by Will Hobbs
I followed the one with the pots, taking advantage of what little cover the forest floor offered. He was heading toward a cluster of boulders shielded by a thicket of scrub oak.
As soon as he’d hid the pots and turned back toward his camp, I investigated. I found four big water jars, several seed jars, half a dozen wide bowls, an effigy pot in the shape of a parrot, and mugs with lizard, wolf, and bird handles. All were beautifully painted with intricate black-on-white designs.
Where was the basket with the medicine man’s bundle? I searched all around the big rocks. It wasn’t to be found. Then I realized that the seed jar I’d seen them with at Picture House, the one my ancient corn came from, wasn’t here either.
Where were they?
I hastened back to their camp, determined to make the most of the time I had left until dawn caught me.
My first instinct was to chew the rope that held Dusty, and so I did, close to her collar, just in case she’d wake up and we could escape together. I quit just before chewing the rope all the way through, so it would look like she was still tied. Dusty wasn’t showing any signs of stirring yet. I listened for her heartbeat. It was slow, but it was there. How long would it take for the drug to wear off?
Next I peeked into the men’s tent. They were sleeping on cots, both already snoring. I looked all around under the cots for stolen artifacts, but I didn’t find any. The thick bed of pine needles made a nicer floor than the Bishop brothers deserved. I found a box of ammunition and their smelly boots. Of course they wouldn’t leave artifacts right in their camp. And they wouldn’t load up their plunder from its hiding place until the moment they were going to leave the area.
Their leather boots seemed too tempting. I chewed some pretty good-sized holes in them. I even chewed their bootlaces through in a number of places.
Where were their keys? I could keep them from going anywhere!
I held my breath, came out into the open between the cots, and took a good look. On top of a milk crate they’d turned upside-down between the heads of the cots, next to a billfold and a gun belt, there it was—their key ring.
Tiptoeing to the crate, I stood on my hind legs and came to eye-level with the key ring. The problem was, the bearded brother had his face practically in the keys.
He smelled bad, like chewing tobacco.
When I tried to take the key ring in my mouth, my whiskers touched his beard, and his hand came to his face like he was swatting at a bug.
I darted beneath his cot and waited. Before long he was snoring again.
I got set to try again. He’d moved a little and made it even harder. He was breathing right on me. That breath could have corroded metal. This time, just as my teeth were about to close on the key ring, my whiskers got inside his nostrils. He grunted and slapped himself in the face. Again I darted away under the cot.
When my heart slowed, I looked again. The first hint of dawn was starting to show. I had to make the most of the time I had left.
Then I realized, Forget about the keys! They might have a second set anyway!
I raced out of there and under the truck, climbed up onto the motor and started chewing wires as fast as I could. All the wires I could reach, I chewed them up and chewed sections out of them so they wouldn’t be able to splice them back together. Then I hid the pieces in a patch of scrub oak.
Something about those shiny keys, though—I couldn’t resist them. I scurried back into the tent. The sun would rise in a few minutes. I thought I had time….
Fortunately, the ugly man had turned over. I was free of him and his face and his breath. This time I took the keys in my mouth. They jingled slightly. Ever so carefully, I made my way out of the tent and started into the nearest trees, where I buried them under the pine needles.
From a scrub oak thicket I kept watch on Dusty. The sun rose, I underwent my transformation, and still she hadn’t moved. A raven flew close, and I could see its dark, intelligent eye looking right at me, almost through me. What did the raven know? What had Cricket called me, a “changeling”? That I was.
I had a bad feeling about my mother. She’d gone to bed with a fever and a cough. Isn’t that the way it begins with hantavirus? I had to get to her as fast as I could, and yet I couldn’t leave Dusty behind.
As the sun climbed ever higher in the morning sky, I was growing more and more desperate, certain my mother was sick. Time slowed down, almost stopped. Seconds hung suspended, like slowly dripping water. At last Dusty began to twitch and shake, and finally she lifted her head. With great effort she rose on wobbly legs. I was about to go to her when the bearded brother appeared at the front of the tent, holding his chewed boots in his hands. The man looked at Dusty, a long look. I held my breath. He turned barefoot to making a fire and starting coffee. He hadn’t noticed the fray on the rope near her collar.
His brother appeared, the tall one with the mustache, and they both were cussing about whatever varmint had chewed up their boots.
“Left a pine cone in place of the keys,” said the bearded man. “Had to be a packrat.”
Dusty was starting to look okay.
Mustache sat on a log and pulled on a pair of socks, then pulled his boots on. The socks showed through in two or three places. “This is stupid,” he said, as he began to knot the laces back together.
“One more night. I want to see what this pot-sniffing dog can do. Then we’re heading home.”
I thought, There’s no chance Dusty would dig for you. But what would they do to her when she wouldn’t?
“Yeah, well, Duke,” the tall one said slowly. “I just don’t like that place. Why don’t we just pick up that medicine bundle and that pot we cached there and call it good?”
“Superstitious, eh?”
“You’ve got to admit, things were more than a little strange—the ball of fire and all. You explain it.”
