Chapter 8: Spirits in the Fire

Graydon could feel himself evenly balanced on his skis. He could feel his arms bearing down on his ski poles, planted firmly to each side. Otherwise he felt suspended in space, hanging in milk.

His feet ended at his boot tops and no trace of snow or shadow or outline or slope or mountainside existed in his vision. There was no horizon and no sky. It was a perfect "whiteout," that rare condition of light in which snow and sky are perfectly blended together and there is no trace of shadow or highlight. There is absolutely no visual sense of shape, slope, or horizon. It is, literally, like being inside a milk bowl.

This was serious. The condition had evolved around him as he traversed the snowy slopes high on the flank of Thompson Ridge. The lowering cloud cover was illumined by an overhead sun, throwing everything into perfectly diffused light coming from all directions with absolutely no shadows. His ski tips could either be wholly on the snow or projecting over the lip of a steep precipice. There was no way to see. Up-slope he could see the dark shapes of evergreen trees, and across the valley he could see scattered barns and ranch houses and clumps of trees, and he could see the winding cottonwood bottoms on the valley floor, but all of that was hanging, suspended, in shadowless white.

Recalling the shape of the mountainside and its slope as he remembered it, Graydon eased forward, gliding slowly, advancing one ski and following with the other. He braced himself with his long poles, keeping each basket firmly planted beside himself as he eased forward in slow, gliding steps. A moment of panic gripped him when he felt himself falling forward, his skis plunging downward under him. He fell and landed on his face in the snow. He forgot the jeep track gouged out of the hillside. He had just skied off the steep cut bank and fallen onto the road. He got his skis straightened alongside himself, levered himself up and onto his skis, and dusted the dry, powdery snow from his pants and jacket. Steadying his nerves, he realigned himself to resume his trek to the hidden winter lodge.

A brisk fire blazed in the great fireplace; his heavy woollen outer pants and nylon ski jacket hung from crossed ski poles leaning against the rock face to dry. Graydon lay on a pad of blankets, stretched out in the light and warmth from the fire, delighting in the memory of the day's travel, part of it in the unsettling whiteout that had finally resolved itself once he'd reached the edge of the timber and could use the trees for guidance across the snowy track. He'd eaten a hot meal, soup and beans and franks with a slice of homemade bread, and was sipping his second cup of hot tea and honey. He'd planned to stay overnight and would resume his ski trek after an early breakfast of bacon, eggs, and biscuits. He had not brought his rifle on this trek. Winter was a hard time for animals, small and large, and he had no wish to kill anything needlessly. Deer, snowshoe hares, grouse, ravens, weasels (called ermine in their winter black-tipped white coats) were winter companions of his field and forest treks. The rifle was not appropriate gear; there was nothing to fear that was not more afraid of him as a human than he of them; only cougar and bear could pose a possible threat and they had been pushed back miles beyond the valley region by hunters.

Graydon slept on the hearth of the great fireplace, wrapped in his wool blankets. The amber glow of coals half buried in ashes bathed him in their warm light, and cast a warmth that let him slumber in comfort while outside in the silvered light of the half moon, the winter landscape lay in frigid slumber. The temperature, in the lower 20's, kept the snow in a dry powder state. Not a breeze stirred. All was wrapped in silence.

A hot meal filled the inner boy. He used the firelight to update his journal, writing his impressions of the day, then he lay down for sleep. He awakened briefly to fold one wool blanket as a pad, and to wrap himself in the second. His rolled jacket served as a pillow.

The dancing flames cast moving images through his eyelids, and these merged with moving images of light and shadow in his mind. Dream state: the free realm where the mind wanders not in ordered paths as the traveler will, but moves through scenes springing out of unconscious depths, those fountains of the deeper consciousness that wakeful states cannot command.

He woke in a pit house with a hard-packed dirt floor and circular stone walls. The air was stifling, smothering, fetid with centuries of smoldering fires and sweating bodies, mingled with scents of herbs and pollens, scorched grains, barks and oils and feathers.

His mind reeled. He was a dancer, head low, chest heaving with gasping exertion, his knees thrusting high as his moccasin-clad feet pounded into the hard-packed clay floor, the throbbing, hypnotic booming drums sending his head forward and back, his steps spinning in tight circles around the fire, pausing briefly when he passed in front of the naked figure hanging from leather thongs. The man's arms and wrists were tightly bound to a peeled pole frame, lashed to twin posts between the fire circle and sacred skin paintings hanging from the kiva wall. As each dancer passed the figure they spun and shook their feathered fists and shell rattles in his staring face, as if to ward away whatever hostile spirits might use his delirious eyes, staring fixedly open and glazed in the flashing light and shadows.

With a crash of drums and a keening, ululating, ear-splitting string of chants, rising in pitch and volume then falling to unearthly, muttering growls, a shaman stepped forth as the dancers hurriedly retreated, diving out through the low exit hole. The shaman, alone with the bound figure, stepped forward to study the man's face, peering deeply into his eyes as if probing the man's soul.

In a moment of choking, gasping terror Graydon found himself staring into the shaman's eyes, falling forward, plunging into the blackness of those orbs. He felt himself tumbling insanely into a bottomless chasm. Darkness swallowed him as he fell, and at that moment he felt the ripping pain of a black stone dagger, its edges scalloped and sharper than any surgeon's scalpel. It slashed into his chest and sawed downward, splitting him open to reveal his furiously beating heart. In the crescendo of pain and horror, his eyes blurred and in the center of his mind a bright point of light began to grow, expanding, coming nearer, and his gaze lifted from the massive bloody opening in his chest to focus on the light, and there he saw the swooping night hawk fling itself toward him and rise up in a whistling rush of wings, flaring, its wings outstretched, inches from his face.

The shaman placed his bloodied obsidian dagger into a shallow clay basin, the steaming water crusted with herbs and pollen. The dagger sank through the mat of green and yellow to lay submerged, the blood vanishing. He reached into a pouch at his side, drawing forth a pinch of shredded tobacco fragments, wild tobacco native to the pueblo canyon region. It was sacred to the first peoples, and remained sacred through the centuries. Chanting tonelessly, the shaman bowed to the four quarters of the world, then flung his head sharply back and in an unearthly, keening voice, he sang imprecations to the spirits above. Extending his fingers and palm forward he brought the tobacco dust up to his face and with a puff he blew it into the gaping wound. At that moment the whistling rush of the diving night hawk's wings and its shrill cry erupted in the space between them, and the man's head was thrown back, his mouth wrenched open and his lungs filled with a gasp. The obscene, gaping wound in his chest was gone, as if never there. His heart pulsed, pounded, beating as steadily as the drums had throbbed before.

Graydon's eyes gazed out through the shaman's eyes, through a misty haze of dancing kachina figures in a landscape of canyon walls and depths. He felt his face breaking into a satisfied smile. With astonishment he recognized the naked man bound to the poles. It was the white man who had killed the attackers and saved the children. But he was different now. His eyes blazed a brilliant sapphire blue, deeply set and piercing in their focus like the far-seeing gaze of a hawk, and his hair, which had been short and dark, was long, to his shoulders. It hung in long, alternating bands of black and grey.