Walking the desert he eyes me, makes the hair stand up upon my neck. His breath a low purr, his footpads small silent temblors. I have heard that he walks on two legs sometimes, unseen he walks the streets of Laughlin, of Kingman, but I have not seen him. Only his tracks in wet sand, only the neck-snapped carcass of the deer. The bighorn sheep have turned to stone: their tears a dry lake the people scrape for salt.
Scrape the land a little and the dreams show through.
The dreams command the people turn rocks over, rake lines in the desert.
The first-born of earth and sky, they dreamed, shamed himself and his daughter Frog killed him. She poisoned him. It took him days to die. He called them all to him and asked to be cremated, but they had no fire. This was before they knew fire. Hanye, a little frog, walked west to the ocean, came back with a smouldering stick borne in his gummy mouth.
The sand fleas dug a hole for him, and Hanye lit a fire beneath him. Coyote stole his heart and fled east. At the mourning party, the lion Numeta and his brother Hatakulya sank into the wet sand.
Coyote wrenches out my heart and flees, his mouth dripping red. He makes trails of my blood on the desert stones, my arteries the Joshua trees’ red-cored roots. Hatakulya stalks me. I stood once at his head, his legs twenty feet long, his body of upturned stone, and he stalked me then. He wore a green crown of broken glass, a tire track necklace: a mantle of indignity laid on him. His breath on my neck. His eyes gauging my spine’s strength. I will fall before him, it is certain: my bones will make his hunter’s necklace.
Mastamho thrust a willow wand into the sand beside his father’s pyre, and the Colorado flowed from it.
Numeta and Hatakulya came up from the ground far to the north. They looked around. They went back down into the earth.
I dreamed Mastamho sank his wand into the sandbar at the mouth of White Rock Canyon, near where the hellish cold water swirls up from the bottom of Lake Mead, and the river started to flow again. It was a flood to end an age and start an age. Those who lived crawled out of the wrack and earth, and all the valley was scraped clean. The stacks that billowed black coal smoke were gone from Laughlin, and the casinos gone and houses on stilts above the river, the gas turbines swept off the old Maze. The dams downstream burst like sutures and the heart of the desert flowed out over them.
Hatakulya and Numeta came to the head of the Mojave River and emerged from the earth. They took clay and shaped it, washed it in the rain, and the clay deer ran into the desert. The lions followed them. In the Hualapai Mountains were trees and water, and the deer were mated and grew fat, and then Numeta made a path for them, his younger brother Hatakulya made a path for them. The doe shunned the path, escaping to the south, but the buck had dreamed badly. He knew he must follow the path to its end.
The lions quarreled over their kill.
Mastamho sings the Pleiades in Grapevine Canyon, a rope of feathered rabbit skin across his shoulder.
Walking the desert Hatakulya eyes me. Scrape the land a little and the dreams show through. He took the buck’s heart in his mouth and left Numeta, walked out into the White Hills among the Joshua trees.
.
So lovely. So sad.
Such dreams we have and such stories we tell - I love this.
I’ve been reading a lot of Charles de Lint over the holidays and a fine book called The Wood Wife by Terri Windling - all involved with Native American and some European shapeshifting stories. Makes the bones shiver, I can’t resist, it feels so true and repopulates my world in a new way. Thanks for adding to that world with much of what you are writing now. Lovely reads, all of them.