On Soldier Ridge

1.
The death threats were credible and, so, McMurray’s retirement dinner had to be postponed.  The new park director had come up from Phoenix and didn’t know small town culture and, further, no one warned her about the bad blood in the community – least of all McMurray, a taciturn fellow and the man that she was hired to replace.  After shadowing McMurray at the State Park for a couple weeks, his replacement planned a dinner for him, earmarking some funds from her operating budget for the party, and booking a banquet room at the Stone Lizard motel.  The town supermarket was hired to provide catering:  some barbecued pork on biscuits, calico beans, and potato salad with a pickle and olive tray  Because McMurray was on-the-wagon at the time, alcohol wasn’t provided, a prudent policy, in any event, because of the many Mormons invited.  The assistant curator at the park museum told me that the new director’s mistake was that she kept the planning hush-hush, swearing people to secrecy since the testimonial dinner was supposed to be a “surprise.”  Of course, secrecy isn’t feasible in a small town in the middle of nowhere and, furthermore, rampant paranoia about McMurray and his operations made the young woman’s covert activities seem sinister.  McMurray had done things covertly as well resulting, as some claimed, in two suicides and a dozen other lives ruined.  In any event, word of McMurray’s retirement party oozed into the community and the desk clerk at the Stone Lizard took a couple calls from folks who wouldn’t give their names threatening to put a bullet between the honoree’s eyes after fire-bombing the reception area and banquet hall.   At least, this is what I was told and I don’t have any reason to doubt these reports.  McMurray, who couldn’t be intimidated, had to be duly advised and he said that he wasn’t afraid and would wear a side-arm if necessary, but the sheriff thought this was too provocative (and was still sensitive about the FBI skirting his authority during the earlier investigation from which the suicides resulted) and, so, he ordered the testimonial retirement dinner postponed until later notice – that is, postponed once and for all.  The sheriff wasn’t a big fan of McMurray.

If you had worked with McMurray in the field, you were a fan.  It had nothing to do with his personality – he was, in fact, a bitter, suspicious drunk, avuncular enough when he wasn’t drinking (rarely) or between his fourth and seventh cocktail, but mean and obnoxious thereafter.  But there was no question that he was the finest, most intuitive, field archaeologist in the Four Corners.  When McMurray scuffed a toe in the earth, his boot uncovered ceramics – and, usually, from hitherto-unknown pottery sequences.   He could read terrain and, unerringly, selected the best place to excavate.  His bore-holes inevitably struck walls or pierced through packed floors into old cuts full of human remains.  When he squinted at the landscape, his eyes were like a ground-penetrating radar.  I worked with him, particularly on Soldier Ridge, and can attest to his brilliance in the field.  When we did a surface survey and walked transects, his observations were orders of magnitude more precise and fulsome than those visually surveying, more or less, identical swaths at his elbow – simply stated, he saw more than others.  McMurray’s talent was such that several times, I heard novices accuse him of seeding sites – otherwise, how could he have known that hand-auguring down through utterly nondescript caliche would yield a kiva full of ceremonial artifacts?  But the indisputable fact was that McMurray’s intuition was just better than others and that he had honed his observational skills by long years in the field.  He didn’t teach, except by example.  Most other professional archaeologists spent most of the year in classrooms or working on publications.  McMurray’s skill-set was different – he eschewed interpretation, couldn’t be employed in academia for various reasons, was too blunt and combative to make any friends at the various professional conferences that he attended, and was only happy working in the field.  But those of us who had the privilege of watching his dirt-work revered McMurray and, so, several of his colleagues, learning of his retirement from Edge of the Pinon and the aborted testimonial dinner in the Utah town, arranged for a party 130 miles away, across the state line at Farmington.  The idea was to feast, drink to excess if McMurray was in relapse, and, then, river-raft the next morning to a few easy sites off the San Juan River.  Younger colleagues, who knew McMurray only by reputation, wanted to see him in action before age and infirmity kept him from trekking the dry washes and slot canyons.  Farmington is a good location in the Four Corners area, pretty much centrally located, and it was beyond McMurray’s sphere of influence up at Edge of the Pinon State Park where he was, as I have said, a dangerously controversial figure.  McMurray was reluctant to drive down for the party  - as always, he was happiest when left alone.  In fact, if it weren’t for the field excursion into the side-canyons off the San Juan, I doubt that he would have attended.  But the idea of venturing into the field again, if only for a couple days made him happy – I could hear the enthusiasm in his voice when I spoke to him by phone.

I asked McMurray if he planned to get out the Utah town now that he was retired from the state park.

“No,” he said.  “I’m still needed here.  To supervise things, you know.”

“But they all hate you,” I replied.

“I take that as a compliment,” McMurray said.

“You’ll end up face-down in a ditch somewhere,” I told him.

McMurray didn’t answer right away.  There was a pause, silence on the phone.  Then, McMurray said:  “That would be okay with me.  I don’t think retirement will suit me.”


2.
The party was improvised on short notice and the raft trip, also, and, so, I went to one of the Walmarts in Farmington to buy some gear.  It was mid-afternoon and festivities were scheduled for a few hours later, a gathering at one of the Mexican restaurants in town that McMurray favored.  (During the Soldier Ridge dig, McMurray had spent weekends in Farmington and so he knew the town well.)  In the sporting goods section, I encountered McMurray – he had Scotch whiskey and vodka in his cart, potato chips, and a couple of canteens.  A clerk working under overhead racks of rifles was showing him a buck-knife in a leather sheath. 

“Getting ready for the trip up-country?” I asked.

He looked startled to see me and shook his head.

“I’m like a boy-scout,” McMurray said.  “Always be prepared.”

“You were born prepared,” I told him.

McMurray’s thin lips fit together crookedly.  The expression on his mouth could be interpreted as either a twisted smile or a snarl.  His hair was whiter than I recalled and close-cropped to his skull but without any trace of baldness.  He had sunglasses and bifocals for reading and close work in the breast pocket of his beige-colored shirt.  He was lean and the sun had chiseled some skin cancers into his forehead and the backs of his hands and there were patches of pale, pink and tender-looking flesh mottling him where the lesions had been excised.  McMurray’s eyes were wide-spaced and his eyebrows were so bleached that they couldn’t be seen.  The razor with which he shaved had cut close and his jaw had a boiled, inflamed appearance.  He was wearing beige trousers as well, cuffed awkwardly above elaborately stitched cowboy boots – his only affectation as far as I could see. 

There was no fat on him and his arms were bony and flecked with scars.  He was like a ruined Catholic priest – you didn’t want to impose yourself on his solitude. 

“I’ll see you in a few hours,” I told him.

McMurray nodded to me and flipped a salute in my direction.  He had a baseball cap bearing the name of the state park in his back pocket.  As I walked away, a kid stocking a shelf dropped a pallet on the floor and the thud startled McMurray.  He shot an indignant glance in the direction of the worker and his hand trembled for a moment before he covered it with the palm of his other hand.


3.
McMurray looked like a ruined priest for a reason.  After junior college, he had attended seminary, been ordained, and, even, assigned a parish for a couple of years.  This was in the East, near Pittsburgh, where he had been born and raised.  It was a large family, as I understand, and McMurray was the youngest child, sickly when he was a boy.  Asthma bothered him and the story was that he had come west to control his symptoms.  I knew that he used an inhaler and, in fact, sometimes dust and pollen in the field caused him to wheeze and gasp for air. 

In fact, McMurray’s bad lungs weren’t the main issue: someone told me that there had been an incident and McMurray was transferred by the diocese to an Indian reservation in upper peninsula Michigan and, then, later to the Navajo school at Shiprock.  His students showed him ruined pueblos and cliff-dwellings in the back-country and McMurray was fascinated by these things.  After another year or so, he enrolled in the University of New Mexico’s anthropology department and graduated, when he was 33, with a degree in anthropology.

