by F. E. Arliss
His name was Circling Wind and Emery almost snorted when he said it. For years she’d listened to her grandmother pass gas and then excuse it by saying, “When you get old, you get the wind.” It was unfortunate that had been the first thing that popped into her mind when he introduced himself. Emery was sure it meant something more akin to tornado or cyclone or whirlwind, then her own stupid instantaneous asssociation.
Since Circling Wind was very stern looking and didn’t talk much, the urge to laugh quickly vanished. He did explain to her in short, concise sentences how aeronautics worked. It was fascinating and she quickly got over her word association ridiculousness.
Somewhere over Oklahoma he let her take the controls and showed her how to raise and lower the plane gently. He even explained to her how to use the foot pedals to control the rudder or to brake the plane when on the ground. Emery loved everything about it and asked a lot of questions. At first she thought the wizened man wouldn’t answer, but eventually, as though he’d chewed over exactly how to say the answer with the fewest words, he’d spit out a descriptively-short sentence that painted a clear picture. He was a master of few words for maximum information. Circling Wind was a wizard with meaning.
When they landed in Arizona, it was in the middle of absolutely nowhere, as far as Emery could tell. They’d been flying over a vast wilderness of red rock and empty brushy plain when the aircraft began to coast downwards. Large cliffs and steep ravines wandered off to the left and right and as they came in low, Circling Wind turned the small craft into a narrow canyon and the small plane touched down lightly and bumped along a dirt runway to a stop.
Either side of the narrow strip was edged by steep cliffs. Emery could see a few small cliff dwelling ruins farther up the canyon walls. She’d looked at a lot of information on the computer about Canyon de Chelly and she figured they were nowhere near the tourist trap at the opening. Almost all of the rest of the area had to be accessed with the aid of Navajo guides, and she believed they were well into tribal lands here.
A battered white pickup truck sat over to the side of the runway. After Emery helped Circling Wind tie down the small plane to anchors pounded into the ground, they tugged a nylon net with camo strips woven into it over the plane and fastened it to the anchors as well. From the air and even close by on the ground, the plane wouldn’t be visible. Emery thought it was very clever and almost like a protection spell but in real matter. She said that to Circling Wind, who merely grunted in acknowledgement with a slight nod of the head.
She grabbed her backpack, scrambled into the shabby interior of the old white pickup and grabbed the overhead seat handle as the truck bumped off down what looked like a dry arroyo. Bertha had told her about arroyos before she came. They were dried up riverbeds and you could tell them apart from real roads because they simply meandered wherever the water went when it flooded.
It took almost half an hour for the truck, with clearly no shock absorbers left at all, to bump, grind and ratchet its way to a stop in front of a heavily pitted, silver Airstream camper. The camper was small. Only about twelve feet long and sat against a mound of enormous boulders in the shelter of a steep cliff. To one side, further up under the cliff, was an adobe-like block shelter with a corral made of brush and twisted pieces of limb, tree and bush. Inside the corral, three donkeys stared at Emery as if she’d suddenly sprouted horns.
She grinned at them, then at Circling Wind. “I love donkeys,” she said, then startled all of them by braying out a very loud, very raucous, very accurate mimic of a donkey bray. It sounded exactly like a broken, rusty, water pump and for the first time, Circling Wind showed a few broken teeth, then burst out laughing. When the donkeys answered back and the braying racket finally ceased, Circling Wind said, “That is good, girl. Very good. Eagle Rising may have to name you Donkey Girl at your ceremony.”
Emery stopped grinning. “I hope not,” she said with feeling and a look of horror on her face, causing Circling Wind to laugh harder, exposing darkened, yellow teeth.
An old woman had appeared at the door of the trailer and having overheard the donkey call bonanza and the consequent exchange of words, limped down the crooked metal steps and said to Emery, “I will not call you Donkey Girl, but that is all I can promise.”
“Good enough,” Emery said emphatically, smiling at the woman. “I’m Emery. Dorothea, Bertha and Letty say “hi”,” she added. “Thank you for having me.”
“She’s got manners, at least,” the old woman said to Circling Wind, ignoring Emery entirely.
“Hmmm,” Circling Wind replied. “Good in the plane. Helpful on the ground.”
“I am Eagle Rising,” the old woman said to Emery. “Come have tea.”
Oh brother, Emery thought to herself, more awful tasting tea. What was it with old people and awful tea?
The tea wasn’t as bad as Emery had feared. After a cautious sip, she’d had another cup and learned in a few words that it was called “greenthread” and was brewed from a type of aster flower. Well, it was good. Better than the weird asparagus root tea she had to drink at the King mansion. They were off to a good start.
Chapter Eight
Eagle Rising
The first night was strange for Emery. She’d been shown to a small bunk that pulled down over the miniscule couch installed at one end of the trailer. She could tell it was usually kept latched shut as Eagle Rising had a hard time getting it to release and come down. Dust billowed out and after flapping her hands to clear the air, the old woman brought two thick sheepskins to line the narrow shelf and then set a rolled wool blanket at each end. It appeared that one was to act as a pillow and the other as a covering, should she need it.
