by Craig Childs
“Le di en el corazón,” he said, pointing his cigarette at the deer, telling us it was a shot to the heart.
Gilberto slipped this photograph off the top and revealed another of the same deer.
He drew a breath off his cigarette and explained that he had gone hunting in the barrancas. The deer were in canyons, barrancas, that run through the Sierra Madre. He had traveled a long way on foot, following deer tracks into difficult places. The hunting is good back where people never go, he said. Soon he had found himself in a huge canyon. He had hunted through fallen trees and boulders big as...what? Bigger than this bar certainly.
Gilberto turned to the next black-and-white photograph. It was of a cliff dwelling, a bank of walls and dark roof beams tucked back into a cave. I had not seen anything of such stature since just below the Mogollon Rim in east-central Arizona. There was no need for reserve between us now. We leaned in from our bar stools as if Gilberto had just opened a treasure chest.
The site he had photographed had thirty rooms, maybe more. It was three stories tall at the back, where adobe walls snuggled against a soot-blackened cave ceiling. T-shaped doors were strung across the buildings like flags.
The next photograph showed globes of buildings bulging outward. This was a different site from the first he had shown us.
How many cliff dwellings are there? I asked.
Gilberto said they are everywhere.
We spread the photographs across the bar, each of us falling into details of wall construction, ceilings and doors and windows. The round olla-like buildings were like nothing else in the Southwest, some of their fat bellies nearly two stories tall, huge mushrooms.
Gilberto arranged five shot glasses along the bar. He pulled out a bottle of sotol he said was bootleg and poured each of us a drink. Gratis.
I looked at Gilberto, who was smiling. I lifted the shot glass to him and then touched it to my lips.
The sotol tasted smoky and as hard as gasoline. It had been distilled in the radiator of a junked car. Gilberto said it was the drink of the mountains. Down in the desert they drink tequila from the heart of the agave plant. In the highlands the traditional drink is sotol, distilled from the heart of the sotol plant, a saw-bladed yucca.
Gilberto was proud of his land. He had spent his life on the slope of the sierra. But never before had he seen such a thing as these cliff dwellings. If we wanted to know, he said, he would tell us where they were.
Yes, we wanted to know. He explained that a maze of dirt roads leads into the sierra, until finally there is only one road, and only a strong vehicle will be able to drive it. There are washouts, rockslides. In places it is hardly a road. There is a rancher named José who lives there and comes out on occasion for supplies on a mule, or sometimes in a vehicle lent by in-laws. José is a lonely, strange man, but very hospitable. In the barrancas beyond where José runs cattle are the cliff dwellings.
Gilberto placed his fist against his heart.
“Es un lugar importante en mi vida,” he said.
I told him we would be careful, that we understood this was an important place to him. He poured another round.
We left the bar that night and stepped into the cool night exhilarated. The air smelled of freshly cut pine and diesel smoke. Laughing at our luck, having encountered Gilberto on a whim, we walked down the street of squat stores and houses. We had received the key to the Sierra Madre, and we teetered with a little drunkenness, amazed at our good fortune. A car rolled by packed with teenage boys.
One leaned out the window and shouted in painfully enunciated English, “How are you doing?”
“Bueno, graciás!” I shouted back.
The car erupted with laughter.
After them a flatbed came down out of the mountains. A single tree was secured to it, a massive trunk of a Mexican pine held down with chains. I was surprised to see a tree of such size, old growth still coming out of the Sierra Madre. The four of us stopped to watch it pass.
We got into our two trucks and drove into the forest outside town, where we slept beneath the pines.
Blades of firelight slipped through gaps in the rancher’s woodstove. It was the next night, and we sat in the brass glow of a single oil lamp. Shadows of table legs and chairs flickered around us like busy cats. We had driven to José’s home earlier that day, hours of dust and sickening bangs of rock on the undercarriages of our trucks, low gear most of the way at one or two miles per hour. As Gilberto had warned, in places it was hardly a road. We had driven until our nerves were wired into tight bundles of concentration. Now we unwound in the evening, invited into José’s small house. Outside, the wind lapped and murmured at the stovepipe.