McMurray spent a half-year living with the Hopi at Oraibi.  He told me it was like being a missionary without the distasteful proselytizing.  The University tried to wrest a thesis paper out of him, but he didn’t like to write and the work was never finished. Then, for the next dozen years, he worked for the Bureau of Land Management on surface surveys in the Gila Wilderness.  He mapped pit-houses and small pueblo villages on mesas and hidden in canyons miles from the nearest four-wheel-drive tracks.  The ranchers in the surrounding range knew him pretty well – every half-month or so, he would emerge from the desert with his crew of one or two surveyors, cadge a meal and some drinks and, then, vanish into the high country again.  The ranchers were friendly – he was like them in that he was independent and mostly wanted to be left alone.  McMurray camped in the meadows under the lush, green peaks to avoid the worst of the heat and, during the day, he and his crew hiked down into the gorges to count the small unit pueblos, mostly just clearings with a bleached dirt ridges where the walls had once been.  In those days, there were black bears in the juniper and douglas fir woods and, even, a few haggard and mangy Mexican grey-wolves, animals with alert and uncanny amber-colored eyes.   McMurray was authorized to do some small-scale shovel excavations and, even, with those limitations, made a number of important discoveries.  Four times a year, he would drive his jeep down to the Wilderness headquarters in Silver City and report his findings.  He never published, probably couldn’t publish because he was generally unwilling to convert raw facts into interpretations.  “An interpretation,” he used to say, “is just an opinion and opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one.”  I know that a half-dozen scholarly papers published by University presses or Kiva were based on his work.  People cited his surveys and borrowed photographs of features and artifacts unearthed in the Wilderness, but McMurray, although cited as a source, was never listed as an author in the articles derived from his surveys.

At the end of his work in the Gila Wilderness, McMurray was drinking heavily and, one day, got into an ineffectual, but nasty, fist-fight with one of his surveyors.  The BLM fired him and McMurray, by this time renowned for his skills, spent eight years in Chihuahua, working as a liaison between the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, that is, INAH, and several American universities funding research in the Forty Houses area.  McMurray, who may have been a little dyslexic, never really learned Mexican Spanish beyond a pidgin level, but, again, he impressed everyone with his field prowess and acumen and was successful in the work.  Old Mexico decayed all around him, the northwest of the country, slowly descending into anarchy.  Toward the end of the tenure, McMurray, who had taken to protecting archaeological sites with volunteer militias armed with shotguns, was accused of attempted murder after a shoot-out near one of the cliff-dwellings.  The police came to take him into custody.  He knew who paid the cops the real money with which they supplemented their meager salaries and, also, understood that detention would mean his murder – in fact, the police would kill him before he even reached the lock-up in Casa Grandes.  The local INAH people were useless – they were all beholding to the Narcos as well.  And, so, McMurray scooted north, reaching the border at Antelope Wells about a quarter hour before his pursuers, following in small white mini-vans, could make the intercept.

After that, McMurray migrated into the private sector.  He submitted his resume to Centennial State Archaeological Consulting in Denver, was hired, and, after supervising, a few road construction rescue digs was assigned management of surveys necessary to clear the basin under Carbon Peak southwest of Durango for inundation as part of the Animas-La Plata water conservation project.  I worked with him on that project at Soldier Ridge and wrote my doctoral dissertation interpreting our findings for Arizona University at Tempe.  My role was to repatriate the demolished human remains to the tribe at Acoma for re-burial under the NAGPRA – genetic testing showed that the skeletal fragments were most closely related to the people at that pueblo.  McMurray was never easy to supervise and, so, a couple years later, after a quarrel with one of the directors at Centennial, he was again unemployed.  It was at that time that the State of Utah hired him to operate the archaeological site at Edge of the Pinon.  McMurray told me that this was a nice bureaucratic job, not likely to be controversial, and that he planned to retire out of this position.  Of course, the FBI investigation intervened and there were suicides and prominent people indicted and, although McMurray achieved enough tenure for his small State pension to vest, it was by the skin-of-his-teeth. 

McMurray said that he did his best work when he could smell a site – that is, kick up the dirt under his boots, sense the presence of hidden water, the faint, slightly mint perfume that plants exude when their roots are near an artesian seep, feel the hollows and pockets in the earth by the flex in the soil or the hollow sound of a footfall.  But he was good with photographs also, aerial pictures, and drone footage as well when that was available.  Every couple months, I made the trek up to the Four Corners to show McMurray imagery of sites that were under consideration for field work.  As long as I brought a bottle of reasonably good whiskey (or, if he happened to be not drinking, paid the tab at the best Mexican restaurant in town), McMurray was generous with his time and opinions.  I never learned where he lived – as far as I knew, he had found a cave in one of canyons in the mountains and taken up habitation with the bats and swallows and the mummies with long fox-red hair that you find in places of that kind.  More likely, he lived among the miners and their families in a trailer court beyond the Walmart, near the road to the open pit.  We met at the museum next to the ruins that he administered, generally after hours, when we could stroll alone among the reconstructed walls to the kiva in the ancient plaza, it’s roof re-built for the tourists with a cedar ladder inserted through the smoke-hole so that people could climb into the underground chamber.  The medicinal plants in the scrub on the path to the ruins were all neatly labeled and McMurray’s employees kept the signs describing features in the Great House (it was a Chaco outlier) reasonably free of grafitti.  After walking the empty site, we adjourned to the museum and McMurray showed me new acquisitions and, then, we opened a bottle, drew up some folding chairs used for the docent tours, and warmed ourselves in the brilliant glow of the scarlet macaw sash, the highlight of the collection and, perhaps, one of the greatest Native American artifacts in the world.  Ordinarily, we just peered through the glass at the feathers, over a thousand red plumes arranged in an oblong, knit into an underlying fabric of yucca fiber.  McMurray sipped his whiskey and carefully wiped fingerprints off the rectangular plexi-glass vitrine protecting the artifact with the handkerchief that he kept wrapped around his inhaler.

“People can’t keep their fingers off the glass,” I said.

“Can you blame them?” McMurray replied.

Once, when McMurray was drunk, he jimmied open the case, using a tool that he kept on his keychain.  He didn’t touch the feathers – they were so intensely red that you felt that they would scorch and blister your fingertips.  But he let me smell the thing.  Mostly, the scent was from the squirrel-fur fringe at sash’s top.  It was a faint gamy odor, a musty rodent smell – if the feathers had any scent, I couldn’t detect it.

“Are you going to sniff it?” I asked McMurray.

He patted the inhaler that he kept in his levis.  “Not me.  At least not now.  My asthma’s bothering me.”

His eyes, normally slits against the bright desert sunlight, were open and warm, almost wet with tears.

“Don’t inhale too deeply,” McMurray warned. 

I asked him why.

“Histoplasmosis,” he said. 

Maybe, he was joking, maybe not.  But I understood his point: there is a price paid for consorting with beauty of this kind.  An artifact with this sort of grandeur can destroy you. 

McMurray poured us each another drink.  Then, he sealed up the shawl in its case and we went outside to admire the dark sky full of stars.  The shawl’s colors were so intense that they seared an after-image on your retina.  When I looked up at the Milky Way, the ghost of the shawl hovered over me in the darkness.


5.
The Mexican restaurant was large and the parking lot was full of pick-up trucks.  The room for private functions was below-grade, at the bottom of some steps, and, therefore, called “The Kiva”.  The wait-staff were Navajo girls from the reservation, most of them plump with black eyes and braided black hair.  A couple of fake sand-paintings adorned the walls in the banquet room and, in the corners of the hall, there were red-ocher Coconino-culture jugs, big-bellied pots that I could see were counterfeit – a relief since fakes don’t raise the thorny ethical issues posed by the real stuff.

