“My mother was diagnosed with ALS at the time I was born. So, no sisters; no brothers, either.”
His face registered his discomfort. “Sorry,” he said gruffly.
She shook her head. “I don't know why I mentioned it.” Her father and grandparents always mentioned the timing in the same breath, as if it were part of the explanation.
When Summer was born, the doctors discovered that Susan had Lou Gehrig's disease.
So the two events were inextricably linked in her memory, and she could never think of her own birth without the pain of guilt for her mother's fatal illness.
She needed to change the subject. “In Lakota culture, is a starchaser a good thing to be?”
“According to legend, the stars are spirits. They carry messages from the Creator to people on earth. So I suppose that a starchaser could be someone reaching for the heavens, trying to be powerful. Or maybe seeking a message.” He shrugged. “It's a made-up name; my mother thought it sounded romantic.”
“With a name like Summer, I can identify,” she told him. “People usually ask me if my folks were hippies.”
“I don't think many hippies become Methodist ministers.”
So he had checked her family background as well as her employment record. She let his words hang in the air, hoping it would make him feel guilty.
“Just doing my job,” he said.
At times Sam made a point of diverting from the trail to check out a side canyon or the shadow under an overhang. No sign of Zack. In fact, she didn't see any signs of any other humans along the way, except for footprints in the dust and a scrap of cellophane, which she pocketed. At another time, she would have celebrated the lack of people in the backcountry. With Zack still missing, it just added to her frustration.
At nine A.M., they stood in a bowl-shaped canyon, a sheltered oasis filled with spindly willow trees.
“Nice,” Perez observed.
“It's nice most of the time.” A thin sheen of water on the hard rock floor reflected the sunlight. Sam pointed. “That's Curtain Creek.”
She waved her hand at a series of potholes scoured into the smooth surface. The largest was nearly three feet deep. “When enough rain falls on the high mesas, the water roars through there. It's what carved out the Curtain.”
She slapped her open hand on a vertical wall of sandstone next to a crude arrow etched into the rock. “And this is where Curtain Creek comes from. ZigZag Passage.”
The V of the arrow pointed toward a narrow crevice. At ground level, only eighteen inches of sandy floor separated the opposing cliff faces. The walls undulated up, opening out gradually toward the top.
Perez stiffened. “
This
is your other shortcut?”
Sam slid her arms out of her daypack. Clutching the shoulder straps, she held the pack on one hip as she sidestepped into the narrow space. She glanced back to make sure Perez was following.
He stood at the opening, scanning the close walls. “You've got to be kidding. This is only a crack. A claustrophobic crack.”
“That's one reason it's not an approved trail.” She raised a finger toward the sunlight above. “Blue sky overhead; look at that if you find it claustrophobic. Take off your pack, hold it next to you, and come on.”
He peered over her head, scrutinizing the passage beyond. “Haven't there been earthquakes around here? We could be squashed like cockroaches under a shoe.” A solid rock wall loomed a short distance away. “It doesn't look like it goes anywhere.”
“It zigs. It zags. Then it opens up again. Don't worryâit's a short passage.”
His rugged face was fixed in a frown.
“Well, get out your map, Starchaser. Take the long trail to the ruins, and I'll see you there in a couple of hours.” She started down the passageway.
By the time she reached the bend in the path, Perez was thumping and muttering behind her. She glanced back. He shuffled sideways, his nose only inches from the rock wall.
The sunlight sifted down from above in narrow shafts, illuminating the layers of rock. The hues were those a master artist would have chosen, blending subtly from one into another. Dove gray. Celadon. Mauve. Bronze. Cream. Buttercup yellow. Each shade represented hundreds of years of geological processes at work.
“Aren't the colors incredible?” she murmured.
“Lovely.”
His sardonic tone made her smile. “This is called a slot canyon, for obvious reasons,” she told him. “ZigZag Passage is just a tiny preview of the Curtain.”
