The skinwalker hesitated.
“Take it,” Beiyoodzin whispered. The matted figure moved forward and reached for it, leaning outward.
Suddenly, with lightning speed, Beiyoodzin thrust the open bag toward the skinwalker.
A heavy cloud of dust erupted from within, flying up into the figure’s mask, spraying in long gray lines across the bloody pelt. The skinwalker roared in surprise and outrage, twisting around, tugging violently at the mask, growing more and more off balance. With the agility of a cat, Beiyoodzin leaped from the outcropping of rock back onto the trail. The skinwalker kicked frantically, teetering a moment at the edge of the precipice. Then it went over with a howl of fury. Nora watched the plunge into the violet, moon-drenched shadows: matted pelt flapping crazily, limbs scrabbling at the air, mask pulling free as the blood-curdling cry meshed with the roar of the flood beneath. And then, suddenly, it was gone.
There was a moment of stasis. Beiyoodzin looked at Nora and Smithback, and nodded grimly.
Painfully, Nora helped Smithback up the trail toward Beiyoodzin. He stood at the switchback, looking down into the abyss.
“I’m sorry to have scared you like that,” he said quietly, “but sometimes, the only defense left us is to play the coyote, the trickster.”
Still looking downward, he reached out and took Nora’s hand in his. The old man’s grasp was as cool, light, and dry as a leaf.
“And so much death,” he murmured. “So much death. But at least the evil has burned itself out.”
Then he looked up at her, and Nora saw kindness and compassion, as well as an infinite sadness, in his eyes.
For a moment, there was silence between them. Then Beiyoodzin spoke.
“When you are ready,” he said, in a small, clear voice, “let me take you to your father.”
Epilogue
Moving at a steady, easy pace, the four riders made their way up the canyon known as Raingod Gulch. John Beiyoodzin, atop a magnificent buckskin, led the way. Nora Kelly followed, riding abreast of her brother, Skip. The massive form of Teddy Bear padded alongside, his back almost grazing the bellies of the horses as he weaved in and out beneath them. Bill Smithback brought up the rear, his unruly hair imprisoned beneath a suede cowboy hat. The exhausting course of antibiotic treatment he and Nora had undergone ended two weeks before, but beneath the hat brim the writer’s skin was still struggling to regain a healthy color.
The late August sky was sprinkled with light cumulus clouds, drifting over a field of brilliant turquoise. Wrens flitted about, filling the sweet little canyon with their bell-like cries. A merry stream, shaded by fragrant cottonwoods, ran sparkling across a bed of soft sand. At almost every bend in the canyon were small alcoves, Anasazi dwellings tucked inside them: none more than two or three rooms, but lovely in their humble perfection.
Nora let her horse keep its own pace, concentrating on nothing but the sun beating down on her denimed legs, on the murmur of water nearby, on the swaying of her mount. Every now and then, she smiled to herself as she heard Smithback behind her, leveling curses at his balky mount, who stopped frequently to nibble a patch of clover or bite off the top of a thistle, completely ignoring the dire threats and imprecations of his rider. The man just had no talent with horses.
She realized how lucky she was to have him here; how lucky she was to be here herself. Briefly, her thoughts returned to their struggle out of the wilderness a month earlier: Smithback weak, Nora herself growing steadily weaker as the fungal infection took hold. If Skip and Ernest Goddard had not met them halfway down the trail with fresh horses—and if there had not been a powerboat waiting at the trailhead, or helicopters idling at Page—they would probably have died. And yet, for a time, Nora almost thought it would have been easier to die than to tell Goddard the news: how their incredible discovery had turned into such a terrible personal tragedy for him.
Here, thirty-odd miles northwest of the ruin of Quivira, the countryside seemed built on a smaller scale: friendly, verdant, well-watered. John Beiyoodzin had paused in his long story—he had paused frequently during the ride, giving his narrative time to sink in.
As they rode on through the sunlit silence, Nora allowed her thoughts to move gradually from Goddard to her own father, and of what she had so far been able to piece together of his own last trip up this canyon. He had taken very little from Quivira. In fact, far from being a pothunter, he had carefully refilled what excavations he had made in a way that would have pleased even Aragon. But in doing so, he had exposed himself to a concentration of the fungal dust, and grown sick. Riding north in hopes of finding help, his sickness had worsened to the point where he could hardly sit his horse. Nora wondered how he would have felt. Would he have been terrified? Resigned? As a child, she remembered hearing him say that he wanted to die in the saddle. And he had done just that. Or almost: eventually becoming too sick to ride, he had dismounted. Then he turned his horses free and waited to die.
“It was my cousin who found the body,” Beiyoodzin said, resuming his story. “It was lying in a cave at the top of a small rise. Seemed to have been there about six months. The coyotes couldn’t reach it, so it hadn’t been disturbed.”
“How did your cousin find it?” Skip asked.
“Looking for a lost sheep. He saw some color in the rock-shelter, climbed up to take a look.” Beiyoodzin paused to clear his throat. “Next to the body was the notebook—the one Nora has now. Sticking out of the front shirt pocket was a letter, stamped and addressed. And beside him was a satchel holding the skull of a mountain lion, inlaid in turquoise. So my cousin went back to Nankoweap, and he was a talker, and soon the entire village knew of the dead white man in the canyon to the south. And because of the turquoise skull, they also knew this white man had found the city we had kept secret for so many years.”
His voice trailed away for a moment before returning, softer, more thoughtful. “This was not a city of our ancestors. Those few who had been there—my grandfather was one—said it was a city of death, of oppression and slavery, of witchcraft and evil. There are stories in our past of a people who came out of the south, who enslaved the Anasazi, and forced them to build these great cities and roads. But they were destroyed by the very god who gave them power. Most who went to the city came back with ghost sickness and soon died. That was many, many years ago. None of my people have returned to the city since. Until recently.”
Beiyoodzin deftly rolled a cigarette with one hand. “The discovery of the body caused a problem for the tribe, because the secret of the city lay with the body of the man. To reveal the presence of the body would be to betray the secret of the city.”
“Why didn’t you just destroy the letter and notebook?” Nora asked.
He lit the cigarette, inhaled. “We believe that it is extremely dangerous to handle the effects of the dead. It is a sure way to get ghost sickness. And we all knew what the white man had died from. So, for sixteen years, the body lay there. Unburied. It just seemed that the simplest thing to do was to do nothing.”
Beiyoodzin stopped his horse abruptly and turned toward Nora. “That was wrong. Because we all knew that the body in the cave had a family. That somebody loved him, wondered where he had gone and whether he was still alive. It was cruel to do nothing. Still, doing nothing seemed the easiest, safest course of action. But doing nothing caused a small imbalance. And this imbalance grew, and grew, until it ended in you coming here and all these terrible killings.”
Nora reined in her own horse beside Beiyoodzin’s. “Who mailed the letter?” she asked quietly. It was the question she had been burning to ask for many, many weeks.