The old woman looked startled when my mother slipped into the water and disappeared. We both leaned forward, observing Kayah’s form as she propelled herself down, and then under the rock we sat on.
A long moment later she returned, clutching an object close to her chest. She smiled and said, “My mother told me about this, but I never had a reason to fetch it.”
With that she handed over a perfectly white stone. It was round and somewhat flattened and embedded in its circumference was a gold band etched with Mayan symbols. I would imagine after all this time it would have been caked in mud, or covered with slime, but it shone a brilliant white.
Ts’aak held it in awe. “Yes,” she mumbled, “we can use this—but we should return it when we are done.”
She whistled for one of her retainers, and then gave the stone to the woman for her to store in her pack.
She handled it tenderly, lost in thought.
Kayah pulled her from her reverie with a question. “Would you tell me how Itzel came to visit the Sinagua for a second time?”
Ts´aak nodded. “Of course,” she said as she sat back on the rock and turned her gaze inward.
She began, “The story is written in the Codex, but I remember it well as Itzel told it to me several times. After my father had escaped from the bear, he stumbled down a steep ravine and found himself in a serpentine canyon.
“He didn’t know which direction to go and feared the bear was still in the area. In his distress, the sky seemed to spin, and he was on the verge of losing his mind when he heard a beautiful song floating on the wind.”
I looked at my mother, and I knew it was the song we’d just been singing. I said, “It was you singing, wasn’t it?”
She smiled shyly. “I think it must have been. I know that year we had been camping some ways into the West Fork.”
She roughed up my hair. “I was adventurous, like you, and on our way back to Oak Creek I’d lagged behind—probably off exploring some side canyon.”
“That’s right,” said Ts’aak. “Itzel told me you were some distance away, and by the time he’d followed the song to you, you were almost back to the others who waited by the confluence of the two creeks. When they saw Itzel stagger in their direction they quickly assisted him. The rest of his party had since stumbled into the Sinagua and had organized search parties but had found nothing.”
“Itzel was in terrible shape. He scared me,” said Kayah.
“Yes, he barely survived.”
“But what had happened with Itzel and the bear?” I asked. As much as it scared me, I had to know.
“You have to finish the story,” I pleaded. “You said he fell into a box canyon. Did the bear find him there?”
Ts’aak seemed to close up at the mention of the box canyon, and Kayah quickly changed the subject. “I don’t think now is the time.”
I was crestfallen, but in a strange way also relieved not to hear the story.
My mother and I left the rock, and together made a cairn on the shore. Ts’aak remained, staring down into the depths below. Eventually I heard her whisper, “If only you had found something beautiful, like this place, not the dark one I’m returning to.”
She must have thought she was out of earshot, but I heard her clearly. I glanced at her from the shadows of the shrubbery on the creek´s bank, waiting to see if she would say more. Instead, Ts’aak quickly took out a flint knife and nicked her hand.
She held her hand over the water, squeezed her fist, and as a drop of blood fell into the water she whispered, “If only you hadn’t gone into that cave.”
I withdrew into the shadows, afraid she might realize I had witnessed all this. But she just hopped back to shore as the drop of her blood slowly sank down, into the depths.
Chapter Three
We walked back downstream, to the small confluence. Another creek flowed out of a twisting pass on the right. This was the West Fork, and I’d heard my mother say the canyon continued for a day´s walk before finally ascending the plateau.
Four willows marked the entrance. Their foliage had turned a perfect gold. As I watched a cold breeze rushed down the canyon and took a great flutter of the leaves in one violent swoop.
The steep red and yellow walls around us were the last refuges of the desert plants like manzanita and agave, but once we turned that first bend into the West Fork these gave way to tall pines. Soon we were walking beneath a green canopy. These weren’t the stunted piñons of the high desert, these were mighty ponderosas that stretched skyward to the clouds.
Interspersed were oaks, their light tan leaves littering the floor. Dead reeds lay bent on the water’s edge.
A light rain picked up, and the drops tap-tapped on the crisp leaves. I raised my head to greet it. I had not felt rain since the monsoons, but now we were nearing weather that had spilled down off the plateau.
We continued, always surrounded by the gurgling of water. The immediate canyon walls were red with streaks of black.
Not too far from the confluence, we made camp at a shadowed point where the walls seemed to close in on us. The sun had disappeared early, and the darkness in that canyon was as thick as smoke.
The guards collected a pile of dead logs and lit a fire, ringing it with stones. Bat plucked some green branches and impaled a few strips of antelope on them and set the skewers to sizzle over the coals.
The fire was nice, and my stomach was growling, but the steep ravine felt confined, and a little spooky. And just as I had the thought that this would be a bad place to come upon a bear, Ts’aak said, “I suppose you want to hear what happened with Itzel and the bear?”
I almost shook my head, thinking this was the worst place to finish that story, but I was also curious. I desperately wanted to know how Itzel got away.
We settled by a low fire and she began, “Well, I told you already that my father had been attacked by the bear and as he was fleeing for his life he fell into a box canyon.”
“Was it a big canyon? Did he hurt himself when he fell in? How bad was he wounded? How badly did he injure the bear?”
