by Sandi Ault
“You come see me that time, I tell that boy take the medicine.” Yohe said. “This night, the dreamers not have that medicine. But some the people grow the medicine, that way we always have some coming up.”
I nodded my head.
“You talk one these. Make offering. You ask Him.”
Suddenly, I realized that she was talking about Momma Anna’s peyote plant, and how she had told me to ask Him for help finding Abasolo. “I did,” I agreed.
“That one some the medicine for ceremony tonight, you got answer now.” She turned to look at her companion, then turned back to me.
After a few moments of silence, Bernat raised his chin and looked right into my face as he delivered a low, guttural, vowel-laden soliloquy in Tiwa. He went on for more than a minute, then stopped and stared at me even more intensely, his eyes bulging a little from their nests in the soft brown fleshy folds around his eyes. He seemed to be waiting for me to acknowledge the gravity of his message.
I looked at Yohe, then back at Bernat, then at Yohe again.
“The dreamers go next other time. They see that Spanish.”
I gasped. “Is she alive?” I blurted it without catching myself. “I’m sorry. I just, I’m not feeling so well, I apologize. It’s…I’ve been worried about her. I fear she is in danger. I pray that she’s alive.”
Yohe looked at Bernat. He gave the slightest nod. Then Yohe spoke again. “They see that Spanish you looking for. This woman need water, need help. She hurt, maybe fall. The dreamers see you fly, see birds. Ancestors make them shiny birds. The dreamers got blessing for you so you can fly.”
“I need to know where she is.” I turned to look at Barat and out of frustration, I reached both hands to my temples and grasped my head. “If you know where she is…” Realizing how this must have looked, I brushed my hands through my hair and then lowered them back into my lap. “If you know where she is, I need to find her.”
Yohe spoke to Bernat in Tiwa and he looked down at his knees and closed his eyes, muttering.
“That cake coming up,” Yohe said, as she sprang from the chair and grabbed a wastebasket next to a nearby table. She shoved it in front of the old man’s face, and he gratefully took it in both hands and stuck his head into the plastic bucket and retched. Yohe turned to me. “More water.”
I hurried to fill the cups again and brought water and a damp paper towel to the peyote chief. He drank both cups dry and blotted his mouth with the towel, then looked down into his lap again. Yohe was standing at the ready with the wastebasket but it appeared that his episode of vomiting was over for now. She set it down and then spoke to the chief in Tiwa again.
Bernat began rocking forward and back in his seat and singing softly under his breath. He went on like that for a minute or two, and then he circled his fingers over his head. I had seen Momma Anna do the same gesture before with cornmeal in her fingers when offering thanks and saying her ritual prayers. The circle over the head was to honor the above, one of the seven sacred directions. Deherrera finished his song and then looked at me. He sat silently studying my face for another long minute, then uttered a stream of words in Tiwa to Yohe.
“You know that place. They gather the clay to make the pot,” she translated. “Many ancestor make pot, that clay. That way they shine.”
“The micaceous clay. I know where they were mining the mica from the earth.”
Yohe nodded. “He say you must fly where ancient ones make the birds. They there in morning, first light. He give spirit blessing you this time.”
The peyote chief took hold of Yohe’s wrist and said a few more words with some urgency in his voice.
Yohe cocked her head to one side to listen, then turned and looked at me with a grim face. “He say that Spanish a dreamer. She come village, dream with Carry Water Clan, that next time, full of life, lot of hope. They meet her this time in dreaming, she cry out to them. He say she might die today. That why we come right away. You must fly, save that one.”
When Yohe finished speaking, Bernat Deherrera got up from his chair and looked around. He folded his blanket onto the seat and went toward the washrooms. Yohe looked at me and said, “The medicine make everything come out fast from here.” She rubbed her belly. “Now that water, that cake coming back out, maybe next other way.”
