by Siena West
© 2018 Standing Reed Books
P.O. Box 87492
Tucson, Arizona 85754
All Rights Reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or distributed in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Brief quotations in critical reviews and other noncommercial uses as specified by copyright law are permitted.
978-1-54-394654-3 (eBook)
Cover Art by Cynthia Elsner
Table of Contents
Author's Note
1. Old Bones
2. Warning
3. Show Low
4. Dream
5. Two Visitors
6. Wildfire
7. Cholla House
8. Desire
9. Summer Solstice
10. Anthropological Fieldwork
11. Lecture
12. Globe
13. Theft
14. Combat Mentality
15. Independence Day
16. Harsh Words
17. Lost and Found
18. Malevolent Spirits
19. Phoenix
20. Resolution
21. Gunfire
22. Hiding
23. Hospital
24. Waste
25. Excavation
26. Otis Greenlaw's Ranch
27. Inferno
28. Arson
29. Cleanup
30. Greenlaw's Hat
31. Caught
32. The Devil's Own
33. Banishing Spell
34. Fugitive
35. Relief
36. Harbinger
37. Bolt
38. Fatal Strike
39. The Ruin in the Canyon
Excerpy from Death Kiss
About the Author
Author’s Note
My fictional world of archaeology, villains, heroes, cowboys, Native Americans, and pot hunters is the product of my imagination. Many places I write about are actual towns, cities, and archaeological sites in east-central Arizona, but I have deliberately scrambled the geographic locations of some to protect archaeological ruins. The epidemic of pot hunting that endangered the fictional archaeological field school at the Taylor Ranch remains a problem today. Pot hunting is an affront to Native Americans, science, and our ability to reconstruct and understand the past.
The real places include the following. Besh-ba-gowah in the town of Globe, Arizona, is a reconstructed pueblo ruin and worth visiting. So is The Shed, a restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico (beware the red chile sauce!). The Phoenix Field Office, the Lakeside Resident Agency, the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, and the Whiteriver Police Station are legitimate entities. LiDAR and tree-ring dating are scientific techniques archaeologists use for mapping and placing archaeological sites in time, respectively. Also real is the University of Arizona, but the faculty directory for the School of Anthropology shows no María Elena Vargas. The School of Anthropology carries out field schools, but not at the imaginary Taylor Ranch. The Arizona State Museum exists and has a repatriation coordinator, although not the person I depict here. Although the Pinedale bird decorates ancient pottery, no ranch in northeastern Arizona uses it as a brand and logo.
Information I’ve included about Apache archaeological sites is accurate. So is the discussion of cannibalism, and the controversy I’ve described is real and acrimonious. The Sinaloa Cartel is unfortunately real, deadly, and dangerous, but pot hunting isn’t one of the Sinaloans’s crimes.
Stories about the fictional Native Americans living at the Taylor Ranch long ago are presented between the chapters. I have modeled these stories on Pueblo language, personal names, and society. The reader should not infer that the ancient Native Americans were Hopi ancestors, however.
A word about the laws I mention: enacted in 1990, the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act specifies the rules archaeologists must follow concerning human remains and associated artifacts on federal land. ARS §41-865 is the Arizona State law that precludes disturbing human remains on private land. Archaeologists use the Archaeological Resources Protection Act to prosecute vandals on federal land.
The fictional places include the Taylor Ranch, Crow Ruin, Cholla House, O Bar Ranch, and the ruin in the canyon, Lightning House. These are nonexistent products of my imagination you won’t find on any map. Also fictional are the Pueblo sorcerer’s bundle, the Railroad Café, and the White Mountain Trading Post.
The characters in this book are fictional and do not represent real people, living or dead. One exception is Emil W. Haury, the supposed excavator of the imaginary Cholla House cliff ruin. He was an actual archaeologist, the discoverer of the ancient Mogollon culture, and a bona fide giant in Southwest archaeology.
Thanks go to Mary Robertson, who read and commented on an early draft of this book; to Cynthia Elsner, who crafted the amazing cover; and to my husband for his continued support and love. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the White Mountain Apache people.
My hope is that my readers will recognize the deep and abiding respect I have for all Native Americans, including the ancient ones whose lives archaeologists attempt to reconstruct and the living peoples who today reside in the Southwest.
Chapter 1
Old Bones
A fleshless face stared sightless from a mound of fresh earth. The eyes were blind because the red dirt of the Arizona mountain country filled the sockets. A young woman knelt beside the skull, which was almost a thousand years old. She ran her fingers across the cool, ivory dome. Long bones—a tibia, a fibula, a femur with the head broken off—lay nearby. Pot hunters had torn the ancient burial from the silence and darkness of a grave intended to serve for eternity.
Archaeologists from the Taylor Ranch field school surveyed that morning in rough country east of Ghost House Canyon. They found the small pueblo ruin and stopped to record it and eat lunch. Pot raiding was familiar to the archaeologists. Every field season, they found sites resembling mine fields, pockmarked with deep holes and piles of backdirt.
