by Sandi Ault
“Hey, did your dog do that?” Gilbert asked, gesturing at his own face in reference to the marks on mine.
I got in the driver’s seat. I smiled at Mountain, and he smiled back. “He’s not a dog. He’s a wolf.”
I drove away.
By the time Mountain and I got home, the sun had almost set, and the shadow of the tall mountains to the west of the property left my cabin in dark shade. I took the wolf for a brief romp through the sage and scrub piñon so he could do his business, then we headed inside. I filled his water and food dishes and put them down for him on the floor, and he began to crunch away at his meat-laced kibble. I hurried to turn on lights in the one big main room, which comprised my living quarters, and even in the pass-through closet and the small bathroom that had been added, shed-style, on the back of the house by the owner some years ago to make it viable as a rental property. I did as Tecolote had told me and covered the windows—which required me to tack up sheets and towels, because I had no curtains. I’d never wanted to hinder my beautiful views, nor had I been concerned about privacy, since I lived in such a remote place, on such a large parcel of land.
After this chore, I swept the ashes out of the woodstove. I covered the metal ash bucket and set it out on a flat stone about ten yards away from the house so any live embers could safely cool before I emptied them on the land. The evening was chilly, so I laid a new fire and lit it. Then I brought San Cirilio into the house, unwrapped his rag coverings, and placed him on the slate tiles near the woodstove, which was as close to a hearth as I had. I realized I didn’t know what to do with the nachi until tomorrow, so I left it in the car. After Momma Anna’s description of its purpose, I decided it wouldn’t help matters to bring it into the house.
As I busied myself with these activities, my mind fretted over my brief encounter with the widow Santana and Gilbert Valdez. Madonna’s worry over what I might be thinking of her, the shame and embarrassment she displayed, even her attractive but plainly modern, white woman way of dressing—all of these evoked strong sentiment in me. In eschewing tribal customs and defying societal expectations, she seemed as determined to escape her own life—who she was—as Jerome Santana had been four days ago in the buffalo field. In breaking the strong fence of custom and tradition that may have enclosed and—at times—stifled her, she also destroyed the very thing that protected her. Now she seemed to me like a misguided lamb among the wolves, and Gilbert Valdez was definitely a predator.
For my own part, I longed for something Madonna Santana was eagerly discarding. I could not imagine that anything would be worth more than belonging to an extended family, a tribe.
After I’d prepared the house, I remembered Tecolote’s admonition to lock the door. But as it was Kerry’s custom to come by for frequent, unannounced visits after his long shifts at the Ranger District in Tres Piedras, I wanted to wait until I was ready for sleep to take this precaution. I turned next to the items the two mujeres had given me. I filled a cast-iron kettle with water from the tap and set it atop the woodstove to make the tea using the things Tecolote gave me. While I waited for the water to heat, I turned to Momma Anna’s little chunk of root and remembered her voice: Burn half with red chile and salt. Carry other half next to heart. I examined the small bit of woody, brown tuber she’d given me. Then I got out my book on native herbs and plants and looked for its likeness among the photos and descriptions. I wasn’t sure, but it seemed most like the root described as cachana, or “witch root,” which botanists had not identified, and whose source was a carefully guarded secret among Native American shamans, even such that its distribution among native peoples was harshly regulated by them. The author of the book speculated that the rhizome might grow in the Jemez Mountains, a range south and west of my cabin. A caveat in the root’s description said the herb should be administered with utmost care because it was extremely dangerous if misused. I gathered the items I would need: a knife and a small cutting board, a large abalone shell I used for burning sage and cedar for smudge, wooden kitchen matches, some red chile seeds, and salt. Momma Anna had given no recipe of proportions, so I decided I would try to use equal amounts of each ingredient. I wiped my abalone shell out and placed a good pinch of the chile seeds and the salt in the center. Then I took my knife and began shaving away at one end of the root, creating short strands of dry, woody fiber. I put these atop the other items in the shell, and then measured out another pinch of seeds and salt, and shaved more of the cachana. Momma Anna had advised me to use half of the root, so I continued in this way until I felt that I had done so. A small heap of debris rose from the shell, like the makings of a tiny ceremonial bonfire.
