Chuck’s headlamp illuminated a partial depiction he hadn’t yet seen. In it, three human figures ascended from a cupped object half-obscured by the sandy floor of the chamber. The three humans were Ancestral Puebloan, Fremont, and Mogollon. The figures rose together toward a blazing sun, floating above a landscape of sandstone ridges and deep canyons.
Spinning his body to face the rear of the cavern, Chuck scooped sand away from the bottom of the far wall. Handful by handful, he revealed more of the cupped object from which the human figures emerged. The object turned out to be a stonewalled kiva—one of the thousands of sunken ceremonial rooms constructed for spiritual use by the ancient peoples at the height of their societies. Every kiva featured a small hole in the center of its floor known as a sipapu from which, according to contemporary interpretations, the ancient peoples believed the first of their kind had emerged from the underworld deep beneath the Earth’s surface.
Chuck uncovered the kiva and lay back from the wall, gazing in wonder at the scene of the three figures rising from the rock-lined ceremonial chamber. A tiny black dot denoted the sipapu in the chamber’s floor. The painting clearly represented the emergence story of the ancient cultures. The fact that it showed representatives of each of the three societies emerging together from the kiva was, in a word, astounding.
The Southwest archaeological community believed that, while trading regularly with one another, the various ancient groups mostly had lived and developed separately from each other over the several centuries of their existence. In contrast, modern indigenous groups—direct descendants of the ancient ones—had worked closely together in recent years to win the initial establishment of the national monuments. The modern tribes continued their close collaboration now, in their fight to return the monuments to their original size. In the light of Chuck’s headlamp, the painting of the creation story, plus the other paintings in the cavern depicting peaceful coexistence between the ancient cultures, indicated the same collaborative spirit may well have existed between the ancient societies to a significantly greater degree than modern anthropologists currently believed.
Chuck spun the outer ring on his headlamp, narrowing its beam until it illuminated only the newly uncovered depiction of the ancient creation story, with the three distinct human figures rising peacefully from the kiva one after the other. As he eyed the figures, the doubts he harbored about Sanford’s publicity plan gave way to hope. The creation story, rendered here by artists from the three distinct ancient artistic traditions, was the final piece of the puzzle. The exquisite pictograph in the cavern might have the power to change the way Utahns perceived the southern half of their state, tipping the balance from exploitation to preservation. Chuck’s job was to create as precise and detailed a digital representation of the cavern and pictograph as possible, for use by Elsie and her fellow tribal members in the fight to protect their sacred ancestral lands.
He set back to work. By the time he left the cave, having recorded the last of the necessary measurements inside, the eastern sky was purple with evening.
He shouldered his pack, pushed his way through the sage branches and out of the hidden opening, and hiked along the base of the wall to the notch leading to the loop trail. A mile to the southeast, the three sandstone bluffs that bounded the north side of the campground rose against the darkening sky in a trio of successive waves, their vertical west walls lit by the setting sun.
Chuck’s knees and lower back ached. Hunger pangs growled in his stomach; he was famished after his long afternoon of work. Rather than return through the notch to the trail and follow the loop path’s circuitous route back to the trailhead, he could save nearly a mile of walking by cutting straight back to camp across the backcountry-access area open to off-trail hiking north of the campground.
Turning away from the notch and the trail beyond it, he set out across the desert, the three matching bluffs beckoning him in the distance. After half a mile, he descended into a steep dirt-walled arroyo. He climbed out the other side, kicking the toes of his boots into the loose soil for traction, and continued toward the campground. He wended his way past the outstretched branches of gnarled junipers and rough-barked piñons, detouring around patches of biological soil crust along the way.
The late-day desert was quiet, the breeze having abated with the onset of evening, the wrens and ravens settled in trees and stone crevices for the coming night.
He reached the bluffs north of the campground, their west-facing walls marking the end of the sagebrush flat that extended eastward from the trailhead parking lot. He passed the nearest of the three walls, the soles of his boots digging into the loose sand at its base. The wall of the middle bluff loomed ahead, orange in the last rays of the falling sun.
He froze in mid-stride at the sound of someone sobbing uncontrollably.
“Oh, Jesus, no,” a man’s voice cried from the base of the middle bluff. “Please, please, no.”
Chuck sprinted ahead. He came upon Sanford in his park-service uniform kneeling in the sand at the foot of the middle bluff’s west wall. The chief ranger clutched the body of a man in his arms. The man lay on his back, his legs splayed on the ground, his arms limp at his sides. The chief ranger rocked the man’s upper body back and forth, weeping.
Chuck slowed and edged forward until he drew close enough to recognize the man in Sanford’s arms. Glen.
Glen was dressed in his worn shirt and khaki slacks. His head lolled from the crook of Sanford’s arm, his eyes open but unseeing.
“Sanford,” Chuck said softly as he approached.
The chief ranger did not look up. He continued to rock Glen’s torso, moaning, his head down.
“Sanford,” Chuck repeated, louder, as he came to a stop beside the pair.
Glen’s neck was bent horrifically to one side, obviously snapped. A contusion purpled his temple. The sand next to his body was gouged where he had plummeted from the clifftop above, fatally striking the ground headfirst.
Sanford looked up at Chuck. The waning sunlight illuminated bottomless grief in the chief ranger’s eyes. Tears rolled down his cheeks, gathering in his beard. He turned his face away and bent once more over Glen’s prostrate form.
Chuck laid a hand on Sanford’s shoulder. “This young man is, was, named Glen. He told me so.”
“I know,” Sanford said. “Elsie and I chose it. This is our son.”