by Kurt Caswell
Kuma was only five weeks old when I got him, too soon for him to leave his mother. His instinct to herd and guard meant that he loved to chase cars and trucks down Borrego Pass Road. And once he learned that my truck was also his, no one could touch it without his permission. His ears did not go coyote-up the way they should have, and his temperament was wary, aggressive, deeply pessimistic. He loved Mozart. I played all kinds of music for him, and he paid no mind. But when I played Mozart, and especially the overture to Le Nozze di Figaro, he raised his ears, cocked his head, and sang and howled and wailed. He was a good companion despite his love for fighting and biting whatever or whoever crossed him. He seemed to me more a part of the desert than of any human community. In the company of most people he appeared anxious, agitated, overly wary, and when we went out walking in the wilds, roaming from sunup to sundown, he was at peace at last, and we were the best of friends.
The first time I saw Kuma lose control was when he attacked my shovel. I bought it at Bashas’ in Crownpoint to pick up the dog shit around the trailer, and I thought I might keep it in the back of my truck to dig myself out if I got stuck in the sand or mud or snow. Kuma was intelligent and attended to detail, as most heelers do, and he noticed and inspected even the slightest change in his environment. The first day I used the shovel, I loaded the blade and pitched the shit over the field fence far out into the desert wastes. Kuma watched me do it, and before the second load left the blade, he leaped up into the space in front of me and had the sharp steel in his mouth. He crashed into it, not sure of what it was, and the shovel blade tilted and knocked him on the head, and his own waste rained down on top of him. I calmed him and had him sit and stay, but he could barely hold himself back. I finished up fast, leaned the shovel against the side of the trailer, and then released him by command. The hair on Kuma’s back rose up as he stalked the idle tool, nosed it, and pressed it away with his nose. When it gave and moved and threatened him, he bit at it, clamping his jaws down across the angle of the blade. His jaw caught there, and for a moment the shovel had him, and it cut him a little in the mouth. When he broke free, he lunged at the metal edge again, snapping and biting and barking until the shovel came toppling down and he stood over it, his body rigid as a board, his hackles standing up across his back, growling and bleeding and frothing in his mouth. That was the first time I considered that he might be more dog than I could handle.
I made walk after walk after walk out behind the school, so many walks that I came to know the land out there like I knew the placement of my books on the shelves. The poetry all together and organized by poet, my favorite poets on the same shelf next to each other: Keats next to Wordsworth next to Coleridge, Thomas, Yeats, Frost, Pack. Travel narratives too, the same routine: Chatwin and Theroux, Byron and Thesiger, Matthiessen and Lopez, O’Hanlon and Least Heat-Moon. A span of books on Asia and by Asian writers. A string of writers who love the natural world. Each time I went walking, I found some subtle difference in the arrangement of things. A fallen branch leaving a track across the sand after the wind. A stone fallen from the mesa top. A piece of trash I hadn’t seen before. A burrow dug out at the side of the wash. A new shining thing in a pack rat nest.
I went walking out through the fields of late fall desert flowers, the yucca and stunted pinyon pine, the soft sandstone labyrinth. I rarely found surface water, and I usually carried none. It was a moderate risk. My trailer was never more than a few miles away, and I didn’t fear getting lost. In this open country, I could always climb up onto something, a great sandstone shelf or spire, and see how to get around and which way was home.
I happened upon Manny Spring one day behind the water tower where the rock face rises sharply up. A sixth-grade Zuni student in this otherwise all-Navajo school, he was soft and round, a little plump, a little shy. Manny’s grandma worked at the school. The other teachers told me that if Manny got out of line, I just had to say so to his grandma, and she’d grab him by the ear with her strong fingers (I saw her do it), and drag him off home for a lickin’. Such a fate I never wished on him. I wasn’t quite sure what Kuma would do when he met Manny—attack him or lick him—but he ran right up to the boy and sniffed at his ankles and hands. Manny reached down and petted Kuma’s head with one hand, and in his other he carried a CO2 pistol pointed at the ground. I noticed three colorful songbirds stuffed headfirst into his pants pocket. He explained without a prompter: “My uncle’s gonna use the feathers.” Kuma stood up on his rear legs then, sniffing at the birds in Manny’s pocket. Manny turned away and put his hand between the birds and the dog, and Kuma licked his fingers. That seemed to me a good sign, the side of Kuma I wanted to encourage. Yet I knew that Kuma felt free and open out here on the desert, and if Manny had approached him in my truck or trailer, the scene would have gone a different way.
