Tribal Ways

6

To Annja’s complete surprise, the car rental agency not only failed to give her a molecule of grief when she called them the next morning to report her mishap, but they insisted she have a replacement without her even asking. They’d come pick her up.

She suspected the jovial and heavy hand of one Lieutenant Tom Ten Bears, OHP. She could imagine him calling the agency to talk over what she had told him and in that self-effacing, aw-shucks, good-old-boy way of his, making it quite clear, in case they didn’t get it up front, what it would mean to them if they were difficult with her.

So almost before she knew it, Annja found herself driving north up I-44 behind the wheel of a shiny new rental car. Then she turned west on Interstate 40 and headed to New Mexico.

The land flattened out as Annja drove through the Texas panhandle. As she entered New Mexico, the terrain gradually became vast wide swoops of tawny land. The occasional lone peak, most likely a volcanic extrusion, showed in the distance. The vegetation ran mostly to short grass, dotted with scrub.

Once, she saw a herd of pronghorn antelope grazing away off to her right.

As she neared her destination the land rose and grew more broken, mounting to what Annja, with all respect to the Wichita Range, considered something closer to real mountains, with ridges and slopes densely furred with straight-boled pines. These, she knew, were the Sandias.

The mountains rose left and right of the highway, then fell steeply in sheer granite walls to foothills that became high desert, sloping gently down to a line of trees that marked the course of the Rio Grande. Before her and to each side stretched the gray and chrome encrustation of an urban concentration—Albuquerque. She stopped there for lunch before continuing west into the desert.

Past the Acoma Reservation and the triangular bulk of Mount Taylor lay the small town of Grants. Following her GPS, confirmed by reference to a Google Earth map she’d summoned in her motel room in Lawton the previous night, a few miles west of Grants Annja turned left down a none-too-obvious dirt road. It wound quickly upward between steep, scrub-covered hills into the Zuni Mountains with their forests of ponderosa pine, along the Continental Divide.

The first attack had taken place at a dig in the Cíbola National Forest, working what was believed to be the remnants of an encampment of Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache led by the great guerrilla master Victorio during his war with the U.S. during the 1870s. The excavation had been protested by Native American groups even though the Mescalero tribe—which incorporated most of the survivors of the various Chiricahua groups except the Mexican Chiricahua, who were still in Mexico—offered no objection. It lay in a steep-sided draw. It had been discovered by a USDA team checking the results of reseeding by air after the area was burned over in a 2004 fire.

The attack had occurred the previous autumn. No signs remained of the dig or the murders. The excavation had been canceled after the incident. Wind and weather had smoothed out the disturbed earth.

Annja found no great mystery as to how the attacker could have struck from ambush there, either. The site lay along one side of a dry streambed, with the tree line beginning barely twenty yards away on one side and a rock outcropping looming twelve feet right above where, from the files, she knew the actual excavation had taken place. It would have taken a very athletic man to have dropped that distance without injuring himself. Then again it also took a very athletic man to kill three able-bodied adults—two men and one woman—and fatally wound a third man.

The sun was falling behind the divide as Annja drove back east. Although she still felt mostly numb about Paul’s death, in between wracking bouts of grief, she’d had a stressful couple of days. Not to denigrate the sheer physical toll long travel and combat took. She pulled off the highway just east of the river and spent the night in the Hotel Albuquerque on Rio Grande Boulevard, just north of Old Town.

AFTER EATING BREAKFAST the next morning at Little Anita’s near the hotel, she walked a few blocks south to the Old Town Plaza. It was a pleasant morning, still crisply cool, although warmer than out on the Plains near Lawton, with the sun just beginning to sting where it touched exposed skin. She sat on a cast-iron bench across from the old cathedral, beneath elm branches starting to turn green, while she used her computer to check her e-mail and confirm some information for her day’s quest. Then she made a few calls on her cell phone and hiked back to the hotel for her car.

The second attack had taken place in early March on land owned by San Ildefonso Pueblo between Santa Fe and Albuquerque. The pueblo itself had invited a state team in to excavate what was believed to have been a temporary settlement by Pueblo Indians sometime predating the great Pueblo Uprising that threw the Spanish out in 1680. Despite that fact, and the fact that both State of New Mexico archaeologists and pueblo experts had confirmed the absence of human remains, the site had once again drawn protestors. There had been an ugly confrontation when pueblo police removed them for trespassing, although there was no record of injuries, nor charges filed.

Apparently there was some sentiment, in the Southwest at least, that any kind of archaeological excavation of potential Indian sites was profane.

Although this massacre was just a few weeks old Annja didn’t learn anything new there, either. As in the other two cases a cautious approach could easily have gotten the killer in range for a final rush without being seen. Especially since nobody would really have been looking.

