Butterflies

Butterflies, or hohokimal, are the living creation of I’itoi in an origin tale woven into the novel’s contemporary narrative. He makes them from the changing colors and patterns of the natural world, then releases them to dance before a delighted group of children. Their origin gives them a particular significance: they are beautiful and joyful, yet associated with shadows and fleeting light, and created to answer I’itoi’s sadness at the transformations of age.

The origin tale

I’itoi comes to a village after a long, hot summer to see whether his people have enough water. There he sees Indian Children playing, an old woman carrying wood, and an old coyote whose ribs show beneath his ragged coat. The children are carefree; the old woman and coyote have lost the energy to sing, play, and dance. Their contrasting conditions make age visible as a change in what bodies can do.

Resting in the shade of cottonwoods, I’itoi considers how living things alter over time. Children will grow old; young calves will mature; a colt joyfully kicking up its heels will become an old horse. Flowers, too, will wither, their colors fading. The butterflies arise from this contemplation: I’itoi wants something that can remain happy and beautiful rather than becoming bent, heavy, dry, or colorless.

Materials and making

Before making the butterflies, I’itoi notices the scene around him: yellow autumn leaves overhead, blue sky showing through them, shadows beneath the branches, and patches of sunlight moving across the ground. Their pattern recalls the children’s dancing. From these ordinary elements he finds a form of beauty that is neither separate from change nor untouched by the world that changes.

I’itoi carries a bag with which he can make things. He gathers yellow leaves and dark shadows, adds sunbeams, brown leaves, and tiny white flowers, then reaches high enough to include bits of blue sky. The mixture is assembled rather than discovered complete: color, shade, light, and plant life are brought together in a single creation. After looking inside, he decides to add more yellow leaves, and catches pieces of sky as well.

Their first flight

The children approach to see what I’itoi is doing and whether he wants to play. Tired from his work, he sets down the bag, lies down with his head on it, and falls asleep with the children in the cool shade. When he wakes, he calls them to watch and shakes the bag open. The leaves, sunspots, shadows, flowers, and fragments of blue sky emerge alive. They float briefly, then dance away into the sunlight, with the children dancing after them.

The release turns the materials of I’itoi’s making into movement. What had been gathered and held in a bag becomes something that cannot be kept there: the butterflies take flight, and the children follow. I’itoi remains beneath the tree, glad that he has made something beautiful and gay that will not grow ugly with age. The tale identifies this moment as the birth of hohokimal.

Change, beauty, and recurrence

The story does not make the surrounding world exempt from aging. The old woman, the coyote, the horse, and the fading flowers remain part of I’itoi’s reflections; the butterflies are his answer to their decline, not a denial that decline occurs. Their origin in autumn leaves and shadows also binds their brightness to the very contrasts that prompted their creation. Light and shade, color and fading, stillness and dance coexist in their making.

A small domestic detail elsewhere in the narrative echoes this pattern. Damsel, a dog in Brandon Walker and Diana Ladd’s household, pays particular attention to the shadows that planes and butterflies leave on the ground rather than to the moving objects themselves. Chasing those shadows is a solitary game she may pursue until exhausted. The tale’s butterflies dance away from I’itoi’s bag into sunlight; Damsel attends instead to their ground-level trace, turning an origin story’s play of light and shadow into a recurring detail of ordinary life.

Place in the narrative

The origin tale appears amid the novel’s account of contemporary events, including the investigation of a murder in the desert. Its movement from children playing beneath cottonwoods to children pursuing newly made butterflies offers a different kind of attention from the surrounding crime narrative: it pauses over how joy, beauty, and loss can exist in the same world. The tale’s resolution is creation and shared play, while its premise remains the unavoidable passage from youth to age.

The butterflies therefore carry both a story-world identity and a thematic function. They are a specific creation made from recognizable fragments of the landscape, but their origin also gives flight to I’itoi’s wish for lasting beauty. Their brief appearance in the air, followed by the children’s dance after them, makes that wish vivid without changing the conditions that gave rise to it.