Shaman Winter

  “We have to keep it under wraps!” Doyle said, turning to Sonny and Lorenza.

  “Yes.” Eric nodded.

  “You never saw this happen,” Doyle said to Sonny.

  Sonny shrugged. Three men were dead, they had families, and he had given his word to keep mum. But that was before Raven had butchered the three guards.

  “Draw some plans up, call it a security drill!” Doyle snapped at Eric. “Just don’t let the fucking press in!”

  “You have three dead men,” Sonny reminded him.

  “Yeah, you let us deal with that,” he grumbled. “We’ve had other situations before—Look, I have a plane to catch,” he reminded Eric. He paused to look at Sonny, the shade of a smile playing in his lips. “I guess you don’t get your grandmother’s bowl after all. Tough.” He walked to the Jeep.

  “Hey, before you go,” Sonny said to Eric, “we need to get outta here.”

  “Sure, sure. No need keeping you here. Captain, escort Mr. Baca and his assistant to the gate.”

  “Yes, sir,” the captain replied.

  Eric was visibly shaken. He looked after Doyle, then turned to Sonny. “What do you think?”

  “He’s alone, and he’s nearby,” Sonny replied. “He knows the mountains, so he’ll head into the forest.” He looked up at the blue ridge of the Jemez. “You don’t have much daylight left.”

  Eric and Paiz followed Lorenza and Sonny to the van.

  “You can’t discuss this with anyone,” Eric reminded Sonny.

  “We know,” Sonny said.

  “We have a few days before this leaks out, then my hide will be pinned to a Department of Defense wall,” Eric said. He turned and walked to the Jeep where Doyle waited.

  “Follow me,” the captain said to Sonny. He pointed to the Jeep they were to follow. “Don’t make any false turns or you will be here for the duration. Understand?”

  “Ten-four,” Sonny replied. The man was stern, nervous. Something had gone very wrong inside TA-Two, and the security team was ready to shoot on sight.

  “Look, you’ve got my number,” Paiz said. “Anything comes up, call me. This guy is really crazy.”

  “You’re telling me,” Sonny replied, and guided his chair onto the lift and inside the van.

  “You okay?” he asked Lorenza when she climbed on board.

  “I’m okay. You?”

  “Tired.”

  He wanted to tell her he had felt the souls of the dead guards in the building, but he guessed she knew. She had known it was Raven all along; that’s why she went around the building, sniffing around and finding the rope he had used to rappel down the side of the cliff. Even now they could sense his evil presence.

  “He’s nearby,” Lorenza said.

  “Yeah, and the guards and fences won’t stop him.”

  “Where will he head?”

  “South, to ’Burque.”

  “He has to go through Bandelier,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Sacred place,” she replied.

  The Bandelier National Park lay south of the large Los Alamos Labs complex. Long ago the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo Indians lived in the caves carved into the volcanic cliffs. They farmed corn and squash along the small stream that ran through the canyon.

  The entire plateau was a place of the ancestors, and the peak of the mountain a shrine to their spiritual ancestors. The kachinas, deities of rain, lived on the mountaintop. And because a sacred time in the cycle of the sun was drawing close, it was time to pray to them.

  Or in Raven’s case, to threaten them with the fire of the plutonium pit.

  “Do you really think he’d go through there?”

  “He disrupts the sacred circle every chance he gets,” Lorenza replied. “Take the Calendar of Dreams and terrorize the gods of the mountain. Taunt them. As long as he has the bowl, he obstructs their power, tries to turn them away from visiting the pueblos. He has the plutonium, his new god, a radioactive core he claims is stronger than the power of the sun.”

  Sonny nodded. Her intuition had always been right. “Okay, let’s go take a look. Tell our escort we want to go out Highway Five-oh-one to Four.”

  Lorenza lowered her window and called out to the captain the route they’d like to take. He shrugged okay, boarded his Jeep, and they followed.

  Sonny called Rita and told her where they were, explaining it would be late before they got home. He tried to reassure her they were all right, but he could hear the concern in her voice. Then he called Howard and asked him to check on Rita.