She got back to Albuquerque about two o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon as she waited for her next appointment going through local and national news accounts of the murders online at a coffee shop on a fairly rustic-looking section of Rio Grande Boulevard a few miles north of her hotel.

The common threads among the murders, aside from the obvious gross similarities, were that they took place on dig sites that were protested by obscure groups. These had no apparent connection between themselves, other than professed radical pro-Native American sympathies. It wasn’t even clear how many of the protestors were actually Indians themselves.

She sat on the outdoor patio beneath a cottonwood beginning to leaf, drinking tea and pondering a few questions. Was the fact that all three attack sites had been protested significant or purely coincidental? If significant, what was the connection? Even the FBI, notoriously eager to discover terrorist conspiracies even where they weren’t, had either actively cleared the protestors of involvement or at least failed to list them as persons of interest.

Plus, frankly, people who’d go out and picket an archaeological dig struck Annja, who’d encountered a few in her time, as precisely the sort who would not be inclined to carry out impossibly violent blitz attacks ending in multiple murders. Nor, for the most, capable.

The light took on a late-afternoon yellowness. The sun had gotten tangled in the branches of the massive old cottonwoods across the boulevard. Time to go, she told herself, and folded her computer shut.

7

The western sky blazed in orange like burning forests when the silver Prius pulled up to the curb by the park and stopped. A tall woman got out of the driver’s side. A skinny young girl in jeans, T-shirt and a yellow Windbreaker, with her black hair in pigtails, got out of the passenger’s side. A big floppy yellow Lab pup, an adolescent probably, spilled out after her.

“You must be Dr. Watson,” Annja said, rising from the picnic table a short way down a grassy slope from the street as the woman walked toward her. She was handsome if a bit heavy in face and hip, and the hair hanging unbound around the shoulders of her mauve cable-knit sweater was black with silver threads. She wore a long dark-blue denim skirt over dark purple suede boots with silver medallions on them.

“Yes,” the woman said. “And you’re Annja Creed?”

Annja agreed she was. “And I’m Sallie,” the girl announced. “It’s short for Salamander!”

“No, it isn’t, Alessandra,” her mother said. “Don’t be untruthful.”

Annja laughed. Something about the girl’s appearance tweaked her subconscious. She couldn’t pin down exactly what.

The dog sniffed Annja’s legs. She hunkered down to stroke its head. “What’s his name?” she asked Sallie.

“It’s a she,” Sallie said. “Her name’s Eowyn. She’s kind of silly.”

“Young Labrador retrievers act that way,” her mother said. “Why don’t you and she go play?”

The girl was looking intently at Annja. “You’re on TV, aren’t you?” she said.

Her mother looked stern. Annja said, “Yes.”

“Oh. I like your show.”

“Thanks,” Annja said.

Sallie reached in a pocket of her jacket and produced a pale-green tennis ball, which she launched down the hill. The dog bounded in pursuit. Sallie ran after her, romping through the shadows of big elm trees lengthening across the hills of Roosevelt Park, which was located roughly halfway between the University of New Mexico campus, where Watson worked, and downtown.

“Thanks for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Watson,” Annja said.

“Susan, please. I’m certainly willing to do anything I can to get to the bottom of these terrible crimes. And I thank you for being willing to meet with me under such unusual circumstances. I don’t really have any time free at school this week, and I don’t want to leave Sallie at day care longer than necessary.”

She leaned forward and fixed Annja with a disconcertingly probing look. Even without the low boot heels she had to stand six feet clear. Annja did not envy any student of Dr. Watson’s who failed to measure up to her expectations.

“So, is your interest in skinwalkers personal or professional?” Watson asked.

If she wanted to keep things up front Annja could match that. “Both,” she said. “I lost a close personal friend in the last attack.” She felt a nasty twinge as she said it.

“Also the authorities in Oklahoma have asked me unofficially to consult on certain anthropological aspects of the case.”

“You’re an archaeologist by training, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Of course, my training included extensive education in social and physical anthropology, as well as subjects like geology.”

“Oh, yes.” Watson herself was a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the study of Southwestern native cultures. “So what can I do for you?”

“My specialty’s the European Renaissance. It’s a little far afield from the South Plains and the Rio Grande Valley. And to be perfectly honest, while we studied Native American history and cultures, my memory isn’t as sharp as it could be.”

“I understand,” Watson said with a grin. “I forgot all my geology pretty much the instant I turned in my last exam.”

“So if you could fill me in a bit on the cultural background of the Southwest and Plains cultures, and any hint you can provide me as to why something out of Navajo folk belief would be operating in the Comanche country of western Oklahoma would definitely be appreciated.”

“Well, to start with, the Indian cultures of North America didn’t live in vacuums, much less isolation from one another,” Watson said.

