At sixteen years old, she was old enough to be married and to be facing the appalling ancientness of her twenties. And yet her own fate seemed almost secondary. The old ones warned that the new century was coming, and with it, the end of the entire world. 1900! Cayetana could not imagine such a frightening date -- all those empty zeros. Lutheran missionaries had said Jesus Himself was riding out of Heaven on a fiery horse, and, apparently, all the dead would leap out of the ground and kill everybody. A wandering Lipan held a short council with the People and told them that the end would be different: the white men would all die and the dead Indios and the buffalo would return. He had given Huila three buffalo teeth and promised that these awsome beasts would be back. The People had never heard of buffalo. "We didn't know they'd left," noted Don Teófano.

"What of the mestizos, like us?" asked Don Nacho Gómez-Palacio. The Lipan had pondered it and said, "Half of you will probably die." The question of the day, after that, was: will half of all of us die, or will half of each of us die? The men were comforted by the thought of their bottom halves living.