S’ab Neid Pi Has

S’ab Neid Pi Has, known as Looks at Nothing, is a blind medicine man whose influence is traced through the people and objects he leaves behind. Although the narrative offers only brief glimpses of him, his teaching survives in Gabe Ortiz’s practice, in the buckskin medicine pouch Gabe passes to Lani Walker, and in the peace smoke shared with both Lani and Brandon Walker. His legacy is not presented as a title alone: it is a way of understanding vision, spiritual responsibility, and the possibility of holding apparently different commitments together.

Identity and Teaching

S’ab Neid Pi Has is introduced as an old blind medicine man and the mentor who told Gabe Ortiz that he would become a medicine man. Gabe initially thought the prediction impossible. As a Christian Scientist, he could not see how that faith could coexist with traditional healing. Later, he concluded that his teacher had been right: the two roles did not have to cancel each other out. The story gives no detailed account of S’ab Neid Pi Has’s life or the circumstances in which he became blind; instead, it defines him through what he taught and what others carried forward.

One of his most memorable teachings is a distinction between sight and vision. As he and his protégé hurried in Gabe Ortiz’s tow truck toward Diana Ladd’s home at Gates Pass, S’ab Neid Pi Has said, “I have lost my sight. I have not lost my vision.” The line makes blindness a concrete part of his identity without treating it as the limit of his knowledge or authority. Its significance also extends beyond him: his example gives Gabe a language for understanding insight as something other than physical sight.

The Medicine Pouch and Peace Smoke

The principal object associated with S’ab Neid Pi Has is his huashomi, a fringed buckskin medicine pouch that he gave to Gabe Ortiz years before the later events of the novel. He had worn it around his thin waist; by the time Gabe brought it out again, it had become threadbare. The pouch contains the practical traces of its use as well as its ceremonial importance: Gabe retrieves from it an old Zippo lighter and uses that lighter to prepare and light wild tobacco.

Brandon Walker’s first encounter with the peace smoke takes place beneath a mesquite tree beside the parking lot of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Gabe has brought S’ab Neid Pi Has there and waited for Brandon to arrive. The old medicine man fills and rolls a cigarette with wiw, rather than the unfiltered Camels Brandon had smoked before quitting. After lighting it with the Zippo, he says nawoj, a word Brandon later learns means “friendly gift” in the context of the Tohono O’odham Peace Smoke. He passes the cigarette first to Gabe and then to Brandon. The bitter smoke catches in Brandon’s throat, but the ceremony also marks his admission to an experience he understands few Anglos encounter. S’ab Neid Pi Has’s teaching is therefore transmitted not only through instruction but through a shared act of welcome.

Inheritance Through Gabe Ortiz

The pouch’s later passage to Lani Walker extends the teacher’s influence into a new generation. During Lani’s required sixteen-day e lihmhun after she killed Mitch Johnson, Gabe visits her each day with a soothing salve and the salt-free meal required by the ceremony. On its last night, he brings the medicine pouch. After they eat, he draws a circle around himself and Lani, opens the pouch, takes out wild tobacco, and lights it with S’ab Neid Pi Has’s old lighter. Lani smokes the peace smoke for the first time with Gabe, her godfather and a beloved family friend. The ceremony makes the inheritance intimate: the pouch is not simply transferred, but brought into a moment of shared instruction and care.

Gabe does not explain every part of what happens that night. The smoke leaves Lani light-headed, and some of their conversation slips from her conscious memory. What remains clear is the act itself and the setting: a circle drawn around the two of them on the mountain, tobacco from the inherited pouch, and a practice that joins the teacher’s past to Lani’s present. The book thus presents S’ab Neid Pi Has’s influence as something preserved through repeated use, even when the original teacher is absent and the full meaning cannot be reduced to a single explanation.

Legacy and Narrative Significance

When Gabe eventually gives the pouch to Lani, Brandon recognizes it as a passing of the torch. He imagines a line of medicine people extending back through successive generations to the ancient medicine woman Kulani O’oks, while understanding that the pouch’s actual, directly established passage is from S’ab Neid Pi Has to Gabe and then to Lani. The distinction matters: the novel places the object within a larger sense of inheritance without claiming a documented chain beyond what its characters can know.

The legacy also carries a question Gabe himself once struggled to answer. He is both a devout Christian Scientist and a powerful medicine man; Lani, Gabe believes, may become both a physician and a medicine woman. Brandon cannot easily reconcile these combinations, but neither Gabe nor Lani treats them as contradictions that must be resolved by choosing one identity over another. S’ab Neid Pi Has’s earlier confidence in Gabe, and his remembered words about vision, give that possibility a foundation. His presence in the story is consequently measured less by the scenes he occupies than by the durable relationships, practices, and expectations that continue in his absence.