The guest of honor was nowhere to be seen.  The cocktail hour began and ended.  McMurray’s replacement, the new manager at Edge of the Pinon, was a small brash woman with loud voice.  She told us that the Smithsonian was taking the scarlet macaw feather sash on tour for a year.  “It’ll be in Japan and Berlin, Paris and the British museum,” she said.  She winked at us: “It’s lucky McMurray has retired because I don’t think he would let it out of his sight.”

Someone asked about McMurray.  An anthropologist from Santa Fe who knew him pretty well said that he was sure McMurray would turn up.  “He’s always late,” the new boss at Edge of the Pinons said. 

I suspected McMurray was in the bar upstairs and, so, I excused myself.  My surmise was right: McMurray was sitting in a booth with a cowboy with a tall glass in front of him, discussing the drought and its effect on livestock.

“You’ll be late for your own party,” I said.

McMurray’s crooked lips cracked open wide enough to say: “Fuck them.”

But he excused himself and got up, following me a little unsteadily to the steps leading down to the banquet hall. 

About 20 people were gathered in his honor.  They applauded and whistled through their teeth when McMurray entered the room.

“I didn’t know so many people would be this happy to see me out of the way,” McMurray said.  Everyone laughed and the woman from Edge of the Pinons guided him by his elbow to the head table. 

McMurray ordered a drink to go with his glass of red wine.  The hot sauce on the table was too mild for him.  He whispered something to the waitress and she had a bottle of a orangish syrupy stuff brought to the table.  On the label, a couple of horned devils were hammering a spike through a screaming man’s extended tongue.  McMurray dumped a couple of spoon-fulls of the sauce on his carnitas and smacked his lips.

One by one, people came to him, shook his hand, and said a few words.  Only a half-dozen planned to make the river-raft trip in the morning.  McMurray looked a little disappointed when he learned that the woman who had taken his place at Edge of the Pinon was looking forward to the excursion.

Everyone asked McMurray about the FBI investigation.  Dr. Willoughby, the new manager at the State Park, intervened: “A couple cases are under appeal,” she said.  “We can’t talk about that matter.  Under the advice of our lawyers.”  I heard someone wonder what she meant by using the words “we” and “our.”

McMurray was on good behavior.  He deferred to the new boss at Edge of the Pinon and was discrete.  After one cocktail downstairs, he switched to coffee and Mountain Dew.  “After all, we’re going into the field tomorrow,” he said.  When asked to say a few words, McMurray was funny and self-deprecating: “It’s our business,” he said, “to clean up other people’s trash, things that are broken, busted-up, thrown away.  It may be ancient trash but it’s trash nonetheless.  So we need to exercise a little humility about our sacred craft.” 

He told a few jokes about work in the field, stories about scorpions and rattlesnakes and bad choices when it came to places to defecate.  There was more applause and, then, the group disbanded, people apologizing for the early night but, after all, it was a long way to Durango or Santa Fe or Gallup, for that matter, dark highways under the wheeling constellations with towns few and far between. 

When the tab was closed, Dr. Willoughby excused herself.  Her boyfriend was a real estate developer promoting retirement living in the Utah town under the ridge from Edge of the Pinon.  He was a suave, well-built fellow who looked like a movie cowboy or a Vegas magician.  Holding hands, they climbed the steps from the banquet hall and went outside, crossing the parking lot to the real estate developer’s silver Mercedes-Benz GLA.  McMurray and I went back into the bar.  People dine early in the West and the dim room was almost empty.  A Navajo bar-maid appeared and lit the small candle between us in our booth.  “Romantic, eh?” McMurray said.

“You know,” he said.  “The whole See-Eye stuff began with ghost-fever.”

“See-Eye?”

“Means ‘Confidential Informant’,” McMurray told me. 

“I’ve got ghost-fever,” McMurray added.  “And you do too.”

“Me?”

“From all that work in the Processing kivas, you know.  Up at Soldier Ridge.”

“I don’t even want to think about that,” I replied.

“Of course you don’t.  But you have to... it’s unavoidable.”

He paused.  The tequila shots that McMurray had ordered came to the table courtesy of the chubby Navajo girl.

McMurray told me that the scandal in Utah began when a janitor who worked at the museum approached him one afternoon and said that there was a meth-head who wanted to sell some artifacts looted from Five Mummy-Baby cave.  The janitor said that the meth-addict was desperate and would make a good deal and that, perhaps, the museum would be interested in his goods.  McMurray was intrigued and so he sent a message to the meth-head that he was interested in meeting with him.

The looter lived in a trailer with tires plopped on its roof to keep the winds from disassembling the thing.  It was low-rent trailer court, the sort of place where blue-collar snow-birds from Milwaukee or Toledo gather in the winter months.  Edge of the Pinons is at a pretty high elevation and it snows frequently in the cold season although the sun is bright and, generally, burns off the ice after a day or so.  But it’s not exactly an optimum place to retire and, so, a lot of the old folks in their dilapidated trailers are nearly destitute and each winter a couple of them die, or commit suicide, and so there are always vacancies in the encampment.  The meth-head was a skinny guy who looked like a Walmart Jesus and his little trailer, as is often the case with the dwellings of methamphetamine addicts, was spotlessly clean – tidying things up comes naturally when you’re tweaking.  The man had a couple of bad dogs that McMurray beat down with the ocotillo staff that he had bought for hiking a few years earlier at the Grand Canyon.  It was typical, McMurray said, that the guy hadn’t mentioned the pit-bull mix dogs when he invited him out to his place.

The meth-head’s girlfriend was a Dine woman, very emaciated and coughing continuously in the next room when McMurray transacted business with him.  McMurray wondered if she didn’t have tuberculosis.

“I’ve got to sell these things,” the meth-head told McMurray.  “I’ve been trading for medicine for Sheila,” he added.  Sheila was the sick woman in the next room.  “But the doc is away, in Belize or Costa Rica, I think.”

He set a towel on the table between us and gingerly opened it.

McMurray said to me: “I could see that the stuff was junk.  Artifacts that the guy’s main buyers didn’t want.  He had a couple of obviously fake Clovis points, a scrap of tattered yucca-woven fabric, and some pieces of Mimbres’ style pottery, black on white slip, showing the tail of some four-legged animal and a shard decorated with half a turtle.  The Mimbres artifacts looked real to me, probably heirloom items found at a Ute campsite in the hills.”

“The guy told me that normally he retailed his ‘antiquities’ – that was his word – to the good doctor.  But he needed amoxicillin for his girlfriend and, for various reasons, she couldn’t return to the rez and get the medicine from the clinic at Shiprock.  She needed Xanax as well and the doctor was willing to trade antiquities for that drug as well.  But he wasn’t around and so needed the cash – a hundred bucks, he said for the lot.”

“I was worried about the woman.  When I glanced at her as I came into the trailer, she looked sweaty and was wheezing.  I gave him sixty dollars, mostly for the Mimbres’ shards, and asked him some more questions about the doctor.  The man told me that the physician had a network of buyers, including a prominent local veterinarian, and that they had a storage unit, in fact eight or more units, at St. George full of artifacts.  There was supposed to be another macaw feather garment, a shawl of some kind, in the doctor’s storage facility.  People came up from Las Vegas to buy things from the doc.  He was an important dealer.  Although I’m not supposed to mention this fact, the local sheriff’s department was compromised, is compromised, same sort of thing I saw in Mexico.”