A gaunt, half-dead piñon pine spread blackened, twisted limbs over the fresh evidence of grave robbing. The survey leader, Cole Merrick, found Linda Benjamin beneath the tree, cradling the skull as if she could protect it from further desecration.
“Look, Cole, it’s perfect—not a crack in it. It’s female—she has a smooth brow, small mastoid processes, and a delicate chin.” Whoever had wrenched the skeleton from its resting place had no concern for the ancient dead. Nor did they have any consideration for their spirits long fled to the afterworld or their right to rest forever undisturbed.
“I don’t understand why people disrespect the dead. It’s disgusting. Look at this.” Linda kicked at an empty cigarette pack and a beer can the pot hunters had left.
“Money, Linda. An isolated site is a gold mine. Skeletons are worthless to pot hunters because they’re only interested in the pots. There’s money in burial pots, especially the painted ones.”
“Aren’t there laws to stop this?”
“Only in theory,” Cole admitted. “Federal, Tribal, and State laws protect human remains, even on private land. But pot hunters make their own laws, and they’ve been digging since the 1800s. They assume it’s their right, and nobody has stopped them—so far, at least.” The conservative Arizona ranching culture had fostered more than a century of pot hunting and was resentful of what they saw as government intrusion, whether legal or otherwise.
“What should I do?” Linda still held the skull, her fingers tracing the smooth arcs of bone above the eye sockets.
“Map the pot hole and the bones—a sketch map will do, because of the disturbance—and take photos. Then rebury the b
ones in the pot hole to protect them.” He checked his field log. “The GPS readings put us on Forest land. That means NAGPRA applies.” He was referring to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. “Do you remember where you found the skull?”
Linda nodded. “Do you suppose the pot hunters took the pots that were buried with this woman?”
“You betcha. Because the bones are broken and tossed around, I bet she had one or more pots. They dug them out and left the bones in the backdirt.”
The student shuddered, despite the heat that had bleached the cloudless Arizona sky.
“You can’t cover up desecration, Cole. Somebody cared for this person—cared enough to bury her, maybe cried for her. She didn’t deserve this.”
You don’t know that, Cole thought. Monsters lived among the ancients, too. The woman may have deserved what the pot hunters had done. The living could not know.
“Something bad is here,” Linda insisted. “I can feel it—it’s supernatural.” She pointed to the blasted tree that hung over them, its limbs stark against the stonewashed-denim sky.
“Even the trees are dead,” she said, pointing to the tree above them. “The spirits won’t appreciate having their bones dug up and tossed around as if they were trash. They will make somebody pay.”
Prickling touched the back of Cole’s neck because he hadn’t noticed that lightning had struck the tree. Their Apache laborers wouldn’t come near it. Lightning power was the most potent of the natural powers and caused frightening dreams and illness. The sickness often leapt from person to person just as lightning bolts jump from cloud to cloud.
“If anybody pays, I sure hope it’s the assholes that did this,” he said, his brisk tone brooking no further nonsense. “This spooky stuff is a load of crap, Linda. Let’s get back to work. If we get off schedule, the director will make someone pay, and that someone will be me. I’ll send Phil to help you.”
“Cole, how can you tell it’s a load of crap?”
But he was gone without a glance at the pale, scattered bones or the blackened tree above them. Everything was normal enough. Noon sunlight washed the land, and the rich scents of pine, earth, and roots filled the air. Despite the seeming normalcy, Linda was convinced something was amiss.
Time would prove her right. Just as a lock’s cylinders tumbled into place, events were set in motion, and the layered implications would not come to light until summer’s end.
* * *
At the Taylor Ranch, the day was collapsing under the weight of the afternoon’s dry heat. María Elena Vargas, Ph.D., sat at her desk in the ranch-house bedroom that served as her office. The director stared out the window, watching the lawn sprinkler swing from side to side in hypnotic swoops. She had been staring, unthinking, for the best part of fifteen minutes. Norman Taylor, owner of the century-old ranch, created the lawn and flower beds to make the place resemble a bed-and-breakfast inn. His efforts were valiant if incongruous in the wilds of east-central Arizona.
Elena had wrestled with the account books since lunch, and the books had won. She thought about stretching her legs and getting coffee when Tim Overton appeared in the doorway. The crew chief’s bright red hair stood upright in tufts. That meant he had been raking his fingers through the springy mop because he was nervous. It wasn’t a good sign.
“Sorry to interrupt, Tía, but you’ll want to see what we found at the spaceship.”
She gritted her teeth. The director couldn’t stop the kids from calling the great, round structure in the pasture the spaceship. “It better be worth abandoning the accounts for, Tim.” She grinned at him. Regardless of what Tim had discovered, it would be more interesting than grocery expenditures.
At the excavation, they found the student crew huddled in the meager shade of a nearby juniper. Tim climbed into the unit and pointed with his trowel to something pale standing out against the darker soil.
“I assume this bone is human. Come down and see what you think, Tía.” Most everyone called the director by a version of the pet Spanish nickname meaning aunt.