“The famous Curtain is another crack in the ground?” He reached the bend in the path where the walls were farther apart, set the pack down and turned to face her, his shoulders brushing the rock on either side. “I can hardly wait.” His inflection implied just the opposite. “I was never one for the sideways-shuffle type of line dances. We Indians like to move forward.”
“I thought âNative American' was the politically correct term.”
“No tribe called this place America, so why should we call ourselves Americans? We Lakota called ourselves the People.”
She scoffed. “Dozens of tribes called themselves the People.”
He shrugged. “I didn't say it was a perfect system. But according to my great-grandmother, it worked fine until you White Eyes started herding us around.”
“Uh-huh.” She completed the short distance to the sunlit opening ahead.
Perez emerged behind her, breathing a sigh of relief and stretching his arms wide.
“You said that you dance?” she asked. “Do you go to the local powwows here in Utah?”
“I'm Lakota.” Perez intoned flatly. “Well, half Mexican, half Lakota. Not Navajo, not Hopi, not Zuni.”
Obviously a sensitive point. “I didn't mean to imply that all tribes were the same,” she backpedaled. “I know you're stationed in Salt Lake, so I thought you might be interested in local activities.”
The rocky path, although bounded by huge slabs that had sheared away from the cliffs above, felt remarkably open after ZigZag. One of the bright yellow MISSING posters was taped next to the vertical slash from which they'd just exited, adjoining a crude arrow identical to the marking they'd found on the other side.
At first the poster startled her, as if it might be a clue left by the kidnapper pointing to Zack's location. Then the probable explanation occurred to her. “Outward Bound must have left this. They went through ZigZag yesterday, on their way to the Curtain.” Which reminded her how fast time was passing. She tried to pick up the pace but soon lost Perez and had to backtrack to find him. He was not far behind but hidden behind a petroglyph-covered spire of sandstone that he'd stopped to investigate. Cream-colored figures danced across a shiny vermilion background. Fat deer ran before three stick figures with enlarged heads. Jagged rays zigzagged down from above the stick figures; the point of origin two curious ovals covered with spots.
“Aliens attacking earth?” he guessed.
“Wouldn't the FBI know all about that?”
He rubbed his knuckles across the dark stubble on his chin. “That's an intergalactic problem; CIA jurisdiction.”
His face was stoic; only a spark of light in his dark eyes revealed that he was anything but serious.
He compared his own hand with an etching of a hand on the rock. His was nearly twice the size of the painted one. “Fremont?”
She shook her head. “I don't think so. The hand signature was a favorite of the Anasazi. The new park archaeologist, Georgia Gates, could tell you more.” She heaved a sigh. “Kent tells me the staff's working on a plan to develop the archaeological sites here.”
“You sound like you disapprove.”
“I'm not keen on focusing on attractions like that, at least not in this park. People should come here to see nature, not man-made features. Have you been to Mesa Verde?”
He nodded.
“Then you know that it's wall-to-wall people there. No wonder the cougars attack them.”
He gave her a curious look and she knew her joke had not come off. “Okay,” she said, “Mesa Verde was made into a park to protect the archaeological sites. But Heritage was set aside to protect the beauty of the backcountry. More people will wreak havoc on the ecosystem.”
“Aha.” He sounded pleased with himself. “They'll scare away prey animals, leaving the predators hungry.”
Hungry enough to eat two-year-old boys? Was that what he was hinting at? “I didn't say that. The truth is, too many visitors scare away both prey and predators. If the park administration focuses on ruins, that means less money for natural resource protection, aka flora and fauna.” Kent would be a wildlife biologist with no funding for recovery or protection programs. “Pretty soon, all that'll be left is asphalt and rocks and picnic tables.”
His chin came up. “And Native American history.”
She sighed. “C'mon, Perez, we're wasting time. Let's hike while we argue. We need to hustle ifâ”
A trill of notes sounded from Perez's chest pocket. He extracted the cellular phone and turned his back to her.
She resigned herself to a break, took out her water bottle and phone, and punched in the number she'd found for Scott McElroy. It felt strange to be making phone calls in the middle of the wilderness, her butt parked on one boulder and her back against another as she watched a golden eagle riding a thermal way up in the sky.