After excusing myself from my Tanoah visitors, I crossed the office area and went to be near Mountain to try to collect my thoughts. I wrapped my left arm protectively around my right side as I felt ready to cry. The poor wolf looked completely inanimate, as if he weren’t even alive. He also looked smaller than usual, and I guessed that was from dehydration and loss of blood. He had been shaved in so many places, and long seams of railroad-tie stitches laced swaths of his flesh together. Where his fur remained, it clumped together, greasy and matted, probably from the drool of the fight dogs. A drip IV was taped to his shaved foreleg. He looked so fragile—not the strong, willful, life-loving companion he had been before Lor stole him from my Jeep just hours ago. My jaw trembled as a tear rolled down my cheek. Beyond the emotional angst, the physical pain was starting to overtake me again, and I knew I would have to inhale another dose of Esperanza’s aroma remedy and perhaps also take another bite off of that tablet to take the edge off. I reached down and nudged Roy’s shoulder. “Boss, I need to talk to you,” I whispered.
42: The Right Place
Roy’s face grew redder and the skin around his eyes tightened as I told him about the secret assignment I’d been working on and why I needed him to help me get a search party together before dawn. He twitched his head back and forth in an almost imperceptible little nay-saying move. Anyone who didn’t know him might have seen this as a tic of some kind, but I could tell that he was angry. I wasn’t sure if he was mad at me, at the situation, or something else, but regardless, I kept talking until I had told him almost everything.
“Now, that is one crazy story. Everything from dead authors to drugs to some screwed up will, and it’s even got the next president of the United States involved in it. So how does all this connect up with Lor Talgren trying to kill your wolf?”
“It doesn’t. That was…I had both things going on at once.”
“How about Gomez’s rig getting blown up? Was that Talgren, or this thing?”
“I don’t know about that. I really don’t think that was Talgren, but I’m not sure. No one but you and me knew that I would be driving that car.”
“Do you mind letting me in on what the Indians there wanted with you?” He gestured in the direction of the two elders sitting in the chairs near the entry. “Is that yet another thing you got going on, or do they know all about this, too? Is that why they said it was a matter of life or death that they get here to talk to you?”
“They are peyote dreamers from the pueblo,” I said. “They don’t know any of the background I’ve told you, none of it. But they saw the poet in visions during their ceremony tonight. They said if we don’t get to her soon, she’s going to die, that she’s hurt, maybe has fallen, needs water.”
“Well, that just adds to the crazy. I know she’s now officially a missing person. But you don’t think she was just out hiking and took a fall? You think it was these twins from California that’s got her back in one of the mines? And maybe her daughter, too?”
“You said earlier this week that you had a report that a bear had broken into one of the mine entrances, and we agreed that it wasn’t likely that it was a bear this time of year.”
Roy took off his cowboy hat and scratched his scalp vigorously, then put the hat back on his head. “I guess that doesn’t sound any stranger than all the rest of this. Well, I sent all the folks who were searching for Mountain home. They already pulled a double shift. We still got Gomez here from our crew, and I can call the sheriff and request the SAR team. They’re the ones trained for search and rescue, and they can bring some dogs. But you mentioned you told your—what is he, your handler?—to call the FBI. If they’re going in, they’ll want us
to stay out of their way, unless they ask for support.”
“I’ll call the Secret Service agent right away—his name’s Coronel. I’ll find out if the FBI is on it. I just want to be ready in case…”
“Ready? You’re not even ready to make a bed, the shape you’re in. You’re going to have to sit this one out, Jamaica. You can’t go charging in now, like you always do.”
I felt my nostrils flare. “So it’s a good thing I asked you for some help, then, right?”
I called Hank, and he answered but told me he’d call me right back. In a matter of seconds, Buzz began vibrating. I took the phone to one of the cubicles and sat down to speak with Coronel. I kept my voice low and quiet, and as we talked, I pressed the malleable herb bundle to my nose and breathed deeply through it several times. I worked the bottle of pain pills out of my pocket and poured several tablets out onto the desk. Finding the one I’d already bitten into, I took another nip off of it, leaving a tiny piece remaining, which I slipped back into the bottle with the rest of the medicine. While I was doing this, Coronel told me that he had just gotten ahold of his FBI contact and told her about the green Subaru and the suspected disappearance of the second woman, Susan Lacy. He said, “She’s already coordinating with local law enforcement, and it sounds like they are getting ready to send in a team to search the mines for Abasolo. You know I don’t have any jurisdiction here, don’t you? I am going to have to stay on the sidelines. But if there is anything more I can do, just call me.”
