The heat felt a little less fierce this morning. Either Caroline was getting used to it after three days, or the air was actually cooler. Grandmother Walks and her family didn’t keep a thermometer handy. After all, the wind and the sun didn’t care about whiteman measurements. Knowing the temperature wouldn’t change it.
She reminded herself that she liked staying warm and dry. Sometimes Stonefort fogs lingered for weeks, dank and gray and cold, never a glimpse of sun, even your skin and hair turned slimy and stank of rotten rockweed with a dash of herring for an accent. Then in winter the sea-smoke and spray froze to everything, icing the boats until the fishermen had to pound it off topsides and rigging or the weight of it would flip their boats right over at the mooring. There was a lot to be said for warm and dry.
And the House wouldn't allow a furnace. Yeah, you could keep warm in January and February — if you stayed within ten feet of a stove.
The canyonlands got cold in winter, too. Bitter cold, almost felt like home. But the sun shone nearly every day, and once it came up she could bask like a lizard and forget about the night. She didn't have to stay cold. And wet.
She squatted with her back against the trunk of a rough-barked cottonwood and closed her eyes, letting the shade and the gentle breeze cool her body and her thoughts. Air flowed down the dry creek bed, bringing with it the mingled scents of juniper and pine, of sage and rabbit-bush and dry grass and horse. And dust. Everywhere, the dust. Her rental car had chameleoned from blue to beige. She never would have taken a dark car into the desert, not even air-conditioned, but they'd already rented all the lighter colors. Just one of the joys of unplanned travel.
Soft footsteps scuffed the sand and gravel, polite deliberate noise to tell her that someone came. Caroline opened her eyes and looked up, blinking into the dappled light that filtered through the branches overhead.
"Grandmother asks for you."
Caroline nodded her thanks to the woman and stood up, brushing dust from her pants. Morning Star, whiteman name Helen Horsebreaker — the woman would actually be a great-grandniece or third-cousin-in-law twice removed or something. Caroline sifted through the tangled family tree in her head. It had taken her six months and a computer database to sort everybody out. They all called Walks-with-the-moon "Grandmother," and sometimes the exact relationship mattered. And then you had to remember the clans, "born to" and "born for" and the relationships between them . . .
They nodded to each other, solemn-faced, each knowing that Grandmother Walks would die before sunset, and walked without speaking that knowledge back to the bed under the trees and the frail brown form lying on it. First People didn't feel a pressing need to fill the air with empty noise.
At least Grandmother Walks had kept her mind. She could barely breathe, spoke one word at a time, but her eyes stayed sharp and each word meant what it said. Not like Aunt Jean, the last year or so. Caroline had been young then, but she remembered. Being a witch didn't immunize you against Alzheimer's. The last time, Aunt Jean had called her by five different names, none of them Caroline. Some of those names had been dead for fifty, sixty years.
Suddenly the remembered death-stink of that sickroom seemed so strong that she almost gagged. Grandmother Walks had it right — much better to die out in the dry clean air with blue sky overhead and the brown mountains filling your eyes and heart.
"Granddaughter."
So again English was permitted. Caroline didn't know if that was kindness or a gentle fence to keep her at a distance from the true heart of Grandmother's dying.
"Grandmother. I have come."
The ancient woman nodded, a fraction of a dip of her chin. "Child. Of. Water." Each word needed a breath of its own. She paused and took three quick shallow breaths to fill in after them. "Hear. Me."
"I listen, Grandmother."
"The. English. School. Gives. You. Nothing."
Another pause, another four breaths and a break when she didn't breathe, Aunt Alice would have a fancy medical name for it. Caroline didn't want to know. Then Grandmother breathed again, and the world went on.
"They. Only. Take." Breathing, shallow but Caroline could hear a rasp in it. "You. Do. Not. Need. Them."
"I do learn from them, Grandmother. Without the school, I never would have come to you."
