Thunderhead

Nora glanced at the group. They were looking back at her, motionless, shocked to silence by what had happened. “Where’s Roscoe?” she managed to ask.

“Back down the trail,” Sloane replied.

Nora dropped her head into her hands. And then, as if in answer, three well-spaced gunshots sounded below, echoing crazily among the canyons before dying away into distant thunder.

“God,” Nora groaned. Fiddlehead, her own horse. Beetlebum, Smithback’s nemesis. Hurricane Deck. Gone. She could still see the wide pleading eyes of Hurricane; the teeth, so strangely long and narrow, exposed in a final grin of terror.

Ten minutes later Swire appeared, breathing heavily. He passed Nora and went toward the horses, redividing and repacking the loads in silence. Holroyd came over to her and gently took her hand. “I got a decent reading,” he whispered.

Nora glanced up at him, hardly caring.

“We’re right smack on the trail,” he said, smiling.

Nora could only shake her head.

* * *

Compared to the nightmarish ascent, the trail down into the valley beyond the hogback ridge offered few difficulties. The horses, smelling water, charged ahead. Tired as they were, the group began to jog, and Nora found the events of the last hours temporarily receding in her devouring thirst. They splashed into the water upstream from the horses and Nora fell to her stomach, burying her face in the water. It was the most exquisite sensation she had ever felt, and she drank deeply, pausing only to gasp for air, until a sudden spasm of nausea contracted her stomach. She backed away, retiring to a spot beneath the rustling cottonwoods, breathing hard and feeling the sting of evaporation on her wet clothes. Gradually the waves of nausea passed. She saw Black bent double in the trees, vomiting up water, joined shortly by Holroyd. Smithback was kneeling in the stream, oblivious, bathing his head with cupped hands. Sloane staggered over, sopping wet, and knelt beside Nora.

“Swire needs our help with the horses,” she said.

They went downstream and helped Swire drag the horses out of the water, to prevent any possibility of fatal overdrinking. As they worked, Swire refused to meet Nora’s eyes.

After a rest, the group remounted and continued downstream into the new world of the valley. The water ran over a cobbled bed, filling the air with tranquil noise. The sounds of life rose about them: trilling cicadas, humming dragonflies, even the occasional eructation of a frog. As Nora’s thirst abated, the sickening horror of the accident returned with fresh force. She was riding a new horse now, Arbuckles, and every jarring movement seemed a reproachful memory of Fiddlehead. She thought of Swire’s poem to Hurricane Deck, almost a love ballad to the horse. She wondered how she was ever going to work things out with him.

They traveled down the valley, which narrowed as it approached the broad sandstone plateau, rising in front of them now less than a mile away. Nora glanced up at the cliffs as they passed, noting again the odd lack of ruins. This was an ideal valley for prehistoric settlement, and yet there was nothing. If, after all that had happened, this turned to be the wrong canyon system—she shut the thought from her mind.

The stream made another bend. The naked plateau loomed ever closer, the stream at last disappearing into the narrow slot canyon carved into its side. According to the radar map, the canyon should open, about a mile farther along, into the small valley that—she hoped—contained Quivira. But the slot canyon itself that lay between them and the i

As they rode up to the massive sandstone wall, Nora noticed a large rock beside the stream with some markings on its flanks. As she dismounted and came nearer, she could see a small panel of petroglyphs, similar to those they had found at the base of the ridge: a series of dots and a small foot, along with another star and a sun. She couldn’t help but notice that there was a large reversed spiral carved on top of the other images.

The rest came up beside her. She noticed Aragon gazing at the glyphs, an intent expression on his face.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I’ve seen other examples of dot patterns like these along the ancient approaches to Hopi,” he said at last. “I believe they give distance and direction information.”

“Sure,” Black scoffed. “And the freeway interchanges and the location of the nearest Howard Johnson’s, I’ll bet. Everyone knows Anasazi petroglyphs are indecipherable.”

Aragon ignored this. “The footlike glyph indicates walking, and the dots indicate distance. Based on other sites I’ve seen, each dot represents a walking distance of about sixteen minutes, or three quarters of a mile.”

“And the antelope?” Nora asked. “What does that symbolize?”

Aragon glanced at her. “An antelope,” he said.

“So this isn’t a kind of writing?”

Aragon looked back at the rock. “Not in the sense we’re used to. It’s not phonetic, syllabic, or ideographic. My own view is that it’s an entirely different way of using symbols. But that doesn’t mean it’s not writing.”

“On the other side of the ridge,” Nora said, “I saw a star inside the moon, inside the sun. I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“Yes. The sun is the symbol for the supreme deity, the moon the symbol for the future, and the star a symbol of truth. I took the whole thing to be an indicator that an oracle, a kind of Anasazi Delphi, lay ahead.”

“You mean Quivira?” Nora asked.

Aragon nodded.

“And what does this spiral mean?” asked Holroyd.

Aragon hesitated a moment. “That spiral was added later. It’s reversed, of course.” His voice trailed off. “In the context of the other things we’ve seen, I’d call it a warning, or omen, laid on top of these earlier symbols. A notice to travelers not to proceed, an indication of evil.”

There was a sudden silence.

“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my,” murmured Smithback.

“Obviously, there’s still a lot we don’t know,” Aragon said, the slightest trace of defensiveness in his voice. “Perhaps you, Mr. Smithback, with your no doubt profound knowledge of Anasazi witches and their modern-day descendants, the skinwalkers, can enlighten us further.”

The writer rolled his tongue around his cheek and raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

As they moved away, Holroyd gave a shout. He had walked around to the side of the rock nearest the entrance to the slot canyon. Now he pointed to a much fresher inscription, scraped into the rock with a penknife. As Nora stared at it, she felt her cheeks begin to burn. Still staring, she knelt beside the stone, fingers slowly tracing the narrow grooves that spelled out P.K. 1983.

23

AS NORA TOUCHED HER FATHER’S INITIALS on the rock, something inside her seemed to give way. A knot of tension, tightened over the harrowing days, loosened abruptly, and she leaned against the smooth surface of the rock, feeling an intense, overwhelming flood of relief. Her father had been here. They had been following his trail all along. She realized dimly that the group was crowding around, congratulating her.

Slowly she rose to her feet. She gathered the expedition under a small grove of gambel oaks, near the point where the stream plunged into the slot canyon. Everyone seemed to be in high spirits except Swire, who silently moved off with the horses to a nearby patch of grass. Bonarotti was busy cleaning the dirty cookware in the stream

“We’re almost there,” she said. “According to our maps, this is the slot canyon we’ve been searching for. We should find the hidden canyon of Quivira at the far end.”