  He clicked off the phone and rested his head on the desk. He felt exhausted, feverish. The sight of the dead guards had unnerved him, he admitted to himself. Raven had struck with fury, right under the noses of the best security in the world. Or what used to be the best.

  Raven’s fiendish laughter seemed to echo in the Jemez canyons as the afternoon wind buffeted the van. Dark clouds swirled on the high peaks. A dark power worked its way up the mountain, and taking advantage of the weak winter sun, it threatened even the ancient deities.

  6

  They drove out on 501 to Highway 4, where they stopped at the checkpoint. The captain Eric had sent to guide them pulled up and cleared the van. Beyond the gate the state cops had received instructions to let them through. Lorenza turned east on 4.

  “Can he really build a bomb?” she asked.

  “If he can pay experts, yes. Like Eric said, Ukrainian and Russian physicists are out of work. The Avengers have enough money to bring them together. Maybe some of the people working in the labs are Avengers.”

  “And Paiz suspects the FBI protects them.”

  “A plot to take over the country. They make us suspect North Korean terrorists, militant groups, fundamentalists driven by their desire for a religious state, even the Russkies.”

  “And all the while they’re being funded right here at home. Driven by a political ideology, and fear.”

  “And we’ve been too complacent.”

  Above them the gray clouds of a winter front swirled over the Jemez Mountains, creating an interplay of molten light and shadow as the setting sun lit them up. On the mountaintop the kachinas were gathering to bring snow to the valley, moisture that would slake the earth’s thirst. Yes, the ancestral spirits were gathering on the mountaintop, but they could not yet descend.

  Raven was out there somewhere, Lorenza had said. She knew him so well. To destroy time, he needed to strike at the ancestors that kept the universe in harmony.

  “I wonder if the medicine men still come here to pray.”

  “Yes,” Lorenza replied. “Except now the Park Service charges them a fee.”

  “A fee to pray on your own land.” Sonny shook his head and reached for his pistol. He took the cartridges out, and with his thumbnail he etched a faint cross on the lead. According to the old stories, even a brujo had to die when shot with a bullet with a cross on it.

  As he reloaded, he looked in the mirror. Lorenza was watching him. He knew better, her look said. Bullets couldn’t kill Raven.

  Yes, he knew, and yet he was still trusting the pistol. What else did he have? The power of his nagual, the coyote guardian spirit? The power in the dream?

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead and shivered. Was he thinking irrationally? Raven’s presence was near, confusing his thoughts. He trusted the pistol even though he knew the battle was one that would take place in the spirit world, the world of dreams.

  “Feeling okay?” Lorenza asked.

  “Okay,” he answered, and tucked the pistol under his belt.

  He felt like praying. For Consuelo, for the three guards, for the world, for the sun, which was three days from the solstice. For himself. Lordy, Lordy, he thought, I need some kind of help.

  They were driving along a mountain road flanked by ponderosa pines, past a herd of deer grazing along the side of the road. Lorenza was driving as fast as she dared on the winding road. One hard turn and she might plow the van into
the tall pines that bordered the road.

  Both knew Raven wouldn’t go away. He would wait for them, give them plenty of clues, lead them to him. That was his method.

  Pray, a voice whispered to Sonny, and he recognized Owl Woman’s voice. She too was nearby, watching over him!

  This was the home of the kachinas, the deities of the Anasazis, the “Ancient Ones” who so long ago made their homes here in Frijoles Canyon. The cave dwellers, people who carved small homes into the volcanic tuff, the ashy outpouring from long-ago volcanic eruptions that had formed the Jemez Mountains. They climbed up to their caves on the cliffsides to escape the nomadic enemies who swept down like wolves, murdering the farmers who planted corn and squash along the narrow confines of the canyon.

  He should have known! It wasn’t just Raven haunting his footsteps. Owl Woman was also close by. She was a grandmother, not yet destroyed by Raven, and she could bless his way.

  “Yes,” he whispered. Give me strength, Owl Woman. Be the tecolote that fights the raven. Be the good ancestral spirit that guides my path.

  He wiped tears from his eyes. “Ah, yes.”

  “We’re here,” Lorenza said as they drove into the visitor parking lot and stopped.