One withered hand stirred on the blanket, the handspun hand-woven wool blanket that belonged in a display of ethnic art but instead was holding in faint body heat on a day that the living found hot. One old brown finger shook in negation.
"Others. Would. Have. Taught. You."
Another pause for breathing, another pause in the breathing, and then breathing again. Any breath could have been her last, but the old woman refused to die until she was damned good and ready. Until she had finished what she meant to do, said what she meant to say. Caroline felt tears cold on her cheeks, evaporating in the dry air, and she bowed her head.
"Leave. Them. Go. Home."
"Grandmother, I have not finished my degree. I have not finished my journey."
That brown finger moved again, sideways and back, waving denial. "Journey. Yes. Degree. No. Degree. Is. Not. Journey."
"Grandmother . . ." But no words came. Caroline reached out, tentative, and touched the withered hand. It gripped her, hard, still strong and independent of the weakening struggle underneath the blanket. Caroline felt a tingle in her fingers, as if she completed an electric circuit. The feeling ran up her arm and down her spine.
"Learn. From. Your. People. Teach. Your. People. Not. The. English." She paused, not breathing this time. "Go. Back. To. The. Waters. That. Give. You. Strength." And then Grandmother panted again, gasping, eyes closed with the effort of that long speech. Her breathing stopped. It started. Her eyes opened.
"Remember. The. Hunter. Find. The. Hunter."
The dark eyes glinted, pure will. Caroline's thoughts skipped away from the dying, wondering how the old woman had reached such an age without cataracts clouding her vision, after so many years gazing into so fierce a sun.
Grandmother's hand squeezed hers again. "The. Hunter. You. Will. Need. Her."
"Grandmother, I will try. My brother thinks he may have found the place where she is hidden."
"Then. Go. Now."
And the hand released hers. Grandmother's eyes closed, and she lay there on the bed. She was still breathing.
Caroline turned away from the bed and nodded to Morning Star. They touched hands and then shared a quiet embrace. Caroline walked slowly over to where she'd left her backpack, made sure she'd refilled the water bottles, hoisted the pack to her shoulders, and then scanned the small world that had become her home for a few seasons. The dusty yard, the rambling wood-framed tin-roofed house faded and frayed and grayed by sun and wind, the sparse dry trees, the rim of brown mountains crowned by a sky as hard as blue enamel. The family, four generations or more, continuing life alongside the dying, baking bread again, watering horses again, tinkering with old trucks again.
As yesterday, as tomorrow, as ten or a hundred years from now in either direction on time's arrow. World without end, amen.
She grimaced and plucked a battered Stetson from a branch stub nearby, remembering to check the hat for spiders or scorpions, the worn felt once white but now the same mottled beige as the car, the dry leaves, the surrounding hills. She hated hat hair, but even October sun could fry her brain. Caroline turned her back on the scene and walked. More tears came, and blurred her eyes, and she fought them back and swiped them away because she had to guard her footing.
A twisted ankle, a rattlesnake, a missed turn on the trail could mean death in this hard land. And two-legged coyotes prowled, white and brown, who might think a woman alone in the wild meant a tasty meal. She paused when she was out of sight of the house and pulled the Glock out of her pack and clipped its holster to her belt.
She blasted the heads off three rattlers before she reached the car, accurate single shots booming and rolling back from the mountains, three snakes that hadn't felt her coming and feared her mood and slithered the hell out of her way to hide. No poisonous snakes in Maine. It wasn't the Injun Way, killing snakes, but she had enough white blood in her that a little precision violence helped discharge the grief and anger that she felt.
At least now she'd have time to see Kenny. She'd driven straight from the airport to the canyonlands, no detours, do not pass Go, do not collect 200 kisses. 200 anything. She felt that warmth again, deep in her belly.
*~*~*
The crowded halls felt weird, after the empty open lands of the reservation, after the broad horizon of Stonefort's bay and the sun rising out of the sea beyond. Everything was hard and sharp and claustrophobic and full of noise. Students. The whole damn world was full of students.