Merle Moore, from the Trading Post, kept his cattle on parts of the land over which Kuma and I ranged, long-legged creatures that lived on rocks and sand. We came through places tramped out by cows, and, in their wake, a minefield of beautiful green bovine splats. Kuma would make a run for it and lie on his back to roll in the fresh spoils. By the time I caught up to him, it was always too late. He got himself in so deep he wore a great green cape over his shoulders and back, and a cap on his head to match. The sun dried him, and by the end of the walk, he sported a spotted shell of cow shit, which slowly cracked and shifted off in clean slabs. The only thing left was the smell.
He was a fine dog, indeed.
I took to walking with Kuma early in the morning, often before light, because he needed an outlet for his great energy. One long walk a day was not enough. So we’d creep out along the edge of the school in the dark, making our way between the juniper and sharp yucca. Some of the maintenance men came in to work early, and I didn’t want to be seen moving so slowly and carefully in that weird light because of what they might say about skinwalkers. About me. They would offer me a warning against going out in the dark, but to their neighbors they would offer a warning because they had seen me going out in the dark. I avoided detection for a few weeks until one morning, passing behind the maintenance building back inside the low trees, I stopped and fumbled with my fly to take a piss. I moved forward onto a yucca and lanced my shins. I cursed and leaped back and cursed again.
Everett heard me as he was getting out of his truck. “Who’s there!” he said into the dark.
Kuma barked at the sound of him, a sure sign to most Navajos that a skinwalker is nearby. Some Navajos who keep dogs tied outside their hogans do so for just this purpose, and when they rise up in chorus in the night, it means “Beware, the witch people are coming.”
“It’s just me,” I said.
“What you doin’ out here in the dark?”
“I’m just taking my dog out,” I said, which made no sense to him at all.
“Well, don’t be whistling out here,” he said. “That brings in the witches.”
Of course I hadn’t been whistling, or at least I didn’t think so. “All right,” I said. “See you later,” and I walked off into the dark.
Soon after that Shane Yazzie said to me in class, “Hey. Mr. Caswell. I seen you in a sheepskin last night goin’ a hun-dret miles an hour!” And he almost died laughing.
Skinwalkers are Navajo witches, and they work their witchery wearing the skin of an animal, usually a coyote or a wolf, or, in my case, a sheep. They prepare a potion of powdered human flesh and feed it to their victim or blow it into their face. A skinwalker will utter a magic incantation, or shoot someone with a small object, like a splinter of bone from the dead, or ash collected from an abandoned hogan where someone has died. People who get a bump on the head are said to have been infected by a skinwalker in this way. Skinwalkers will also use narcotic plants to subdue their victims, and often this technique is employed for seducing women, and for winning at gambling or in trading. Even the boldest Navajos are terrified of skinwalkers.
Most of my students had a story to tell about an enco
unter with a skinwalker. Usually it happened when their parents were away from home. “Mr. Caswell,” they might say. “Guess what? I was home with my sister and my cousin-brother. And at night the dogs started barkin’. We were real scared, and so we blew out the lamps inside and looked out the window. It was real dark out there, and then we seen it. It was a skinwalker goin’ real fast. But we were so lucky it didn’t see us’cause we blew out the lamps. And we were real scared too.”
The only way to defeat a witch or skinwalker is by use of medicinal plants and certain ceremonials. A successful ceremony is said to effect the death of the witch, and some sudden or strange deaths in a community are explained this way. Witches are also frequently said to be killed by lightning. If a community can get someone to confess witchery, it is said that their death will occur magically within a year’s time. Or in the olden time, a confessed witch might be ritually and brutally killed.
