Whispers of Old Winds

By George Seaton

After Sam returns home from two tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, he moves to the Colorado mountains, where he hopes to begin a new life with his husband, Michael. Sam becomes the sheriff of sparsely populated Pine County, while Michael opens a curio shop for tourists where he sells his art. When Sam and his deputy attempt to rescue a body from a dangerously fragile mountainside snowpack, Sam’s perception of the world, his husband, and the veracity of truths whispered in old winds, are called into question.

I’
D
ONCE
told Michael about the Navajo kid in my unit who believed the lore of his ancestors was true and irrefutable. The kid’s name was Joe Hill, and his eyes would sparkle and his arms and hands would speak a language of their own when he’d sit with me and retell the stories he’d been told as a child by his grandparents and the elders of his tribe. There was the Sun God, who rode from east to west each day on one of his five horses, carrying the sun with him. And Spider Woman, who sat upon Spider Rock and taught the Navajo how to weave on a loom, using the sky and the earth as materials, with lightning and sun halos to perfect the strength, vibrance, and beauty of the weave. There was the First Woman, who married the Sun God and gave birth to the Sun God’s child, and then, after resting under a cliff and being sprinkled with stream water, she gave birth to the Water God’s child. Yes, and there were the stories of creatures who were once human but became shape-shifters through witchcraft when they desired to change or when the situation called for it. Joe called these creatures skinwalkers, who could take the form of the animals of the forest, desert, and plains.

“Did you believe the story about the skinwalkers?” Michael asked, his head resting on his arms as he lay on the rug of many colors in front of the rock-lined fireplace. The fire reflected in his brown eyes, and also the crystal glass into which I’d just poured more red wine. His hair, too, shined with the rise and fall of the flames.

“I think
he
believed it. He was a good kid—a good soldier. He was from northwestern New Mexico.”

The deadly quiet mountain night was upon us, the only illumination in the cabin coming from the fire. The rug provided its own heat, the Puebloan weavers surely having infused it with their own ancestral lore. I sat cross-legged in front of Michael and concluded that any happiness I’d ever sought in this world was at hand. I knew this simple moment would reside forever in that place in my mind where such precious things are stored for later retrieval, for the times when they’re needed the most.

“Were there skinwalkers in Iraq? Afghanistan?” Michael asked.

“Several incidences. Or so Joe said.”

“But you believed him?”

“To a point.” I paused to sip wine.

Michael sat up, faced me, and crossed his legs like mine. “Tell me,” he said, with the expression on his face that had come to explain so much about the man that fate or dumb luck or heaven above had brought into my life when I had needed him the most. It expressed Michael’s insatiable hunger for truths that were hidden behind opaque surfaces; he yearned to get to the bottom of things.

“One time,” I said, smiling, knowing what I told him was ambrosia, a sweetly fulfilling gift that fed his passion for knowing the unknowable. “One time,” I repeated, “we were on night patrol near a village of mud houses. There was no moon or electric lights. Some of the villagers had generators for electricity, but they’d all been turned off. It was very quiet. Joe sat down beside me. He was a small man but tightly muscled. Had the sweetest smile and the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. He’d just been promoted to PFC and was proud of that. Anyway, we had stopped on a small rise that overlooked a village we believed had been infiltrated by the Taliban. I told my men to spread out. Joe and I were looking through our NODs—night vision goggles—at the village below us when Joe said, ‘I saw an owl.’

“‘Cool,’ I said, thinking that seeing an owl was pretty special for Joe given…. Well, given that he was an Indian.

“Then Joe put his hand on my shoulder. ‘No. Not so cool,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a skinwalker. An owl. Somebody is gonna die.’

“I flipped my goggles up and looked at Joe. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

“‘Maybe they’re already dead,’ Joe said. ‘Look! There!’ He pointed.

“I flipped my NODs back down and looked at where Joe was pointing. I saw a vividly white blur, as if a bird were flapping its wings and alighting on the ground. When the flapping stopped, the white blur became the shadow of a man.”