José stood and walked to the woodstove to take the kettle off. He poured hot water into five metal cups and slid a clean spoon with a jar of instant coffee across his faded, pink-flowered tablecloth.
Mes tras mes, he said. Month after month he is alone with no woman.
He complained that he had to make his own tortillas, wash his own clothes, kill and cook his own food. A wild turkey hung from a wooden peg behind us, freshly taken with a shotgun. It looked like a dark headdress on the wall.
Three hundred cattle, José said, on half a million acres, and no one else but him, a mule, and a couple of dogs.
“Muy solo,” José said.
José looked to be about sixty years old, but he could have been much younger, his face worn beyond his years, his gray hair combed back. He wore a clean T-shirt under a button-down shirt. He sat on a stool made out of a tree stump, his hands laid flat on the knees of his faded jeans, his leather cowboy boots planted firmly on the floor. He had given us the only four chairs he had, three made of rickety wood and one an aluminum beach chair.
For guests, he said.
His Spanish was quick and blurred. We picked our way through his words, while he listened in turn to our slow hunt for adequate grammar. We had gotten the message across that we had been directed by Gilberto the bartender, that we were looking for cliff dwellings. José considered Gilberto to be overly sentimental.
“No es como él dice,” José said. It is not as Gilberto says.
José told us that the canyons below here were feo, ugly. They were all cliffs and caves and forests too thick and steep for cattle. Terrible country. Shaking his head, leaning toward the table and then back away from it, José sputtered at us with a long description of why he did not like the cliff dwellings, speaking a language I barely recognized, the rapid dialect of a hermit. Cliff dwellings made him uneasy, houses of the dead, human bones eroding from the ground. He had no idea the age of the dwellings. A hundred years, a thousand years, what is the difference? He tried to stay away from such places, passing down there only to track lost cows. He had not so much fear as contempt for these places.
Bárbaros, he called these people, whoever they were. Barbarians. Gente salvaje. Wild people in the cliffs. Proper people live in houses. Why were they hiding?
“Y su cerámica,” José said with disgust, stumbling out his words as if in disbelief. “To’o esta roto, nada entero!” All their pots were broken, nothing left intact!
He took this to mean their ceramics were cheaply made, the work of primitives. He had no idea how old these places and their artifacts were. When I told him the pots were probably five, six hundred years old and that they were broken from age, and not from poor manufacture, he said it hardly mattered. Ancient, new, what is the difference? They are dead.
“Es un malo lugar,” José said. “Esta lleno de fantasmas.” It is a bad place full of ghosts.
I quickly said, “Estamos interesados en el pasado.”
José stopped and licked his lips. El pasado, the past, who has time for the past? He said he was lonely living with ghosts.
Then he smiled.
“Ahora, ustedes deben comer,” he said, relaxing his shoulders, gesturing to the food he had set on the table, tortillas made with his own hands and yellow, rancid margarine.
We we
re hungry. We did not want to eat all of his food, though. We had brought plenty of our own. But we had already shown him our cans of beans, our bags of rice, and he had looked at them as if they were from another planet. He insisted that we eat his food, beans and tortillas, his ingredients hauled in a mule’s saddlebags.
We smiled, thanked him for his hospitality, and reached out to tear off pieces of the tortillas. They tasted fresh, made today, powdered with burns and wood smoke. We ate quietly, with approving smiles and nods. The wind hemmed among the pines outside, and José paused, hearing it. The flame in the oil lamp shifted just slightly with the change in pressure. Shadows ducked through the room.
