A Wolf in the Desert (12 page)

“What you did for her, petting her kitten, promising to help her, was a nice gesture.”

“It was more than a gesture, Indian. I like Callie, I wish there was something I could do.”

Sliding his arm around her neck, bending it to her throat, he pulled her back against him. “This is a catch-22. She's damned if we don't and more damned if we do.”

“She won't survive this. She was meant for cooler climates and kinder times.”

“Kinder than where she came from.”

“Why?” She turned in the circle of his arm, tilting her forehead to his chest. “Why do we always hurt the gentle ones? Why are we so cruel?”

“There are some who believe it's the nature of the species, that it's a natural and a primitive need for the strong to prey on the weak.” His fingers found the knotted muscles of her neck and worked them skillfully, tenderly, probing their tension. “Like Snake, they believe the fragile, like Callie, were meant to be victims, that it's their sole purpose in life.”

“Some.” She smothered a gasp of pleasure and pain as he found a particularly cramped muscle and ministered to it. “But not you.”

“There are others who don't, as well.”

Patience raised her head from his chest, considering him curiously. There was an odd ring to his voice, as if he spoke in more than general terms. As if the others he spoke of were more than vague, faceless and nameless beings. “They would help Callie?” She risked the question. “These others who believe as you?”

Indian's fingers grew still. He stared into her eyes, his piercing gaze reaching into her, taking her measure once more, as he judged what he should, or shouldn't, say. After an interminable time he nodded. “They would help Callie and those like her.”

“Who are they? Friends?” With a sudden narrowing of her eyes, her gaze probed as deeply as his. “Colleagues?”

“Custer and Hoke, and their sort are my colleagues. For now.”

“For now.” She repeated, not in question but a glimmer of understanding.

“Yes.”

Indian at his frustrating and tacit best, never using two words, or three, or five, when one would do. “What do you mean by those like Callie? Who would help them? When?” If he'd worn a shirt or his vest, she would have shaken him, trying to jolt the answers from him. Instead she tapped his chest with impotent fists. “Indian!”

“Hush.” He stopped her inquisition with a finger at her lips. “It's enough that you know there's help. Who they are isn't important. When?” He lifted a naked shoulder glistening with sweat that trickled to the band of low-rising trousers. “The time's indefinite, but soon.”

Patience wasn't to be mollified by ambiguous promises. Shrugging away from his touch, she demanded, “How soon, and will it be in time for Callie? She's already pounds thinner since I first saw her. Snake and the desert are sucking the life out of her.”

“I'll find her a hat, or something that will serve as a shield against the sun.”

“A hat!” Patience looked at him as if he'd gone crazy. “The girl could very well be dying and you think a hat will help?”

“It will keep her skin from burning and preserve precious moisture.”

“An ice cube on a third degree burn.” She growled the criticism.

“Only that,” he agreed mildly, “but a start.”

“Damn you!” She moved beyond his reach, her hushed tone only emphasizing the seething depths of her rage. “Damn this. Damn all of you.” Her bitter rebuke continued, her voice never rising, the tone never changing. Nothing that would torment innocents like Callie escaped her wrath.

Indian listened without comment as the diatribe ran its course. When she had exhausted her vocabulary and her voice, he caught her by the shoulders, shaking her a little. “I know you're bewildered and incensed by what seems an unnecessary delay, but there's more at stake here than Callie or you.”

“Bewildered? Ha! Where did you get the idea what I feel is that simple? I'm a yo-yo vacillating back and forth, and bewildered doesn't begin to say what I feel.”

“What you need is to cool down.” To prove his point, Indian lifted a moist lock that had escaped her braid and plastered itself to her face.

Patience slapped his hand away. “Don't patronize me.”

“I wouldn't think of patronizing you. And I meant what I said, you need to cool down.”

“Sure, in a seep that's half a toe high in a flood.”

“I didn't say here,” he explained with maddening composure.

“Then where?” Even to Patience the demand reminded her of a sulking child.