Climbing into the bunk was a bit of a feat, as she had to stand on the corner of the couch below, then step onto the narrow edge of the kitchen counter and launch herself across the foot and a half wide space that separated them. She’d slammed her head into the ceiling on the first try and while she’d made it, the pain in her head had her ignoring the fact that the rolled wool blanket was very scratchy and uncomfortable. She was so tired, and perhaps a bit concussed, that she slept like a log, waking only once to pull the other rough blanket up as a shield against the cold.
The second night, she learned to don her silk long underwear for bed, that way the itchy blanket didn’t have as much of a brillo-pad like effect on her skin. She’d taken one of her tee-shirts to put over the blanket that acted as a pillow and usually the fresh air, long days, and concentration on what she was learning was enough to knock her into a deep sleep. Plus, she always slept better when it was cool. The old crones had been right, it got very cold at night and she’d even taken to wearing the antler hat to bed.
Eagle Rising slept on the couch below her and was usually still puttering around the trailer as Emery drifted off to sleep. There were three mangy sheep dogs that patrolled the area around the trailer. Duke was Emery’s favorite and stayed outside all night, rising to greet her enthusiastically when she’d tromp from the Airstream each morning. He was mottled black and white and had one blue eye. She adored him as he trailed along behind her on her donkey and came to lean against her trustingly whenever they stopped to rest.
Eagle Rising’s favorite was a gnarl-eared pitbull mix called Shade. He was a strange greyish color and was practically invisible in the dusk. Shade slept inside the trailer, laying across the threshold like an invisible alarm. His ears, or lack thereof, having been mostly chewed off in a dog fighting arena, caused him to get infections caused by dirt and dust in the inner canals. Eagle Rising calmly stuck her finger in his ears each night with a rag soaked in vinegar and cleaned the dust from within. This would invariably send the hundred-pound dog into a rapture of groaning and writhing as he pressed his considerable weight and enormous head against the woman’s wrinkled fingers. The amount of dirt removed each night was impressive and gross. The dog would have been dead or deaf long ago without this nightly ritual.
The last dog, Bino, sho
rt for binoculars, was an adoption from a shelter over a hundred miles away. According to Eagle Rising, he was something called a sight hound and had been brought to the States by an Egyptian couple who found his need to run at alarmingly fast speeds too much to cope with considering Arizona’s strict city neighborhood pet laws. Here in the wilderness he could spot an intruder miles away and raised the alarm frequently when antelope or anything unusual came within a few miles of the trailer. He could usually be found sitting high up on the cliff overhead, head swiveling in every direction to make sure no intruders were close. Emery could see his use. It was just that every time he yelped and dashed off, they had to stop what they were doing and find out what had set him off.
She found this irritating until the day one of his mad dashes identified a straggling group of immigrants as they tried to keep up with a hardened coyote, or human trafficking guide, as he marched them through one of the dried-up arroyos several miles out. Eagle Rising had to use a rifle scope to identify the group as the binoculars had picked up nothing but a slight movement. The scope, a much more powerful tool, identified the group better. Several of the women were being dragged along and were tied together with a length of rope to keep them from running. Emery felt sick when the older woman let her look through the scope to see what Bino kept alerting on.
She’d sunk to the ground and put her head on her knees, suddenly for the first time in her life feeling faint and light-headed. The realities of what had before been a concept they talked about once at school was now within her vision. She’d seen the women staggering with weariness, filthy and bedraggled as they were hurried along.
“What are we going to do?” she asked Eagle Rising, gulping in gasps of air to try to calm her quivering stomach.
“We’re going to go call Chris, the border patrol guard for our area. That’s what we’re going to do. Then we’re going to get on our donkeys and follow them at a distance to keep him apprised of where they’re heading. Get your hat on girl. Let’s go!”
They’d tracked the group for three hours before the Border Patrol closed in. Their donkeys paced the group steadily at a distance of about a mile. Eagle Rising called in coordinates to Chris, the Border Patrol officer she knew, about every twenty minutes to update the situation.
The old woman had packed water in canteens into both their donkey’s saddle bags and emptied several boxes of protein bars into Emery’s backpack and jammed a first aid kit into her own. The bulky satellite phone also went into Eagle Rising’s saddle bag where she could reach it by twisting slightly and sticking her hand into the worn canvas bag strapped to the back of her slim English style saddle.
She’d explained to Emery that western saddles were far too bulky for the small donkeys and a close-contact type, English saddle was far more comfortable for the angular animals. Having seen the pattern on the wool saddle pad under her own leather saddle, Emery suspected that her sleeping pillow and bunk blanket were just old donkey pads. They had smelled so dusty she wasn’t sure if she could have detected donkey odor or not.
When they’d reached the group after the Border Patrol had the coyote in custody, Eagle Rising had calmly handed around the canteens, shoved a protein bar into each grubby hand, and then seen to any cuts and bruises the group of mostly women had received.
