A down-and-out member of the royal family befriends me. He's got a scheme to win power. On the day of the new queen's coronation, we sneak into the capital. Slip into the parade in front of her float. When we come to a narrow place, he strings three dark purple cords across. This is the sign of the royal house, so no one dares to unbind it, and the parade must stop. When it does, the down-&-outer leaps to her float, grabs her crown and runs.

The Navaho Elders stare down from the judging stands; we try to look innocent.

Later we're cornered. The only way out is to attack a guard tower and fight our way past them. Kill one guard. And they're immortal!

At this point I complain to the Genius Cartoonist who's drawing our adventures: "This chapter is too violent. Killing immortals is not only bad karma, it's bad komix!"

So the Artist draws us in a second less violent chase...

Now we're snake people being hunted by an FBI agent. We can't negotiate--we can't even speak human language, just hiss.

We make it to a safe house, but the G-man raids it--lands a chopper on the lawn! Swiftness and daring are our only hope--as he enters the house, we slip down into a steep ravine, slither back round to the front yard, and hide in his helicopter.

He comes back out, starts it up, and flies to Headquarters to report on the snake hunt--with us in back.

We slip out of the chopper and over to the FBI research library. Aha! The card catalog. Now here's a way we can speak. I pull open a drawer with my fangs, and flip the cards with my tongue... to a card with a subject heading on it, printed in red. "Animals, Wild--Harmless."

The librarian comes over warily. I poke my snout at the heading. That gives her pause--we can read? We're intelligent?!

In the end we negotiate, with a translator. I apologize to the lead snakehunter for biting him once, and he apologizes for shooting at me (it's why I bit him)...

And that's that.

"Not perfect, but better" I think to our Cartoonist. And wake.

Notes

• Navaho Elders and my human-language problems: my family had just been camping in & around the Navaho Reservation. I was studying the language, which I found challenging to pronounce, but fascinating. So concise and exact.
• Snakes: Unsure. A subliminal sighting that day? We were camped at Bryce National Park, pretty high up for rattlers, over 2500m/8000'. More likely symbolic. But of what?
• Violence toward and from government: at the time, the news was full of governmental use of (unapologetic) force and outright killings. Kent State, Jackson State, Attica Prison, the storming of Alcatraz. And Pine Ridge, with G-men versus Sioux, was yet to come.
• "Wild Animals, Harmless": This scene is why I posted this decades-old dream. So often snakes are seen as Freudian phallic symbols; occasionally, as symbols of regeneration (shedding their skin) or wisdom. But this snake-me shows real ingenuity--if you can't speak Human, find writing that speaks for you!

Or it may have been looking forward, not back. Years after this, after college, my first real job was updating the card catalog for Stanford's main library. Before the catalog went online, I filed around half a million catalog cards. Makes me wonder...

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