“I asked the meth-head what was wrong with his girlfriend.  He told me that he didn’t know and that medically the whole thing was a mystery, no diagnosis really of any kind, but that she was sure that it was ghost-fever.  ‘What is ghost-fever?’ I asked.  ‘She goes pot-hunting with me,’ he said.  ‘Up in the caves and shit.  We were in Five Mummy-Baby Cave and there’s still bones in there, a lot of bones.”  I told him that there were rats and bats and cave-swallows.  ‘It could be histoplasmosis,’ I said.  ‘She knows what’s got her,’ the meth-head said. ‘The ghosts of the dead people in those caves,’ he told me.  ‘It’s unclean, taboo.  You got to be cleansed if you go into places like that.  There’s a... residue.’  I asked him how you cured ‘ghost sickness.’ He shrugged.  ‘We don’t have gas money,’ he said.  ‘With this cash, I’m gonna get her back on the rez and have a native healer do a sage ceremony or something like that.  She’s gotta be cleansed.’ he told me.”

“I took the artifacts, called the BLM, and they had me talk to the Federal Bureau agents in Salt Lake and Phoenix. I called up the doc and arranged a meet.  They FBI had me wearing a wire.  The doc is a gracious man and we met in his beautiful house up in the red rocks.  He showed me a half-dozen museum-quality artifacts.  We had some more meetings and I got him to name names.  Then, the G-men swooped into town, took people away in handcuffs and raided the storage units at St. George.  You know, the rest.  The doc killed himself with an overdose and the vet’s wife also committed suicide.  There was a huge scandal.  It was in all the papers.”

McMurray said that the feds had the artifacts in Salt Lake City in a warehouse building big enough to house private jets seized as instrumentalities in drug crimes.  “They’re deaccessioning the stuff right now,” he said.  “To private collectors in China and Saudi Arabia.  Worse than the fucking looters.”

“That can’t be true,” I said.

“You can take it to the bank,” McMurray replied,

I asked McMurray what happened to the girl with ghost-fever.  “You know, I never found out,” he said. 
“But you say that both of us have it?”  I asked.

“We do, my brother, we most certainly do.”

6.
The plan was to build an earthen dam, impound the Animas and drown the whole basin.  A Senator’s name was already attached to the lake even though the valley was dry when we began our work.  The project had already endured a decade of litigation over environmental impact and water rights and, now, that the tribes had granted their final clearance, everyone wanted the work to proceed as swiftly as possible.  The contractors were fearful that the complicated web of easements and agreements might collapse, particularly in light of tribal elections on the Ute Mountain reservation before the end of the year.  Centennial was retained to complete a surface survey of archaeological features in the basin, sink a few test pits, and, then, report that the valley could be inundated without risk of destroying anything significant.  During a dig underwritten by a university, the objective is to discover things.  A rescue survey is the opposite – the agencies financing the work hope that nothing much is found. 

The survey was vexed from the start.  We were underfunded and inadequately staffed for the work – the site was relatively large, about 5 hectares (12 acres) and complex.  Centennial’s crew consisted of the project manager, Ivan Sepka, and McMurray, the assistant manager.  I was completing my academic work at the University of Arizona at Tempe and had been loaned to the project as an intern – the school was paying my expenses and a minimum wage stipend.  A surveyor without archaeological experience was hired to map the features at the site – he was a local man laid off from one of the mines in the mountains.  Two high school kids from the Ute Mountain band were also on the payroll as a concession to tribal authorities.  They were earnest young men, related to one of the members of the tribal council – Sepka and McMurray called them the “Tonto twins.” 

Sepka, a Russian emigre, was a Canadian citizen working in Colorado on a green card.  He was a cancer survivor and his disease was thought to be in remission, but he was very weak and unsteady on his feet – although some of his balance problems were related, undoubtedly, to the bottle of vodka that he kept in the vehicle.  His skin was jaundice-yellow and his big ears standing apart from his skull were withered and transparent – the bright sun shone through them so that his face was bracketed by bright red membranes when he ventured out of the company Suburban to survey our work, an infrequent occurrence.  Sepka told everyone who would listen to him that he was dying.  McMurray drank with him at night at the motel, but kept dry during the day. 

The basin was only a few miles south of Durango, but the town catered to tourists and was expensive with lots of fern bars and upscale sandwich places and, even, a Swiss fondue restaurant for the ski business during the winter – the mountains north of Durango were high and the ski resorts were open from October until the first of May.  Our per diem was paltry and so we set up operations at an old motor-court on the county highway near the gravel road that led over a high wooded ridge and, then, down into the basin.  As if ashamed of itself, the motor-court was pushed back from the asphalt road, occupying a triangular tract where two dirt lanes maintained by the tribe intersected at an oblique angle.  The place consisted of about fifteen small stucco cottages, each one-room with a toilet, tightly packed together with spaces between the shacks just wide enough to park a car.  Our Suburban was too big to fit in the jigsaw of lanes separating the cottages and, so, we parked it along the front of the road house where the office was located.  A long narrow bar and grill called Poppie Cocks displayed a fizzing neon sign to the cars passing on the black-top a 150 meters away – the turn-off for the place crossed a dry stream bed lined with aspens and, then, angled uphill past the place’s septic field and propane tank. A stench hung in the air along the drive-way, but I couldn’t tell if it was sewage or the sulphur in the propane gas leaking out of the old torpedo shaped cylinder.  The eccentric location of Poppie Cocks and its motor-court was due to a railroad-siding behind the cottages – the amenities served not only the traveling public on the highway but rail traffic.  Some tracks overgrown with golden-rod ran along the back boundary of the property, next to dismal, dangerous-looking playground with a couple wooden picnic tables, a swing-set, the razor of a slide, and a merry-go-round. 

No one was around the place during the day.  Mid-afternoon, gaunt women with small children sometimes emerged from the cottages.  The women all knew one another and they ate at Poppie Cocks gathered at one big table in a lean-to built up against the narrow room with the pool tables and the arcade games.  At night, the place was rowdy.  The bar seemed to be crowded and the kitchen was busy – in good weather most of the food was grilled outside on a patio fringed with Christmas tree lights.  A part of the premises inside was caged off with chicken wire – you could buy pornographic magazines and DVDs stored in that cage.  Sometimes, cowboys got into brawls in the narrow dirt paths between the cottages and it wasn’t uncommon to hear the boom of gunshots after midnight.  And the track wasn’t completely abandoned – in fact, on occasion a train of ore cars would rumble up along the siding and stop with metal shrieking against metal and, then, there would be more disturbances, a sort of protracted rioting that might last until dawn.  It didn’t take us long to figure out the nature of the place and this was problematic – we were working long hours, sunrise to sunset in the basin, and it was sometimes hard to sleep at night.  A couple of times, Sepka stumbled into one of the cowboys or other hoodlums that frequented the place after dark and got beat up, not too severely, more of an indignity than injury, and he was hot-tempered and, like everyone in Colorado, kept a hand-gun in the Suburban.  Fortunately, he was too drunk to find the gun when he pulled himself up out of the mud and searched for the Suburban – in fact, he usually couldn’t remember where the Suburban was parked.  Twice, McMurray and I had to retrieve him from the gravel bed of the creek where he was lying face-down and helpless on the cool, round stones. 