“I'll take you there.” He didn't touch her again as he waited for her to follow his lead. When she didn't respond, he prodded mildly, “Come with me, Patience.”

She wanted to say no, to keep her anger, but something in his look wouldn't let her. Something about him would never let her. “All right, I'll come with you.”

“It isn't far,” he assured her, only then taking her wrist in his grasp, circling the small bones with fingers like possessive manacles. He didn't expect her to run away, didn't expect her to resist. He simply wanted to touch her.

There were saguaro along the obscure trail, but they grew more sparsely now. Walking where only his steps had gone in centuries, he took her deeper into the desert on a course that was hotter than hot, prickly, sticky, and so dry there was no suggestion of the cooling he promised. The trail wandered, sometimes in directionless ways around paloverde, ocotillo, and more cacti, yet ever toward the wall of a mesa of sheer red rock.

Though it appeared a greater distance, they were less than fifteen minutes from the main camp when he led her to the wall and to a fissure that rent it from ridge to ground. Patience had looked out at this towering monolith more than once, even at the fissure. She hadn't once suspected it was more than a fold in the rock, washed in shadow and the natural, darkening mineralized stain called both desert varnish and desert paint.

Even if the shadow had been perceived as fissure, it would have been judged small, dwarfed as it was by the massiveness of the mesa. But it was far from small, and widened at its base to a cavelike opening. When he clambered with her over fallen rocks, and led her through it, Patience expected a cave, and discovered instead a tunnel. Traversing the narrow passage and stepping out on the other side, she found they had come to a small shaded canyon enclosed and protected by its bastion of red rock. Scattered over the floor of the canyon were trees, a glade of aspen, juniper, pinyon pine, and Douglas fir, and tall grasses standing like a small, still sea. Through the center flowed a winding ribbon of water, less than a river, but more than a trickle.

“How did this happen?” Patience asked as she gazed in awe.

“Millions of years ago water flowing over cracks in the top of the mesa found stratums of sandstone among harder elements. It began to dig a crevice, continuing through the yielding stone to shales of finer, harder mudstone and siltstones. Captured, it formed seeps and more springs. Their rare, precious moisture fostered the growth of plants that are the hanging gardens unique to canyon country. Eventually roots of the gardens penetrated where water could not, cracking the stone, allowing another outlet. And the process began again. Over time it was repeated time and again, with water digging deeper and deeper into the body of the sandstone.

“At the same time, by the same process, another trickle ate away at the base of the mesa, pushing farther and farther along its path, finding other crevices, digging caverns and carving caves. Eventually the trickle above became torrents, speeding ever downward. At the base of the mesa, seas gathered, rising and receding, then rising and receding again. In time, the two met, the center of the mesa caved into the caverns.” A gallant and graceful sweep of his hand offered the canyon for her pleasure. “And this stronghold was formed.”

“No one has found it in all these years,” she mused. Remembering the salty, sweat-dried sheen that gleamed over his muscular shoulders and chest, and the distended veins in his arms, instinct told her the boulders at the mouth of the tunnel once guarded this tiny paradise from the rest of the world, until Indian rolled them away. “How did you know?”

“I didn't. I was looking for shelter for the night, sometimes detritus as you saw at the entrance of the tunnel means a cave or small burrow. With a stone as fulcrum, and the limb of a tree as lever, I moved them away and found this.”

“How long has it been hidden away? Are we the first to see it?”

“Only the first in a long, long while. Look.” Indian directed her attention to a cluster of markings and shapes etched into a wall. “Petroglyphs,” he explained. “Figures scratched and carved into the desert varnish. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years ago, those who came before us left this record of their passing. These records in stone can be found in many parts of Arizona. Most of their meaning is lost, yet by them we know a people passed this way and stayed awhile.”