“Don’t care what it was, Rodney. Shut up and make some breakfast so we can eat something and go back to sleep. How ’bout steak and eggs?”
I had to listen to them for another hour. They never said anything else that was important. Cuss and spit and rail against the government, that’s all they did. At last they went back to their cots. They hadn’t discovered about their truck yet.
I thought I was in the clear when I tiptoed to Dusty. I was just slipping my hand into my pocket for my pocket knife when the one with the mustache—Rodney—appeared at the front of the tent, in his skivvies and bare feet, and saw me there with Dusty clear as day, not twenty feet away. He yelled at the top of his lungs, “Duke! There’s a kid out here!” then came sprinting at me.
Eleven years old Dusty was, and meek as a lamb. I’d never even seen her curl her lip in all that time. I thought that guy had me dead to rights, when Dusty came snarling between us, vicious as a pit bull, and bit him bad on the hand.
I’d heard the pop of the rope as she lunged; she was free.
Holding his hurt hand, Rodney backed off. Duke was at the front of the tent taking all this in. Now he turned quickly back inside.
“Dusty!” I yelled and took off running. She was right with me. I tore into the cover of the nearest scrub oak and we plunged down the side of the mesa together.
Behind us came gunshots, loud as cannons. But with all this brush, I knew they couldn’t see what they were shooting at.
After a few minutes I slowed down to a jog. I had a long way to run. We wouldn’t have to worry about them chasing us, not in those boots of theirs.
Nine miles cross-country and we’d be home.
18
All the days of my life led up to this one. As I came running up to the cabin my father stepped outside. He looked so scared he didn’t even ask me where I’d been. “Your mother …” he managed. “She’s much worse than when she went to bed last night.”
I found my mom in the living room, where my father had set her up in the hide-a-bed. She was propped up on her pillows, absorbed in the view through the windows onto the fields. Her face was fl
ushed with fever. I was sure she had hantavirus, and I was sure she’d somehow caught it from me.
My mother’s face lit up when she saw me. I had to fight to keep from crying. “Hey now, Tep,” she said with a smile, “Where have you been this morning? You’re all scratched up.”
“All over the place,” I told her. I’d intended to tell her and my dad about the pothunters; I’d intended to call the sheriff and the BLM ranger. Now all of that would have to wait. I wasn’t going to get anything stirred up right now that might involve my parents. Those pothunters were good and stranded. My mother was too worn down, and my father was too worried about her, for either of them to be worrying about me.
“You should go to the hospital,” I told my mom.
She took my hand as I knelt by her side. “I’m fine,” she assured me. “Your father and I already talked about that. Tep, really I don’t feel that bad. I just caught the flu from being silly and standing out in the rain.”
“Lynn,” my father said, “you’re just so stubborn.” He turned to me and threw up his hands. “She’s got a cough, muscle aches, a headache, fever: all the early symptoms of hantavirus.”
“The symptoms of the flu,” my mother maintained. “I’m going to stay home where I can get well.”
My father shook his head, but said nothing further. He turned and went into the kitchen.
My mother pressed both my hands in hers and met my eyes. “Even if it is hantavirus, Tep, I’ve decided against going to the hospital. You know how people are dying on the way, or once they get there—”
“Don’t even talk like that!” I pleaded.
“Don’t—” “Listen, Tep. I’d stand more to lose on the way to the hospital than what I’d gain by getting there. I’ve thought about it, quite a lot. If it’s hantavirus, my best chance is right here, on the Seed Farm, with you guys. You guys and the Seed Farm are my strength. I’ll need every bit of my strength, if that’s what it turns out to be.”
“But, Mom—”
“Take me away from here, jostle me around, and my roots would go into shock.”
She managed a smile. I couldn’t. My father returned with a small bag of ice cubes which he wrapped in a washcloth and pressed against her forehead.
The minutes passed, long as hours. My mother drank a cup of echinacea tea, which is supposed to be good for the immune system. Then she closed her eyes, fighting her battle. She looked so calm. I knew my father was anything but calm. He couldn’t go against her wishes, yet he knew he was losing the chance to call for help.
It seemed to me, as the hours ticked away, that she was worsening. My father kept changing the icepack on her forehead to cool her down, but her fever was worse and her breathing was becoming more and more labored. At one point she opened her eyes and asked my father, “Do you hear that flute?”
My father was startled. “No … Do you hear a flute?”
“It’s coming from on top of the bookcase,” she said.
My father and I stood and went to the bookcase. On top of a stack of scientific journals was the large green insect I’d met in the night, vibrating its wings as before. I wondered why I couldn’t hear the music now. The insect was exactly the same: bright green, with huge eyes and long, waving antennas. I remembered how the old man, his eyes rolled back in his skull, had changed into this insect and back again.
“Tep, can you hear the music?” my mother asked.
“He’s playing just for you,” I replied.
My dad said, “There’s only some kind of katydid over here, Lynn. We don’t hear a flute. It must be your fever. I wonder what species this is. I’ve never seen one exactly like it before.”
My mother sighed. “Really, I do hear it. It’s the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard. It sounds something like water, and something like the wind, and a lot of other things—everything that’s beautiful, Tepary. It’s indescribably beautiful, and very soothing.”