“A skinwalker?” Michael asked.

“Maybe. The next thing I knew, I heard another one of my unit say, ‘Oh! Christ!’ I looked to my right, about twenty yards away, and saw two or three of my men hovering over something on the ground. We rushed over there. A staff sergeant named McGill was lying on the ground, his throat cut ear to ear.”

“Damn.” Michael’s eyes were wide, a concerned look on his face.

“Yeah. No one had seen or heard anything—except Joe.”

“But you…. You saw it too,” Michael said.

“Yeah. I saw something.”

“Wow. What about the other times? You said there were several?”

I sipped some more wine, then reached out and drew my fingers through Michael’s hair. “Dear heart, I don’t really want to remember those things. There was nothing good about them.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “But you believe? Skinwalkers?”

“Ah,” I sighed. “I believe there are some things that are unknowable, mysteries that we can never untangle.”

He smiled then and nodded as he picked up his glass and sipped.

I don’t know why, but I felt that maybe he knew more than I did about such things.

I
GLANCE
out the window, and there’s a figure approaching the door, a fur-lined hood over the head, the head bent down against the sideways-blowing snow. The door opens and I see it’s Digger as he pulls the hood off and slams the door behind him.

“Whew!” he says, taking off his gloves and vigorously rubbing his hands against each other. “Cold as a witch’s tit.”

Digger—Dick Snead—is one of my three deputies, who—and I’ve made this conclusion several times—is about as useful as, yes, tits on a boar. But he’s a good-looking kid, with dark blond hair and blue eyes, with a nice ass. He’s got the potential for becoming a good deputy. He’d volunteered for the Army directly out of high school and applied for the deputy job with credentials spanning three years of military police experience. Worked in noncombat duty stations in Germany, Japan, and Virginia. But like I said, after four months on the job here, I’ve concluded he’s a slow starter.

And we didn’t give him his nickname. He showed up with it at our front door.

“Got a report of a body up the mountain.” He pulls off his coat, hangs it on a hook next to the door, and steps to the small table where Mary keeps the coffee pot full and hot.

I lean my shoulder on my office door frame, adore Digger’s ass for a moment as he prepares his coffee, and then ask the pertinent question: “This body alive or dead?”

“Oh,” he says, turning toward me, cup in his hand. “Hank flagged me down on the road. Said he’d been up near Elk Creek cutting Christmas trees and saw a body lying spread-eagle, facedown in the bowl about a hundred yards from him. He didn’t want to go down there ’cause…. Well, you know how that bowl is when there’s snowpack.”

I nod. Any urgency I’d felt about heading up the mountain to check this report pales at the mention of that name. Hank is Henry Tall Horse, a Ute Indian who has been up here for probably the last ninety years, though nobody knows for sure how old he is. He’s a sly old man who has probably made the same conclusion about Digger that I have. Hank seems to enjoy toying with him by sending him on wild-goose chases that have just enough credibility to engage Digger’s curiosity. Digger has yet to catch on to Hank’s wiliness.

And every time I run into Hank, he gives me a wink and says, “Helluva deputy you got, chief.”

“You gonna check it out?” I ask, glancing at Mary, who is trying to stifle a laugh as she works on the department’s budget for next year, her adding machine clicking away. She, too, knows what Hank is up to.

“Gotta put some gas in the Ski-Doo,” Digger says.

“That bowl’ll eat the Ski-Doo in a quick minute.”

“Besides that,” Jim Harris, my number one deputy, says, “if he saw the body a while ago, it ain’t visible now. You see how much snow we got over the past hour?”

“I’ll go up there with you in a bit, Digger,” I say. “Go get the snowshoes from the storage shed.” I do wish, though, that my number two deputy, Don Hoag, had not started his vacation two days ago. He’d taken his wife and kids to Disney World in Orlando. Not that I don’t think Digger will have my back if anything happens up there, but Don’s got more experience with these mountains. Hell, he’s got a nice ass too.

“Yessir,” Digger says, setting his coffee cup down and grabbing his coat.