She knew there were more people in this single building than in all of Stonefort, even counting the graveyard vote. More people on the campus than in the whole of Sunrise County. And every one of them seemed to possess four elbows.
Caroline threaded her way through the mindless jostling conflicting mob of students rushing between classes. Hell, her own brain was just as empty, still circling with the vee-winged silhouettes of turkey vultures on their thermals. Every time she came in from the field, it was the same. She wouldn't be here for another three weeks.
She ducked into the refuge of a dead-end corridor, all offices so the swarms passed by, and then into the once and future faculty lounge that budget cuts had divided into eight cubicles for grad students. Space was tight enough that she'd soon know exactly what her fellow inmates had for dinner for the past three nights.
She nodded at Rajiv Balakrishnan, physical anthro, and Sandy Moore, another ethnologist, waving off their greetings and questions. She wasn't up to that. Wasn't back yet. They'd understand. They'd been there.
Besides, the first thing she'd have to talk about would be Grandmother Walks. That hole was still too large.
And then she faced her desk. Chaos of books and papers, shelves and shelves of more books, a bleached coyote skull serving as a paperweight, the spiny ovate of a sea urchin shell hollowed out by hungry gulls and reminding her of the smell of salt, it was the same mess she'd left months before. With another stack of papers waiting on the hard oak swivel chair. Caroline muttered curses in three languages — Anthro 102. Shit.
She'd made the mistake of calling ahead, and look where it got her. Essays to grade. Welcome back.
She could quote half of them, word for word. Not just the ones plagiarized from frat files, or pulled straight off the web — the ones that took Prof. Stevens' lectures and recent papers and parroted them back to him. Sometimes it nearly made her scream. No thought, no synthesis, no outside opinions for comparison. And she was supposed to aid and abet flunking at least twenty out of the lecture class of a hundred — freshman-level courses culled the herd, a weeding ritual. But which twenty?
Skip that. First she had a call to make. She cocked her head to one side, thinking, shifted a Navajo basket to the top of another stack of books, moved a tourist Kachina to one side, and found her phone.
Five rings and then a female voice, "Hello?" No department name or anything — had to be Beth with two other calls on hold.
"Hi, it's Caroline Haskell. Is Doc Stevens in?"
"Lemme check." Click, pause, another click. "Yeah. He's got a student with him, shouldn't be a minute. How'd everything turn out?"
"My aunt's getting a little better. I really should still be there. She tries to do things . . . ."
"Oh." Another pause. "Well, I dunno if Boss Man will swallow any more time off. I've heard Mutterings in High Places. You have been warned. How's things out in the sagebrush and sand?"
"Grandmother Walks died yesterday."
"Oh. Sorry to hear that. But she was really old, wasn't she? Not much of a surprise?" Click, pause, another click. "Okay, he's free now. But he's got a grant meeting in five, down in Claussen. Don't expect more than half his brain." And another click, and a booming male voice.
"Hey, welcome back! I should have left half an hour ago, so save the chit-chat for later. Tomorrow. What's so urgent?"
Doc Stevens ran through life at least half an hour late — anthro grad students went with "Stevens Standard Time" when they made appointments. Caroline gathered her thoughts.
"Two things. Look, can we list Grandmother Walks as one of the authors of that paper?"
She could hear his head shaking in the phone's silence. Then he sighed. "Can't do it. Look, if Dean Johnson had his way, you wouldn't be listed. To quote His Imperial Majesty, 'That young woman needs to decide whether she wants to be an anthropologist or an Indian.' Objectivity, dear Caroline, objectivity is the foundation, nay, the very cornerstone of our science. That's a paraphrased and condensed version of a rather longer sermon. Count yourself lucky that I'm filtering his words. Bottom line is, you're on probation."
Shit. The grad school dean and the department head worshipped "objectivity." They treated people as lab specimens — the observer did not interact with the observed. You sat off on a hilltop and watched their lives through binoculars, taking notes. You might record their songs, but you didn't join the singing. Damn sure you didn't join the peyote circle.
