by Sandi Ault
Once inside, I eased my bum leg down slowly, and Mountain and I settled onto the tile floor of Mason’s great room. The wolf laid his head in my lap. “We’ve been through a lot,” I explained. “We just want to be close to each other.”
“So I’ve heard,” Mason said. “Tongues tired of well-worn lore have been wagging with this exciting new epic since dawn. I don’t know how they managed before the invention of the telephone. When there’s news, they can’t wait to tell it. Especially about a white girl who lives with a wolf and performs heroic rescues. They are calling you La Loba. Did you know that?”
I rubbed Mountain’s mane. “No, I hadn’t heard. It’s good, though. I like it.”
A woman came with a tray of tea and left it. Mason poured us each a cup but remained standing, stopping to take a sip to test the flavor. He smacked his lips approvingly. “Now. Let’s see. What can I do for you, Ms. Wild?”
“I wanted to tell you that the prize you were looking for is lost.”
“The prize?”
“The CD-ROM.”
He sobered, set his teacup down. “Ah. You know this for a fact?”
“I do. It went over the edge of the cliff around the neck of Yellow Hawk.”
“Was it destroyed?”
“It was. Smashed into bits. As was the peyote chief.”
The professor grimaced. His spine seemed to lose its strength and he collapsed into a nearby chair. He lowered his head and rubbed at his forehead—back and forth, over and over, as if wiping at a stain that refused to come out. I saw his Adam’s apple quiver as he swallowed. Finally he found a little composure. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, his voice shaking.
“And Hunter Contreras is gone, too. He was crushed by a landslide when the canyon rim began to disintegrate in the storm. He was after the CD to make some kind of offering to the war god. A scalp ceremony?”
He swallowed again. “Aha,” he said softly. “Aha. To appease the gods for crimes of the People, no doubt. And count coup for defeating the enemy.”
“The enemy?”
“Yes, the enemy.” He took a wadded handkerchief from his pants pocket, removed his glasses from their case in his shirt, and began rubbing the lenses with the cloth, as if there were something important he wanted to examine and he needed his vision to be clean and clear. He didn’t look up as he spoke. “Perhaps the enemy in this case was me, whether they knew it or not.” After a few moments, Wiley Mason returned his handkerchief to his pocket, put his glasses low on his nose, and stood up and walked to the window of his great room.
“I think at least one of them thought it was me,” I said.
He pursed his lips and nodded his head in agreement, then gazed out through the glass and didn’t speak for a time. Finally, he said, “I wasn’t going to publish it, at least not in this lifetime. I only wanted to preserve the Tiwa language. Santana was willing to help me do that, if I promised to keep it safe until such time as it was absolutely necessary, so that the language would not become extinct.”
“And you were going to pay him for this?”
He turned to face me and nodded. “Yes, there was to be an exchange of some money. There was evidently a need for money in his family—a son by a previous marriage in trouble, and his wife…it sounded like there were problems there.”
“And Gilbert Valdez? Was he the one who brokered the deal?”
Mason shook his head, frowning. “No, you have that wrong. I contacted him after I found out about Santana’s death. I asked him to look for the CD-ROM among the dead man’s things, because I knew Valdez was seeing the widow. I don’t think he knew what he was looking for, what was on the disc. I told him it was some computer programs we were working on.”
“It’s interesting,” I said, rising to my feet. “Madonna told me about a man her husband was working with. I didn’t put it together until I saw the disc in Yellow Hawk’s hand. It was the CD-ROM that Santana was making for you that he was working on, not a man he was working with. Santana must have been making a joke, inventing a character named Seedy Ron.” I set my teacup on a side table. Mountain got up and stood beside me. He nuzzled my hand.
“Dear, dear. It’s unfortunate,” Mason said, taking his handkerchief out again and dabbing at his neck. “The whole thing’s very unfortunate.”
“Yes, it is. It’s a sad story for Tanoah Pueblo.” I waited, a long, awkward silence growing between me and the professor. Finally I said, “Well, I’ve got to be going…the pilgrimage is today. I promised to see some folks off on their journey.”
“I’ll show you to the door,” Mason said. He gestured toward the front of the house. “And the little boy? Is he going to be all right?”
“Yes. He’s going to be in the hospital for observation for a while. He was hypothermic, dehydrated, but he’s coming along just fine.”
“It’s lamentable, I think,” the scholar mused. “It seems like whenever we move to try to preserve these amazing cultures on the very edge of extinction, somehow we manage to do almost as much harm as good—if not more so.”
I offered a gentle smile. “That’s what my boss said about the ruins up above the falls. He said it was better just to leave them alone.”
“Maybe it’s already too late to save the past,” Wiley Mason said. And he closed the door.