We met each morning in the basin.  The Tonto Twins came from some place on the other side of Carbon Mountain, driving an ancient jeep on a hillside track that was just barely visible among the fir and Utah junipers.  The surveyor had a little Honda and commuted from Durango – I think his wife worked as a special needs paraprofessional at the local school.  Sepka growled out orders that McMurray interpreted for us.  It was pretty clear that Sepka didn’t want to discover anything of significance, least of all any human remains.  But the valley was known to have been inhabited during the Pueblo I period, that is about 600 to 900 AD.  On one side of the basin, two stony ridges ran parallel to one another above a gulch where stone was exposed and where rattlesnakes sometimes sunbathed.  A dozen or so pit-houses, spaced irregularly on terraces on the ridge slopes were, more or less, obvious – circular discolorations in the earth that extruded pale flakes of potsherd.  On the opposite side of the gulch, another half-dozen sites were apparent on a level ledge on the ridge.  Several well-worn paths, still visible as furrows in the ravine slopes, connected the two locations.  A hundred meters away another terrace showed signs of agriculture, probably corn and squash – in fact, we found several shapely seed jars, teardrop-shaped and miraculously intact in the fill comprising the garden.  (The people had carried earth in baskets up from a river-bottom a quarter mile away to make the level area protected by the brow of the hill.)  The Utes knew about the place but avoided it because of its bad medicine.  The Tonto Twins had been immunized against the ghosts in the valley by several elaborate rituals conducted before they were authorized to work with us.  Pot hunters had chopped several unseemly trenches among the pit house domiciles and the edges of those holes were also fanged with white broken shards.  There was no shade except the flanks of the low stony ridges at the site and, so, it became our custom to work one-side of the ravine in the morning, when the shadow fell there, and the other side in the afternoon when the sun’s movement had cast shade on that part of the village. Mid-day, the place was brutally hot and dusty, suffocating in the pits, and the sun made the stones hiss and hum as if they were alive, a kind of deadly energy radiating up from the ground.  We paid the Tonto Twins to bring cartons of lemonade, four or five a day, that had been frozen solid the night before.  Sepka sat in the Suburban, drowsing – sometimes, he got out to urinate, but otherwise was pretty much immobile, baking in the car with all the doors open. 

We did a surface survey first.  Sepka wanted to focus the survey on the higher slopes of Carbon Mountain, about a mile away from the sites on the parallel ridges.  His motivation was obvious – he didn’t want us to find anything.  The hillsides were wooded and cool and there were many mule deer in the dappled shade so that it was pleasant to walk there – the trees were well-spaced and there wasn’t much underbrush because of the arid conditions.  Of course, we didn’t find anything except for a 19th century log cabin, rotted into piles of worm-bored sawdust.  For a week, we dutifully marched through the woods.  McMurray said that it was ridiculous – we were surveying hillsides above the projected level of the lake.  Water wouldn’t even cover these areas.  Below us, earthmovers and dump trucks were raising a huge grey rampart of packed dirt that was gradually sealing off the valley.  The silver sluice of the stream ran between piles of freshly heaped earth.  The Tonto Twins were bemused.  They said that Indians didn’t live on high mountain slopes were the terrain was mostly vertical, subject to heavy snow and avalanche, and far from the water at the bottom of the valley.  “Does he think our ancestors were idiots?” they complained.

After about a week of fruitless surface survey on Carbon Mountain, McMurray told Sepka that we had to earn our fees by studying the pit-house village, split by the stony ravine on the other side of the basin.  Sepka was angry and shouted at McMurray and his face with its wide high cheekbones turned blazing red.  “You’re trying to kill me,” Sepka cried.  McMurray told him that if he wanted to sulk about it, he could stay at the motor-court during the day and no one would be the wiser.  Sepka kept to his cottage for a few days, but it was too boring for him and, so, reluctantly, he joined us in the field again. 

The pit house village seemed to be divided into two moieties, split by the rocky ravine.  The pit houses were characteristic for Pueblo I, round excavations dug down about four meters and, then, roofed with thatch assembled on tilted superstructure of posts.  There were several levels of pit-houses showing that the site had been occupied for more than 300 years.  We found middens full of smashed crockery and lithic tools as well as rabbit and mule-deer bones.   McMurray’s work was intuitive and fabulously precise.  When we bored a hole, we found cultural material.  The liaison with the earthmoving contractors pestered us daily and said that we needed to complete the survey as swiftly as possible.  McMurray grinned at the man and said that we had a contract as well and had to perform the terms of our work or we would be sued.  “We can all get along in this valley,” McMurray said.  He invited the contractor to join us at Poppie Cocks for beverages and steak.  The contractors were local.  “Are you kidding?” they said.  One of the men spit some tobacco juice on the ground.  “The wife would kill me,” he said.  McMurray made a wry face: “We wondered about the friendly housekeeping staff.”  “Shit,” the contractor said, grinning at McMurray.  Sepka stayed out of it.

During our third week, when the summer was really heating up, McMurray found and surveyed a couple of large round indentations dug down into the ridge side.  He said that these were ritual sites, once domed, with bigger wooden vigas that could be core-sampled to establish dates.  The ritual buildings were much cleaner, had been swept repeatedly, and didn’t show the scatter of domestic debris that we found in the pit-house dwellings.  McMurray sensed a palisade and found it around the edge of the village on south side of the ravine.  The palisade was easy enough to locate once you knew it was present.  Oddly enough, the post-holes for the stockade ran through parts of the ravine, until the project had been abandoned to the impenetrable rock outcroppings.  “One side of the village built a wall between it and the other people across the ravine – at least, they tried to...” McMurray said.

That night, we went into town and had Mexican food at a sit-down restaurant.  The place was full of tourists wearing shirts and tee-shirts that smelled of sunscreen.   McMurray told us: “We’re gonna find something interesting tomorrow.”  Sepka shook his head angrily.  “Better not,” he said.  He was too far gone to order and so he just ate chips with salsa.

The next morning, McMurray crossed the ravine with the Tonto Twins and walked through the place where we knew that there were a half-dozen pithouses.  He pounded in a couple of stakes, took a photos, and, then, squatted down, sniffing at the earth like a dog.  The boys stood next to him, awaiting his orders.  McMurray sent me a text-message.  “Smells funky,” he texted.  An hour later, he called me on my cell-phone and told me to come across the ravine to where he was digging.  “Should I tell Sepka?”  “No,” McMurray said, “let him sleep.”

I hustled along the footpath through the ravine with the surveyor behind me scrambling up and down the slopes slippery with gravel.  On the terrace, McMurray had sliced a square-cut trench about a meter deep.  The trench passed through strata darkened with black charcoal and cinders. At the deepest part of the hole, I could see a yellow fragment about the size of my thumb.  “Look at that,” McMurray said.  “What is it?”  McMurray shaded his eyes and looked at me.  “Part of someone’s cranium,” he said.

“A burial?” I asked.

“Not a burial,” McMurray replied.

“How you know?”

“I just know,” he said. 

“I better get Sepka,” I told him.

“No, let him sleep,” he said.  “We have human remains.  Now, let the wild rumpus begin.”

McMurray sent one of the Tonto Twins to the Suburban to get hand-trowels, some brushes of varying sizes, and a couple of scale-markers. 

“We have to slow down,” McMurray said.

“This will kill Ivan,” I said.

“So be it,” McMurray replied.

We worked for three hours more or less silently.  The fill in the pit was dense with skeletal fragments, most of them the size of my fingernails.  As the sun was setting, we uncovered a granite metate and mano.  The cradle of the metate was littered with human teeth.

Sepka staggered over to the trench.  He had fallen in the gloomy ravine and slashed open the palm of his hand.  He smelled strongly of booze.  “What the fuck is going on?” he asked.  “Why aren’t we back at the motel.”

“Look,” McMurray commanded.

The pit was flecked everywhere with bone fragments.

“What is it?”

“Processed human remains, extremely processed,” McMurray said.

The Tonto Twins were kneeling next to the pit, staring at the scatter of bone shards.  They looked a little sick.

“Oh my god,” Sepka said.  “Oh my god.”

7.
The river-float was supposed to begin at 9:30 and, although I was hungover, I reached the landing on time.  Dr. Willoughby was already there, stylishly attired for the field, a little like a female Indiana Jones with an Australian bush-ranger hat tipped over her brow.  There was a small café next to the portapotty toilets and she was sitting at the counter sipping coffee. Her boyfriend was down at the concrete boat-launch apron skipping stones across the surface of the San Juan river.  Dr. Tabaaha arrived a few minutes later, driving a Navajo Nation jeep bearing a Monument Valley landscape in silhouette on his license plate.  He had missed the dinner due to some tribal function but had driven up early from Window Rock.  “Where is the guest of honor?” Dr. Tabaaha asked me.  “Late,” I said.  “He’s always late,” Dr. Tabaaha replied.