Before I could strike a match to this concoction, my kettle began surging steam. I opened Tecolote’s small cloth bundle and saw sunflower seeds in a nest of dried herbs, and green and brown and yellow strands of what might have been flower petals, stamen, and pistils. The seeds made me think of the old bruja’s nickname for me: Mirasol, which means Sunflower. When she first called me by this moniker, she said it was for the flower that “grows where you grew, tall—like you—with yellow crown.” I lifted the lid on the kettle and threw the contents of the bundle inside. I watched the seeds float and spin in the bubbling water, the herbs take on the liquid and drop to the bottom, and the strands I thought were flower parts disintegrate. The liquid boiled for a minute or two, and then I poured some off into a big coffee mug. The smell of the broth was tantalizing: sharp like citrus, with a woody, mushroomlike undertone. I brought the mug to the table to let it cool, as the curandera had instructed. Then I turned again to my smudge mixture. Holding the abalone conch in one hand, I struck a match with the other and held it to the base of the material piled in the shell. The root took the flame instantly and began to hiss and shrivel, giving off an astonishing amount of smaze for such a little heap of fuel. The chile seeds popped and withered and turned black, and the blend of ingredients danced with green-tinged flame. The smoke was acrid and my eyes began to water and sting. My nose recoiled and I thought I might sneeze. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.
I wanted to set the conch down; it was burning my hands. Foul vapors obscured my view of everything. I couldn’t see the table: I reached out to place the shell on its top but I felt empty space. The heat from the smudge seared my palms. I swung to one side and tried again to find the tabletop, and I released the scorching bowl to spare my hand any further damage. I heard a crash as the abalone shattered against the floor.
Still unable to breathe, and coughing now, I made for the door, or where I thought it should be. Just as I was about to reach for the knob, I felt a blast of both noise and air, and I heard the door slam back hard against the wall, as if something—or someone—had fairly exploded into the room.
Mountain and I were running, only not on the gorge rim as we so often did. This time, we were on the slopes of a sharply escalating ascent. There was a feeling of urgency—we had to get somewhere in a hurry, or get away from something. We were not running for joy and pleasure but perhaps for our lives—or someone else’s. Mountain was out in front of me, but he stopped frequently and turned to encourage me on. His tongue hung several inches out of his mouth from exertion, in spite of the intense cold, and he looked at me with anxious eyes. He turned onto a trail that led farther up the alp. “No, no,” I told him, “not that way. We want to go down. We want to go down the mountain, we want to go home.” The wolf looked torn between his instincts and mine. He reluctantly turned back and took the lower trail, but he didn’t run ahead as before, staying just behind me instead.
A cold mix of rain and sleet began to pelt us, and I could hardly see the trail. The ground was wet and slippery, and several times my shoes slid and made my stride erratic. I had to get down the mountain, I had to get both of us down the slope as fast as I could or something unimaginably horrible would happen. I tried to run faster but my legs were cold and unresponsive. My foot lodged on a root and I tripped and fell face-first, downhill into mud and musty
detritus, which smelled sharply of orange and also earthy, like mushrooms. I tried to pick myself up but my arms wouldn’t move—I couldn’t raise them from the ground. I cried out in pain. Mountain lay down beside me and nuzzled my neck, his breath heavy and moist. He beckoned me to climb on his back, to take hold of the long ruff of mane at his neck and ride on him. I managed to grasp a fistful of fur. Instantly, I felt him lifting me as he rose, and I was somehow small enough to ride him, to ride on his strong back, his thick coat surrounding me and keeping me warm, my only connection that one handful of hair that bound me to the back of him as he loped effortlessly away from danger, away from the cold, away down the mountain to safety and home.