"Okay. Second thing, my brother just came up with a lead on some artifacts from the Four Corners area, collected in the 1930s. Might be data for your diffusion study. Can I get another couple of weeks free to check it out? The museum's in Maine, I'll pay my own expenses."
In other words, no grant or department money spent. In other other words, a bribe.
Silence, thinking time, then "I'll ask Kane. Gotta go. Bye." Click.
Caroline hung up her own phone, shifted the stack of essays off her chair, and sat down. She stared at the phone. She wrote that paper. Prof. Stevens might be her faculty advisor, and Doc Kane the department head, but all they did to get their names on the paper was change a few commas here and there and substitute some six-syllable words that meant the same thing as what she'd already written in plain English.
"Edited," that was the term. Caroline wrote it, and at least half the words came straight from Grandmother Walks. But they wouldn't put Grandmother's name on the paper, and you'd need a magnifying glass to find Caroline's in the final publication. "Research Assistant."
A faint voice rasped in Caroline's head: "They. Only. Take."
Well, Caroline was about to take a few things, herself. She reached for the phone again, dialing a number she knew better than her own, and felt that warmth growing again.
*~*~*
Caroline toweled her hair, wondering if she'd finally washed out all the dust and dried leaves and fragments of arthropodal exoskeleton. And long hair made her mandatory field "tick check" harder. It was easy to see why Aunt Kate stuck with a buzz cut, working dirty all the time like she did.
Kate had given up on femininity years ago, viewing long hair and perfect nails as more of society's traps to keep women in their place. Keep women from earning a living on their own, supporting themselves and their children on their own. Men didn't like that concept. It raised questions about their importance in the universe.
But femininity wasn't all bad. Caroline's body felt relaxed for the first time in months, hormones appeased if not quite satiated. The quiet snores behind her improved her worldview considerably. Male snores.
She tossed the towel over a chair and stood naked in the pre-dawn darkness of her balcony, letting the desert air-dry her body and her hair. Dark body, dark towel, dark shadow from the twin balcony overhead, even if someone else watched for the sunrise they never would see her. Nor did she much care if they did. This part of the day was too sacred to miss.
Thunderstorms had crashed through, last evening, what some tribes called a male rain, hard and noisy and quickly done. They'd cleared the air, washing out dust and smog and leaving a trace of moisture in their wake. Her skin could feel the difference.
Her apartment faced west. Damn poor exposure, for the desert — afternoon sun turned the place into an oven, and the fourth-floor height gave that sun a clear shot over the next block. But it gave her a clear shot, too, all the way to the mountains west of town. She smiled at the incongruity of watching west for the sunrise.
The mountains waited in silence, vague black lumps under indigo sky and fading stars, and Caroline moved slowly into the Tai Chi routine that Aunt Alice had taught her. Heaven and Earth. Parting the Wild Horse's Mane to Both Sides. White Crane Spreads Its Wings. She took empty steps, lifting each foot and shifting her balance and then replacing the foot in the same spot, restricting the form to the cramped area of her balcony.
Peace flowed through her muscles. As she moved, exaggerating the slowness of the form to stretch it out, the sky brightened and the mountains gained form and the purple silence seemed to vibrate around her, untroubled by early cars and the hum of air conditioners and distant sirens. Magic closed her ears to such distractions. She could have been alone on a mountaintop.
She'd timed it perfectly, from practice and the day's almanac in the paper. Just as she returned from Heaven to Earth, fire touched the topmost peak of the highest mountain to the west. She stood totally still, relaxed, breath shallow and silent, and watched red light creep down the slopes, turning to orange flame against a violet sky and splashing each lower peak and ridge.
Sunrise in the west, falling rather than climbing. She chanted her greeting to the sun — Naskeag poetry thousands of years old, keeping her voice low in consideration of the open door behind her.