Emery helped her as best she could. It was clear to her that this wasn’t exactly the trip the women had signed up for. No one got tied up and hauled along like a slave for the fun of it. Later, Eagle Rising had informed her that most likely, though the girls would be returned to Mexico, they’d been saved from forced prostitution. Whether they would remain free once they got over the border once again all depended on what help they received from family and friends. It was a terrible business.
Emery felt quite sick for most of that afternoon and ended up simply sitting slumped in a broken lawn chair in the sun recovering. Eagle Rising left her alone. The lessons life dealt on the horrors of what people could do to one another took some time to come to terms with.
Emery thought that had to be the most excitement for the week, but each day had been interesting. They’d gathered herbs, worked with Navajo spirituality rituals, studied animal tracking, ridden through narrow canyons lined with ancient hieroglyphs from the earlier inhabitants of the valley, and twice scaled the cliffs to long abandoned pueblos to perform open air rituals and dances. It had been a week of wonder and Emery had loved every minute of it. Well, except for the human trafficking incident. That had been depressing.
The most interesting part was her initiation into feeling the power meridians of the earth. They’d ridden the donkeys to places that Eagle Rising told her where ancient energy crossroads and then settled down to meditate. The first time they’d done this Eagle Rising had broken off a Y-shaped piece of hazelwood tree sapling and showed Emery how to scry for water and energy. After a few days she’d gotten the hang of it. Water pulled downwards. Energy made the branch quiver slightly and sometimes flip upwards almost smacking her in the chin.
There were a surprising number of underground aquifers in the area and Emery was stunned at the consistency with which she could find a pull on her wand, then dig a bit and find damp sand. It was something she never tired of feeling jubilant every time she unearthed a hollow that slowly filled with water.
As for the energy meridians, at first she didn’t really feel much. But after meditating a few times on the junctions of energy where her wand had quivered, usually coinciding almost exactly with where Eagle Rising’s wand would twirl wildly, Emery noticed that she felt lighter, cleaner, and more energized. Sometimes the two wands vibrated quite a distance apart and Eagle Rising told her that this was because the two of them needed different veins of the ancient energy. It was as though the meridians consisted of different types of energy braided together to form a large current. Depending on the needs of the scryer, the vein of the current with the energy most needed could be narrowed down in the search. It was fascinating and the week had gone much too quickly.
They’d taken a last trip down into the arroyos to gather an herb that should be at the height of its potency. It was an ugly plant called Ocotillo and had long spiky stems with little round leaves that poked off of them. At the end, it had orange blooms that looked a little like freesia blossoms to Emery. Some of them were enormously tall as the plant could live up to a hundred years according to Eagle Rising.
They were going to harvest a few of the flowers to make a syrup to soothe Emery’s fluid retention from allergies. Emery thought that was a nice way of saying snot. She had snot. A lot of snot. It was gross. And, since paper tissues were out of the question, she’d been rinsing out her cloth hankies in the little stream each day and laying them to dry on a bush. It got the job done, but seriously, snot was sticky and it took a lot of scrubbing and sometimes sand to get it out.
Each of them had a small canvas pouch and a sharp pair of hand clippers for gardening. As they meandered through the patch snipping off the largest of the bloom heads, Emery felt the hair on the back of her neck begin to prickle. She stopped dead in her tracks.
Eagle Rising, immediately sensing something was wrong, turned and said, “What is it?”
“Ummm, don’t know for sure,” Emery muttered, then whirled as a rattle-like sound whirred through the air. She was so startled that her legs got tangled up with her boots and her boots got tangled in a clump of brush. Before she knew it instead of running from the rattling sound, she was falling straight towards it.
From the corner of her eye Emery saw the blob-like form of the diamond-back rattler rise into the air and suddenly she was on the ground. Once, twice, she felt the rattler strike like lightning, then felt its soft body writhe across her forearm and disappear. She didn’t dare move in case it was still nearby.
“The rattler is gone, girl. Let me see the wound,” Eagle Rising snapped, pulling Emery over onto her back and grabbing the arm that had been attacked. Both women stared at Emery’s forearm in consternation. Eagle R
ising turned it one way, then the other. “Did you feel it bite?” she asked.
“Yes. Twice. It struck twice,” Emery gasped, thrusting her arm out from her body as though it might explode. “Twice. I’m sure!” she gasped again.
The only evidence of the snake strikes were two slightly reddened areas showing the distinct impressions of two round marks that looked like a rubber-band had been snapped on her skin. Little rivulets of liquid spilled down from each area and dropped onto the ground. Emery assumed it was the snake's venom.
Quickly the old woman scooped up a handful of sand and scrubbed it over the area, then examined it minutely for signs of broken skin. “It didn’t puncture the skin,” she said slowly, disbelief lacing her voice. “The fangs didn’t penetrate.”
“Maybe they’re broken off or something,” Emery theorized, her voice still shaky. “Anyway, I’m glad I’m not dying a slow painful death from rattler bites.”
“Don’t be an idiot, girl,” snapped the weathered crone. “I’ve got antidote with me. And you don’t need it. Broken teeth my eye,” the old woman muttered. “Come on, let’s go get a cup of tea and quiet our nerves. We’ve got enough ocotillo for your medication.”