Professor Gordon (University of Santa Fe) and his husband, Juan, came a little later.  True to form, McMurray didn’t show up until after 10:30.  A blood vessel had burst in his right eye so that McMurray had a picturesquely gory visage, but he seemed jovial and, even, was apologetic about being late.  The river-guide was a scrawny young woman named Cassandra.  She distributed orange life-jackets and assembled us on the brink of the river where the concrete apron dipped into the stream so that she could recite in a singsong voice a memorized speech about river-raft safety.  The sun was high overhead and the water reflected the light in a hot, bright glare.  Downstream, buttes eroded into cathedral shapes rose pink and green above sloping buttresses that dropped down to sheer, fluted cliffs overhanging the river.  On the buttresses, pour-offs from butte escarpments had traced alluvial fans intricate with fallen boulders the size of locomotives and eroded ravines studded with glittering quartz crystals.  Cassie put on her sunglasses after her speech, shook hands with each of us solemnly as if to commemorate some kind of pact, and, then, handed-out oars.  We pushed off in two rafts.  Cassie was in the lead inflatable sharing the raft with McMurray and Dr. Tabaaha.  Gordon, who was experienced navigating the upper Rio Grande, piloted the second raft where the rest of us were located.  The rafts were roomy, built for eight, and so we could stretch out on the soft, pillowy rubber and watch the sky slip by, perforated now and then by a rock pinnacle or a looming fissured cliff.  The river smelled like ice and the water was bottle-green and shockingly cold.  The cooler with the steaks and salads for the cook-out was in the lead raft.  Cases of Corona and Coors light were there as well.  The beer didn’t have to be kept cold.  When we reached the river side campsite, the plan was to immerse the cans in the cold water. 

The river ran swift, flashing white over boulders where cliffs narrowed the stream.  I was glad that there would be trucks waiting down-river at the end of the excursion, an effortless way to return to the landing from which we had embarked.  The banks of the river were screened by cottonwood and coyote willow, a linear green band rippling in the breeze above the eddying water.  Beyond the veil of leaves and branches, layers of rock were tilted up at 45 degree angles ending abruptly in red stone cones.  In other places, side canyons flying banners of waterfall sprayed down over the jagged cliffs.  We stopped at noon where a rust-red sand-bank made a causeway from the lagoon up toward a gorge in the bluff tangled with a jungle of tamarisk.  The sand-flies were bad in that place, perhaps, because of the thicket embedded in the cliffside crevasse and, so, after eating sandwiches and opening some beer, we followed the river deeper into the country. Cliffs rose over the water, grey and sagging so that big stones had fallen among the trees and crushed some of them.  McMurray pulled us to the side of the river and we hiked a quarter-mile, wading several shallow channels to a rock shelter hollowed out in the hillside.  Some field-stone granaries were built in the corner of the shelter and a pale sandstone face was painted with ghostly figures bearing spear throwers.  “Atlatls,” McMurray said gesturing at the rock.  Above the figures, a frieze of quadrupeds, either lizards or small mammals crawled across the stone, sketched head to tail.  A hand print, missing a little finger, was blown onto the rock surface, outlined in a pale red pigment. 

We went back to the rafts and rode the river another couple miles, sweeping around huge bends constricted by towering rock faces.  Again, McMurray gestured us aside.  We scrambled up a mud bank and McMurray parted green fronds as if they were curtain and there was another painted rock, this showing men on horseback.  “It’s historic,” McMurray said.  “Either Navajo Apache or Mountain Ute.”  Someone had left a bright knotted tangle of tobacco offerings in an old, twisted tree.  A series of improbably tiny toeholds chipped in the rock face led upward to a small cliff-dwelling hanging like a balcony over the river.  Dr. Tabaaha had binoculars and we passed them around.  The little white-stone structure had two windows open toward us like eyes.

At the next bend in the river, a narrow lane of green zigzagged up the canyon wall.  The sandy terrace below the bluff was soggy near the river but dry enough for campfires higher on the slope and we could see that others had built fires here before, rings of ash and soot with stones rolled up around the hearths to make places to sit.  McMurray said that the site was above us on a great skirt of buttress beneath a high, striated escarpment.

“It will only take twenty minutes or so, although there’s some vertical gain,” he said.  Gordon’s husband said that he had climbed up to the ruins a year before and that he was content to remain on beach-like delta pushed out into the river.  Cassandra pulled the rafts ashore with Dr. Willoughby splashing in the shallows as she pushed on the inflatable boats.  With the rafts secured, Cassandra sprawled across one of them, lighting a cigarette.  “Be careful,” Gordon’s husband said.  “You don’t want to burn a hole in our ride.”   Cassandra shrugged: “I’m always careful,” she said.  Dr. Willoughby’s boyfriend said that he would remain with the others and keep them company.  “I can pitch some tents,” he said.

The slit in the canyon wall was buzzing with insects and thorny.  A narrow path corkscrewed into the fissure in the bluff.  After scrambling through the wet vegetation, we came to a slot canyon, a dusty defile mostly the width of a pickup truck.  In places, the crevasse narrowed so that you had to climb sideways and couldn’t put two feet next to one another in the deep slanting groove in the rock.  The squeezes were followed by more open places, amphitheaters of rock in which our voices rang against the bowl-shaped hollow.  The last hundred meters were stepped like a stone ladder tilted up to a rim smoothed by a thousand years of flash floods.  Above the rim, a field of chaparral green with sagebrush and yellow-capped Mormon tea sloped toward a big conical hill fortified on the top with a low, broken wall.  Several enormous boulders calved off the cliffs overhead created a sort of natural gate, a thoroughfare ascending between the rockfall toward the hill and the crude rock wall on its crest.

Grey and bone-white pottery sherds were visible where ravines had sliced open the hill. 

McMurray led us half the way up the steep slope.  Dr. Willoughby said: “You told us there was a Chaco great-house here.  I don’t see it.”

“You’re standing on it,” McMurray said, gesturing at the tumulus that we were climbing.  From our vantage, I could look down and see some humped berms at the foot of the hill and ranks of cut stone peeping through the Mormon Tea and sage. 

Dr. Willoughby blinked her eyes and said that the climb had made her thirsty.  I knew that McMurray couldn’t offer her his canteen because it was probably full of vodka and lemonade.  She drank from my water bottle.  Some dragonflies hummed through the air. 

“Maybe, three stories with a tower,” McMurray said.  “You can see the D-shaped enclosure.” 

Dr. Tabaaha said: “The desert is taking it back.  It’s hard to see.”

We scrambled the rest of the way up to the ring of rocks atop the mound.  From that place, we could see over the buttress and down to the tongue of mud and sand thrust into the river where Dr. Willoughby’s boyfriend was working to set up a tent.

McMurray pointed to the base of the hill and we slipped and slid down to the level terrace and the shelter of the colossal boulders forming an entrance-gate to the site. 

“Imagine coming upon this place a thousand years ago,” McMurray said. 

Dr. Willoughby shouted her boyfriend’s name and waved.  The air overhead crackled with cave-swallows bursting from jar-sized pits in the rock face angling up over the Great House mound.  The man’s sunglasses caught the sun and glinted as he turned to look up at us.  The swallows spun tight circles in the air.

“It’s called ‘Pigeon House’ for a reason,” McMurray said, shading his eyes to look up at the birds.