As I stood up, I saw Roy coming across the office toward me, his phone at his ear. “Yes, ma’am. I’m the one who called the sheriff and requested a SAR team. Yes ma’am, we have a few personnel who can assist. Agent Wild is right here, I’ll let you talk to her. Yes, that mine area is overseen by the BLM. Yes, ma’am we will. Here she is…” He thrust the phone at me and mouthed FBI.
☽
In the wee hours of the morning, a team consisting of Deputy Sheriff Jerry Padilla, six Taos County SWAT officers, two FBI agents, and a pair of New Mexico State SAR (search and rescue) dog handlers and their canines assembled at the ranger station. We circled around the map as Padilla laid out the plan. “I’ll work command,” Padilla said, “and Agent Wild here, because of her injuries, will remain at this station and relay any outside communications with dispatch. Now, we want to work under the cover of darkness for maximum stealth, so we’ll move out immediately after this briefing. There’s nine mine caves in the canyon there, and we don’t know which one the targets are using. So, SAR will advance with SWAT protection until the objective is identified, and then FBI will take point once we know that. Command will stage here,” he pointed at the road entering the mica mine property, “so everybody bump to this location in five, then ops will go in on foot from there. Jamaica, you arrange for an ambulance to stage here,” he pointed to a spot on the road well back of the mine entrance, “and tell them to make sure they roll in silent and keep their rig out of sight, if they can. Any non-ops personnel will maintain radio silence unless contacted by command. There is a UHF radio repeater on the rim of the canyon approximately a mile from the mine, so we will use the SAR 2 UHF radio channel and hopefully we’ll have coverage with that repeater. However this terrain is tricky, so if ops gets cut off from command, then FBI will take over comms at the scene. Otherwise, let me restate: radio silence. Understood?”
With all the hubbub in the ranger station, Gomez and the ranger had roused from the cots and joined the briefing, and a dozen or more first-responders from the Forest Service and law enforcement had arrived to provide additional resources if needed; they assembled around the map behind the core insertion team. Vicky Kasza, the ranger/receptionist who ran the station, had come in and taken over the facility. She ushered the two Tanoan elders into the break room and offered them the use of the cots. Yohe took advantage of this, but the peyote chief took a chair and remained upright with the wastebasket in his lap. He was still vomiting occasionally from the effects of the plant medicine that produced his vision of Abasolo in a cave with shining birds. Vicky offered them pillows and coffee and told them she would check back with them periodically. Kasza had also assigned a fresh duo to watch over Mountain. “Don’t you worry, Jamaica,” she told me, “I will personally keep an eye on him as well, and let you know the moment he wakes up or if there are any changes. You just focus on what you gotta do.”
I only wished I had something I could do. It was three in the morning when the incident team left the ranger station. I went out into the parking lot and looked up at the sky. A weak winter half-moon had risen early, and now it trembled from behind a mask of clouds as it sunk toward the horizon in the west, leaving the landscape with almost no relief from the darkness. I raised my face to the stars and said a prayer that had many parts. Voicing my pleas to one twinkling light, I asked for my beloved Mountain to heal and come back to me alive and well from his own drugged dream state. To another, I asked for Abasolo’s safe rescue from her captors. And to another, I sent blessings for her new-found daughter and hopes that she was alive and well and would be rescued along with her long-lost mother. And finally, I searched around the sky until I found the barely-visible Seven Sisters, the constellation Pleiades, and I asked for the safety of the team.