Kerry’s hand on my face felt warm. I looked at him and smiled. “Oh, you’re here. I must have had a bad dream.”
He wrinkled his brow. “You all right?”
“I’m okay,” I said, stretching, checking every part to see if it worked. I sat up, looked around. I was on the floor near the woodstove. The house was cold, the door standing open.
“Can you move? Can you get up?”
I rubbed my eyes, then took a deep breath. “Yeah, I’m okay.” I pushed myself to my hands and knees, then rose to my feet.
“Good,” Kerry said. “C’mon then. We have to get Mountain to town now. He’s barely breathing.”
27
Cry, Wolf
One vet in Taos contracted with the Division of Wildlife to see animals brought in with injuries or illnesses. Kerry got the man out of bed and down to his clinic to tend to Mountain. “Has he been poisoned?” the doctor asked.
“No. I don’t know. I—”
Kerry interrupted. “We don’t know what happened; we just found him this way, lying on the porch in front of the door.”
“How long’s he been like this?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
The vet gripped Mountain’s large chest with his hand. “His heart’s barely beating. You stay here with him a few minutes. Let me make a call and get someone down here to help me.”
I pushed my head into Mountain’s neck, willed him to breathe, his heart to beat. I smelled his wild scent. “C’mon, buddy, you can make it,” I sobbed. “You can’t leave me here. I need you.”
Kerry rubbed my back as I continued to bury my face in the wolf’s fur. “You saved me,” I whispered. “You got me down the mountain. Now, get on my back and ride. I’ll carry you, I’ll get you back to safety. Come on, just let me bring you home again.”
A sour cup of coffee and two bottles of water later, the vet sent me and Kerry home. “He’s ingested something, would be my guess, something that’s either drugged or poisoned him. We don’t have much in the way of fancy diagnostics here like they have in Albuquerque. I’ll do some blood work, run a few tests. Until we know more, we can only watch him, keep him hydrated. It’s touch and go. Nothing you can do here, might as well get some sleep. I’ll call you if anything develops.”
“But I don’t have a phone!” I said.
“Not even a cell phone?”
“No, they don’t work out where I live. I’m almost off the grid.”
“Well then, you call me. I’ll be up with him through the night. You go to the nearest phone in a couple hours and we’ll touch bases like that until we see a change. How’s that?”
Back in my cabin, I found the cracked conch shell on the floor in front of San Cirilio, its contents dissipated from the flames. On the table sat Tecolote’s infusion in the big mug, cold now. I sniffed at it. It still smelled good, even enticing. I was thirsty. Kerry coaxed a fire in the woodstove while I deliberated whether to drink the tea: Is that why things went wrong, because I didn’t drink it after burning the root?
Then I remembered the root! The other half was missing, not on the table, nowhere to be found. I was supposed to put the other half next to my heart, but perhaps Mountain had gotten hold of it and eaten it. “Take me to the café on the highway,” I told Kerry. “I have to use the phone right away.”
In the middle of the night, I rose from the bed, carefully taking Kerry’s arm from around me and placing it on the pillow. He muttered something and dropped back into deep sleep. I pulled my Pendleton blanket from the chair and cloaked myself with it, went to the table in the dark and felt around until I found the mug of Tecolote’s tea, picked it up, and took it with me. I went outside, to the place where Mountain and I so often sat at night, looking up at the stars. I lowered myself carefully to the ground, so as not to spill the contents of the mug. It was very cold out, and I gathered the blanket tightly about me. I felt the emptiness of Mountain’s absence, remembering all the times he’d stayed beside me, watched for coyotes or mountain lions, or run in place and whimpered in his dreams while I tried to work out the meaning of my day’s events, or some other pressing matter. I sniffed at the tea again and the smell was still inviting, so I took one small sip and waited.
Nothing.
I took another sip. The drink was delicious and felt soothing to my throat, which was sore and raw from the smoke of the witch root.
I waited.
Still no effect, other than that the tea seemed to be quenching my thirst, when all the water I’d consumed earlier in the evening had had little effect.
