“Thanks,” said Maggie gratefully. “I’d rather wait here than go home right now.”
“Let me just finish up the feeding here. You go sit down. Go on.”
Maggie sat down heavily on a bale of hay as the old woman tended to her other animals. While she worked, Maggie peered into the surrounding runs—but the animals there were just animals, and nothing more mysterious than that. The bobcat kittens had gotten quite large, wrestling each other in their small fenced yard. The cast had come off of the kit fox’s foot. The antelope had gone back to the wild and a pregnant mule deer was in his run now, one leg thickly bandaged. Maggie looked down to the end of the row where Cody’s run stood empty.
“Still no Cody?” she asked Lillian.
“We’ve seen her, twice,” Lillian replied as she filled up the eagle’s water trough. “She’s let us know that she’s still around, but she’s not going to come back now. I reckon that even with that bad leg, she’s happier in the wild.”
“Provided we can keep that fool with the gun away from her,” Maggie muttered.
“Amen to that,” said Lillian. “Cody was with that one-eyed coyote both times that we spotted her—as well as that other female she runs with. John thinks Cody and One-Eye have mated, and that’s why she left us so suddenly.”
Maggie swallowed. Was Pepe running with Cody? And did that mean Cody was one of them too? Her eyes widened suddenly, thinking about Pepe Hernandez and the Foxxe sisters. Cody had disappeared about the same time that Fox had told her his sisters had come home. Angela walked with a limp, as Cody did. Isabella could be the second female. Was she totally loco now, or were the Foxxe sisters like Crow, like Pepe, like Thumper? And if they were, then what did that say about Johnny Foxxe himself?
She pulled her hat brim down against the sun, watching Lillian in the kit fox’s cage. She remembered what Lillian had said about the painting of Crow, naming him Mr. Foxxe, the father of María Rosa’s children. Yet Johnny Foxxe was a man of flesh and blood; Maggie would stake her life on that. He had none of the glamour of the otherworld around him, not like Crow or Thumper, or even his two sisters. And he’d seemed as baffled by the painting of Crow as Maggie herself had been.
Was it even possible for a creature like Crow to father children on a human woman? Old folktales recorded such occurrences of fairies impregnating human women, and creating changeling children. She found she could easily imagine that the shy Foxxe sisters had parentage that was only half human. But then she thought of Fox himself, sun-browned, lean, and … solid, was the word she came up with. She thought of him swinging a hammer on Cooper’s roof, and playing the accordion last night, and putting away ten of Dora’s enormous pancakes in one sitting. She shook her head. No, she just couldn’t see it. Unlike his sisters, Fox was one of the most down-to-earth people she’d ever met.
Maggie sighed deeply, thoroughly confused, as Lillian finished in the last cage.
“Honey,” said Lillian, “you’re white as a sheet. Let’s get out of this sun and get some grub into you before you faint clean away on me.”
As Maggie followed her to the house, she paused beside the ringtail’s cage. The plump animal was still curled up asleep, his sides heaving with labored breaths. She closed her eyes and then looked again. One almost human arm was tucked around skinny knees, the other pillowed his cheek. His flesh was the silvery green of cholla cactus, and cactus spines circled his head. Pale rays of light streamed from his shoulders. They looked for all the world like wings.
• • •
Fox scraped the knife across the stone. He tested the blade. It was very sharp. Then he stripped the bark from the thin willow poles he had brought to the edge of Redwater Creek. He placed the poles into the ground, bending them into a circular shape; he lashed them together, using the long strips of bark and lengths of rough twine. When he was finished he had a low hut standing barely waist high, circular in shape. He covered this frame with a heavy green tarp, blocking out the afternoon sun.
When the inside of the round structure was completely sealed against the light, Fox raised a flap and went back out. The sun was riding lower on the distant hills, casting long, cool shadows. He dug a firepit and gathered deadfall, sycamore and cottonwood. Adding this to his pile of dry mesquite logs, he began to build the fire. Fox spoke to it softly as he did so, talking to the wood, to the smooth round stones placed inside the circle of the kindling and soon covered by the leaping flames.
