidity makes you cling
to  something  that  exists  only  in your thoughts. It  soothes  you  while
everything is at a lull,  but  then the awesome, mysterious  world will open
its mouth  for you, as it  will open for every one of us, and then you  will
realize that your sure ways were  not  sure at  all. Being timid prevents us
from examining and exploiting our lot as men."
     "It is not natural to live with the  constant  idea of  our  death, don
Juan."
     "Our death is waiting and  this very act we're  performing now may well
be our last battle on earth,  " he replied in a solemn voice.  "I call it  a
battle because it is a struggle. Most people move  from  act  to act without
any struggle or thought. A hunter, on the contrary, assesses every  act; and
since he has an intimate knowledge of his death, he proceeds judiciously, as
if  every act  were his last  battle. Only a  fool would  fail to notice the
advantage a hunter has over his  fellow men. A hunter gives his  last battle
its due respect. It's only natural  that his last act on earth should be the
best  of  himself.  It's  pleasurable that way.  It  dulls  the  edge of his
fright."
     "You are right, " I conceded. "It's just hard to accept."
     "It'll take years for  you to  convince yourself and  then  it'll  take
years for you to act accordingly. I only hope you have time left."
     "I get scared when you say that, " I said.
     Don Juan examined me with a serious expression on his face.
     "I've  told you,  this is a  weird world, " he  said.  "The forces that
guide men are  unpredictable, awesome, yet  their splendor  is something  to
witness."
     He stopped talking and looked at me again. He seemed to be on the verge
of revealing something to me, but he checked himself and smiled.
     "Is there something that guides us?" I asked.
     "Certainly. There are powers that guide us."
     "Can you describe them?"
     "Not  really,  except  to call  them forces,  spirits, airs,  winds, or
anything like that."
     I wanted to probe him further, but before  I could ask anything else he
stood up. I stared at him,  flabbergasted.  He  had stood up  in  one single
movement; his body simply jerked up and he was on his feet.
     I was  still  pondering upon the  unusual skill that would be needed in
order to move with such speed when he  told me  in a dry tone of command  to
stalk a rabbit, catch it, kill it, skin  it, and  roast the meat  before the
twilight.
     He looked up at the sky and said that I might have enough time.
     I  automatically started off, proceeding the way  I had done  scores of
times.  Don  Juan  walked  beside  me  and  followed  my  movements  with  a
scrutinizing look. I was very calm and moved carefully and I had no  trouble
at all in catching a male rabbit.
     "Now kill it, " don Juan said dryly.
     I reached  into the trap to grab hold  of  the rabbit. I had it by  the
ears and was pulling it  out when a sudden sensation  of terror invaded  me.
For the first time since  don Juan had begun to teach me to hunt it occurred
to me that  he had never taught me how to  kill game. In the scores of times
we had roamed in the desert he himself had only killed one rabbit, two quail
and one rattlesnake.
     I dropped the rabbit and looked at don Juan.
     "I can't kill it, " I said.
     "Why not?"
     "I've never done that."
     "But you've killed hundreds of birds and other animals."
     "With a gun, not with my bare hands."
     "What difference does it make? This rabbit's time is up."
     Don Juan's tone shocked me; it was so authoritative, so  knowledgeable,
it left no doubts in my mind that he knew that the rabbit's time was up.
     "Kill it!" he commanded with a ferocious look in his eyes.
     "I can't."
     He yelled at me that the rabbit had to die. He said that its roaming in
that beautiful  desert had  come  to an end. I  had  no  business  stalling,
because the  power or the spirit that guides rabbits had led that particular
one into my trap, right at the edge of the twilight.
     A series  of confusing  thoughts and  feelings overtook  me, as  if the
feelings had been  out there  waiting for me.  I felt with agonizing clarity
the rabbit's tragedy, to have fallen into my trap. In a matter of seconds my
mind  swept across the most crucial moments of my own life, the many times I
had been the rabbit myself.
     I looked at it, and it looked at me. The  rabbit had backed up  against
the side of the cage; it was almost curled up, very quiet and motionless. We
exchanged a somber glance, and that glance, which I fancied to be  of silent
despair, cemented a complete identification on my part. "The hell with it, "
I said loudly. "I won't kill anything. That rabbit goes free."
