![]() ![]() A coyote was barking somewhere over on Comb Wash far behind her. She shivered, picked up the backpack, and struggled into it. It was quiet here, just a few insects making their nocturnal sounds. And that irrationality made her think of Maxie. But for some reason, it was necessary to her. That wasn't necessary for publicationâhis approval. He'd have to agree she'd proved her case. She'd wine him and dine him and show him what she had. Then she'd roll out the sleeping bag and not get out of it until she was rested. ![]() She had maybe two more to go before she reached the site. She yawned, stretched, reached for her backpack, decided to rest a moment longer. He hadn't given a damn about anything else when she'd known him at Madison, and he didn't now. Bo was a biologist, scraping out a living as a part-timer with the Bureau of Land Management while he finished his dissertation on desert lichens, or whatever it was he was studying. When she put it back, Bo would never guess it had been missing. She'd done her borrowing carefully, disturbing nothing. The house was dark when she'd arrived, and she'd left it that way, finding the key under the flower box where Bo always left it. She had called from Shiprock, just to make doubly sure that no one was using Bo Arnold's old house out on the highway. She glanced at her watch: 10:11, changing to 10:12 as she watched. Somewhere in the darkness up the canyon she could hear the odd screeching call of a saw-whet owl, hunting nocturnal rodents. She stopped, shifted the weight, and adjusted the pack straps. The handle of the folding shovel she had strapped to her pack was pressing against her back. That would have been fine with Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was meeting Lehman. If Maxie suspected anything, she suspected Dr. She would spend a night where she could hear the sounds of civilization, something besides the endless Chaco silence. She'd told Maxie she had the Chaco feverâneeded to get away, see a movie, have a restaurant dinner, smell exhaust fumes, hear a different set of voices, make phone calls back to civilization on a telephone that would actually work. She had jotted down the list of supplies people needed. She'd collected the outgoing mail to be dropped off at the Blanco Trading Post. She was driving into Farmington, she'd said. She had made the rounds of the permanent housing and checked with everyone on the digging team. There was absolutely no possibility of privacy. In that tiny, isolated Park Service society of a dozen adults and two children, everyone knew everything about everybody. And the children would chat about it to their parents. The children were up in the gray dawn to catch their school bus. Of course, they had seen her driving away from Chaco. Friedman-Bernal rested now, sitting on a convenient rock, removing her backpack, rubbing her shoulders, letting the cold, high desert air evaporate the sweat that had soaked her shirt, reconsidering a long day. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal blocking out the light of an October moon.ĭr. If an Anasazi had risen from his thousand-year grave in the trash heap under the cliff ruins here, he would have seen the Humpbacked Flute Player, the rowdy god of fertility of his lost people. Seen from above, the shadow would have made a Navajo believe that the great yei northern clans called Watersprinkler had taken visible form. The backpack formed the spirit's grotesque hump, the walking stick Kokopelli's crooked flute. Sometimes, when the goat trail bent and put the walker's profile against the moon, the shadow became Kokopelli himself. An animated pictograph, its arms moving rhythmically as the moon shadow drifted across the sand. Sometimes it suggested a heron, sometimes one of those stick-figure forms of an Anasazi pictograph. Out on the packed sand of the wash bottom the shadow of the walker made a strange elongated shape. T HE MOON HAD RISEN just above the cliff behind her.
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