“You’re right about that,” I said.
“Yeah. But now I don’t know if I did the right thing. Mr. Benally knew about it—he’s one o’ the few people who believed me—and he was tryin’ to tell me, no, don’t waste it now, save it for the skinwalkers, but I didn’t listen.” He hooked a thumb in the direction of Darren’s body. “Now I’m thinkin’ maybe I shoulda waited, you know?”
If only.
“Even if you still had the jish, Frank,” I pointed out, “you couldn’t have saved him last night without interrupting your sing.”
“True,” he said. “But that don’t make me regret what happened any less.”
There was nothing I could say about his regret, except to perhaps offer the advice to suppress it savagely. It keeps you functioning.
“What happened to the hippies?” I asked, to distract both of us from our regrets.
“Oh. Well, Changing Woman told me they’d wake up eventually, but she didn’t say when. It was summertime and hotter than a branding iron down there, and part o’ me thought it’d serve them right to get sunburned, since they wanted to be red men so badly. But then I thought they might get seriously burned, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. So I did my best to drag them into the shade. One of them was too damn huge and I couldn’t move him, so I put my hat over his face and hoped he’d be all right.”
“That was kind of you,” Granuaile said, smiling at him. “I know from experience that a bad sunburn can make you terribly sick, so that was a good precaution.”
“What could you see after Changing Woman touched your eyes?” I asked.
“Most things were the same. But some things weren’t. I saw some colors around my jish that weren’t there before. I could see which homes had been blessed well and which ones hadn’t. And whenever I did ceremonies after that, I could kinda see what I was doing, see everyone’s spirit and how the songs and the sandpaintings could change them, bring them into harmony with the Holy People, and unite the spirit world with the physical. And sometimes I’d run into people who had colors around them too. People like you. People like that lady with the death goddess inside.”
“How about Mr. Benally?” Granuaile said.
Frank squinted at her. “Well … yeah. Him too.” He looked at me. “You know who he really is, don’t you?”
“I think so,” I said. “He—”
“Wait,” Frank said, holding up a hand. “Don’t say any names. That’s important.”
I didn’t understand, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. If he thought it was important, far be it for me to gainsay him.
“I think he’s one of the First People,” I said, hoping that wasn’t stepping over any lines.
“Yep. I think so too. Problem is figuring out which one. They’re capable of trickin’ a fella pretty good. Let’s say no more about it.”
I shrugged. He seemed to have a pretty good idea it was Coyote, so I wasn’t going to force the issue.
“You’ll be all right for a while?” I asked.
“Aw, sure. Where you goin’?”
“Gotta walk the dog.” Oberon’s tail swished energetically through the air at this announcement. “Might head north.”
Frank looked at me sharply. “You be careful.”
I nodded acknowledgment at him and called Oberon, who’d been quietly watching all this time. “Ready to do a little bit of hunting, buddy?”
"Sure! Hunting for what?"
I switched to mental communication. Skinwalkers. Let’s see where they went. If they’re hiding in a cave, maybe I can get Colorado to collapse the entrance and solve our problem for us.
"Okay, but I need a drink first."
“All right, let’s go,” I said. Granuaile joined us as we walked down to the car. We stepped softly around Darren’s body. Oberon whined once, then put his nose down to the ground.
"They came this way. They used the road. That burnt-rubber scent is easy to follow." We paused at Granuaile’s car and poured some bottled water into one of those collapsible dog bowls. We also took the opportunity to fill our tanks with some beef jerky and crackers. Then we took an extra couple of water bottles each for the trip ahead.
"Ready," Oberon announced. He trotted back to the base of the hill, snuffled around a little bit, then turned north. "Footprints here, strong smell, occasional blood drops too from that one you speared. This is going to be simple."
I expect it will get harder soon.
“What’s the plan if we find them, sensei?” Granuaile asked. We broke into an easy jog to keep up with Oberon.