I sit behind my desk, look at the mess on top of it, and wonder why I thought being the sheriff of a sparsely populated county in Colorado would be one exciting thing after another. The paperwork and supervisory responsibilities make short shrift of whatever excitement I had anticipated when I got the bug up my ass to run for office.

S
HORTLY
AFTER
my thirtieth birthday, I decided to run for Sheriff of Pine County, and I won by seventeen votes. My opponent was the incumbent, Howard Slaughter, who’d been sheriff up here for the past twenty-seven years. He’d been a good sheriff, tough as nails and dedicated to an unshakeable philosophy that all things in life are either black or white; gray areas just didn’t exist, except as conspiratorial endeavors by God-hating, limp-wristed, left-wing sonsabitches who were out to destroy the essential fabric of America. I suspect those seventeen winning votes came from that same cadre of evildoers Sheriff Slaughter believed populated the gray areas of life in Pine County.

Two years before my election, Michael and I had moved up here to make the best of our new life together, away from the fast lane in Denver and the increasing dissatisfaction we both felt with city life in general. I’d met Michael in a Denver bar not a week after I’d returned from two tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if you want to call it love at first sight, then go ahead. The senseless passion that initially put us in bed together soon developed into something as precious as life itself. He was only twenty-two, Italian, lithe, bright, and beautiful. I was twenty-six, Irish, and hardened by the things I’d seen and done in that faraway place where hell was a reality for the living as well as a destination for the dead.

Michael had had the ability to calm the inner demons that followed me home from the war, sometimes with only a smile, but most of the time with his words, his voice a salve as soothing as a springtime morning in these mountains. We married in Taos a year after we’d decided to move in together. We then moved to Pine County a year after that. And in two years, we’d finished rebuilding the dilapidated shack on our seventeen acres of forest and meadow into a three-bedroom log home—a paradise that was our dream destination and is now our everyday reality.

The county seat of Pine County is Gunderson Junction, a small town named after a Methodist minister who came this way in the 1850s to bestow the Christian message to the red-skinned savages who’d lived here for probably more than a thousand years. The savages had, according to Gunderson, mistakenly believed that Mother Earth and Father Sky were responsible for life’s blessings rather than a Semite who’d died on a cross. It wasn’t a pretty subjugation. But the Manifest Destiny of the white man had prevailed in Colorado as it had everywhere else. And now those few Indians who still live here are much like old Henry Tall Horse, still quietly attuned to their ancestral beliefs and gracious enough to give a wink and a smile to tourist mommies and daddies who point Hank out to their children, saying, “Look there. An Indian. A real, live Indian.”

It didn’t take long for Michael and me to get to know the locals, and we never obfuscated our relationship to anyone. We were accepted by most because that’s the rule up here: live and let live. There were a few who looked on us with the same eyes I suspect Gunderson looked upon those savages. Religious fervor will do that to any person who believes rules for living a good life come from a book and not from the heart.

We were surprised to find that there were two other couples—James and Carl, and Melissa and Audra—who lived nearby—a relative term up here—and with whom we’ve spent some quality time. The plan is that all six of us are going to have Christmas Eve dinner and drinks tonight at our cabin.

Michael invested some of his inheritance from a doting uncle to the opening and operation of a small storefront in the Junction. He sells his own acrylic paintings, photographs of the countryside and critters, and other fare that is the kind of crap tourists buy as remembrances of the places they’ve been. He will close his shop early this afternoon to start preparations for the Christmas Eve shindig. Not that he gets a whole lot of customers this time of year. I think he keeps his shop open year-round just to see if I ever do more with Digger’s ass than look at it. His shop is just down and across the street from the sheriff’s office, and his view is pretty good if he’s looking for any indiscretions that might occur across the street. Michael appreciates a fine ass as much as I do, and though we’ve never discussed it, I think Michael believes I’m open to temptation. I’m not, and I suppose if the subject ever comes up, I’ll convince him otherwise… two or three times in one night.