As the fire grew, he stopped talking and he listened, the way Tomás had taught him. He heard only the crackle of the fire, the snap of the dry wood, the hiss of the green. The music of the water. The whisper of the wind. A single coyote in the hills. He frowned, knowing that if Tomás had been here, the other man would have heard more.
Fox knew that there were creatures in these mountains, even if he still couldn’t hear them speak. Spirits of the rocks, the trees, the water; they’d been his playmates as a child. He had lived out-of-doors so much back then he could have almost been a mountain spirit himself; but then he’d grown up, and gone down to the valley. He had not had such visitations since. It wasn’t until Tomás came to the upper cabin, with his drums, his songs, his spirit-fires, that Fox had begun to realize there was more to those old visions of his than a lonely child’s imagination, steeped in too much poetry.
He loved this desert. He wanted to know it, to See it with more than simple human sight. He knew that Tomás could teach him how. He had worked with the older man for several years, and still he could not hear the voices in the flame. He could not See as a child Sees. But he was a patient man. These things took time. And Fox had all the time in the world.
He sat beside the fire, waiting for the sun to set, the moon to appear. He placed his deerskin drum beside him, where the skin would tighten from the heat of the flames. Next to it was an Irish penny whistle, an Indian flute and a western one. He took a small pouch from the pocket of his jeans, and poured tobacco into his palm. He held it for a moment, then he gave it to the fire with a prayer for all of his ancestors … whoever they might have been.
Mr. Foxxe. María Rosa. He had no certain knowledge of their history. He could only guess by the lines of his face what lineage was in him: Anglo blood, by the color of his eyes; something else by the light brown color of his skin. Hispanic? Indian? Did it matter? He was of this land, whatever it had been. He was born here. Eaten its food, drunk its water, sweated under its hot, hot sun; he had taken the land into his body. His blood and bones were formed of it. He belonged here, as nowhere else.
Tonight he would ask the land for blessing, and protection, as he had that night six months before. He frowned, remembering his fire by Deer Springs on the night he’d come back to the mountains. He’d been traveling down in Mexico, and he’d felt such joy by the fire that night, to be back home in his Rincons again. But that was the night that Cooper was killed, as he’d discovered on the very next day. He’d been the one to find Cooper’s body, in a wash bed, miles from the canyon.
Fox added more wood to the fire, his heart heavy. The old man drove him crazy, but he missed him. If only he had thought to ask for Cooper’s protection that night by Deer Springs as well… But he hadn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. He wished he could know that for sure.
He had learned from this. Tonight he had come not to ask for the land’s protection for himself, but for the ones he loved in this place: for his sisters, his mother, the Alders and del Rios. For Tomás, and the wild ones in the hills. And most of all, for Maggie Black.
While Fox waited for the sun to set, he picked up the flute of copal wood. The courting flute. He blew a soft note on it and adjusted the slide. Then he sat and he played, for the spirits of the hills, and for Maggie, wherever she was tonight: a Navajo song, an Irish song, a Spanish song, and a song of his own. He gave his music to the wind, the water, the stones, the yellow and crimson flames. Soon he would give them tobacco smoke, cedar, sage and sweat as well. And then he would ask what he’d come to a
sk. He’d speak, and then he would listen. And this time, if he listened hard, he might finally hear an answering voice.
• • •
The sun was sinking in the hills by the time the men from the sheriff’s office left. Maggie declined Lillian’s offer of supper; she’d spent half the day at the Alders’ already. Maybe Fox would be home by the time she got back, although he still wasn’t answering his phone. She said good night to Lillian and John, and hiked down the driveway to the road. The track joined the road at the posted entrance to the Red Springs trail-head. Maggie hesitated, and then she turned onto the trail instead of heading home.
The evening air was crisp and dry. The light was tinged with violet and the saguaro cactus cast long purple shadows across the winding trail. The pathway led through staghorn cholla, teddy-bear cholla and prickly pear. She could hear the sound of the creek in the distance. A coyote loped across the hill. It was not an animal she recognized, but she said, “Tell Crow I’m looking for him,” as he dashed through the brush toward Redwater Creek, his white, bushy tail held high.