At the highest arc of the sun that day, the People set off on horseback for Indigo Falls. Mountain stood beside me as I bade my medicine teacher good-bye.
“It good you bring that wolf with you. You belong to him.”
I smiled and stroked Mountain’s head.
“You make good jerky,” Momma Anna said, patting the square pouch tied to her saddle. “I have plenty meat.”
“You taught me.”
“You good learn. I only do. You learn you, not me.”
“Momma Anna, would you permit me to ask a question. Just one?”
“You know we don’t like question over here. We already got FBI everywhere over this.”
“I know, but I have to ask. Do you know who left that nachi in my car?”
“That one, look like a scalp. Someone put prayers in that stick to have your scalp. That a bad spell. You put in water, like I told you?”
“Yes. I did just what you said.”
“That make prayers happy. You keep yellow hair.” She flattened her lips into a small smile.
I smiled back. “I was wondering if you would do something for me.” I pulled the last rope of prayer ties from around my neck and handed them up to my mentor.
She turned her head to the side slightly, scrutinizing me. Her hair was tied in a tight pattern of intricate knots and red cloth at the nape of her neck—she had gotten up well before dawn this morning to have a woman in the village do the ceremonial hair tie for this special occasion.
“Could you put these in the water for me? For your brother?”
Momma Anna’s lip trembled with grief. She took the strand of bundles from me and put them over her own head. “I am proud do this. I have many turkey feather, too. We need many prayers to heal. Many prayers. We cannot stay with him while he get ready for journey because they say mountain crumble when he…Now that way, way through sacred water, Eye of Great Spirit, under House of Dead, that way to where old ones live—it lost, no way through no more.”
I thought about that. The connection—between the past and the present through Indian land, through the Indigo Falls—destroyed. I shook my head. My eyes filled with tears. Then I offered: “You can still get there, to what’s left, anyway. There’s a road, if you can call it that, on the other side.”
“That road built by white man—that the new way. But we have no way back to time before. We must carry it with us. Here.” She put a hand to her heart. “We have only today now,” Momma Anna said, and she pressed her heels into the horse’s flanks.
I watched her ride down the dirt lane and join the other members of the family, who waited on their mounts. Yohe wagged a hand at me. “Good-bye, White Girl,�
�� she said. Lupé waved and turned alongside Frank, who had Angel seated in front of him. Serena adjusted the white blanket shawl over her head, a sign of mourning. Anna’s brothers Eddie and Pete solemnly fell in, each with a small child on board. The family of riders moved into the line of Indians on horses headed through the old walls of the pueblo and up the side of Sacred Mountain. I heard them singing as they rode away.
Across the fields and on the slopes of the foothills the grasses glistened, refreshed by the thirst-quenching rains of the previous day. The leaves of cottonwoods along the brook shimmered in the light. Even the run-down adobe houses along the dirt lane to Momma Anna’s house looked washed clean. Father Sun sent golden warmth through a brilliant blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. A magpie scolded us, and came to light on the fence post at the end of Momma Anna’s drive.
For an instant, I felt abandoned by my Tanoah family—left to stand here like an outcast, unable to partake in their journey, their celebration, even their grief for the ones I’d seen die.
But then, I looked down at my best friend—my family. His long mane shone in the sun, his tufted ears alert, his eyes watching, drinking in all of it—the riders, the magpie, the sky, the rippling leaves of the trees. He sniffed the air. His shoulder muscles trembled beneath his thick, handsome coat. It was a joy to behold his feral beauty, but I saw also that he could never again be truly wild. Or free. Time and circumstances had taken that from him—and given him to me for safekeeping. I smiled, and he looked up and gazed directly into my eyes. He wagged his tail at me. I dropped to one knee and hugged his neck. “We have today, buddy,” I said. “We have today.”
About the Author
Sandi Ault has employed her skills as a writer and storyteller while earning her living as a musician, bandleader, composer, journalist, editor, teacher, and novelist. She has toured and recorded with her own band, composed musical works for dance companies and other performances, and written a soundtrack for a short film.
For the past several years, she has taught writing workshops and classes while working on her own novels. While exploring the Southwest in her research for Wild Indigo, Ms. Ault taught writing classes at the University of New Mexico in Taos. In her home state of Colorado, Ms. Ault has taught workshops independently and through Front Range University in Estes Park.
Ms. Ault currently lives in a high mountain valley of the Rockies where—in addition to writing novels—she is a volunteer firefighter as well as a Fire Information Officer responding locally and nationally to wildfires.
She lives among the pines with her husband, Tracy, her wolf, Tiwa, and her horrible kitty, Wasichu.
Visit her website at www.SandiAult.com