My father looked more worried than ever. “Don’t get mystical on us, Lynn.”
With a slight smile, my mother said, “There’s more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our philosophy.”
“You’re tired,” my father insisted. “You should rest.”
“Yes, I think I’ll try to sleep.” She motioned toward the teacup on her nightstand. “After a while, I’ll have another cup of echinacea.”
My dad went out to brew some more tea. I kept watch by my mother. She nodded off.
I went to the dresser and whispered, “Thank you, magical person, for playing for my mother.”
The insect didn’t answer, but kept on playing, trilling its transparent wing covers.
When my mother woke, late in the afternoon, she told us she felt better though she looked even worse to me. Then she announced, “I want to tell you what I’ve learned from my midden studies.”
“You shouldn’t try,” my father said firmly. “It’ll take too much out of you.”
“I still think it’s the flu. Now listen.”
My father bit his lip as my mother drew herself up in the bed, gathered her strength, and said, “I’ve made some conclusions.”
“You don’t have to tell us,” my father insisted. “Not now.”
“But I’ve been waiting so long to tell you, both of you. Now listen! This is important to me!”
My father took her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“This is what the packrats tell us: when the people first built pithouses in the cave, two thousand years ago, tall trees grew close by, ponderosa pines like we find up on Enchanted Mesa today. The Enchanted Mesa ponderosas are only a remnant.”
“That’s remarkable,” my father said.
“Yes, it is. And the big trees didn’t grow only around Picture House. At all three other midden sites it was the same story. During the twelve hundred years people lived here, I found a gradual decline in the evidence of ponderosas in the rat middens. A hundred years before the abandonment there was none at all. No needles, no seeds, no ponderosa bark flakes, no cone segments …”
“The people cut down all the trees?” I wondered.
My mother rested and then she said, “They might have used them up, every one. When their tall pine forest was gone, the subsoil in their fields would have dried up, less rain and snow would have fallen….”
My father whistled softly. “The big drought came, they couldn’t raise nearly as much food….”
“Their populations would have crashed, and the survivors moved on.”
My mother waited, closed her eyes, then spoke again. “People dried up other places by cutting down their trees…. Greece and Turkey … Lebanon … Morocco … lots of places. It’s going on today more than ever, all over the world. We can learn from the story the packrats tell about Picture House.”
“What a hypothesis,” my father said.
“That’s all it is—my Packrat Hypothesis. If we do the same studies at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde and a lot of the other sites, it would be very exciting to compare our findings. Maybe those places were deforested, too. It might only be one piece of the puzzle of their disappearance and the migrations of the pueblo ancestors, but it might be an important piece.”
At that, my mother started coughing violently, wheezing for breath. Her face turned beet red. My father was greatly alarmed, and so was I. When she could manage it, she drank some water. I ran for new ice for her forehead.
“Now you need to rest,” my father was saying when I returned.
My mom shook her head, and said with a smile, “I guess I know too much about time. I know how precious it is.”
She was much worse, it was obvious.
My mother closed her eyes, calmed herself. A few minutes later she made the little clucking sound she’s always used for Dusty, and Dusty got up and stood by the bed. “What happened to the flute music?” she asked suddenly. “It’s gone.”
I looked over to the top of the bookcase. “So is the katydid.”
Just then came a soft knock at th
e door. “Come in,” my father said.
The old man removed his beat-up straw hat and walked in. He was stooped over, barefoot as always, as weather-beaten as mud that has cracked and dried in the sun.
My mother opened her eyes wide and greeted him with a smile. “It’s good to see you, Cricket.”
My mother laid her hand on the broad crown of Dusty’s grizzled head. “Good girl,” she said, and then my mother looked up at my dad and me, and said sheepishly, “I have a confession to make.”
My father said, “Lynn, what are you talking about?”
It was getting so much more difficult for her to speak. She hardly had the breath for it. “I’ve been hoping … it was only the flu. I’d convinced myself it was only the flu. Suddenly I’m not so sure. I should tell you this. I cleaned out the greenhouse about ten days ago.”
I already understood, but my father was completely confused. “What do you mean?” he asked her.
“My packrat studies didn’t make me sick. I discovered … the deer mice had gotten into the greenhouse—quite a few of them.”
My father went pale.
“I know, I know,” my mother said. “I thought I was being so careful. I opened the windows, wore my mask…. I guess the virus is a lot finer than the mesh on my mask.”
My father put his head in his hands. My mother reached for him and put her hand on his cheek. “I didn’t want one of you guys beating me to it. I just should’ve left the greenhouse alone. I found where the mice were getting in … I plugged it up. It shouldn’t be a problem again.”
“Lynn,” my father said gravely, “If this goes much further, your lungs will suddenly start to fill with fluid. Maybe they already are.”
“Please, Art,” she said. “Don’t start that again. I know where I should make my stand.”
Cricket’s ancient eyes were suddenly lit with an idea. He turned to me and said, “You spoke of the pink-skinned man’s medicine bundle. Tell me, Tepary, did it have any plants in it—herbs?”