Animal Dreams

I shaded my eyes and looked up the canyon. Its narrows gave window views into its wider places. Giant buttresses of rock extended from the canyon walls, like ships, complete with knobbly figureheads standing on their prows. Some of the figureheads had been stranded, eroded away from the mother rock, and stood alone as sculptured spires. Where the canyon grew narrower the rock buttresses alternated like baffles, so the river had to run a slalom course around them. So did we. The truck crunched over icy shoals and passed through crystal tunnels of icy cottonwood branches. We passed a round hogan with a shingled roof and a line of smoke rising from its chimney pipe. A horse wandered nearby, nosing among the frozen leaves.

Several times Loyd stopped to point out ancient pictures cut in the rock. They tended to be in clusters, as if seeking refuge from loneliness in that great mineral expanse. There were antelope, snakes, and ducks in a line like a carnival shooting gallery. And humans: oddly turtle-shaped, with their arms out and fingers splayed as if in surrender or utter surprise. The petroglyphs added in recent centuries showed more svelte, self-assured men riding horses. The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

Eventually we stopped in a protected alcove of rock, where no snow had fallen. The walls sloped inward over our heads, and long dark marks like rust stains ran parallel down the cliff face at crazy angles. When I looked straight up I lost my sense of gravity. The ground under my boots was dry red sand, soft and fine, weathered down from the stone. If the river rose to here, the mud would be red. Loyd held my shoulders and directed my eyes to the opposite wall, a third of the way up. Facing the morning sun was a village built into the cliff. It was like Kinishba, the same multistory apartments and unbelievably careful masonry. The walls were shaped to fit the curved hole in the cliff, and the building blocks were cut from the same red rock that served as their foundation. I thought of what Loyd had told me about Pueblo architecture, whose object was to build a structure the earth could embrace. This looked more than embraced. It reminded me of cliff-swallow nests, or mud-dauber nests, or crystal gardens sprung from their own matrix: the perfect constructions of nature.

"Prehistoric condos," I said.

Loyd nodded. "Same people, but a lot older. They were here when Columbus's folks were still rubbing two sticks together."

"How in the world did they get up there?"

Loyd pointed out a crack that zigzagged up from the talus slope to the ledge where the village perched. In places the crevice wasn't more than two inches deep. "They were pretty good rock climbers," he said. Loyd's forte was understatement.

There wasn't a sound except for the occasional, echoing pop of a small falling rock. "What were they scared of?" I asked quietly.

"I don't know. Maybe they weren't scared. Maybe they liked the view."

The doors were built so you'd have to step high to get out. Obviously, for the sake of the children. "Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?"

"No worse than raising up kids where the frontyard ends in a freeway."

"You're right," I said. "No worse than that. And quieter. Less carbon monoxide."

"So you do think about that sometimes," Loyd said.

"About what?"

"Being a mother."

I glanced at him and considered several possible answers. "All the time," and "never" seemed equally true. Sometimes I wanted to say, "You had your chance, Loyd, we had our baby and it's dead." But I didn't. That was my past, not his.

"Sure, I think about it," I said, needing to relieve the pressure in my chest. "I think about hotwiring a Porsche and driving to Mexico, too."

He laughed. "Only one of the two is legal, I'm told."

I wanted to try and climb up into the cliff village, but Loyd explained that we'd crack our skulls, plus you weren't supposed to mess with the antiquities.

"I thought you broke all the rules," I said, as we climbed back into the truck and headed farther up the canyon.

He looked surprised. "What rules have I broken?"

"Authorized Navajo personnel only, for starters. We're not even supposed to be down here."

"We're authorized guests of Maxine Shorty of the Streams Come Together clan."

"Does she live here?"

"Not now. Almost everybody drives their sheep out and spends the winter up top, but the farms are down here. Leander and I spent almost every summer here till we were thirteen."