The air between the great boulders was heavy and still.  I felt the sudden rush of depression and vague fear that pervades places like this, a sort of nameless dull energy impounded here and unable to disperse.  One of the boulders was chipped and a wall-size flake of rock had fallen into the dust.  The smooth beige panel of stone created where the rock split was painted with spirit-creatures with knobby heads sprouting ocher-colored tendrils and antennae.  The figures had no feet and only vestigial arms like flippers.  Their torsos were casket-shaped rectangles the color of dried blood floating on the face of the rock.  I felt a crawling sensation on the back of my neck and shoulders, the feeling that I was being watched and, when I turned from panel marked with the big figures, I saw other spirits, also the color of ox-blood, floating on a big shield-shaped face of rock on the other boulder. 

“Fremont,” McMurray said, gesturing toward the paintings on the big boulder.

Dr. Willoughby was about to say something, but McMurray held up his hand to show that she should be silent.  He stood very still, listening, head cocked back.  The wings of the bird circling overhead creaked a little like sails on a boat under wind.  The river 150 meters below sighed softly, a faint hiss where the current was detaching sand from its banks, one speck at a time. 

McMurray walked over to one of the waist-high berms, surveyed the sage and Mormon tea and flowering greasewood.  He stooped to inspect the green starburst of a yucca plant.  A thistle grew hip-high in a sandy circle where the surface of the hill seemed slightly discolored.  McMurray uprooted the thistle and sniffed its roots and, then, removing a trowel from his backpack, cut down into the earth from which he had pulled the plant.  He dug for a few moments.  Dr. Tabaaha lit a cigarette. 

“Here,” McMurray said.  There was the sudden fizzy feeling of something found in the earth, something uncovered, the faint detonation of fireworks somewhere near your breast bone, a sudden change and flicker in the light.

At first, it was hard to see.  But McMurray had pierced down to a tangle of woven yucca fiber about the size of a postage stamp.  A little below and to the side of the fiber was a jagged tooth next to the quill of a feather.  McMurray gently swept up the yucca strands with the tooth and quill. 

“Medicine pouch,” McMurray said.  “That’s probably a shark tooth.” 

“A shark tooth?”  Dr. Willoughby said.

“Trade item,” Gordon replied.

“Here’s the real prize,” McMurray said.  He scraped in the hole a little with the trowel and lifted a small black stone.  He spit on the stone and knocked the dirt off it.  The rock was pitted as if corroded by the fires of outer space.  “It’s an iron meteorite,” McMurray explained.  He offered the stone to Dr.Tabaaha who declined to accept it, turning his palm down.  “You should feel the weight,” McMurray said.  Dr. Willoughby took the stone when McMurray presented it to her.

“Holy shit,” she said.

McMurray dug a little deeper until a cream-colored rounded surface appeared.

“Here’s the owner of these goodies,” McMurray said.  “Cranium.  It’s a flex burial.  The dude is on his side in this hole.  He’s a holy man or, maybe, a woman.  Someone buried in this place of power.  I’m guessing it’s a thousand years old.”

Dr. Willoughby stooped to examine the bone.

“How did you know?” she asked. 

“I can smell it,” McMurray said, “the disturbance of the earth, I don’t know– it’s just intuitive.”

“You must have seeded this place,” she said.

“Oh come now, Joyce,” McMurray replied using her first name.  She shrugged.

McMurray put the yucca fiber, the shark tooth and quill as well as the little iron pebble back in the ground, carefully setting the artifacts on the yellow bone.  Dr. Tabaaha took out another cigarette, shredded it, and scattered a little tobacco in the hole.  Then, McMurray covered the bone and pouch contents with a couple inches of dirt.  The dirt was very dry and light as pollen. McMurray removed a beer can from his back pack, passed it around until there was nothing left and, then, crushed the aluminum under his boot.  He slid the flattened can into the hole and pushed another eight inches of soil over it.  “That way people will know that the grave’s been opened and when,” McMurray said.

The birds overhead dived down into the jar-sized cubbyholes on the cliff face and it was very still.  The warm beer, even a couple sips, had gone to my head and I felt a little unsteady.  We climbed down to the river without saying much.  McMurray told us that he was tired.  “I’m an old man,” he said.  He took a dirty shirt out of his backpack, made a pillow, and fell asleep on the sandy river bank.

8.
After the steaks were grilled and eaten, we pumped up the fire with the last of the wood, roasted some marshmallows and finished off the beer.  The stars shown through some high wisps of cloud still glowing in the sunset’s ionosphere.  Then, the Milky Way appeared overhead like a great melting drift of snow and constellations were like bright bludgeons that beat down on the cliffs and buttes. 

Dr. Tabaaha asked if someone could ferry him across to the other bank of the river.  “Are you kidding?” Cassandra said.  “In the dark, with this current – you’d end up a mile downstream.” 

“This is a little too close, you know,” he said.  “The enemies of my ancestors.  You see, they don’t like to cross running water.  It’s just safer over there.”  He pointed to the shadowy stand of Russian Olives lining the opposite bank.

“You’ll have to be okay here,” Cassandra told him.  Dr. Tabaaha plucked an ember from the bonfire and lit a cigarette.

Gordon’s husband brought out a guitar and sang a couple of Dylan songs.  McMurray had a beautiful tenor.  He sang an old song about the wreck of the Titanic and, then, “Danny Boy.” 

Dr. Willoughby asked McMurray how he had found the burial in the shadow of the Great House.  “I’m still trying to figure that out,” she said.

“It’s a matter of proper orientation,” McMurray said.  “You have to think like the ancient people thought.  You have to see the landscape with their eyes.”

“No one can do that,” Dr. Willoughby said.

“It’s just a veneer,” McMurray said.  “They felt things.  We think.  We cover it all up with thought.”

“Sicklied o’er by the pale cast of thought,” I said.

“Hamlet?” Gordon’s husband asked.  I nodded.

A couple of bottles were going around.

“It’s like archaeo-astronomy,” McMurray said.  “I think it’s pretty much bullshit, you know, tracing alignments and such.  The moment you start thinking in terms of how the sun and the moon and the stars are supposed to act, how they cross certain imaginary lines, azimuths and so on – you see, thinking in those terms will get you nowhere.  We know the formulas and the laws and we know that heavenly bodies will be obedient to them, will perform on our command.  But that’s not the ancient orientation.  They don’t see the sun as a fiery object a billion miles away but as a great being draped in radiance that visits us and touches certain places in the landscape and those places, then, have significance.  Maybe, they’re not holy exactly, but somehow...I don’t know...brighter perhaps,  You have to be humble and can’t imagine the moon and sun as under our rule, but rather more powerful than us...”

“That’s reasonable,” Dr. Willoughby said.  “But it doesn’t explain how you found that burial.  It’s some kind of a magic trick, some kind of parlor game pulled off to impress us...”

“Why would I want to impress you?” McMurray said.

“You seeded it up there,” Dr. Willoughby said.

“You just don’t understand,” McMurray answered. 

Dr. Willoughby’s boyfriend looked a little indignant.  He picked up a flat stone and gripped it in his fist.

“We should sort of cool it down,” he said.

“We debate these kinds of things all the time, you know, Joyce and me...” McMurray said.

“Tell me how you do that parlor trick?”  Dr. Willoughby asked.

“How do you know I haven’t been here before.”

“Exactly,” she said.  “You seeded the place and, then, dug out what you planted up there.”

“Don’t be a bitch about this,” McMurray replied.

The real estate developer squeezed the rock hard in his hand.  “Hey, come on –“ he said.

“No, no,” McMurray said.  “I meant I’ve been here before, a thousand years ago.  I’ve stood on the hillside when there were people in the Great House.  I helped bury that old dude.  I smelled him decomposing.  I brushed the flies off his corpse.” 

“You don’t believe that,” Gordon said. 

“Time doesn’t exist,” McMurray said.  “All time is right here now.”

“Time is the only thing that exists,” Dr. Willoughby said.