Annja was only mildly surprised at a tenured professor using such a politically incorrect term as Indian; very few Native Americans she’d ever met showed anything but the most strident contempt for the phrase Native American. Tom Ten Bears hadn’t had much use for it, either.

“Even before the Europeans’ arrival, my own people, the Kiowas, were especially famed for their roles as raiders and traders. Rather as the Vikings were in Europe and even the Mediterranean. So were the Comanches, especially after the two nations allied in the late eighteenth century. Comanche relics have turned up in the Cahokia Mounds. Kiowa tradition recalls trading voyages to the country of the Maya—who were themselves noted for the long journeys of their own traders, who also served as proselytizers for their religion.”

“Really?”

Watson nodded. “So the South Plains people were common visitors to New Mexico. What’s now northeastern New Mexico was part of their customary range. In fact, the Kiowa-Comanche alliance got its start in the 1790s on what’s now the site of Las Vegas, New Mexico—you did know there was one, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes. In the mountains east of Santa Fe,” Annja said.

“That’s it. You’d be surprised how many people have only heard of the one in Nevada. Or maybe you wouldn’t. At any rate, the relationship between the Pueblos and the South Plains people was especially problematic. Sometimes the Plains folk came to the Pueblos to trade, sometimes to pillage and kill. It was the usual antagonism between settled groups and nomads.”

“I’m familiar with that,” Annja said. “So where do the Navajos come in?”

“Originally as rivals,” Watson said with a smile. “As an Apachean subgroup of the Athabascan peoples they and their fellow Apacheans also raided the prosperous and populous riparian communities. That often brought them into conflict with the South Plains people. Usually the Apache came off second best.”

Annja noted a half-hidden grin at that. That was something she’d noticed in her dealings with people of Plains Indian extraction—no matter how vocally they tried, as many did, to disavow violence and war, they remained at core warrior cultures. And thoroughly proud of their histories.

“It wasn’t perfectly straightforward, of course,” Watson said.

“Are human interactions ever?”

Watson laughed. “Not that I’ve noticed.” She shook her head, seemed to go introspective for a moment. “Anyway, one thing that happened was that the Jicarilla band of Apaches early on settled in northern New Mexico, and entered into alliance with the Taoseños. They provided security for the great annual Taos trade fairs.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Yes. So there was always considerable contact between the people of the Southwest and of the South Plains. A famous hide painting exists of a battle—at about the time of the American Revolution—between Spanish troops with Apache mercenaries and French ones alongside Comanche allies.”

“Who won?”

“The French and Comanche. I’m tempted to add of course. Anyway, the contacts, if anything, grew stronger with the conclusion of the wars of Indian subjugation. After the final surrender of the Chiricahua Apaches to the U.S. Army in the 1880s they were eventually shipped to Fort Sill in Oklahoma.”

“Which is the heart of Comanche territory.”

“Yes. About half the Nation still lives around Sill and Lawton. Of course, by the time the Chiricahua gave up their relatives the Navajo had long since come to terms with the inevitable and settled down to become sheep-herders. Meanwhile, the Chiricahua had extensive exposure to Comanche culture on the reservation.”

“I didn’t think there were any reservations in Oklahoma,” Annja said.

“There aren’t anymore. It was the usual story. The free peoples of the Plains kept being restricted to smaller and smaller chunks of less and less desirable real estate. Then as soon as they got settled in, somebody would discover something on the land they’d been ceded—gold in the Black Hills, say—and they’d be pushed off again.

“In Oklahoma the Kiowa and Comanche were both forcibly settled onto reservations, which were then whittled away to nothing. The last Kiowa were forced out for white settlement in 1901, the Comanche in 1906.”

“That’s sad,” Annja said.

“Yes. It is. Don’t worry—I know you didn’t do it.”

Annja laughed. “So what can you tell me about the Dog Society?”

“Originally a Cheyenne warrior society. One of six, actually.”

“Why would Comanche radicals be calling themselves after a Cheyenne group?”

Watson shrugged. “You’d have to ask them. However, the Cheyennes spent a lot of time in the South Plains, and had much contact with the Kiowas and Comanche. They still do. Also, the Dog Soldiers were known for their extreme aggression. They were eventually outlawed and cast out of the Cheyenne tribe after one of their members murdered a fellow tribesman, and formed their own band. That could be part of the attraction for violent radicals, that aggressive association.”

“I see. What I still don’t understand, I’m afraid, is how and why someone evidently caught up in Navajo witchcraft would wind up committing murders in Oklahoma.”

“Again, I have no good explanation to give you. Such an individual would be very…twisted, by the standards of any human culture. Navajos—Athabascans—still take witchcraft with the utmost seriousness. It’s the blackest evil to them. People accused of witchcraft still have a tendency to turn up dead.