THE EYE OF TLALOC
SIERRA MADRE OCCIDENTAL
Ihad been in jungle before, and this northern reach of the Sierra Madre was not jungle. The terrain we traveled through with a couple of weeks of supplies on our backs was mountainous, broken apart by fathomless barrancas, no trails except those left by animals. Brushy forests of Mexican pines, walnut trees, and big-toothed maples grew along the drainages where we set camp amid fallen boulders and hoops of wild grape. It was not jungle, but it was also not the Southwest that I knew—far too overgrown and pitched with shade. Unfamiliar birdcalls spilled from the canopy like silver coins. We were walking the far end of a mountain chain that starts near Mexico City almost nine hundred miles away and reaches nearly to the Arizona border, an unbroken line from tropics to desert. The heart of Mesoamerica lay to the southeast, and to the north was the Pueblo core of the Southwest. I felt as if I were on a bridge balanced between geographies and cultures.
Just as Gilberto had said, cliff dwellings were everywhere in this reach of barrancas. Even his photographs had not prepared me for the number of ancient settlements packed into nearly every cave we spotted—biscuit-colored adobe walls notched with black windows and conspicuous T-shaped doorways. The number of T shapes was startling, crowds of them of many sizes and a variety of dedicated forms, some nearly trapezoidal at their tops, some keyhole-shaped, and some perfectly square. We found broad T shapes through which two people could pass at once, and others as small as dollhouse doors, little niches barely large enough to fit a hand into.
Successive T-shaped doorways inside a Sierra Madre cliff dwelling (the ceiling has collapsed between the first and second stories). REGAN CHOI
We climbed to these towering cliff dwellings and walked awestruck through their rooms and hallways. Some buildings were three stories tall, cave ceilings black with wood smoke. With frayed parts of baskets on the floors and painted bits of murals peeling off the walls, they appeared not to have been touched for centuries. We felt as if we had walked into a lost Mesa Verde. Not for an instant were we unaware of the antiquity surrounding us. As we climbed through thickets of poison ivy, as we cooked meals night after night, as we gathered water from springs, there was a constant sense that we were in someone else’s house. Even when we got drunk one night on a bottle of Gilberto’s bootleg sotol we had packed, two of us took off in the dark and found a ruin. Walking shoulder to shoulder through its rooms in the beam of a single headlamp, we were suddenly sober, hearing nothing but our own breath in these gaunt quarters.
After only eight days of moving through the barrancas, we counted forty-four cliff dwellings—enough rooms to have housed a few thousand people, a small city of interconnected sites. The broken pottery we picked off the dusty, cobwebby floors seemed to date to late in the fourteenth century, perhaps into the fifteenth, making these sites contemporary with Pueblo migrants swelling south from Arizona, those who did not return to the Colorado Plateau.
One morning I wandered up a canyon slope and found a cave set back in the face of a cliff. There, as expected, was yet another cliff dwelling. We were finding them everywhere like hornets’ nests, compact and elaborate villages set high in the barrancas. Third-story chambers receded into the cave’s frail dungeon light. My hands were dark with soil from climbing up through the forest. I looked as if I had been grubbing for potatoes. I did not wipe my hands on my pants when I reached the front of this dwelling. I walked slowly into it, stepping around broken pottery, pieces of Babicora Polychrome with red and black designs on a cream-colored background, and sherds of Ramos Black pottery as glossy as opals—both styles present during the height of Paquimé. There were also countless corncobs on the floor, evidence of massive agriculture. Polished tubs of grinding stones were set out, each filled with dry, blown leaves. Among these metates I saw the fragile shoulder of a discarded basket. People here had been proficient weavers, that was for sure. Almost every cliff dwelling we had seen had mats with diamond-twilled weaves or pieces of cotton fabric made on an anchored loom. In one place sixteen feet of finely braided rope was coiled in a corner. These residents were highly skilled craftspeople. Everything they did seemed touched with excess consideration. Even the larger timbers used for posts and beams had been planed flat and smooth with stone tools, as if taken from a modern lumberyard.
Out front, at the overlooking balcony of the cave, stood a row of bulbous chambers, adobe moons floating at the edge of the dwelling. These I had seen in Gilberto’s photographs, plump chambers I imagined were used for storing grain, access allowed from above through circular door stones inserted into conical roofs. Their insides were as smooth as porcelain, brushed with a fine clay plaster.