“McElroy here.” He pronounced it Mackelroy. She identified herself and mentioned Kent.
The elderly man was more than willing to talk about Coyote Charlie. “He told me himself that was his name. Well, the Charlie part of it, anyway. I may have added the Coyote.”
“You talked to him?” She was still having a hard time picturing Coyote Charlie as a normal, talking human. She took a swig of water.
“Uh-huh. A couple of us were up on Table Mesaânow there's a stupid name for youâ”
“Means the same thing, table and mesa.”
“You're a sharp one!” She heard him take a sip of something, and then he continued. “Anyway, we were camping out under this beautiful full moon, talking about nothing as usual, when up walks this stranger. Barefoot, no backpack, not even a jacket. Californian, I thoughtâone of those woo-woo types?”
“Um-hmm,” she responded, wishing he'd hurry up. She decided the soaring wings overhead belonged not to an eagle but to
Cathartes aura
. What her Kansas relatives would call a turkey buzzard.
“But no, he wasn't Californianâhe said he was from the old-growth forest in Oregon: he was emphatic about that. I'd guess he was in his twenties, early thirties at the outside. But he was certainly a woo-woo. Said he was living off the land. Likened it to the Garden of Eden.”
Sam dropped her gaze to the surrounding rocky plateau. “Here?”
“We all thought it was pretty strange. But he rattled off all the wild edibles, right out of the bookâpiñon nuts, juniper berries, cholla fruit. Told us he ate ant larvae and partridge eggs and jackrabbits and trout from the river in the canyon. Said the ancient Anasazi, who knew how to live in harmony with nature, showed him how to live. Even said he was a reincarnated Anasazi warrior, if you can believe that.
“So I guess they got tutti frutties in Oregon, too. But, you know, he looked healthy. So maybe he knew what he was talking about, living off the land. Course, it was summer then. Not the one before last but the one before that.
“Two years ago.” She took another sip from her water bottle, stood up, and stuffed it back into her pack.
“Or was it three? Anyhow, after he left, we were missing a sack of macaroni and a packet of freeze-dried stew. Not to mention most of our matches. So Charlie's concept of living off the land was probably a little broader than we supposed at first.” Another slurping sound.
“But the weirdest thing was that when we'd more or less run out of conversation and were all sitting around just staring at the fire, the coyotes started to howl. They often do, up on the plateau like that, in the summer. And this guy, he just lifted up his head and howled along with them.” McElroy cleared his throat. “Made my hair stand on end, the noises he made.” He paused again for a sip. “But you know, I sort of wanted to howl along with him. So I did. We all did.”
Sam knew the feeling. She was about ready to howl with impatience right now. “And his name was Charlie?”
“Charles, Carlos, something like that. So we started calling him Coyote Charlie. I'm glad to hear he's still up there. Nice to know that someone can still live so free. Maybe he
is
a reincarnated Anasazi.”
Sam thought about Coyote Charlie's regular performances. Everyone got a little wild now and then. But the phantom had made howling with the coyotes a monthly habit, almost like a religious ritual. “Since he's been showing up every month for years, Mr. McElroy, do you think maybe he moved here, that he's a local?”
“Call me Scotty; Mr. McElroy sounds like a school principal. A local? Hmm. Coyote Charlie a local? Never really thought about that.” Sip, slurp, swallow. “Well, he couldn't be really local, like from Floral or Las Rojas. I think I'd recognize him if I saw him again. Besides, I pretty much know everyone that lives around here, and there's nobody his age who's
that
nuts.”
His comment made her wonder how many other nutcases lived around the park or just how crazy one would have to act to be considered
that nuts
. Had the Unabomber's neighbors thought he was nuts? The Green River Killer's? In her opinion, most people didn't really pay much attention to others around them. The evening news was filled with citizens swearing that their good neighbor couldn't possibly have committed the murder he'd just been arrested for.