She laughed. “One question at a time. From his Codex I know the canyon was narrow, maybe thirty paces wide and twice as long. One end tilted down to a small pond, its bottom cluttered with dull oak leaves that had fallen from the plateau.
“And even though he’d survived a mighty drop, he was more worried about his shoulder, where the bear had mauled him. He could find no exit from the canyon as he staggered around, only a cave in the back.”
As she talked, I pictured the scene in my mind, and kept Ila pinned to my chest for courage.
Eventually, she continued, Itzel entered the cave:
To the left was a dark chamber, and straight ahead a low-ceilinged room with several wide puddles and a mound in the middle. The puddles reflected the soft sunshine outside and gave a dim light.
He limped to a puddle, collapsed to his knees, and drank deeply. As he leaned forward, blood from his mangled shoulder dripped into the clear water. Suddenly he picked up the trace of a sinister breeze on his wet face. It felt like the fetid breath of a carnivore. He strained to make out what might lurk beyond the pools of water and glimpsed a low, dark tunnel.
His hair stood on end as he sensed an ominous hum coming from it. He thought that if he were smart, he would turn and run, but the low hum and the strange breeze had a numinous grip on him.
My mother looked up and the two women held each other’s stare for a moment, then Ts´aak described how at this very moment, a noise from outside drew Itzel´s attention. To his horror, an ominous shadow darkened the entrance. He could make out a large bear lumbering forward, limping and grunting.
It shook its massive head and then turned left into the small dark recess. Itzel realized he had stumbled right into the bear’s den.
With no other option, he slowly backed into the dark tunnel.
“What was at the other end of the tunnel, Ts’aak?” asked Totsi.
Ts’aak glan
ced at Bat, her retainers, and the two remaining guards. Bat was mute, and his loyalty unquestionable, but the others she could not chance. Suddenly there seemed to be too many ears about.
She caught my mother’s eye. “We will talk about that at the proper time.”
“But how did he get away from the bear?” I pleaded.
Ts’aak’s eyes widened. “That you won’t believe.”
I leaned forward, eagerly, and she continued. “Eventually Itzel had to sneak past the bear,” she said. “He could tell he’d wounded it terribly, and hoped it would die, but it just lay in the shadows panting.
Itzel waited until the soft glow reflecting off the water had completely faded, and then tip-toed past the beast, praying that he could pass unnoticed.
But when he had safely emerged from the cave, he still couldn’t find a way out of the box canyon. A bloated, pale moon had risen, and its reflection in the small pond of water lit up the canyon. He was surrounded by enormous walls that shot up toward the night sky. He looked toward a growth of ancient alligator-bark junipers that crept up the wall, but their uppermost branches were far short of the rim of the plateau.
He looked at the pond. Its bottom lay thick with rotting leaves and broken sticks. Something about the water soothed him but he had to find a way out and get away from the bear.
The evening was serene, and he felt enchanted as he looked around the moonlit canyon.”
Ts´aak looked up. “He told me later that he didn’t know how long he stood there taking it in. The strange experience was timeless, and he was overcome with a peaceful sensation—not thinking of the bear at all—feeling benevolent and happy, when he turned and saw the bear standing not five paces away.
It shocked him to his core. He hadn’t heard a thing.
Horrified, he stepped backwards into the water, and felt his feet sink down into the muck.
The bear roared and lumbered forward. Itzel took another step away from it, and just as the bear looked ready to attack there was a mighty crack.
Itzel’s feet broke through a rotted leaf barricade, and he was sucked down. For one quick moment his momentum stopped, his eyes just above water-level, the bear staring at him coldly.
And then he was tumbling through the earth, choking and gasping in the torrent of dark water, banging violently against rocks and debris, until finally he came to a stop, sprawled on the ground outside the box canyon.
He felt like he’d been swallowed and spat out by a giant.
What Itzel did not know was that the debris had filled in the only exit chute from the box canyon, and it was packed so tightly that even the water couldn’t drain out.
He got up and stumbled down a narrow, steep canyon, battered and half-drowned.”
I leaned closer, knowing this was close to when my mother found him—and the white-haired woman soon confirmed it.
“At the bottom of that canyon,” said Ts´aak, looking at me, “where it flowed into the West Fork, he heard your mother singing.
He didn’t know she was Sinaguan, only that her song was beautiful, and after his experience in the sinister cavern, he was drawn to her like a moth to a candle.”
Ts’aak looked up at Kayah, and I could tell this was a burning question that had been on the tip of her tongue since she’d first arrived. She asked, “Do you know where that canyon is?”
My mother sat up a little straighter, “Yes, I do. Since the days your father visited us, we have called it Itzel canyon. It is close.”
At these words Ts’aak smiled. But my child’s eyes could see that something was still troubling her.
Chapter Four
The first rays of the sun took longer to reach us as we followed the twisting path of the West Fork. Soon the upper reaches of the canyon, above us, were bathed in gold. But I shivered in the canyon´s shadows, waiting, as the sunshine slowly slid down the vertical walls, lighting up ghostly slabs of pale sandstone, and grey stains of desert varnish.
