Caroline hung up the phone and stared at it like it was one of those desert rattlesnakes she'd had to learn to take seriously because Maine didn't have any poisonous snakes. Heavy black wall phone, 1940s battleship tech, you could use the handset to smash a burglar's skull and still call the police to come collect the corpse.
Typical equipment for the House — if it works, don't mess with it. And the cell phones would not work in the House. Dead spot in the coverage, company said they'd have to install another tower. Or something. Microwave relays and water magic didn't mix.
Jumbled thoughts, her way of not thinking about the call she'd just had. Stretching the not-thinking further, she lifted a dish towel off two bread pans, releasing the warm yeasty savor of cinnamon-raisin bread into the kitchen. This time, baking had been her idea, not the House's. She gauged the level of the dough and decided she could wait another five minutes before stoking up the stove.
"You want to talk about it?"
Caroline turned around. Aunt Alice stood in the doorway to the parlor, face troubled, waiting to hear the other half of the conversation. Not eavesdropping, she couldn't help hearing this end. Caroline had nearly had to shout to be heard over the rez system line noise out in Arizona.
"Grandmother Walks is dying."
"Oh, damn. I'm sorry."
"That was her youngest daughter, closest one of 'em to a phone out there in coyote country. Didn't say her mother was dying. The Satapai don't say things like that straight out. Come at it by way of the back fence."
"Anything we can do? Pay medical bills, find a specialist?"
"She's about ten years older 'n God. And traditional. And damn near as pig-headed as you. No medical bills, not the kind of care she'll want, and the other traditionals owe her so damn much they'll have to line up and take numbers to care for her. She'll just have them move her bed out under the sun and stars and lie there watching the sacred mountains. Wait for an eagle to soar overhead some evening, fly away with it."
Something hot ran down her cheek, and Caroline realized that she was crying. "She asked for me. Said she needs to talk to Bright Waters. That's what she calls me."
Aunt Alice took a deep breath and let it out. "Then you have to go. Kate and I will muddle through."
Then she stood and thought for a moment. "How long will it take you to get packed?"
"Ten minutes. Left most of my stuff out there when I got your call." She wrinkled her nose, remembering. "Including a couple of loads of dirty laundry from the field."
"Okay. Get at it. I'll call Dennis Levesque — he told me he's got some errands need doing up to Naskeag Falls, looking for another excuse to justify the drive. Might as well drop you off at the airport. We'll need a briefing from you before you go, whatever you've managed to dig out of those Morgan archives."
Damned House again, organizing the entire township for its ends. At least this time it was helping her instead of using her. She glanced back at the loaf pans, waiting on the shelf of the stove.
Aunt Alice touched her gently on the arm. "I'll take care of the bread. Second rising, yes? I was baking bread in that stove before you were born. Same recipe. Get packed."
*~*~*
Caroline settled into one of the Eames chairs in the parlor, took a deep breath to reset her brain from the packing, and nodded to Aunt Kate and Aunt Alice. Stone circle, that was the topic, keep it short and to the point. She was running on minus minutes, unless she wanted to wait six hours for the next plane.
"Dentis diaboli, sometimes just dentis. Couple of times they refer to dens lapideus. Mostly they don't talk about it at all."
Kate shifted in her chair and didn't ask any questions. Rather pointedly didn't ask. Caroline gave herself a mental swat above one ear and backed up.
Her aunt knew Latin and had graduated from college. Kate didn't, hadn't. Hell, she'd never even graduated from high school — Aunt Alice once said something about Kate punching out her stepfather and leaving home, had her fill of hypocrisy and fundamentalist bullshit, got a job to support herself. She'd never stopped learning stuff, though, just most of it wasn't academic. School of hard knocks, post-grad course.
"Dens, dentis — tooth, teeth. Like in 'dentist.' Anyway, 'The Devil's Teeth.' Sort of an editorial opinion, I guess, given we're talking about a bunch of tight-assed Celtic Catholic priests. Sometimes 'The Stone Teeth.' One single reference to 'Dentis draconum' in the depths of all their mangled Latin, 'Teeth of the Dragon.' Anyway, that's your stone circle. First reference is within a few years of the earliest Morgan archives.
