Wild Sorrow (15 page)

Again, I scanned the horizon with my field glasses. On an impulse, I decided to drive my Jeep toward Pueblo Peña as far as the terrain would permit and then hike in the rest of the way. I knew from my chase after the ATV that there was a long finger of land I could take to the south for a half mile, and so I struck out driving in that direction.

We left the Jeep on the finger mesa and started hiking, the wolf and I both wearing our packs. Mountain was delighted to be out in open country after so much time spent confined in the Jeep. As we moved to the southwest, a series of fierce gusts whipped across the high desert, pushing against us. At first, I watched for sign of the cougars, even though I felt sure the cats would be in a cave on the other side of the little spring. Eventually, I admitted to myself that I wanted to see the cemetery that Lorena Coldfire had spoken of visiting each year on the Day of the Dead. There was something about the abandoned boarding school that still haunted me, even after Cassie Morgan's remains had been carried off to the morgue.

Outside the wall, behind the school, I saw a pair of tilted stones that might once have been grave markers. On further examination, I could see the outline of several small raised mounds of earth in a row, the telltale signs of graves. I stopped to give Mountain water from the tube of my CamelBak and then took a drink myself. I studied the ground and tried to discern the scope of the school cemetery. A section of downed barbwire in withered ricegrass hinted at a forgotten fence line. Using that as one perimeter, and the back wall of the schoolyard as another perpendicular one, I walked out from the adobe wall and searched for the farthest limits of the graveyard. These were not readily apparent, but the more I examined the area, the more the land revealed to me. I made out five distinct rows where the ground had been groomed in some way, probably by the digging of graves. I walked the length of the row that had been the least disturbed by the ravages of wind, the one next to the schoolyard wall. I counted twenty-three berms, some more obvious than others. Twenty-three! Five rows of twenty-three, possibly even more, a design for twenty-five? Five rows! Over one hundred children had died at the San Pedro de Arbués Indian School!

Against a clump of cactus, a hint of something red fluttered in the wind. I went to examine it and found a petal from a fabric flower stuck in the spines of the cactus. This, no doubt, was left over from the loving vigil that Lorena Coldfire made on the Day of the Dead, when she came to bring food and offerings to these forgotten children.

I decided to look for the ancient stone staircase that Scout Coldfire had spoken about, with the two shrines on the ledge below. Mountain had found a shady spot next to the adobe wall and had parked himself out of the wind. I called to him, and he joined me, and we headed toward the canyon rim near Pueblo Peña.

Following Scout's directions, I located a series of large boulders at the lip of the canyon. These marked the meager path leading down, and—as instructed—I worked my way carefully around the big stones, on a packed-earth ledge not twelve inches wide that slanted at a precarious pitch. This short, steep trail led to a silty shelf under the cliff lip. Mountain followed me with an unaccustomed trepidation, carefully placing his paws almost in single file, unsure whether he wanted to proceed, but drawn by the code that said we always traveled together. We cautiously descended to the ledge. Above us, the lip of the canyon jutted out more than two feet, creating a concave bowl in the cliff face beneath it. I stepped carefully to the edge of the narrow terrace and looked down as a gust of raw wind sandblasted my skin.

Below, on the sheer side of the canyon wall, I found the pecked-out hand- and footholds leading down the stone face to the bottom, a nerve-wracking way down at best. I imagined the ancient ones who had made these, the daring and determination that were required to dangle off the face of a sheer cliff wall and chip away at it with stone tools. Above, these amazing people had built a stone city on the high rim of a canyon, a place from which they could see and be seen for miles around. And below, in this wide rent in the earth, lay the life-giving river. As I stood looking down into the canyon, I thought of when Momma Anna had told me about the hole in the top of everything, how the People came up through the hole in the Indigo Falls, how the Creator breathed life into a baby through the hole in the top of her head, how the spirits traveled in and out of all things material through the hole in the top. And I saw this canyon as perhaps the ancients did, as a hole or crack in the land from which the Earth's spirit came forth. Perhaps the spirits of the ancient ones still traveled up and down this primitive stone stairway, up and down the hand-and footholds from the source to the place where they could see all the way to the horizon.