Skinwalkers are not dead, but they use the dead. And everything about the dead terrifies most Navajo people. Even to look at a dead body, unless it is an animal killed for food, is considered dangerous. Many Navajos these days will dispute this fact, and it’s true that Navajos, like all peoples, leave some beliefs behind and acquire new ones. The old ways don’t disappear from a culture, however—they just go underground. You’ll find plenty of individuals that believe or don’t believe one thing or another, but the currents from the olden time still flow beneath them. The dead are associated with ghosts, which return to the world from the north, the land of the dead, usually to seek out some revenge. This is why many traditional Navajo people avoid Anasazi ruins, which are in such abundance in Navajoland. Ghosts can appear as animals such as mice, coyotes, or owls, and they can appear as whirlwinds, flame or fire, or even strange dark objects in the night. And ghosts can change shape, usually under the cover of darkness, right before one’s very eyes.
I wonder if to Everett, that morning, I didn’t appear as a strange dark object in the night. Or if when he called to me and I answered, what he saw was a skinwalker that metamorphosed into a long-haired white English teacher with a dog.
Such soft asylum is the sun, and that day in late October, that cool, happy day in fall, I needed sanctuary like I needed nothing else, sanctuary from my classroom, from my trailer home, from Borrego Pass School. I had just seen Caleb Benally ride away in a police car after he threatened someone with a knife at lunch. He likely always carried that knife in his pocket, but somehow on that day, he’d decided the situation demanded he use it. He was a scary kid, and he didn’t like me at all. I wondered how long it would be before he decided to use that knife against me.
I drove to Ganado to see Mary. We planned to make a Saturday hike, just the two of us and our dogs—Kuma, and Mary’s dog, Ranger—down Three Turkey Canyon to a ruin there, Three Turkey Ruin. Mary had talked about this place when I arrived at Borrego, a nineteen-room cliff-house dated between AD 1266 and 1276, located about six miles south of Canyon de Chelly. Somewhere on a wall in that ruin we’d find three white and red pictographs that looked like turkeys, though they have also been identified as handprints and as gourds. We might also find more recent habitation in that canyon, parts of hogan walls that predate the Long Walk of the Navajo in 1864. There was little else to note about this place—the ruins at Chaco Canyon are far more grand, Mesa Verde is far more famous, and the hike to White House Ruin in Canyon de Chelly far more dramatic. Yet we needed none of that. Few people knew about this place, Mary had said, and even fewer bothered to make the hike to it. We’d likely have the entire canyon to ourselves. That sounded ideal to me.
From Ganado we drove west on 264 to the junction, and then took 191 north toward Chinle. Driving that happy highway, the morning breaking bright about us and talking together about everything, something, nothing at all, some amorphous cue appeared in the land, appeared in Mary’s mind, and I slowed and turned east onto a little dirt road where she called it out, and we started toward the rising sun. We drove my truck, bumping along that dusty gouge that passed as a road through the desert, because Mary’s truck didn’t have four-wheel drive. We’d need to cross several washes, Mary said, and who knew how much water might be flowing. Maybe too much for Mary’s truck. Maybe too much for any truck. Maybe none at all. The road was deeply rutted where water had carved its passage, storm after storm. I aimed my wheels up along the edges on a high track where other vehicles had gone before, and we tilted this way and tilted that, following the dirt rail-line. Ranger stood on the seat in the extra cab behind us looking out, with little Kuma pressed up against his front legs, jockeying for position, and they both whined a little, kneaded the seats with their front feet, they so wanted to run. If we slipped off, or slipped in, the tires would likely jam sideways, and the nose of the truck jam forward so that whatever power came from the wheels would only move the truck deeper in. We’d have to dig our way out then, and I didn’t have a shovel. At the first wash we found only a flat slick of water moving across the wide sand flat. We pushed fast over it, and water flared up alongside us, onto the hood a little, splashed the windows. Mary smiled and laughed and loved it, and on we went through the rock and sand, up and over humps of ground shaped by the wind, and along cactus patches and juniper, a rabbit striking for cover, a scrub jay flittering across. Another wash came into our path, and here there was more water, deeper water, flowing over a rocky wash bed. I stopped, hesitated.