Indian pointed higher to a series of indentations scooped from the sandstone and leading mysteriously upward. “Footholds,” he explained. “A stairway to their homes.” A crumble of stones clung to a ledge high on the canyon wall. There was little surviving conformation, yet the ruin was still too orderly to be anything but man-made. “Their band was small, but they built well, with an eye for defense. No enemy could reach them from above, nor approach from the ground any way but singly by the footholds.”

“Who were they?” Patience was fascinated. “Why did they leave?”

“My guess is they were Sinagua. A name that means ‘without water,' but it didn't hold true for this band. Not while they were here. There are other cliff dwellings in other places, abandoned as these were. We don't know where the people came from, why they left, nor where they went. We're left with only the evidence of their passing. Preserved as they are by the dry air, without scientific testing we can only guess how long these might have been here.”

“Maybe we shouldn't stay.” She spoke in whispers out of reverence for an ancient people who had lived, loved, and died, and then abandoned this hidden place.

“Are you thinking of spirits, O'Hara? Ghost from the past?”

“Maybe.”

“Frightened?” He lifted a questioning brow, but did not mock.

“This isn't a fearful place. It seems...” She looked to Indian, at a loss for words.

“Peaceful?” he supplied.

“Exactly,” she concurred. “Too peaceful to intrude.”

“They were a peaceful people, good farmers who knew how to live off the land, harvesting the natural plants and animals at their disposal. If they followed the pattern of other Sinagua, this was their haven for a century or better. I don't think their spirits will mind if we make it ours for a time.”

“I still don't understand, why did you choose this place of all places to look for shelter?”

“By chance, no more than that.”

“Indian, master tracker.” She laughed, and for the first time there was a teasing lilt in her voice.

“Only of natural elements, spirits and ghosts elude me.” He smiled and it took her breath away. “How about a swim?”

“In that?” She looked at the stream that flowed through the grove of aspen. That it was larger than the seep by the camp, didn't mean it was a river. “Only midget ducks could swim here.”

“Don't be so sure. Let me show you.” He lifted the brow again, and smiled, causing a flood of strange, unsettling reactions within her. “Master tracker at work.” He tapped his chest in a playful gesture totally at odds with the man he'd been till now. “First we go to the stream where only midget ducks can swim.”

“That would be a logical move, even for one who isn't the master tracker,” Patience observed wryly.

“Ah, but we don't stop there, we follow the trail.”

“Let me guess,” she interjected. “The trail of the water.”

“You've done this before.”

“Just a lucky guess.”

Suddenly he reached out to cup the side of her face in his palm, a thumb stroked the vein at her temple. “I like you like this, whimsical, a little zany.”

“I'm suspecting you're Heckle and Jeckle.” She wondered if he could feel the swiftness of her hurrying heart, and hear the huskiness in her teasing retort.

“You mean Jekyll and Hyde.”

“I mean Heckle and Jeckle.”

“Should I ask who they are?”

“Why not?” Her grin was a dare, as the natural curving of her lips brushed his palm.

“All right.” Indian wanted to kiss her, to taste the delight of her laughing mouth. “I'm asking.”

“Heckle and Jeckle are television and movie cartoon characters. Two crows to be specific, and as old as Methuselah.”

“Before my time. Contrary to what you might think, Methuselah isn't one of my contemporaries.” His shrug was becoming a familiar gesture. “We didn't have television or movies on the reservation when I was a kid.”

This was the first specific mention of his heritage or his past. Patience wanted more, but dared not push. “Before mine, too. Some people are old movie buffs, but Tynan, my youngest brother, is an old cartoon buff.”

Finding he was hungry for more of her life and history, Indian put aside his stirring needs to walk with her by the stream. “Youngest brother? Youngest of how many?”

“Three.”

“Any sisters?”

“One.”

“Older than you? Younger?”

“Older.”

“Have we reversed roles here? One word answers are my prerogative as the inscrutable red man.”

Patience slanted him a mischievous glance. “Bothersome, isn't it?”

“Yep.”

“Gary Cooper, right?”

“Yep.”

“You're the Indian, not the cowboy, remember.” She nudged him in the ribs with her elbow.