“Depends on the situation,” I replied. “I’d prefer to call in an air strike, but unfortunately that’s not a viable option. Don’t worry, I’m not planning on poking them awake and suggesting a duel. Whatever we do, it will be from a safe distance and completely cold-blooded.”
The trail ended on a small knoll three miles away. My improvised javelin was there, stained with blood, and there were plenty of tracks and smells for us to decipher. I wouldn’t be able to smell any of it while in human form.
“Fair warning: I’m getting na**d,” I said to Granuaile as I unslung Moralltach and stripped off my shirt. “I need to shift and find out what Oberon’s smelling.”
Granuaile made no reply, but she let out a wolf whistle when I shucked off my jeans. I shifted quickly to my hound form so she wouldn’t see me blush.
I sneezed immediately, as I often did when I changed to a hound. The potent sense of smell that comes with the form is far more jarring than suddenly walking on all fours. What hit me first was the burnt-rubber scent Oberon had described, except there was something fouler mixed in. It was like placing your face next to the exhaust port of a city bus just when it accelerates from a stop; it was asphalt and rubber and oil and everything black and smelly in a single, lung-destroying cloud. But underneath this were other scents: the blood and sweat, fear and anger of two humans, two bobcats … and something else.
"Atticus, you smell that?" Oberon asked.
"You mean the thing that kind of smells like chicken but not really?"
"Yeah. It’s a big bird, whatever it is. But it doesn’t smell like a hawk or a raven. Not a crow either."
"Hmm. I see the bobcat prints here, the human prints too.…" These were mostly smudges and scuffs in the sandy dirt; there was nothing like a perfect print in the mud waiting for us there. "Look for bird tracks. Careful where you step."
"Well, I think I found some. These aren’t bobcat claws."
"Let me see." I padded over to where Oberon had his nose to the ground and considered the outlines of two large talon marks. It was an incomplete print—impossible to tell the species without a clearer picture, but it was definitely a larger bird.
"You think they flew out of here?" Oberon asked.
"Yep. They used this little knoll as their staging area. Fly in here with bobcat skins in their talons and land. Shift out of bird skins and leave them here. Shift into bobcats and attack us. After they killed Darren, they probably came back here and shifted out of their bobcat skins too, because they had to talk. So I stuck one, and that’s when they returned and shifted into birds again. Perfect way to prevent anyone tracking them home. But one was injured right at the shoulder, so his buddy probably had to carry him. I doubt he’d be able to fly in his condition."
"Is that physically possible, for a bird to carry another one?"
"Sure, some of the bigger birds can carry their own weight or more. I can carry twice my weight when I’m in owl form."
"Ah, but a five-ounce bird cannot carry a one-pound coconut. Got it."
"Probably had to make two trips. He would have had to come back and get the bobcat skins too."
I looked up and around. There were any number of places to the north and west where the skinwalkers could be hiding, all kinds of little holes up in the mesa, lots of water-carved caves and the like. If Frank Chischilly had known precisely where they were, I’m sure he would have told me. Hell, if Coyote had known where they were, he wouldn’t have had to resort to tricking me like he did. So now we had two choices: We could spend all day searching for them, with the distinct possibility of finding nothing, or we could go back to the hogan and approach the problem from a different direction.
"Damn. They’re craftier than I thought, Oberon. I prefer my mortal enemies to be stupid."
"Are we through here? Can I mark up the place?"
"Sure. In fact, I think I’ll join you for the fun of it. Feels like it’s been ages since I allowed myself to be immature." Oberon and I went around lifting our legs on scrub cedar, boulders, and the javelin.
Granuaile wrinkled her nose at us. “That’s really classy, sensei.”
Oberon and I chuffed at her.
Chapter 10
Plan B was to get the gold moved under the mountain and then get out of there so that the skinwalkers would pursue me—the cure for Famine’s curse—and leave the Navajos alone. The problem was, once I returned to the proposed site and broached the subject, Colorado didn’t feel like cooperating.
