The Enchanted Burro And Other Stories as I Have Known Them from Maine to Chile and California — Context and Discussion

Ritual as Narrative Engine

In the excerpt, Pablo’s hunt is a sequence of ritual acts: kneeling, breaking a twig, drawing the Left-Hand Pouch, smoking to the cardinal points. Each gesture is named and described—the tiny arrowhead of moss agate, the sacred corn meal inside the fetish. Lummis does not step aside to explain Pueblo belief; he lets the actions carry the story. The effect is that the reader learns the logic of the hunt by watching it fail. The doe’s unnatural resilience is never rationalized, only registered in Pablo’s growing dread. This pattern recurs in other stories: a mummy-miner, a witch deer, a silver omelet. The rituals are not decorative; they are the plot.

The Foreword’s Challenge

Lummis opens with a sardonic jab at “Truly Clever” authors who write from Pullman cars or library desks. He claims twenty-five years of footsore travel, new languages, and slow adoption from stranger to friend. This is not mere boasting: the stories themselves are dense with specific detail—the name of a lake (Titi-Caca), a mining process (patio), a mountain (Misti). The foreword frames the collection as earned knowledge. Yet the fiction is not reportage; it is shaped by the conventions of the adventure tale and the local-color sketch. The tension between authentic experience and literary form is part of the book’s texture.

Geographic Range and Its Limits

The subtitle promises stories “from Maine to Chile and California,” and the contents deliver: New Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, California, New England. But the excerpts show that the bulk of the collection dwells in the Southwest and the Andes. The catalog subjects confirm this: New Mexico and South America are the primary settings. The New England pieces—‘A ’Rastle with a Wildcat,’ ‘The Rebel Double Runner’—are outliers. Readers should not expect a balanced tour of the Americas; the book’s center of gravity is the frontier where Lummis lived and worked. The variety is real, but the weight is uneven.

Because the excerpts are limited, the reader will encounter many stories not sampled here—‘The Mummy-Miner,’ ‘The Silver Omelet,’ ‘The Great Magician.’ The collection rewards attention to how Lummis handles the boundary between folklore and fiction. Watch for moments when a character’s belief system collides with an outsider’s perspective, or when a ritual is performed without explanation. The book is best read as a series of experiments in ethnographic storytelling, not as a unified novel.

I’ve shelved Lummis’s burro tales beside Dames — Background and Themes for years now, and they seem to whisper to one another. Both understand how a place shapes its people’s quiet rituals, their daily dignity. One walks desert trails, the other parlor floors, yet each holds the same patient respect for lives lived close to the bone.