"Anyway," she went on, "the Welsh community split almost as soon as they arrived. Not just a cat-fight over religion — it seems to have been as much a farmer-sailor thing as Pagan-Christian, with Old Believers moving inland for better soil and less fog and the seamen staying down here by the bay. The farmers set up your stone circle and used it to strengthen their bond with the land."
Yes, the big woman would make a damned convincing Mother Earth. Talking with stone, talking with wood, drawing on all the power of Stonefort Island and the peninsula, strong and straightforward and silent. No wonder the stone circle called to her for help. Aunt Alice glanced over at Kate, nodding to herself, apparently thinking along the same lines.
"Naskeags kept moving with the seasons like we always had, inland and coast, no reason to choose between the two groups. We could learn different things from each." Caroline paused again, just making a connection. "The Woman stayed here once the Welshmen came, guarding our spring. Maybe that's why we don't have any lore about the circle?"
Alice shifted her gaze from Kate to Caroline. "Maybe. There's some chants you haven't learned yet, fights between the Woman and the priests. I'm guessing the Old Believers slipped between the lines in there, references that meant one thing to their century and another thing to us. One talks about stones that dance and drum. Maybe that wasn't just metaphor . . . ." Alice shook herself. "No time for that, no need right now. You've got a plane to catch."
Caroline checked her watch. "Yeah, and two hours to clear security, with a last-minute one-way ticket and brown skin. Instant terrorist. Got a bomb I can borrow? Anyway, after a few centuries they stop mentioning the other village. Don't know if it was a run of bad winters or a Mohawk raid or what. Couple of new family names show up in the births and christenings and deaths, but that's the most of it. Silence."
And they sat in silence. Thinking about Roanoke Colony, Maine style, a village that faded out of history, leaving a ring of stones on a barren ridge and some tumbled walls deep in the woods. Thinking about the Greenland Vikings and the Little Ice Age.
Finally Kate stirred. "I think I might want to check the tax maps and deed registry, find out who owns that land. I'll step across the hall, next time I'm up to the courthouse."
That drew a blink and sudden stare from Aunt Alice, and then she nodded slowly as if something had touched off a spark in her head. "Don't faint if you find your family name attached to it. Didn't your Uncle Ray own a bunch of timberland up that way? Bet your truck already knew that road before you ever drove it."
Tires crunched gravel out in the driveway, Caroline's ride to the airport. She grabbed her carry-on and headed out the door. Turning back for a moment, she dumped her Morgan notes on the kitchen table. There might be something else in them that Aunt Alice could turn from nonsense into sense. She paused, breathing deep of the baking bread and the faint woodsmoke and the drying herbs.
Home. Remember it.
The car was five miles down the road before she remembered what she'd left out in the rush. One of those new names had been Rowanlea. Sounded more English than Welsh to her, not Latin either, but God only knew what it had been before one of those half-literate priests puzzled out what to scratch on the crude parchment.
Rowan-lea, Rowan-meadow, a name that might hold considerable power to the Old Believers. More like a title than a name.
Sometimes shortened to Rowley. But Aunt Alice would pounce on that, first time she read the notes. And Caroline had a plane to catch. She could call back from the airport.
And she could call Kenny. The thought warmed her, somewhere south of her belly. God, she'd missed that man.
*~*~*
Not jet-lagged, not really, but Caroline blinked and reminded herself that the sun's height didn't need to match her body clock. A couple of time zones west and considerably south, the sun should still show above the mountains. Even at the beginning of October.
Grandmother Walks, Walks-with-the-moon. The old woman rested in the shade of a cottonwood, skin and bone as gnarled and weathered as that beacon of water in this dry land. Caroline felt her own skin relax in the change from parched to merely dry. The shadows even seemed cool, by contrast.
Caroline had damn near frozen when she flew to Maine in June. Now she'd jumped back into the oven, little over a day of flying and driving and hiking the last five miles under the desert sun because she didn't want to junk her rented Chevy on the so-called road. Clear pounding desert sun, temperatures hitting 90 when she'd just left 50s and rain, with fog rolling in off the bay. Even the scruffy little pines smelled different, baked resin and dust rather than a cold moist tang mixed with salt and seaweed and wet earth.
Grandmother Walks. Caroline found herself looking at the trees, at the dusty sand and rock, at the brown mountains rimming her sight, not at the old woman propped up on pillows on a bed set outside for breeze and shade and view.