     A profound emotion made me  shiver. My arms trembled as I tried to grab
the  rabbit by  the ears; it moved fast  and  I  missed.  I  again tried and
fumbled once  more. I became  desperate. I had the sensation  of  nausea and
quickly kicked the trap in order to smash it and let the rabbit go free. The
cage  was unsuspectedly strong and did not  break  as I thought it would. My
despair mounted to an  unbearable feeling of anguish. Using all my strength,
I stomped on the  edge of the cage with  my right foot.  The sticks  cracked
loudly.  I  pulled the rabbit  out.  I had  a  moment of  relief, which  was
shattered to bits in the next instant. The rabbit hung limp in  my  hand. It
was dead. I did not know what to  do. I became preoccupied  with finding out
how it had died. I turned to don Juan. He was
     staring at me. A feeling of terror sent a chill through my body.
     I sat down  by some rocks. I had a terrible headache. Don Juan put  his
hand  on my  head and whispered in my ear  that I had to skin the rabbit and
roast it before the twilight was over.
     I felt nauseated. He very patiently talked to me as if he were  talking
to a child. He said  that the powers that guided men or animals had led that
particular rabbit to me, in the same way they will lead  me to my own death.
He said the rabbit's death had been a gift for me in exactly the same way my
own death will be a gift for something or someone else.
     I  was dizzy. The simple events of that day had crushed  me. I tried to
think that it was only a rabbit; I could not, however, shake off the uncanny
identification I had had with it.
     Don Juan said that I needed to eat some of its meat, if only morsel, in
order to validate my finding.
     "I can't do that, " I protested meekly.
     "We  are dregs in the  hands of those  forces, "  he snapped at me. "So
stop  your  self-importance  and use this gift  properly." I  picked up  the
rabbit; it was warm.
     Don Juan leaned over and whispered in  my ear, "Your trap  was his last
battle  on earth. I told  you, he had no more time to roam in this marvelous
desert."

     BECOMING ACCESSIBLE TO POWER

     Thursday, August 11, 1961

     As soon  as I got out of my car I complained to don Juan that I was not
feeling well.
     "Sit down, sit down, " he said softly  and almost led me by the hand to
his porch. He smiled and patted me on the back.
     Two weeks before, on August 4th, don Juan, as he  had said, changed his
tactics  with me and allowed me  to ingest  some peyote buttons. During  the
height  of my hallucinatory experience I played with a dog that lived in the
house  where  the  peyote  session  took  place.  Don  Juan  interpreted  my
interaction with  the dog  as  a very  special event. He  contended  that at
moments of  power,  such as  the one I had  been living then,  the world  of
ordinary affairs did not exist and  nothing could be taken for granted, that
the dog was not really a dog  but the incarnation of Mescalito, the power or
deity contained in peyote.
     The post-effects of that experience were a general sense of fatigue and
melancholy, plus the incidence of exceptionally vivid dreams and nightmares.
     "Where's your writing gear?" don Juan asked as I sat down on the porch.
     I had left my notebooks in  my car. Don Juan walked back to the car and
carefully pulled out my briefcase and brought it to my side.
     He asked if I usually carried my briefcase when I walked. I said I did.
     "That's madness, "  he said. "I've told  you never to carry anything in
your hands when you walk. Get a knapsack."
     I laughed. The idea of carrying my notes in a knapsack was ludicrous. I
told him that ordinarily I wore a  suit and  a  knapsack over a  three-piece
suit would be a preposterous sight.
     "Put  your  coat on over  the  knapsack,"  he said. "It is better  that
people think you're a hunchback  than  to ruin your body  carrying  all this
around." He urged  me  to  get out  my  notebook and  write. He seemed to be
making a deliberate effort to put  me at ease.  I complained again about the
feeling of physical discomfort  and the  strange  sense of unhappiness I was
experiencing. Don Juan laughed and said, "You're beginning to learn."
     We then had a long conversation. He said that Mescalito, by allowing me
to play with him, had pointed me out as a "chosen man" and that, although he
was baffled by the omen because I was not an Indian, he was going to pass on
to me some secret knowledge. He said that he had had a "benefactor" himself,
who taught him how to become a "man of knowledge."