As I returned to the present from my glimpse into the past, Mountain stood watching me, unsure what we were going to do next. It was obvious to him that we'd reached the end of the trail. “Hang on, buddy,” I said. “I want to look at these.” I pointed at two short stacks of stones a few feet apart under the narrow rock overhang. These were certainly the two little shrines that Coldfire spoke of. I knelt in the dust and looked closely at the cairns. Bits of leather thong and withered feathers peeked between the stones, the remnants of offerings of beauty and honor. One tiny turquoise bead nestled in a recess of one of the stacked stones. I remembered Sica's story of the two little Apache boys and felt certain that these cairns marked their secretly made graves. Who had been coming here and leaving offerings?

Mountain came to see what was drawing my attention and then suddenly stopped, eyeing the ground in front of him. A slender snake seemed to be sunning in the dirt at the edge of the shelf, but the reptile didn't move.

“Hold on, Mountain,” I said, rising to my feet. “You stay.” I approached slowly, only to find that it was not a snake at all, but rather a piece of nylon rope. I picked it up and shook off the dust. It was new-looking, knotted and burned at each end to prevent fraying, a strand perhaps three feet in length, at best.

As I held up my find to examine it, a sprinkling of grit and gravel pattered on my hat brim. Then more, a frantic tap dance of tiny bits of sand and granules, a storm of mineral debris. I looked up just as an avalanche of rock and red soil rushed toward me. Pebbles, sand, and sediment bombarded my neck and back. A large rock struck the top of my head, producing a shooting pain down my spine, then another—a jarring smack on my shoulder, and another—a whack on the hip. And more like that, lambasting my back, hammering at the tops of my buttocks, my arms, my legs. Shards of the cliff edge pounded down on me, and then basketball-sized boulders began to fall. I threw myself under the slim stone protrusion, and hard into Mountain, who was now cowering against the cliff wall. The backs of my legs took a beating as showers of shale and chunks of rock and sandstone pummeled the parts of my body exposed beyond the overhang. One great stone the size of a beach ball struck the shelf next to my heel after it shredded the back of my jeans and stripped the skin from my calf.

When the slide subsided, I stood frozen in place by fear and pain, still stunned from the blow to my head. Mountain, trapped between my body and the indent in the cliff wall, had escaped harm, but he, too, seemed to be in shock, as he didn't try to escape the confinement of my body's weight pressing on him. My shoulder, back, and legs felt as if someone had skinned them and salted the wounds. My head throbbed from the blow it had taken before I'd ducked under the rim. Even my jaw hurt, as if the impact of the rock against my skull had compressed everything from the crown down. As I pulled myself off him, Mountain stepped warily over the rubble of the slide. I looked down at the back of my right leg and saw the source of the unbearable stinging that struggled to compete with the pain in my head. A rash of long, red streaks and shredded flesh speckled with grit covered the surface of the leg. The heel of my boot leather had been sliced away, exposing a circle of green sock that had somehow managed to remain intact over the back of my foot.

Mountain led as we struggled our way back to the top, where the boulders I had carefully stepped around no longer graced the rim. While the wind buffeted my body, I examined the place where the stones had once stood. I saw scrapes in the sandstone where someone had levered the big rocks and deliberately started the slide.

I stood up and looked around. My attacker could easily be hiding behind the ruin wall a hundred yards away, waiting to ambush me again. I felt vulnerable standing on high ground in the open, and I called Mountain to me and made my way to the north, away from the ruin, and then back to my Jeep as fast as my bruised body could go.

Wild Life

Diane helped me to clean my wounds and sat on the floor to apply antibiotic ointment to the backs of my legs with a cotton swab. “You didn't see anyone? You didn't hear anything?” she said.

“The wind was coming right at me. Whoever it was used that to their advantage.”

“But you can see forever out there.”