The old woman's family went on with life around her, not a wake or death-watch but regular life — bread baking here just like back in Maine, but an outdoor mud-brick oven instead of the wood stove. A small boy, probably great- or even great-great-grandchild, feeding and watering a horse. A youngish man with his head buried in the engine compartment of a sandblasted battered pickup damned near as old as Kate's relic. Life flowing on around the old woman moved outside so she could die with her sacred mountains forming her last horizon.
Caroline closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had to face this. It twisted her guts like seeing Aunt Alice in that damned hospital, a tiny figure dwarfed in the huge bed with wires and tubes and blinking beeping monitors and the indignity of a catheter bag. But her aunt had been going to live, verdict passed before Caroline even got in to see her. Grandmother Walks was not.
It felt like seeing a volcano dying. Some kind of force of nature.
Grandmother Walks had been the focus of any place she stood, any group she entered. Strong, vital, active, she'd left Caroline sweating and gasping in her wake when they climbed to her sacred places. Now the old woman could barely lift her hand, had to pause between words to catch her breath.
Probably cancer, Caroline thought. Breathing too much radon, drinking too much arsenic in the water. Eating dust from one of those H-bomb tests sprinkled on her mutton stew. Something like that, some one of the thousand ways this land kills people, but we'll never know which one because she won't go to the white doctor for a diagnosis. Not that she'd be treatable at her age, anyway.
"Granddaughter."
Caroline opened her eyes. The old woman was staring straight at her, not at one of her real granddaughters.
"I came." The old woman had used English, not the People's speech, giving Caroline permission to do the same. The kindness brought tears to her eyes.
"You came. It is good." Grandmother paused to breathe.
"It is good." If Caroline spoke into the gaps, it made them less obvious.
"I have lived. I have done. Enough. I am finished."
"You have lived." Damn, that was an epitaph anyone could envy. This was hard.
Tears felt cold here, evaporating so fast. Strange. Caroline looked around, thinking of the daughters who were old women themselves, the granddaughters older than Aunt Alice. Even with short generations, Grandmother Walks was old. Old like the bristlecone pines high in the hills.
"I gave you. A task."
The words jerked Caroline back to Grandmother Walks, back to the withered body on the bed. "You have given me many tasks, Grandmother. Some I have finished, some I have not. I had to leave and help my aunt."
"I remember. You had. To leave. That. Was. Good."
She stopped and coughed, quietly. Caroline found a damp cloth, leaned forward, and wiped the old woman's lips and chin. One finger brushed a withered cheek in passing, and it felt like the parchment of those Morgan archives, dry and stiff and cool.
"The Hunter. Of Ghosts. Have. You. Found her?"
The Hunter of Ghosts. That was the name they'd given her for the "doll" that Gary sought at the university. Not its "real" name, most likely. A description of its function, instead, something that an outsider could safely know. Caroline wondered if even Grandmother Walks knew the "real" name.
"My brother seeks the Hunter. He has found records, but this thing is hidden, locked away, and the record may call it by another name. Name it to another People."
Grandmother Walks nodded twice, barely moving her head. "Talk to. That woman. Call her. The Hunter." One gnarled hand reached out and squeezed Caroline's wrist. The grip felt strong, such a contrast to the frailty, and for an instant Caroline hoped. And then the hand dropped away to flop on the bed. "Go to her. I have seen you. It is good. Come back. I talk. Later."
A woman stood up. She'd been squatting patiently by another cottonwood down the dry creek bed, and Caroline knew that was her signal. That was the woman Grandmother Walks named. And again it was a title, not a name, in this dance of deep tribal secrets. The Hunter looked like First People, dark, middle-aged or older, stocky and rounded, but Caroline couldn't spot a single clue as to tribe. Nothing in her face and clothing, no jewelry, not even the way she'd cut her hair. Generic Indian.
She moved funny, as if when she lifted a foot she had to remember that it was supposed to touch the ground again. And the Brownian motion of the family moved them away from that cottonwood as Caroline moved toward it. This place worked like Aunt Alice and the House. Caroline's skin crawled with the same feeling as when the Spring woke up and noticed people and started asking questions.
The woman nodded hello. "She is dying."