     I sensed  that something dreadful was about  to  happen. The revelation
that I was  his chosen man, plus the unquestionable strangeness of his  ways
and the devastating  effect that  peyote had had on me, created  a state  of
unbearable apprehension and indecision. But don Juan disregarded my feelings
and recommended that I should only think of the wonder of Mescalito  playing
with me.
     "Think  about nothing else, " he  said. "The  rest will come to you  of
itself."
     He stood up  and  patted me gently on  the head and said in a very soft
voice, "I am going to teach you how to become a warrior in the same manner I
have taught you how to hunt. I  must warn you,  though, learning how to hunt
has not made you  into a hunter,  nor would learning how to become a warrior
make you one."
     I experienced  a  sense  of frustration,  a  physical  discomfort  that
bordered on  anguish. I complained about the  vivid  dreams and nightmares I
was having.  He  seemed  to deliberate  for a  moment  and sat  down  again.
"They're weird dreams, " I said.
     "You've always had weird dreams, " he retorted.
     "I'm telling you, this time they  are  truly more  weird  than anything
I've ever had."
     "Don't concern yourself. They are only  dreams.  Like the dreams of any
ordinary dreamer, they don't have power. So what's the use of worrying about
them or talking about them?"
     "They  bother me,  don  Juan.  Isn't  there something I can do to  stop
them?"
     "Nothing. Let them  pass, "  he said. "Now it's time for you to  become
accessible to power, and you are going to begin by tackling dreaming."
     The tone of voice he used when he said "dreaming" made me think that he
was  using  the word in a very particular fashion.  I was  pondering about a
proper question to ask when he began to talk again.
     "I've never told  you about dreaming,  because  until  now  I  was only
concerned with teaching you how to be a hunter, " he said. "A hunter  is not
concerned with  the  manipulation  of power, therefore his dreams  are  only
dreams. They might be poignant but they are not dreaming.
     "A warrior, on the  other  hand, seeks power, and one of the avenues to
power  is dreaming. You may say that  the  difference between a hunter and a
warrior is that a warrior is on his
     way to power, while a hunter knows nothing or very little about it.
     "The decision as to who can be a warrior and  who  can only be a hunter
is not up to us. That decision is in the realm of the powers that guide men.
That's  why  your  playing with Mescalito was such  an important omen. Those
forces guided you to  me; they took you to that bus  depot,  remember?  Some
clown  brought  you  to me. A perfect omen, a clown  pointing you out. So, I
taught you  how  to be a hunter.  And then the other perfect omen, Mescalito
himself playing with you. See what I mean?"
     His weird  logic was overwhelming. His words  created visions of myself
succumbing to  something  awesome  and  unknown, something which  I  had not
bargained  for, and which I had  not  conceived existed, even in my  wildest
fantasies.
     "What do you propose I should do?" I asked.
     "Become accessible  to  power;  tackle your dreams,  " he replied. "You
call them dreams because you have no power. A warrior, being a man who seeks
power, doesn't call them dreams, he calls them real."
     "You mean he takes his dreams as being reality?"
     "He doesn't  take anything as being anything else. What you call dreams
are real for a warrior. You must understand  that a warrior is not a fool. A
warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he's not  drunk, or crazed,
and he has neither the  time nor  the disposition  to  bluff,  or to  lie to
himself,  or to make a  wrong move.  The stakes  are  too high for that. The
stakes  are his trimmed orderly life  which  he has taken so long to tighten
and perfect.  He  is not  going  to throw  that away  by  making some stupid
miscalculation, by taking something for being something else.
     "Dreaming is real for a  warrior because in it he can act deliberately,
he can choose and  reject, he can select from a variety of items those which
lead to power, and  then he can manipulate them and use  them,  while in  an
ordinary  dream he cannot  act deliberately." "Do  you  mean then, don Juan,
that dreaming is real?"
     "Of course it is real."
     "As real as what we are doing now?"
     "If you want to compare things, I can say that it is perhaps more real.
In  dreaming  you  have  power;  you  can  change things; you may  find  out
countless concealed facts; you can control whatever you want."