She continued on until she reached the creek at a place where it formed deep bathing pools. The trail merged with the path that climbed the hill along the water’s edge. The path led to Red Springs in one direction, to the Foxxe sisters’ house in the other. Perhaps the white stag was at the springs tonight, Maggie thought as she chose the uphill path. And perhaps he wasn’t a stag at all, but another shape-shifter like Crow.
Maggie found herself looking twice at every bird, every lizard, every rock and creosote bush, wondering which was real and which was … what? Unreal? Or surreal, as Anna Naverra would say? It was all real. It was the magic, the pulse, the heartbeat at the center of the world. She wanted to know it better. She wanted to learn the secrets of the desert, Cooper’s ‘language of the earth.’ If she listened hard she could almost hear it, a thread of flute song above the wind.
And when you learn its language, what then? said a dry voice in her head, a Cooper voice. Well then, maybe she’d start writing poems again, Maggie told it. Not like Cooper’s poems, of course. Her own poems, her own exploration of the desert. She frowned. But how could she render this place better than Cooper, or even half as well? Those old doubts rose to the surface again, the ones that always chased her away from making poems. Journalism was easier—if only because she didn’t care so much.
“So,” came the sound of a voice, amused, “you have decided you can answer my question after all.”
Above her, Crow was sitting on a ledge of stone jutting over the creek’s other bank. He wore only his copper bands, and the feathers braided into his black hair. His body was marked with spiral tattoos, as it had been in her dreams.
“What question is that?” Maggie tilted her head back to look up at the shape-shifter. The dying sun turned his skin to gold and she shaded her eyes from the light.
He said, like a teacher repeating a lesson, “You have asked me twice, now, who I am. I told you that you could ask me a third time only if you could answer that same question. And now you’ve come to look for me. Have you discovered the answer then?”
“I’ve always known the answer,” Maggie said. She crossed the creek, leaping from stone to stone, clambering across a sycamore’s root. “Give me a hand. Help me up there.”
Crow grasped her wrist and pulled her up. She sat on the rock ledge next to him, dangling her boot heels over the side. The water flowed swiftly below, carving waterfalls from the smooth white stone. She could barely hear the music of the flute above the water’s song.
Crow grinned at her, and she wondered why she never noticed before that his teeth were so sharp, canine and predatory. Grandmother, what big teeth you have… The better to gobble you up.
“Then tell me who you are,” Crow said, “and why you have come to this land of mine.”
“That’s two questions,” Maggie pointed out.
He ignored this. “Quick now. Who are you?”
Maggie shrugged. “I’m many different people,” she said. “So I guess I’m a bit of a shape-shifter too. In West Virginia, I’m Emil Black’s granddaughter. In L.A., I’m Nigel Vanderlin’s ex-wife; in London, I’m Tatiana Ludvik’s crazy friend. I’m a vagabond writer to my friends in Holland; a sweet summer affair to a sculptor in Florence; a hopeless klutz to every gym teacher I’ve ever had—do you want me to go on?”
“Those are just the shapes. What’s underneath? The essence, that doesn’t change from shape to shape. That’s what a shapeshifter has to know, or you lose yourself. You can’t get back. You’re trapped in one shape, and you can’t get out.”
She frowned, thinking about this.
“What are you at the core, Black Maggie?” He smiled viciously. “I don’t believe you know.”
She said, hesitantly, “At the core, at the very center, I think I’m still a poet.”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe that. You don’t even believe it yourself. You might have been once. What are you now?”
She was growing irritated with Crow. “Once a poet, always a poet; it’s in the hardwiring, like breathing,” she said, aware that she was paraphrasing Lillian Alder and hoping that she did indeed believe it. “Look, I’ve answered your question, so I think you should answer mine.”
“Why should I?” he said smoothly. “You haven’t given me a true answer. Why should I give one to you?”