“The Navajo wolf, or skinwalker, is basically the worst kind of witch. You can only gain that kind of power through extensive contact with the dead—something most of the Southwest Indians are very leery of, and which the Athabascans in particular dread. Also, the shape-changing power can only be won through committing one or more ritual murders.”

“Wow,” Annja said.

“That’s not a life-way I’m terribly conversant with. Modern Navajos don’t like to talk about it for two reasons. The acculturated ones dislike associating their people with what seems to them a potentially pernicious superstition. The traditionalists dislike talking about religious beliefs to outsiders because to talk about witches invites their attentions, which traditional Navajos believe can be literally deadly.”

Watson shook her head. “Really, I’d say even a lot of the most modern Navajos feel at least a certain thrill of dread about skinwalkers. Just as atheists raised amid Christian society sometimes harbor secret fears of hell.”

“I’m familiar with that phenomenon,” Annja said.

“Now, there is someone who might be able to expand on what little I can tell you about the Navajo wolf phenomenon. I can put you in touch with Dr. Yves Michel of the World Health Organization. He’s spent the past couple of years among the native peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, studying Southwest Indian health issues on behalf of the U.N. Particularly mental health issues—he’s a psychiatrist as well as holding a doctorate in cultural anthropology. A very erudite man. Although I have to caution you—he can be difficult.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“He does, however, like to talk about his areas of interest. In particular, he’s made an intensive study of the skinwalker belief complex. While he has yet to publish any papers, he’s passed drafts around to many friends and colleagues that I understand have created quite a stir.”

“Wait—I think I’ve heard of him.”

In fact, Annja was pretty sure she’d seen his work on skinwalkers discussed on alt.archaeology, a Web site she frequently visited that was devoted to discussions of fringe archaeology. While she considered herself a stout skeptic, she also felt she owed it to her discipline to maintain an open mind; hence, her continuing attention to the outer limits of archaeological research. It was entirely possible that among the piles of printouts stacked on the sofa or coffee table of her Brooklyn loft apartment was actually a copy of Dr. Michel’s draft paper. She spent so little time there these days she couldn’t keep track of everything.

Dr. Watson took out one of her own business cards and wrote Dr. Michel’s phone number and e-mail address on the back of it. As she did so Sallie came racing back with Eowyn loping behind her. The girl plopped herself on the cold cement bench near her mother. The Lab lay down beside her, panting and grinning.

Annja found herself studying the girl. Sallie noticed and, like any bright child instinctively mistrusting adult scrutiny, said, “What? Do I have a booger?”

“Sallie!” her mother said sharply. She passed the card to Annja. “Sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry. It’s rude to stare. You just look familiar somehow.”

“Wait till I’m famous,” Sallie said. “I’m going to be a superheroine.”

Watson sighed exaggeratedly. “We Plains people tend to have active imaginations. A cultural thing, I think.”

She reached out to tousle the girl’s hair. Sallie endured it a moment, then leaped up and went dashing off once more with Eowyn in happy pursuit.

“I guess you wonder why a middle-aged woman has such a young daughter,” Watson said. “She was the outcome of an attempt to save a marriage.”

She sighed. “And like most such attempts, it didn’t work. I try not to talk about that where she can hear. I hate keeping things from her. But it’s a terrible responsibility to lay on a child. She’s a wonderful child.”

Light began to dawn on Annja. “She wouldn’t have an older brother, would she?”

“Yes. His name’s John. He’s fourteen years older than she is. They love each other, but there are limits to how close they can be across that kind of gap.”

“I think I know why she looks familiar. Please forgive my asking a highly personal question, but you wouldn’t happen to have been married to Lieutenant Ten Bears, would you?”

“Yes,” Watson said.

Annja sagged as if she’d been sandbagged. “So that’s why he recommended I talk to you.”

Watson laughed again. She had a hearty laugh. “I’d like to think a degree of respect for my competence influenced him. We do respect each other, even if we’re miles apart in most of our viewpoints on things. I’m a leftist, if not an entirely respectable one—he’s a right-winger, a total gung-ho patriot. I guess what you’d expect from a war hero and lifelong cop. We still feel…affection for each other, too. The divorce was amicable. Of course, you couldn’t say that for the last few years of our marriage.”

“Wait—your son’s name is John? Johnny?”

“Why, yes,” Watson said. “He served with the Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he came home he was changed.”

“And now he’s leader of the Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club?”

“He’s a community activist,” Watson said, “who prefers to think of himself as an outlaw biker. Not that I altogether approve of what he’s trying to achieve. Sometimes he seems way too much like the militia crazies of the nineties, who’re starting to make such a comeback now. But I’m much calmer about his activities than my ex-husband is.”

A dog barking vigorously broke the thread of conversation. Annja and Watson looked across the large park. The sun had set. The air grew chilly, with only a bloodred band on the horizon and reddish undertints on a few clouds. The evening filled the hollows of the park like velvet.