     Don  Juan's premises  always had  appealed to me at a certain  level. I
could easily understand his liking the idea that  one  could  do anything in
dreams, but  I  could not take him seriously. The jump  was  too  great.  We
looked at  each other  for a moment. His statements were  insane  and yet he
was,  to the  best of  my knowledge,  one of the most level-headed men I had
ever met.
     I told him that I could  not believe  he took his dreams to be reality.
He chuckled as if he knew the  magnitude  of my untenable  position, then he
stood up without saying a word and walked inside his house.
     I sat for a long time in  a state of stupor  until he  called me to the
back of his house. He had made some corn gruel and handed me a bowl. I asked
him about  the time when one  was awake. I  wanted to  know if he  called it
anything in particular. But he did not understand or did not want to answer.
     "What do you  call this,  what we're  doing now?" I asked, meaning that
what we were doing was reality as opposed to dreams.
     "I call it eating, " he said and contained his laughter.
     "I call it reality, " I said.  "Because  our eating  is actually taking
place."
     "Dreaming  also takes  place,  "  he replied,  giggling. "And  so  does
hunting, walking, laughing."
     I did not persist in arguing. I could not, however, even if I stretched
myself beyond my limits, accept his premise.  He seemed to be delighted with
my despair.
     As soon as we had finished eating he casually stated that we were going
to go for a hike, but we were not going to roam in the desert  in the manner
we had done before. "It's different this time, " he said. "From now on we're
going  to  places  of power; you're going  to  learn  how to  make  yourself
accessible  to  power." I  again expressed  my  turmoil.  I said I  was  not
qualified for that endeavor.
     "Come on, you're indulging  in silly fears, " he said in  a low  voice,
patting me on the back and smiling benevolently. "I've been catering to your
hunter's spirit. You like to roam with me in this beautiful desert. It's too
late for you to quit."
     He began to  walk  into the desert  chaparral. He signaled me  with his
head to follow him. I could have walked  to my car and left, except  that  I
liked  to  roam in  that beautiful desert  with him. I liked the  sensation,
which I experienced only in  his  company,  that this was indeed an awesome,
mysterious, yet beautiful world. As he said, I was hooked.
     Don Juan led me to the  hills towards the east. It was a  long hike. It
was  a  hot  day;  the  heat,  however,  which  ordinarily would  have  been
unbearable to me,  was somehow unnoticeable. We walked  for quite a distance
into a canyon until don Juan  came to a halt and sat  down in  the  shade of
some boulders. I took some crackers out of my knapsack but he told me not to
bother with them.
     He said that I should sit in a prominent place.  He pointed to a single
almost  round boulder ten or  fifteen  feet away and helped me climb to  the
top.  I thought he was also  going to sit there, but instead he just climbed
part of the way in order to hand me some pieces of dry meat. He told me with
a deadly serious expression that it was power meat and should be chewed very
slowly and should not be mixed with  any other food. He then  walked back to
the  shaded area  and  sat down  with  his  back against a  rock. He  seemed
relaxed,  almost  sleepy. He  remained  in the  same  position  until I  had
finished eating. Then he sat up straight and tilted his head to the right.
     He seemed to  be listening attentively. He  glanced  at me two or three
times, stood up abruptly, and began to scan the surroundings with  his eyes,
the way a hunter would do.  I automatically froze on the spot and only moved
my eyes in order  to follow his movements. Very  carefully he stepped behind
some rocks, as if he were  expecting game  to  come into  the area  where we
were. I realized then that we were in a round covelike bend in the dry water
canyon, surrounded by sandstone boulders.
     Don Juan suddenly came out  from behind the rocks and smiled at me.  He
stretched his arms, yawned, and  walked  towards the boulder  where I was. I
relaxed my tense position and sat down.
     "What happened?" I asked in a whisper.
     He answered me, yelling, that there was  nothing  around there to worry
about.
     I felt  an  immediate jolt in my stomach.  His answer was inappropriate
and it  was inconceivable to me that he would yell, unless he had a specific
reason for it. I began to slide down from the boulder, but he yelled that  I
should stay there a while longer. "What are you doing?" I asked.
     He sat down and concealed himself between two  rocks at the base of the
boulder where I was, and then he said in a very loud voice that he had  only
been looking around because he thought he had heard something.