“Because I’ll give you something else back for it,” she offered. “I’ll give you one of my poems.”
He laughed at her. “What makes you think I want your poems? I’ve had Cooper’s. Why would I want yours? You’ll have to do better than that. Give me something else.”
“What do you want?”
He placed his hand over her heart and pushed her back against the stone. “I want your pulse, your breath, your voice. I want everything.”
She said, “No.”
He wrapped his other hand into her hair. “What makes you think I can’t just take it?”
“You can, but you won’t,” she told him, and she prayed that this was true.
“Oh no? And why not?”
“Dah-maz,” she said.
Crow smiled, a cold, inhuman smile that made her shiver under his gaze. Then he pressed his lips to the top of her head, almost tenderly. He let her go.
“Dammas,” he said, correcting her pronunciation. He narrowed his eyes. “When you can give me a true answer to my question, then come find me again.”
He stood. He flung himself into the air, changing form and taking flight. Maggie caught her breath as a huge black bird climbed the wind and soared into the darkening sky.
She found herself alone by the stream as the waxing moon rose over the hills. Maggie inched down from the ledge with effort, and started across Redwater Creek. A flat stone shifted underfoot and she scrambled for another stone; she was soaked to the shins, her boots leaking water, by the time she reached the other bank.
She shivered. As the sun disappeared, it took all the warmth of the desert with it. She should not have stayed outdoors this late without clothes warmer than one thin shirt. The night was closing in on her. The path was dark and difficult. She no longer heard a distant flute song; now it was the low beat of a drum.
She climbed with care over tumbled gold rock as she descended on the narrow path, passing by the trail that led to the Alders’ and continuing downhill along the creek. The creek broadened out, white sycamore trees and small cottonwoods hugging the rocky banks. The roots of the sycamores twined and knotted over stone, like the trees in Arthur Rackham paintings. Tall saguaro populated the hills on either side, watching her pass.
At a place where the land leveled out below, a bonfire blazed in a small clearing. The steady sound of a drum was louder now. It came from a low circular structure built beneath a sycamore’s crooked limbs. Maggie stepped into the light of the fire, drawn by the heat and the rhythm of the drum. As she sat, shivering, grateful for the warmth, she saw Fox’s flutes, his boots, and hi
s silver Hopi bracelet lying on the ground.
Something that had been tense in her all day relaxed now. Fox was here. She’d been needing his solidity on this day when the ground underfoot kept shifting. And there was something more she needed, or wanted—perhaps it was just to talk to him, to see what shape Thumper and Crow and Pepe would take in his clear grey eyes. Fox was a man, Maggie reflected, who would know just what was at his core. Love for the desert, compassion for its creatures—that’s what she’d guess his essence would be; that and an ability to truly listen. Why had it taken her forty years to understand how valuable that was?
She fed more kindling into the fire. Overhead, the stars arced over a sky more vast than she’d ever known skies could be. She breathed in the desert, the smells of creosote, sage, dry sand, and burning mesquite. A dark shape crept out of the night. One-Eye, Pepe, in his four-footed form. In this shape, he was more coyote than human, creeping toward her with a wild creature’s wariness. Then he lay beside her, resting his chin on Maggie’s knees as she sat staring into the flames.
Much later, when the drumbeat stopped and the night was still but for the small bats overhead, Maggie fed the last piece of wood into the fire, feeling herself content, at peace, at rest, at home. It was an odd sensation. One-Eye slept; her leg was numb where the animal rested his heavy head. His tawny fur was soft beneath her hand, warm against her thigh.
The tarp was thrown back from the circular hut and Fox emerged, limned by firelight, on his knees on the cold, dry ground with clouds of steam billowing around him. As the smoke escaped into the night, it was lit by a silvery luminescence, and in the smoke, she could see pale figures crowding the doorway behind him. They seemed to be made of smoke and light, vaguely human in shape, but no more than that. They lifted into the clear night sky on wings trailing steam and spiraling stars. Then they faded, with the smoke, beyond human sight. Fox looked up at her with wonder.
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