I thought I was through with my prayers and was about to go back inside when a night-flying creature—either a bird or a bat—startled me as it swooped past, so close above me, that I could hear its wings beating a fast, furious shushing sound and feel cold air rush across my cheeks. I remembered Esperanza telling me I would have to fly, perhaps many times, and suddenly a flashback of the old bruja overwhelmed me: Tecolote appeared just as I had last seen her, so weak and tired, struggling to kneel in front of her candles and her carved wooden saints, muttering a prayer. I turned to the sky once more and asked for her protection and healing, too.
As I started to go back inside the station, Dominic Gomez met me at the door, pulling on his jacket. “Vicky has taken over the wolf watch, and she has people on it,” he said. “I’m going to go down to command and see if I can be of any help.”
I wanted to go with him. I felt useless so far away from the action. After giving the instructions to dispatch for the ambulance, I had nothing to do, and couldn’t foresee that I would need to do any more than that. The curandera’s herbs and the additional bite of that pain pill I had taken were beginning to mask my injuries; plus, adrenalin was surging in my bloodstream now that we had a plan and were taking action. I wanted to go lead the search and rescue myself. But both Roy and Jerry Padilla had insisted that I stay at the ranger station. I held up a hand, delaying Gomez. “Dominic, I just thought of something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Do you remember Monday when you were in the Bear’s Paw with your coffee, talking to the locals?”
Gomez nodded. “Yeah. My worst thing, small talk, although I guess it worked. Ibanez came out of the woodwork like Roy said he would.”
“Remember when I came in the café, I interrupted a conversation between you and that tourist couple because you looked like you were trapped and they wouldn’t shut up? You know, they are the ones we now think are the kidnappers.”
“I more or less got that they were suspects from the briefing.”
“You said those two were full of questions. Do you remember what they were asking you about?”
He wrinkled his nose, reached up and adjusted his ball cap on his head. “They wanted to know of any good outfitters who carried climbing gear. I didn’t really know that much about it, so I told them they had to go to Taos. There’s no shops up here anyway. Then they kept asking about some spirit cave or bird cave, something to do with birds in a cave. Now that I know more about it, I’m guessing they meant the mine.”
Once the incident team had deployed, the ranger station morphed from a hub of noise, excitement, and activity to an oversized waiting room—sparsely populated, mostly quiet, empty-feeling—yet full of unseen currents of anxious energy left behind by those who had just departed
, and barely contained in those who remained. The recessed lights in the ceiling bathed the walls inside with a harsh electronic glow while the blackness outside lurked hungrily at every window, eager to prevail and suck up the light. I went to sit near Mountain. He was still deeply sedated, but I could see his chest rising and falling ever so slightly with his breathing. With all his shaved patches, he looked half-grizzled and half-naked. Where the fur had been torn or shaved away, his blue-white skin looked lifeless, like the scaled flesh of a fish. I wanted to touch him, to pick up his big head and hold it against my chest, in my arms, to smooth his ruffled fur and soothe his hurting places. But I obeyed the vet’s instructions and remained a few feet away. I closed my eyes and tried to will healing energy into his body.
I started when I felt a touch on my shoulder. It was the peyote chief, his face looking down at me with an expression of urgency. I jumped to my feet and followed him as he led me to the break room, where Yohe was asleep on one of the cots. He nudged her awake, and began muttering in Tiwa to her. The auntie sprang to her feet incredibly quickly for such a big woman, and an elder at that. She looked at me, then turned back to Deherrera and said something to him in their native tongue. Then they both turned toward me, and Yohe began to relay what the chief was telling her. “He say you got a message.”
Deherrera mumbled to her again.
“That one, Indun message, that the right place.”
The chief spoke a few more sentences in Tiwa.
“That place with the birds. You must fly. Before sun rise, you be there.”
I stood looking at them, confused, and then suddenly I realized what the peyote chief was trying to tell me. The Indun message! I had forgotten about Rico’s voicemail message, with all that had happened this night. “The team is looking in the wrong place! They’re not in the mine caves, are they? They’re at the ruin on the cliff ledge!”