“We can make it, easy,” Mary said. “That looks pretty solid.”
I engaged the four-wheel drive and drove in. Water rose up around us as my truck slipped and spit stones out from under the tires. Mary rolled down her window, put her hand outside, and wet it in the wash spray. We touched the opposite bank and the front tires pulled us up, up onto the sand ramp, and away we went over the hump and across the shining desert.
“All right!” Mary said. “This Dodge can ford.” And she looked at me and laughed.
We arrived there where the road met the head of the canyon, and I pulled up under a juniper into the shade. We bailed out, took up our packs, and, with Ranger and Kuma already gone off in front of us, walked in.
The cottonwood and gambel oak were turning, the leaves gone golden and red. Leaves lay scattered about on the pebbly wash bed too, and in the morning, in the secret corners in the shade, we found frost from the hard, cold night. The air felt fresh, smelled clean, and we began a walking rhythm that carried us, razzmatazz, for an hour. We spoke very little, the morning was so quiet, with Mary in the lead, her hair curly and bouncing over her daypack. Ranger was a streak of white and black through the juniper and cactus and brushy shrubs. He’d appear, quite suddenly, walk along us for a bit, nose Mary’s hand as if to say, like Abraham, “Here I am,” and then vanish again into the Arizona morning. Kuma, like a little brother, was forever a bit behind, tracking Ranger with his nose and ears, coming in from the side of the trail to find where Ranger had been, and, looking at me and mewling in his disappointment, he’d run alongside until Ranger flashed across the path out in front, and away he’d go barking and squirting up the dust.
It felt so good to be away from the school, away from all my fears and doubts. Here I was free and happy and complete, just walking the canyon as the canyon unfolded to walk it. I weighed no choices and made no decisions. I was not in conflict with anyone or anything. My legs carried me along as if without my consent while the canyon, the path water takes, led me on my way. If nothing more, if nothing less, perhaps this was why I came to the Southwest. If the whole school year was a bust, if I failed as a teacher, at least I’d have this walk with Mary and the dogs on this exquisite morning through new country.
No clouds anywhere in the crack-line sky view out of the canyon, and time moved the cool flat morning on into noon. It warmed up, but not much, Mary still comfortable in her shorts and long-sleeve poly-pro, me in my long cotton walking pants and T-shirt. I noted how little we said as we walked, how little needed saying. Ranger appeared, disappeared. Kuma found him and lost h
im. A canyon wren called from the cliffside.
Up ahead of us now we could see it, the dark, solemn overhang where the ruin endured the ages. “Three Turkey Ruin,” Mary said, as if the words were waiting for her at that place.
We dropped our packs and sat in the shade looking up. The sandstone overhang shaded the little collection of dwellings up there, and we could see how pleasant it must have been way back when, the rooftops alive with people grinding corn, mending baskets, talking in small circles; the canyon bottom where the children played, young girls bathing in the shallow stream, and men gathering near a cottonwood to walk out together on the hunt. What could we say to each other in that perfect moment, the ruin suspended in time, the breeze in the cottonwood tops trembling the leaves, and Ranger and Kuma panting and lying on their sides now, a puff of dust where they breathed? What would we say? I wanted to say that it was beautiful, but Mary knew that. I wanted to say how fine it was to feel the hard canyon under my feet and the cool, high elevation air, but Mary knew that. I wanted to say how grateful I was, how happy to have a friend like her in a place like this, but Mary knew that too. So we sat there looking up, taking in the morning turned to day, thought about our lunch because we had walked ourselves into an appetite, but we didn’t want to spread that lunch out yet—the breads and cheeses and pepperoni, the canned oysters, the little sweet things we carried with us, the fresh fruit. We let that moment go on, and on a little longer still, until nothing at all was going to happen, and then something did. Something startled Ranger from his rest, and his head popped up, his lip on the left side tucked weirdly in his teeth, his ears twitching and alert. He got up, listened, and then rose and drifted off to inspect the here and there.