There was no sound other than my light footfalls and birds squabbling in the forest below as I passed through these unusual structures. An adobe stairway led to a second story, and I followed it, stepping past tusks of fallen ceiling timbers. I hardly wanted to breathe, not wishing to break the stillness. T-shaped portals surrounded me as I ascended the stairs, showing the way into a lair of farther rooms beneath rafts of roof beams. When I reached the top of the stairs, I saw on the floor shreds of woven textiles and small wooden tools wrapped in dried animal sinew. It looked as though a closet had been turned upside down. A third-story room had caved in, its contents strewn across this second-story floor. Never had I seen so many pieces of artifacts. Indeed, it seemed that the people had stepped out one day and simply not returned, their belongings decaying over time. As I continued, it sounded as if I was walking on gravel and broken glass even though I took slow, gingerly steps around the plentiful corncobs and shattered pottery.
In front of me was a room with a circular floor. There was not much left of it besides the floor plan itself, its walls mostly fallen over. What walls remained were made of jacal, a lattice of adobe and wood unlike anything we had seen among these cliff dwellings, more like structures I knew from Kayenta, in northeast Arizona. I walked inside this open, round room. It was the first circular structure I had encountered in the barrancas (different from the grain storage rooms, which were mushroom-shaped and stood on round pedestals). The room reminded me of a kiva, or at least some architectural memory of one.
If it was a kiva, I thought, there would be a sipapu. Just off the circle’s centerpoint I knelt and swept away wood slivers and mortar crumbs. There I found a small adobe pit no larger than a breakfast bowl, exactly where you would see a sipapu.
These were the people I had been following, I thought, a projection of Anasazi, the next step south of Salado. Something started at Chaco might have reached the Sierra Madre—the Lost Others of the Zuni, Hopi exiles, ancestors of the Pueblo. Kiva builders. People of the T. I seem to have found a kiva, a blueprint of a ceremonial structure carried down from the Colorado Plateau. I brushed debris back over the dish—this possible sipapu—stood up, and moved on.
I took my time in this ruin. Walls were painted with designs. Geometric images were etched into the plaster. I passed into one of the second-story rooms, where I walked across an expanse of corncobs and snippets of threadbare basketry. Against the back wall I found a shaft aiming straight down, its walls made with a sandpaper plaster different from that of any other room. I peered into the hatchway leading down this shaft and saw it was much deeper than I expected. I pulled out my headlamp and shined a light ins
ide, maybe five, six feet down. At the bottom, faded under centuries of dust, was a collection of bones. The bones were still in place, articulated, outlining a body.
It was a bird, a fairly large one, with its clavicle hitched up against its breastbone. The pronged feet were barely visible, relatively flat, not sharp or curved as one would expect from a raptor or an owl that might have become lost in these rooms. I passed my faint beam from one bone to the next, deciding this had to be the remains of a turkey.
It must have fallen in, I thought. Domestic turkeys had no doubt been kept in this cliff dwelling once upon a time. Turkeys had been raised at nearly every major pre-Columbian settlement across the Southwest. Aviculturists at Paquimé had raised thousands of these plump ground birds, rearing them for their feathers, some for their meat, and many for what appears to have been sacrificial burials. These burials are curious, most of them consisting of decapitated birds. Hundreds of headless turkeys were found interred along with ceramic hand drums beneath a single plaza in Paquimé’s House of the Dead. There is little doubt that these headless turkeys were part of some important and widespread ritual. It has been imagined that at Paquimé turkeys were decapitated for Tlaloc, a deity presiding over rain and drought. The hand drums may have been pounded to imitate the sound of thunder, a reminder of precipitation.
Headless turkeys have been found at sites all along the north-south route I was tracing from the Colorado Plateau to Mexico. They have been excavated from kivas at Chaco Canyon—very specifically placed between the ventilator shafts and the deflector stones, where human bodies were sometimes interred. Archaeologist Susan Ryan had uncovered turkeys without heads in her Colorado excavation on the Great Sage Plain.