     I asked if he had heard a large animal. He put  his hand to his ear and
yelled that  he was  unable to hear me  and that I should shout my words.  I
felt  ill at ease  yelling, but  he urged me in a loud voice  to speak up. I
shouted that  I  wanted to know what was going on, and  he shouted back that
there was  really  nothing around there.  He  yelled, asking if I  could see
anything unusual from the top of the boulder. I said no,  and he asked me to
describe to him the terrain towards the south.
     We shouted back and forth  for a while and then he  signaled me to come
down. I joined him and he whispered in my ear that the yelling was necessary
to make our presence known, because I had to make  myself  accessible to the
power of that specific water hole.
     I  looked around but could not see the water hole. He  pointed  that we
were standing on it. "There's water  here, " he said in a whisper, "and also
power.  There's a spirit here  and we have to lure it out;  perhaps it  will
come after you."
     I wanted to  know  more  about the alleged  spirit, but he insisted  on
total  silence. He advised  me to stay  perfectly  still and  not let out  a
whisper or make the slightest movement to betray our presence.
     Apparently  it  was easy for  him to remain in complete  immobility for
hours; for me,  however, it was sheer torture. My  legs fell asleep, my back
ached, and tension  built up  around  my neck  and shoulders. My entire body
became numb and cold. I was in great discomfort when don  Juan finally stood
up. He just sprung to his feet and extended his hand to me to  help me stand
up.
     As  I  was  trying to  stretch  my  legs I  realized the  inconceivable
easiness with  which  don Juan had jumped up after hours  of  immobility. It
took quite  some time for  my  muscles to regain the  elasticity needed  for
walking.
     Don Juan headed back for  the house. He walked extremely slowly. He set
up a  length  of  three paces as the distance I should observe in  following
him. He meandered around the regular route and crossed it four or five times
in different directions; when we finally arrived at his  house it  was  late
afternoon.
     I tried to question him  about the events of the day. He explained that
talking was unnecessary. For  the time being,  I had to  refrain from asking
questions until  we were  in  a place of power. I was dying to know what  he
meant  by that and tried  to whisper  a question, but he reminded me, with a
cold severe look, that he meant business.
     We sat on his porch  for hours. I worked on my notes. From time to time
he handed me a piece of dry meat; finally  it was too dark to write. I tried
to think about the new developments, but  some part of myself refused to and
I fell asleep.

     Saturday, August 19, 1961

     Yesterday morning don Juan and I drove  to town  and ate breakfast at a
restaurant. He  advised  me  not to change my eating habits too drastically.
"Your  body  is  not used to power  meat, " he said. "You'd get  sick if you
didn't  eat your food." He  himself ate heartily. When I  joked about  it he
simply said, "My body likes everything."
     Around  noon we hiked back  to the water canyon.  We  proceeded to make
ourselves noticeable to  the spirit by "noisy talk" and by  a forced silence
which lasted hours.  When we left the place, instead of  heading back to the
house, don Juan took off in the direction  of the mountains. We reached some
mild slopes first and then we climbed to the top of some  high hills. There,
don  Juan picked out a spot to rest in the  open unshaded  area.  He told me
that  we had  to wait until dusk , and that  I should conduct myself in  the
most natural fashion, which included asking all the questions I wanted.
     "I know that  the spirit is out there lurking, " he said in a  very low
voice.
     "Where?"
     "Out there, in the bushes."
     "What kind of spirit is it?"
     He looked at me with a quizzical expression and retorted,
     "How many kinds are there?"
     We both laughed. I was asking questions out of nervousness.
     "It'll come out at dusk, " he said.  "We just have to wait." I remained
quiet. I had run out of questions.
     "This  is the time when we must keep on talking, "  he said. "The human
voice  attracts spirits. There's  one lurking out there now.  We are  making
ourselves available to it, so keep on talking."
     I  experienced  an  idiotic  sense  of  vacuity.  I  could not think of
anything to say. He laughed and patted me on the back.
     "You're truly  a pill, " he said. "When you have to talk, you lose your
tongue. Come on, beat your gums."
     He made a hilarious gesture of beating  his gums together, opening  and
closing his mouth with great speed.
     "There are certain things we will talk about from now on only at places
of power, " he went on. "I have brought you here, because this is your first
trial. This is a place of power, and here we can talk only about power."