Right on cue, she heard the rustle of sheets and a male groan from the shadows. She smiled to herself, picked up the damp towel, and slipped back in through the screen slider.
"Woman, you are insane."
Kenny Grayeyes rolled over on his belly and buried his head under a pillow. She let her eyes savor the long lean dark body for a moment, mostly shadow against the light sheets, and then wickedness triumphed. She shifted her grip to one end of the towel and flicked it out as a whip, snapping across both cheeks of his butt. He yelped and rolled away, off the side of the bed to collapse in a heap of tangled arms and legs and bedding on the carpet.
She'd expected him to come growling out to grab her for a glorious tussle and the hot slippery aftermath when she let him win, but he just groaned again and forced himself up to sitting against the wall. He shook his head.
"Totally insane. Less than two hours' sleep, and you're up before the sun. Exercising, while I'm lying here in ruins. And you're already too damn strong." He groaned again, rotating his head on his shoulders as if testing the connections between them. "Woman like you could kill a man."
He stopped and scanned her naked body from head to toe, and she felt hormones stirring again. But he shook his head. "Hell of a way to die. Maybe tonight. I might have recovered enough by then."
She slipped around the bed to stand over him, feet straddling him so that he could look right up into her body, seeing if she could get a rise out of him that way, so to speak. No luck. Damn. Well, he had other uses. She'd never met a man who fit her better, mentally as well as physically. Right now, she had more than three months of physical to work off, but she could wait. Go for the mental. Hit him while he was still groggy.
"Given any more thought to living in Maine?"
His face turned sad, and he reached up. She grabbed his hands and hauled him to his feet.
"Oh, momma." He groaned again, arching his back and shoulders. "You weigh too much for some of those positions."
"Nah, you're just getting flabby. Need more exercise." She leered a suggestion as to what kind of exercise she meant, and then prodded the question again. "Maine?"
He kissed her on the nose. "Can't, sweetheart. My people are here. The air smells right. I've tried leaving, and my feet just won't stay away. This is the dirt they know."
And there it was again, hanging between them. She hated that answer and understood it all too well. Could she tear her own roots out of the Maine coast, the sea and stone and spruce and cold and fog that birthed her? Trade her Spring and the silver lakes, the laughing streams, for this dry land?
Could she tear her heart in half and leave him?
Besides, there was the House. It didn't trust men.
She settled herself on the end of the bed, patting the tangled sheets beside her until he sat. Would Grandmother Loon give her the words to say? So appropriate, her spirit animal, the mad red eye, the maniacal laughter in the night, the need for solitude, the bird so much more at home in water than on land or even in the air.
Enough light flowed in now from the sunrise that she could focus on his eyes. "Can we find a way? I love you. I need you. Bodies, brains, I don't know which, but we go together. You understand about me, you understand about the spirits of the water and the land. You talk to them yourself. You even understand about the House. Can't we find a way?"
And the House even understood that some of its Women liked men. She wouldn't be the first. He couldn't live there, the place would start to pick on him, but he could stay in the village, spend nights . . .
Trouble clouded his eyes. He met her look, but part of him was elsewhere. "I love you. I need you. Yes, I understand about you and the spirits. But I understand because I am tied to different spirits, a different land, a different magic. I think we're playing out the story of the Stone Warrior and the Moon Girl. We never should have met."
That story ended badly. They could see each other across the desert nights, see each other forever and always, but they could never touch. Again, Caroline felt the chill of tears in the dry air.
Every time, it comes down to that. Each of us belongs to our own land. I do not belong here. He does not belong in Stonefort. I never should have come here. Even the pines smell wrong.
Grandmother Loon does not live in this land. I don't know what his spirit animal might be. He's never mentioned it, and that's not the kind of thing you ask, not even of a lover. But I bet it doesn't live in Maine.
Aunt Alice's voice came back to her, a Jeffers poem read aloud and reread long ago, as Caroline felt talons sink into her chest:
"Give your heart to the hawks."