  Above them the southwest sun cast gigantic slanting rays of light through the dark storm clouds. Streaming light that bathed the earth.

  Sonny knew Bandelier. As a university student he had fished the Jemez with his buddy, Dennis Martínez, and he had hiked through the trails of the monument. Just up the canyon lay the Tyuonyi Ruins, a sacred place, full of the spirits. A place for meditation, especially at this time of the year.

  He let his chair down on the lift and tucked the pistol under the wool serape Rita had sent.

  “Don’t let your legs get cold,” she had admonished.

  There were no other cars in the lot. This time of the year and of the day was not the best for visiting the park.

  The lone park ranger in the visitors’ center was surprised to see them. “It’s almost closing time. A storm’s coming in,” he informed them. “You sure you want to go up the canyon?” he asked when Lorenza took out her wallet to buy tickets. He looked at Sonny in his chair.

  “We’re sure,” Lorenza said.

  “I’ll give you an hour, no more. It’s closing time,” he repeated, pointing at the clock on the wall.

  She paid the fee while Sonny went to the bathroom. When he returned, she went. Sonny browsed through pamphlets. A quote from Adolph Bandelier’s 1880 journal caught his eye. He read the entry:

  About 4 PM the border of the almost precipitous descent into the Cañon de los Frijoles was reached, and it took one-half hour to descend—on foot, of course. The grandest thing I ever saw. A magnificent growth of pines, encima, alamos, and towering cliffs, of pumice or volcanic tuff, exceedingly friable. The cliffs are vertical on the north side, and their bases are, for a length as yet unknown to me, used as dwellings both from the inside, and by inserting the roof poles for stories outside. It is of the highest interest. There are some of one, two, and three stories. In most cases the plaster is still in the rooms. Some are walled in; others are mere holes in the rocks. Much pottery of the older, painted sort, but as yet no corrugated ones, I found entire chimneys, metates, manos and a stone-axe.

  Bandelier had been the first white man from the East Coast to explore the canyon. Before him the Spaniards from the Río Grande valley had chased after nomadic Indians, and in their search they had discovered the old Indian ruins that dotted the mesas of the piedmont, but they had no time to explore. Later the canyon was visited by Navajos who raided the villages in the valley, stealing sheep, women, and children. The deep canyons of the plateau provided excellent hiding places.

  Bandelier had excavated the caves and dwellings, discovered that the Pajaritan Indians had farmed corn, beans, and squash along the banks of the small creek that gurgled through the canyon. Centuries before the Spaniards came into the region, the Anasazis had constructed their pueblos of mud and stone all over the Four Corners region around Mesa Verde.

  Around AD 1500 the Anasazis began to move out of the Four Corners region, leaving behind them the great pueblos they had built at Chaco Canyon. At Chaco they had built roads leading out in the four directions, smooth roads that perhaps were used as trade routes. Roads used to run ceremonial races, some anthropologists presumed. Perhaps the roads were used by the deer dancers coming into the pueblo during the ceremonies, or maybe the roads were meant for the kachinas, pathways for the ancestral deities to enter the pueblo during the blessing time.

  The Anasazis evolved into the Pajaritan people, who built small one-family or extended-family structures on the mesas of the Pajarito Plateau. Here they told the legends of their coming into being, stories of the creation of the people and their role in it. Here the medicine men prayed and the people performed their dances so the cosmos might stay in harmony. Here they honored the spirits of their ancestors.

  Sonny read on, learning from the brochure that the Pajarito Plateau consisted of a long shelf of compressed volcanic ash and basalt. The lava spilling out of the long-ago active Jemez volcano formed the plateau over a million years ago. Rain and wind sculpted the shelf into long, narrow mesas and deep canyons. Here Folsom man hunted, later seminomadic hunters and gatherers passed through the region, and finally the descendants of the Anasazis came, the Pueblo Indians. Half a century before Coronado arrived in 1541, the plateau was abandoned and the people moved into the Río Grande valley to found the pueblos of Cochiti, Santa Clara, and San Ildefonso.

  “Ready?” Lorenza said.

  “How far up the canyon can I get in the chair?” Sonny asked the unenthused ranger at the counter.