So this was going to be English, too. No language clues, no nice definitive words or names to tie this mystery to a tribe. Making such a bald statement about Grandmother Walks might offer a hint, but that could just as easily point to whatever Society this "Hunter" represented. They'd be more accustomed to dealing with death and the dying. With ghosts. Unless she lived in the spirit world herself.
"She is dying. She asked me to speak with you."
The woman looked at Caroline, head to toe, eyes narrowed, openly weighing her L. L. Bean wilderness chic and two-hundred-buck boots. The desert air chilled. "This is not a thing for your whiteman school. I would not meet you if she would live long enough to finish weaving the blanket we started together. I do not know you. I do not trust you. You come from beyond my land."
Caroline looked away, out from under the cottonwoods and up to one of the mountains that ringed this valley. One particular mountain, dry and red-brown and sharp-toothed, dotted with scrubby juniper and pinyon pine, and one particular rock-face below the west ridge that showed a possibility of water. "Grandmother Walks-with-the-moon taught me many things. She did not need to teach me to keep my mouth shut. I am Naskeag. The grandmothers of my tribe and clan and hearth also have secrets."
Caroline sensed the nod, rather than seeing it. And then the woman stepped up beside her and followed her gaze. "She took you there?"
"She took me there. I will not speak of it, to you or to anyone. Even if I think you know it."
"It is good."
"This thing we hunt. My brother seeks it for you. He is a warrior skilled in such hunting. Is it dangerous? May a man see it? I ask for the safety of my brother."
Caroline heard a deep breath beside her — in, held, out slowly. "A man should not see her. This is women's business, women's magic. All things are dangerous. The Hunter drinks ghosts, drinks spirits living in the wrong bodies. My People have need of her."
Spirits living in the wrong bodies. Oh, shit. This could get sticky. Just breathing the word "skinwalkers" around here could spread nightmares across three reservations . . .
But this woman knew the way of secrets. "I tell you a story. My people live by the great sea, far to the morning. Many years before the English came, many many years, another people came from the great sea. Naskeags met them, met the Sea People in their white swan canoes. The Sea People joined their hearts to ours and lived with us, lived with us for centuries and became Naskeags. One of them was my brother's father. One of them was my father. You see this in my face."
Okay. Out with it. "The Sea People are Spirit People. They look just like other men and women, live and die just like other men and women, but some of them can change from men to seals. They are not magicians. They do not steal bodies. This change is in their blood, from ancient times. They are called selkies."
Caroline felt the tension beside her. This woman, whatever she was, this Hunter, did hate and hunt magicians who could change their skins.
No help for it. "My brother can do this. I have never tried. Grandmother Walks-with-the-moon saw this in my blood and named me, named me for the bright waters of my home by the great sea. Will the Hunter of Ghosts see this in my brother's blood and think his spirit lives in the wrong body? I ask for the safety of my brother."
Caroline waited. For a minute, a second minute, she thought the woman would walk away.
Caroline stared out at the mountain and thought about following Grandmother Walks up those jagged rocks, puffing and sweating to keep up with that endurance, legs burning with exhaustion, arms and face scratched by thorn and rock. Grandmother Walks had never looked back or slowed. And now the ancient woman lay dying. Caroline's sight blurred again.
Finally the Hunter took another deep breath and let it out, almost hissing. "She trusted you. I must trust you. This is not good. I do not know if your brother would be safe. What I think, I think that both bodies are no more than different shapes of the same body. That this is the proper way of your Sea People, Spirit People, not a sickness. I do not think the Hunter of Ghosts will wake from her dreams unless she is called. But I do not know this. I am afraid. Even I am afraid."
She turned and faced Caroline. "I say my people need their Hunter, I say the need is worth the risk, but I must not choose another's dangers. Tell your brother these things. Let the decision be his only."
The woman nodded again, slowly, troubled. "If you find what we hunt, call this number. Leave a message that any stranger might see without harm. One will find you."
She pressed a piece of paper into Caroline's hand, and then slipped away down the dry creek bed. She moved like a ghost herself, silent, never touching branch or thorn, never disturbing a single stone.
Reflex swiped Caroline's shirtsleeve across her forehead, wiping sweat that was already drying in the desert air. Sometimes she thought she knew too much, had heard too many legends in this ethnology thing, made too many connections. That woman frightened her. If she was a woman.
Call her the Hunter.