     "I really don't know what power is, " I said.
     "Power is something a warrior deals with, " he  said. "At first it's an
incredible, far-fetched  affair; it is hard to even think  about it. This is
what's happening to you now. Then  power  becomes a  serious matter; one may
not have it, or one may not even fully realize that it exists, yet one knows
that  something is there,  something  which was not noticeable before.  Next
power is manifested as something uncontrollable that comes to oneself. It is
not possible for me to say how  it comes or what it really is. It is nothing
and yet it makes marvels appear before your very eyes. And finally  power is
something in oneself, something that controls one's acts and yet obeys one's
command."
     There was a short pause. Don Juan asked me if  I had understood. I felt
ludicrous saying I did. He seemed to have noticed my dismay and chuckled.
     "I am going  to teach you right here the first step to power, " he said
as if  he were dictating a letter to me. "I am going to teach you how to set
up dreaming."
     He looked at me and  again asked me if I knew what he meant. I did not.
I was  hardly  following  him at all. He explained that to "set up dreaming"
meant  to have a concise and pragmatic control over the general situation of
a dream, comparable to the control  one  has over  any choice in the desert,
such as climbing up a hill or remaining in the shade of a water canyon.
     "You must start by doing something very simple, " he said.
     "Tonight  in your dreams you  must look  at your hands." I  laughed out
loud. His tone  was so factual that  it  was as  if he were telling me to do
something commonplace.
     "Why do you laugh?" he asked with surprise.
     "How can I look at my hands in my dreams?"
     "Very simple, focus your eyes on them just like this." He bent his head
forward and  stared  at his hands with  his mouth open.  His gesture  was so
comical that I had to laugh.
     "Seriously, how can you expect me to do that?" I asked.
     "The  way I've  told you, " he snapped.  "You  can, of course, look  at
whatever you goddamn  please-your toes, or your belly, or  your pecker,  for
that matter. I said your hands because that was the easiest thing for  me to
look at. Don't think it's a joke. Dreaming is  as serious as seeing or dying
or any other thing in this awesome, mysterious world.
     "Think   about  it  as   something  entertaining.   Imagine   all   the
inconceivable  things  you could  accomplish. A  man  hunting  for power has
almost no limits in his dreaming."
     I asked him to give me some pointers.
     "There aren't any pointers, " he said. "Just look at your hands."
     "There must be more that you could tell me, " I insisted.
     He  shook  his  head and  squinted  his  eyes, staring  at me  in short
glances.
     "Every  one  of  us is different, " he  finally  said. "What  you  call
pointers would only be what I myself did when I was learning. We are not the
same; we aren't even vaguely alike."
     "Maybe anything you'd say would help me."
     "It would be simpler for you just to start looking at your hands."
     He  seemed  to be organizing his thoughts  and bobbed his  head up  and
down.
     "Every time you  look at anything in your dreams it changes shape, " he
said  after a long silence. "The  trick in  learning  to set up  dreaming is
obviously  not just  to look  at  things but to sustain the sight  of  them.
Dreaming is real when one has succeeded  in bringing everything  into focus.
Then there is no difference between what you do  when you sleep and what you
do when you are not sleeping. Do you see what I mean?"
     I confessed that although I understood what he had said I was incapable
of accepting his premise.  I brought up  the point that in a civilized world
there were scores of people who had delusions and could not distinguish what
took place in the real world from what took place in their fantasies. I said
that such persons were undoubtedly mentally ill, and my uneasiness increased
every time he would recommend I should act like a crazy man.
     After my long explanation don Juan made a comical gesture of despair by
putting  his hands to his  cheeks and sighing loudly.  "Leave your civilized
world alone, " he said. "Let it  be! Nobody is asking you to  behave like  a
madman. I've  already told you, a warrior has to be perfect in order to deal
with  the powers he hunts; how can you conceive that a warrior would  not be
able to tell things apart?
     "On the  other hand, you, my friend, who  know what the real  world is,
would fumble and die in no  time at all  if you would have to depend on your
ability for telling what is real and what is not."
     I obviously  had not expressed what I really had in mind. Every time  I
protested I was simply voicing the  unbearable frustration  of being  in  an
untenable position.
     "I am  not trying to make you into a sick, crazy man, " don