Elena joined him in the unit. An alien wave of cold nausea and fear swept over her the moment her feet touched the dirt. Her nerves shrieked that below lay something wicked. Elena forced herself to stay in the pit when it was the last thing on earth she wanted to do.
She borrowed Tim’s trowel and probed around what proved to be a piece of human bone. She troweled farther and stifled a scream when the trowel’s tip touched another bone. It felt like a jolt of electricity slicing through her hand.
¡Ave María Purísima! Elena muttered the old Mexican charm against witchcraft. She ignored the dread and nausea and continued to work. She discovered more bones—splintered pieces of long bones, crushed phalanges, and bits of flat bone that might be scapulae or pelvic bone. The bones told her what she needed to know. But when she stood up, she feared she would faint. Dim images floated in her peripheral vision—pictures of stone knives and dismembered bodies—and she heard distant screams and smelled a faint scent of blood.
Tim looked at her blanched face with concern. “Are you okay?” She took a deep breath, trying to pull herself together. When they climbed out of the unit, the sickness faded.
“You were right, Tim. You found a human occipital-bone fragment. The other bones are human, too, and they’re all smashed to bits and mixed up.”
“Shit,” Tim mumbled, raking at his hair. “What did I do to deserve this?”
Elena smiled at the poor kid with the rat’s nest of ravaged red hair. “You did just fine, chico. But you know excavation must stop.”
Tim was familiar with the rules. When archaeologists encountered human remains, they quit excavating. Within 48 hours, they had to report the find to the State museum, which began the consultation process with Native Americans, who would tell the field school how to proceed.
“It should be okay to keep working until you’ve exposed the entire bottom of the unit. We need more information—is it a disturbed burial or something else?” The condition of the bones and her own physical reactions told Elena the bones were not from a typical burial. But there was no need to tell Tim.
“Okay. I’ll just trowel around the bones and brush the dirt off.”
“Perfect. Then cover up well.”
But the situation was far from perfect. It wasn’t the slowdown to the work but the malevolence rising like vapor from belowground that troubled the director. A terrible act must have taken place long ago to have engendered the dread and cold she experienced. Elena feared that the dead in the pasture wished them harm.
* * *
It began with an irrigation system. Norm planned to run water lines out to a stock tank and dig up an old, caved-in cistern because his cattle kept falling into it. Elena had trained him well—Norm wouldn’t dig unless an archaeologist monitored the work. In point of fact, it was funny. The Taylor family had dug in ruins forever. When Elena finagled an arrangement for Norm to host the field school, he was forced to abandon his hobby.
It was ironic that Norm’s attempt to do the right thing had brought him trouble. He’d started the project with a water-line trench near the cistern. Tim, who monitored the trenching, saw a curious feature in the trench wall—a dipping line of black and a rim of red, burned clay. They stopped to investigate, and then Tim told Norm to scrape off the first layer of topsoil with the backhoe to show the top of the feature in plan. A curving line of burned clay encased a charcoal-black interior—part of what looked to be a circular feature. The bright red and dense black colors stood out against the light brown soil of the pasture. Whatever the thing was, it had burned.
After Elena inspected the discovery, she instructed Norm to follow the curving edge as far as possible and scrape off the topsoil. When he finished, it was clear the feature was circular—and large.
Elena gathered the students to measure it as in one of her favorite old black-and-white movies. They spread out, arms extended and fingert
ips touching, shifting around until they stood on the edge of the feature. Just as the scientists in the movie had done, the archaeologists stood several feet apart in a large circle. But instead of an alien spaceship buried in the Arctic ice, the archaeologists marked what appeared to be an enormous pit dipping below the cistern. Elena was not the only one who shivered when the size of the feature was apparent. The kids called it the spaceship because of its size and shape. They, too, remembered the old science-fiction movie.
The discovery was unexpected because the pasture was far from the ruins being excavated, and no tell-tale pot sherds and bits of flaked stone on the surface showed that below was something human-made. The feature wasn’t a pit house or a kiva—the ceremonial chamber of the ancient and modern Pueblo peoples. It was far too big to be a hearth or roasting pit.
Having to stop work annoyed Norm, but it was necessary to excavate the feature, at least the part that the irrigation system would disturb. The crew started with two excavation units near the cistern. At first, the work was straightforward. Below the humus was a jumbled layer of charcoal and burned wood. The archaeologists sampled the burned wood for tree-ring dating, and it took forever to complete the tiresome job. When the crew removed the burned wood, they discovered a layer of stones. The big blocks of sandstone and limestone were jammed close together with only a little dirt packed between them. It took tremendous effort to wedge in a pick, pry up a stone, and haul it out of the pit.
And then today, Tim’s crew removed the last of the stones, and under them, he found the bones.
As her senses told her on the dry, bright afternoon, whatever the human bones represented, it was malevolent. It wasn’t possible to let the bones lie, allowing the evil to sink back into the ground and then covering it up once more. They would have to remove and analyze the bones, if the Native Americans allowed, so that Norm could complete the irrigation project. Elena feared that the malignancy would spread. It would cast a pall over them, like the shadow of a great horned owl before it swoops to pierce its prey with long, curved talons.