//Reluctance / Discord / Hate mines// he told me. Well, fair enough. But I had to get him to agree, not only to fulfill my obligation to Coyote but to give myself a free hand to deal with the skinwalkers.
//Necessity / Urgency// I replied.
//Query: What necessity?//
It took some time to explain why Coyote’s plan for solar and wind power was far superior to the current coal mining operation going on. To Colorado, a mine was nothing more than a giant hole with unconscionable water usage and a surefire way to destroy the habitat of anything living nearby. But he conceded that generating power from clean energy was better than generating it from coal—even if the government wanted to call it “clean coal,” an Orwellian oxymoron if ever there was one. Still, he flatly refused to provide material for a precious metals mine while the coal mine continued to operate.
//Query: Coal mine ends, gold mine begins?// I asked.
//Yes / Coal mine must remain closed//
//Agreed / Harmony// I said.
//Harmony// Colorado gave the equivalent of a mental nod.
When I came out of it, the workers were breaking for lunch. They’d been working on the roof with a sense of purpose since Darren’s body had been taken away, and Sophie Betsuie had stayed down in the flat with the surveying crew, laying out whatever plans Coyote had cooked up. Coyote himself had yet to make an appearance. Granuaile was working on her Latin, and Oberon had found someone game enough to play tug-of-war with him on a piece of rope. It was Ben Keonie, and he was now the foreman for the crew.
"Hey, Atticus, you watching this?" he asked.
Yes. You’d better let him win, Oberon. If you pull him down, he’ll lose face with his crew.
"Oh. Good thing you said something, because I was about to yank him off his feet and then hump his leg, proclaiming him to be my bitch."
Play nice with him and you’ll earn back a sausage. Negative fourteen.
"Okay! This is fun anyway. He’s making growly noises at me. He’d probably make a good dog."
I called Granuaile over for a confab and explained that I’d need a ride down to Black Mesa. “Colorado’s forcing me to pull a Monkey Wrench Gang before he’ll agree to move gold here.”
“What’s a Monkey Wrench Gang?”
“You’ve never read Edward Abbey?”
Granuaile shrugged. “Nope.”
“Well, they call it ecoterrorism now, and I would agree that if you blow stuff up you’re being terrifying. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to sabotage their machinery in a completely safe manner. It will effectively shut down their operation and they’ll have to replace everything before they start again.”
“You can do that?”
“Sure. They can’t stop me. All I have to do is sneak in there and unbind the steel in the engines. Or bind the pistons to the cylinder walls. Turns ’em into big hunks of scrap metal, no way to repair it.”
“Well, why don’t you do that more often? Wouldn’t that protect the earth?”
“I could spend my entire life doing it, shifting from place to place, and I still wouldn’t stop them. I can do one big mine, maybe two, a day. So that’s 730 mines a year if I don’t take a day off and never spend two nights in the same place. Do you know how many mines there are in this country alone? Tens of thousands. And for every mine I shut down, another one will start somewhere else. Even the ones I shut down will reopen after a while. And that’s doing nothing about developing and dams and overfishing and oil spills and clear-cutting virgin rain forest for cow pasture so some fat man in Rio can have a steak. There’s no way I can keep up.”
Granuaile tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear and sighed. “Kind of depressing when you put it like that.”
“On the bright side, what Coyote’s proposing to do here is a step in the right direction. He’s right, you need a lot of capital to create a new energy infrastructure. The problem with generating so much electricity in a concentrated area is that there’s no efficient way to transfer it to the rest of the country, and the government’s not going to step up and do the right thing anytime soon.”
“Been meaning to ask you about that, sensei.”
“Ask what?”
“How do we know Coyote’s going to use the gold the way he says he is? What if this is just a scheme to get rich and make a fool of you, and all that talk in Tuba City was one big con job? He knows what you are and what buttons to push. Why are you buying his story at face value?”