  “The trail is clear, but it ain’t easy even for a motorized chair.”

  “Vamos,” Sonny replied. Lorenza opened the door and they started up the trail. The chair easily handled the first part of the asphalt trail, which was handicap accessible. Where the asphalt gave way to packed earth, they found the ground frozen, so the going wasn’t too difficult. They followed the small, clear steam of Frijoles Creek to the first cave dwellings.

  A cold wind descended into the canyon, moaning through the pine trees. Two large crows rose from a tall ponderosa pine, circled, and disappeared up the canyon in the direction of Ceremonial Cave.

  Sonny shivered. During the day the winter sun had warmed the cliffside. Long ago shamans studied the course of the sun, counting the days of the solstice. Somewhere in the canyon the medicine men had constructed a slit in the rocks, a Calendar of the Sun. All the ancient people had such calendars, for the course of the sun was important to their survival. The sun was the Giver of Life, the Grandfather.

  Now the canyon was empty, save for Lorenza and Sonny and the cold wind whipping down from the peaks.

  “I’m tired,” Sonny said. He drew in a gulp of the cold, clear air. This high the oxygen was thin. Lorenza nodded. They were close to eight thousand feet high. Here was good enough.

  Except for the wind swaying the tops of the trees, the silence in the canyon was eerie. They stopped and let it seep into them. The small gurgling brook ran down the canyon floor, its water winter clear. The wind whispered in the bare cottonwoods that lined the creek and in the pines that clung to the sides of the cliffs. A call and a royal flash of blue announced a blue jay in the alamos; then came the croak of a mountain raven farther up the cliff.

  Lorenza took an eagle feather from her bag. She began to sing softly. To Sonny it sounded familiar. It was the same song she sang during the ceremony when she taught him to take his coyote form, the spirit of the coyote in which he could descend into the spirit world.

  He closed his eyes and let the chant work its medicine. Lorenza passed the eagle feather over him, praying to the deities of the place to cleanse away the presence of the guards’ souls.

  The spirits of the canyon responded; after all, it was a holy time, a time when the kachinas of the mountain were gathering in the snow clouds,
ready to descend on the Río Grande pueblos.

  Animal spirits appeared first, the red fox, a doe with a year-old fawn, a buck, skunks and birds, cackling jays, playful squirrels, all gathering to meet the coyote Sonny felt within.

  Above them, the mighty kachinas, so colorful in the light of the setting sun that one was blinded by their presence.

  Sonny felt the ghosts of the dead guards disappear. He breathed a sigh of relief. Then the chant stopped. He opened his eyes slowly, watching the last of the animal spirits disappear into the forest along the side of the stream.

  “They’re gone,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” Lorenza said. “Now I go on to the Long House to pray. Feel up to it?”

  “You go on,” he replied. He was tired, and there was no use testing the chair. Anyway, from where he sat, he could look directly up the narrow canyon to the nearby peaks. The sun shining through the clouds was worth contemplating.

  She leaned and kissed his cheek. “Your coyote guardian is still strong. Be alert.”

  Then she walked on up the path toward the Long House ruins. Sonny watched until she disappeared around a bend. Was she going to pray or to draw Raven out?

  He bowed his head. A swiftly moving bank of gray clouds shut out the sun and the canyon grew dark. Pray, Sonny thought. They had just come to pray in the presence of the spirits of the place.

  “Let the spirits of the ancestors bless me.”

  Yes, pray, Owl Woman said. Her whisper was the soft moan of the wind, the gurgling of the stream, the occasional call of a jay. Sonny felt the spiritual power of the earth permeating his body, filling his soul. Owl Woman was guiding him.

  The clouds rolled away, and again brilliant rays of sunlight broke through, a shower of fire. Then she appeared, dressed in the soft buckskin the women of the desert had prepared for her wedding ceremony. She held the Calendar of Dreams, the shiny black bowl on which were inscribed the dream symbols, the future.

  The golden light shone on her and bathed her in an aura of beauty. Behind her Sonny saw other figures rise and move, giant figures descending from the mountain, the kachinas of rain, the ancestral deities walking down the path along the creek. Dressed in colorful costumes, the figures came in procession toward him.