With their Indian guide, Bernard and Lenina enter the Savage Reservation. Lenina finds everything here “queer.”
Lenina soon discovers that she has forgotten her soma, so she must experience the Indian village of Malpais as an unmedicated reality. In quick succession, she and Bernard witness old age in the figure of an ancient Indian, Indian mothers nursing their babies, and a hedonistic ritual dance that fuses Christian and Indian religion. This wild dance ends with a coyote-masked shaman whipping a young man until he collapses—a blood sacrifice to bring the rain and make the corn grow.
After this bloody spectacle, Bernard and Lenina meet a straw-haired, blue-eyed young man dressed—incongruously, it seems—as an Indian. Strangely, too, the young man speaks like a character from Shakespeare and tells them that his mother—Linda—comes from the “Other Place.” When he also mentions that his father was named “Tomakin,” Bernard connects this young man with the D.H.C.’s visit to the Reservation.
The young savage introduces them to Linda—a “very stout blonde squaw,” who tells Lenina and Bernard her strange story of being abducted by the Indians. She has spent much of her life on the Reservation, she explains, where she gave birth to her son, John, the young savage.
