- This long poem tells the story of the Ck'o'yo magician Kaup'a'ta, or "the Gambler."
- He's a handsome guy, with nice clothes and a big house in the mountains.
- He waits for people to wander up to his house and then tries to get them to gamble with him. He offers his fancy schmancy clothes for the old hunting clothes they're wearing. Just think of it as a game of mystical strip poker.
- No one ever refuses the Gambler.
- The blue cornmeal the Gambler offers his guests is mixed with human blood. When they eat it, the Gambler has power over them.
- The guests lose their shirts—literally.
- When the guests are naked and helpless, the Gambler offers them one last chance. If they can guess what he has in a bag hanging on the wall, they can have all their clothes back, and all of his, too.
- But if they don't guess correctly, they lose their lives.
- The guests always try to guess (they're in the Gambler's power, remember), but they always guess wrong.
- So the Gambler hangs them in his storeroom, cuts out their hearts, and lets their blood run down into the blue cornmeal.
- One day the Gambler even captures the storm clouds. Since they can't be killed, he locks them up in four rooms of his house.
- After three years of drought, the storm clouds' father, the Sun, goes looking for them.
- The Sun asks his grandmother, Spiderwoman, what happened to the storm clouds. She tells him what happened with the Gambler.
- She coaches him on how to defeat the Gambler.
- First she gives him some medicine to blow on the black ducks that guard the Gambler's house.
- She warns him not to eat anything the Gambler offers him.
- Most importantly, she tells him what's in the bags hanging on the wall. The Gambler has two constellations in his bags: Pleiades and Orion.
- When the Sun goes to see the Gambler, things go just as Spiderwoman predicted. When the Sun has lost everything, the Gambler bets his life that the Sun can't guess what he has in the bags hanging on the wall.
- When the Sun guesses correctly, the Gambler tells him to take a knife and kill him. But the Sun knows the Gambler is trying to trick him because he can't be killed.
- The Sun cuts out the Gambler's eyes and throws them into the sky, where they become stars.
- Then he releases the clouds and tells them to come home.
- Back to prose: Tayo meets a woman under an apricot tree. He explains to her that he's looking for some cattle.
- The woman is only a little older than he is, and she's working the indie-artsy look.
- Tayo thinks her face looks like an antelope dancer's mask.
- Oh, and she has ocher eyes. (Ocher is kind of an earthy yellow.) Everyone important in this novel has unusually colored eyes. Could this be the woman from Betonie's vision?
- The woman lets Tayo get his horse some water and he looks for a place outside to unroll his sleeping bag.
- It's pretty windy out, and the woman invites Tayo to come inside.
- The woman is wearing a hand-woven blanket with patterns of storm clouds, lightning, and wind.
- The woman's house is comfortable and familiar.
- Tayo is nervous. His heart is beating fast and his hands are all sweaty. We think he kind of likes this lady.
- The woman gives him something to eat, then mentions that you can see the stars tonight.
- Seems like an innocent statement, right? But it gives Tayo a chill and makes it hard for him to eat his dinner.
- Tayo has been watching the sky every night, looking for the pattern of stars Betonie drew. In September he had seen them in the north.
- He had left Laguna before dawn and driven all day until a washed-out bridge prevented him from driving anymore. Then he continued on horseback.
- Tayo gets up from the table and walks out onto the porch. When he looks up at the sky, he sees Betonie's stars!
- The following page is a picture of the star pattern that Tayo sees in the sky.