When daylight finally peaked over the far-off rim of the canyon, winking at us from above, we’d already been walking for an hour.
The party was smaller now; Ts’aak had ordered the porters and retainers to remain behind at the confluence of the main canyon and the West Fork. This left us with Bat and another guard, Ts’aak, my mother and myself.
Before we left I had watched Bat fill a backpack with rope and enough food for about a day. In the evening he’d finished drying the antelope meat, and had packed some of that away, too.
We walked over the smooth, worn red rock, occasionally stepping through shallow water where the game trails we followed meandered across the small creek. Eons of waterflow had carved into the side of the sandstone cliffs, and now the banks seemed to be leaning out over the water, undercut, like giant frozen waves.
As we got deeper into the canyon, the cliffs closed in and we had to wade through waist deep water several times.
Soon the walls were only twenty paces apart. The water crept over the bedrock here, collecting in pools, and all that impeded its slow flow were clumps of grass that had sprouted in patches of sandy gravel.
Fall already had its grip here, too, and the ferns were brown and folded. Yellow-leafed willows and alders grew wherever they could find purchase, their dry leaves rustling when I brushed against them, some already crunching under my step.
Occasionally a cold blast descended from above, where the higher altitude welcomed winter with open arms. Lightning-struck trunks of pines lay across the trail, blackened and bald, and we crawled over them.
Thick red and black-barked pines reached for the heavens, desperate for the sunlight that filtered down to us as it penetrated their branches, glinting off their needles and dangling tendrils of moss.
A few insects were still buzzing around in the cool morning air, zipping ahead of us as they flew in and out of the light.
Finally, a large, steep canyon appeared on our left. “This is Itzel’s canyon,” said my mother.
Ts’aak stared up at it and all color left her face.
This canyon was nothing like the flat and navigable one we had been following. After a short approach, it rose steeply into massive boulder fields and precipitous steps. Near the top I spied an enormous wall. How would we climb that?
I was about to say something to my mother when I saw Bat and the one remaining guard unpacking several coils of rope.
“We’ve never gone up,” said my mother. “I only know that it is where Itzel came from.”
Ts’aak nodded.
We proceeded up the trail for the next few minutes with no obstacles other than a tangle of briars that choked the canyon, but I dreaded the climb that surely lay ahead. The rock towered before us, daunting and full of shadows.
Bat went ahead now, scouting the trail, leaving the other guard by Ts’aak’s side. It was rough going. Finally, he found a game trail that we could follow—until we reached the first step.
Here, Bat shouldered the rope, and somehow scurried up to a ledge. I was surprised at how nimble he was, considering his size. He tied the rope to a massive juniper with roots deep in the rock, and then continued up the trail while the other guard helped Ts’aak, my mother and me ascend.
I was the last to go up. They tied the rope around my waist and pulled me as I scrambled up the rock.
We ascended several cliffs in this fashion.
Now we were higher up the canyon and the depths below scared me. The sandstone had changed from crimson to a soft yellow, and high above I could now make out the blue-black rock that capped the plateau.
As I looked ahead again, a black-eared squirrel blocked my way. It chattered loudly at me, but quickly retreated when Bat approached.
We paused and ate a lunch of manioc while Bat scouted ahead again. Upon returning he told Ts’aak what he had found with a series of hand signals.
She said, “There is a long, slanted rise ahead of us. Bat has set a rope. Beyond that is a very high cliff. My father would not have survived a fall that high
. His hidden canyon must be close.”
As we finished eating and got on our feet again, she sent the remaining guard down the canyon to wait at the confluence of Itzel canyon and the West Fork.
We continued, now a party of four. The long, slanted rise wasn’t as scary as the steps, but we never would have made it without the rope. I wondered how Bat had scrambled up it in the first place.
We paused at the top of the rise and looked around.
On our right, towering yellow sandstone walls rose straight up; on the left a long, steep slope of pines loomed; high above I could see tall trees swaying along the edge of the plateau rim. But I could not see anywhere that Itzel´s canyon might be tucked.
I walked along, my mother beside me. A steep scree leaned against the base of the cliff, and it was cluttered with massive boulders that had toppled down from above, over the ages.
On one sat a large raven.
I imitated his gurgled clicking and he danced around.
Then he hopped down, into a shadow beneath a rectangular shaped boulder and disappeared.
Curious, I climbed across the talus slope, my feet slipping in the loose earth until I reached the place.
I looked around the boulder where the raven had disappeared and underneath it found a slanted chute. It was a long, narrow tunnel, and at the far end I could see blue sky. I crawled inside. It was cool in there, the rocks covered with moss and ferns.
“Hey!” I shouted over my shoulder. “Come look.”
I scurried up the tunnel and could hear my mother following behind, calling for me.
We paused at the exit, and I peered back and watched Ts’aak turn to Bat and point at the ground before the chute. She looked nervous. I couldn’t understand her words, but it was clear she was telling him to remain there, and under no circumstances was he to follow.
When I emerged from the chute, the first thing I saw was the raven hopping in place ahead of me. He ogled me, expectantly, but as more and more people appeared behind me, he fidgeted and soon flew away.
The Sirens of Oak Creek Page 3