“I didn't see anyone. They must not have gotten close until I was down on that ledge. Ouch! Be careful.”

“Sorry. This is twice you've been out on that mesa since you discovered the body, and both times . . .”

“Yeah. Somebody's either following me or hanging around out there, and they don't like it when I get close.”

“But why? I mean, why hang around and risk getting caught?”

I held up a finger. “Wait until you see what I've got.” I started to walk away.

“Hey, where are you going? I'm not done yet. You've still got a—”

“I'll be right back. I have something in my pack I need to show you.” Wearing only my panties and bra and a virulent red rash of scrapes and bruises, I limped out of the bathroom and then came back holding the length of nylon rope with a pair of tweezers. “Look what Mountain found on that little terrace under the canyon rim.”

Diane's mouth gaped open as she got to her feet. “Nylon rope?”

“The real deal,” I said. “Look at this brown stuff embedded in the middle, too. It looks like it could be dried blood. I'm sorry I didn't have an evidence bag or anything. I zipped it into its own pocket in my backpack and have tried not to touch it.”

She took the rope carefully by one knotted end and held it up to the light. “Here,” she said, picking up a pair of soft sweatpants off the bathroom counter. “Put these on. I'm going to call the Silver Bullet. This rates some overtime.”

 

 

While Diane took the nylon rope to her office—where a courier with an evidence bag had been dispatched to wait, bag the item, and then drive it to the lab in Albuquerque—Mountain and I spent a miserable hour unable to relax and rest.

I began to feel the beating I'd taken in the avalanche as soon as I slowed down. There was no way to be comfortable with my backside skinned and stinging. I tried lying on my belly on the couch, but my shoulder and neck ached unbearably, and I couldn't do anything to distract myself while lying prone. I was too wary to sleep, my mind whirling over the events of the past few days trying to discover new evidence that would make sense of my situation.

Worse still, my normally isolated and monastic lifestyle made me ill-suited to be at ease when I heard people moving outside, the noise of sirens—and even the crash of a car accident at a nearby intersection, which caused both me and the wolf to jump with fright. At my cabin, the sound of a car engine meant an imminent visitor. The din of traffic here at Diane's house was constant, and Mountain sprang to his feet dozens of times, expecting to greet—or challenge—someone at the door. Even the sound of children shrieking with laughter as they rode past on bicycles grated on both our nerves.

By the time Diane returned from her office, Mountain had taken to pacing back and forth across the living room looking out one window and then another, and I had figured out a way to roost on the rim of the couch and was cleaning my handgun on a towel spread across the coffee table.

“I thought you were going to get some rest,” she said.

“Where's the Silver Bullet?”

“He's working a lead. He'll be over later. Let's see if our salad we made last night is still any good.” She headed for the kitchen.

“So what are you going to do about the landlord and the oven?”

“I found out about a tenants' rights agency in Santa Fe and called them. It turns out I do have rights as a tenant. But I have to take my landlord to court and get the judge to enforce the law.”

A siren sounded nearby and Mountain erupted into a throaty howl. Diane came to the door of the kitchen and watched him, amused. I began to howl along with the wolf, to show my sympathy for his misery—and mine. Diane joined in, and for almost five minutes, we yipped and howled like a regular pack.

About ten minutes after that, a police car pulled up in front of the house, and an officer came to the door. Diane answered, Mountain came to peer around her, and I looked over her shoulder. I recognized the patrolman from a recent incident involving a youth from Tanoah Pueblo.

“We've got a complaint of disturbing the peace,” the uniform said.

“What?” Diane bristled.

“How ya doing?” I reached through the opening between Diane and the door frame and extended my hand. “Jamaica Wild, BLM. We had a chance to work together just a few weeks ago when a young man from Tanoah Pueblo—”

“Oh, yeah.” He smiled. “I remember you. Thanks for helping us out on that.”

“No problem, Officer. And we're sorry we got a little carried away there with our group howl, but we'll keep it down from now on.”

“That's a big dog,” he said, eyeing Mountain with curiosity.