I continued to sip the liquid as I watched the stars and huddled under my blanket. I felt a small warming in my chest as I finished my cup, but no other noticeable side effects. I did, however, feel great sadness and fear about Mountain, and I began to cry. “Great Spirit, Mother Earth, and Father Sky,” I prayed, “please don’t take my great heaven beast, my soul mate, my wolf companion from me. He’s all the family I have, and I love him beyond measure. Please help him to heal and recover. I love him. I need him. Aho.”
28
Wicked Things
I dreamed again of Mountain and woke before dawn, sobbing into the bedcovers. Kerry stirred and rolled over, and I got up to write down the contents of the dream:
At first, Mountain came to lie down beside me as I was doing something; he just wanted to be near me. I noticed him and felt good that he had come to be with me, and I paid attention to his beauty and felt comforted by his presence.
Then we were running together on the side of a steep slope. A bad storm was coming. I was trying to find our way home, and I wanted to take the lower of two paths, but Mountain struck out on an ascending one. I called him back, but he looked at me and waited, wagging his tail, as if to say, “Come on! This way!” I had to coax him several times before he would come join me on the downward path. “This is the way home,” I kept telling him, but he lingered and stalled and didn’t want to run with me on the trail I had chosen.
I started some coffee brewing, and Kerry got out of bed and came up behind me. He put his arms around my waist and nuzzled his face in my neck. “You need to shave,” I said. “You’re rough as sandpaper.”
He rubbed the side of his jaw with one hand. “Sorry.”
I turned to face him. “You slept last night. You actually slept.”
He grinned. “I know. Hey, babe!” His tone was strange.
“What?”
“Have you looked in the mirror?”
I brushed my uncombed hair with my hand. “No, why?”
“Take a look,” he said.
I made for the bathroom, and he followed. Standing at the sink, I examined my reflection. The marks on my cheek had faded overnight, only faintly pink now instead of the virulent red they’d been for days.
“What happened?” he asked.
I touched my cheek—no burning. “I don’t know. Maybe Tecolote’s tea.”
“You drank that? You’re braver than I am. After what happened, I wouldn’t have touched that concoction.”
I continued to scrutinize myself in the mirror.
Kerry watched for a few moments, then said, “Babe, I know you love that wolf better than anything or anyone in this world.”
My eyes grew moist.
“You’ve got to be hurti
ng bad. Why don’t you talk to me?”
“I dreamed about him.” I clutched at my chest, grabbed a handful of my T-shirt and twisted it into my palm. “It was like something I saw when I was…when I passed out after burning the smudge.”
“What was it? What did you see?”
“We were climbing a mountain and he wanted to take a trail leading farther up but I knew we had to go down. There was something urgent about it; I knew we had to get down the mountain but that wolf wouldn’t come with me.”
Kerry turned me around and looked at me, his hair still disheveled from sleep, a line on his face where the pillow had wrinkled into his cheek. He gathered me into his warm chest. “Boy, when it rains it pours, huh? So many tragedies in just one week.”
“I don’t even have my job to do so I can occupy myself,” I said. “I feel like I’ve wandered into a nightmare, all this strange stuff that’s been happening to me. I don’t feel grounded, I can’t…I want Mountain!” I broke into a sob.
Kerry squeezed me tighter. “Listen, I’m going to drive down to the café and use the phone. I’ll take off work today and stay with you.”
“No, no, don’t do that,” I said, pulling away from him. I looked into his green eyes. “I may need you more if—if…Mountain…”
“I’ll be here if that happens.”
“Go. I’ll be all right.”
He hesitated. Then he gave a little snort. “You’re so stubborn.”
Alone in the cabin, I felt Mountain’s absence so painfully that I wanted to do anything to distract myself. I drove up the highway to the café to call the vet. “His heart’s just barely beating,” he said. “He’s not conscious, but he’s hanging on. We’ll just have to see what the day brings.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do? Pump his stomach? Anything?”