“That’s the orientation of a professional archaeologist,” McMurray said.  “You need to establish chronologies, soil stratification, ceramic sequences.  But it’s all make-believe – there’s no such thing as time.  Right now, the Great House is full of people and, then, four-hundred years later, I’m burying that shaman in the shadow of the ruins, and it’s all the same, the sky is still full of stars and the swallows are still pouring out of the rock and down here we’re still bullshitting.”

“I know people who believe what you say,” Gordan’s husband spoke up.

“Absolutely,” Gordon said.

“You don’t have the proper orientation,” McMurray said.  “You weren’t raised in the faith.  Jesus said: Before Abraham, I was.  There’s no time.  You can look it up in the Gospel of John.”

“People believe what they want to believe,” Dr. Tabaaha said.  “Maybe, it’s a blessing to view things in that light.” 

“A blessing and a curse,” McMurray answered. 

“Why a curse?” Gordon asked.

I was sitting at McMurray’s right hand.  He turned to me and I saw the orange flames flickering in his glasses. 

“Well, you were with me up at Soldier Ridge,” McMurray said to me.

Coyotes sang in the darkness.  Maybe they had always been singing and always would be.

“A curse,” McMurray said, “because it’s not in the past.  Not pushed away somewhere under the ground.  It’s all happening right now, it’s never not happening.  Do you see what I mean?

I said: “The slaughter on Soldier Ridge?”

“Exactly,” McMurray replied.  “You remember that pit house, those two pit houses.  They were big and there was a bench in one of them around the wall and, at first, we thought it was a kiva – the broad, wide pit as big as most Pueblo I kivas.  Remember the inhumation –“

“Yes,” I said.  “The burial on the bench.”

“A later burial,” McMurray said.  “But respectful enough.  But, then, down at the level of the floor, the bones, every one of them smashed into bits, what did we estimate? – 15,000 fragments from eleven skeletons in that hole.

“25,000 splinters in the other pit-house, maybe 21 people,” I said.

“They took the bodies and cut them into pieces and, then, cut the pieces into pieces and, then, used metate stones for grinding corn to smash the pieces into powder.  You can imagine: the floors of those pits had to be knee-deep in tissue, blood, internal organs beat into slimy pulp, scalps floating on the gore and eyeballs, flecks of skin, the tips of fingers, joints like greasy, wet hinges.  And we were down there, in the dust that was really human dust – I mean there’s no way around it, human dust and inhaling it in that heat so that you nearly couldn’t breathe, mid-afternoon, it was like you were suffocating in those holes and we had to label everything and take photographs and sift through the broken bones, none of them larger than the fingernail on my pinky.  I’m telling you that it does something to you.  Documenting that much carnage.  Day after day.”

“It was weeks,” I said.  “Scraping up all those bones and putting them in plastic baggies.”

“You see, by my way of reckoning, the massacre never stopped.  It’s still going on.  The stone axes are still hacking people apart, and the blades are still cutting the meat from the bones, and the metates and manos are still grinding and grinding and grinding.”

McMurray said that he had to take a leak.  He got off and wandered away in the darkness.  The coyotes called to one another and some bats flew on lopsided wings through the night.  When he came back to the fire, he was staggering and almost pitched face-first into the blaze.

“What happened to the remains?”  Dr. Tabaaha asked me.

“DNA showed that the dead people were closest to the folks at Acoma,” I said.  “The bones were put in a casket and blessed and there was a priest on hand at the pueblo and they buried it all up there, on the mesa top in the churchyard.”

“You see, it makes you feel very, very lonely,” McMurray said.  “It’s that old feeling that you don’t fit into the world because of what you’ve done or what you want to do or because of what you’ve seen.  We recovered a half-dozen feet that weren’t completely pulverized, skeletal remains that were disarticulated, but you could piece them together.  The ankle bones were all smashed to pieces pre-mortem and the bottoms of the feet had been flayed, you could see the butcher marks, also pre-mortem, and, then, someone used a stone to beat the raw soles of those feet until the bones were all flaking.”

Dr. Willoughby groaned slightly: “You don’t need to regale us with the details.”

The Real Estate developer asked: “Why would they do that?”

“Hobbling,” McMurray said.  “You can’t run away if your ankles are broken and the soles of your feet scalped.  You have to just lay there and...”

“And wait your turn,” I said.  “It gives me nightmares.”

“But I mean why would they have done that?” the Real Estate developer asked again.

“You’d have to ask that question in Rwanda or Kosovo,” McMurray said.

“Witches,” Dr. Tabaaha said.  “They hanged witches in Salem.  Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

“You know how the old Great Houses were bleached, how they mixed lime and calcite into the adobe to make a brilliantly white facade?” McMurray asked.

Gordon nodded his head: “I’ve heard of that.”

“I think they were making some kind of human paste, some sort of pigment out of the bodies to use to paint the outer walls of their pit houses.”

“I try not to think about it,” I said.  “It gives me nightmares.  That was a hard, hard summer for me.  All those smashed up bodies.”

“It’s still underway: extreme processing,” McMurray said.  He took another deep pull on the bottle.  By this time, he was the only one still drinking.

Cassandra stood up.  She was wearing a hooded sweat shirt.  The wind was sweeping over the ice-cold expanse of the river and it was now chilly.  She put out her cigarette.

“To bed,” she said.  “Early day tomorrow to get to the landing down-river.”  I saw that she was holding a paperback copy of Jane Austen’s Persuasion in her hand.  “Don’t stay up too late telling each other ghost stories,” she said.

“That whole experience, all that carnage up on Soldier Ridge,” McMurray said.  “It’s changed my life.  It’s altered me.”

“PTSD?” Gordon’s husband said.

“I don’t know,” McMurray replied.  “You see I’ve personalized it.  There’s been times in my life when I think it could have happened to me.”

“What do you mean?”  Dr. Willoughby said.

“Up in Utah.  In that goddamned town,” McMurray said.  “People threatened me.  I was afraid in the grocery store, afraid in fast food places and restaurants up town.  It was like there was a lynch mob forming.  Threats of death.  I could feel that if the townspeople got me alone somewhere, they’d tear me limb from limb, rip out my eyes and crush my balls and cut me to pieces.”

“Well, you got their ob-gyn and the town vet in trouble.  Two suicides and others sent to prison,” Dr. Willoughby said.

“I had to protect the artifacts,” McMurray said.  “There’s nothing worse than a fucking, goddamned looter and, I’ll tell you, most so-called archaeologists are just looters themselves.”

“Please,” Dr. Willoughby’s boyfriend begged.,

“I’m not blaming you,” Dr. Willoughby said.  “But you knew there’d be consequences.”

“Grind my fuckin’ bones to make their bread,” McMurray said stuttering a little on “bones” and “b-b-b-bread.” 

“So you’re retiring from the biz at the right time,” she said.

“I’m retiring at a convenient time,” McMurray replied.  “You see, you can afford to b-b-be b-b-b-blithe about it.  But you know, I’ve always known that I’m different.  I’ve always been different from others.”

“I don’t understand,” Gordon’s husband said.

“You wouldn’t,” McMurray replied.

It was silent for a moment.

“The lynch mob is always just a few steps behind me,” McMurray said.  “If I fell into their clutches, they’d peel back the skin on the soles of my feet and, then, cut me into little pieces.” 

“That’s pretty dramatic,” Dr. Willoughby said.

“I’ve been in that pit,” McMurray said.  “And I’m different from others.”   

Gordon asked McMurray how he intended to spend his retirement.  McMurray mentioned the NFL and college basketball on TV, mentioning something about sports gambling in Vegas.  Dr. Willoughby told us about her daughter who was in High School, but living with her father in Phoenix.  Dr. Tabaaha spoke about his sons who played for the basketball team in Window Rock.  McMurray was quiet but kept drinking. 

9.
McMurray and I shared a tent.  The booze on his breath made me dizzy.  Sometimes, he snored, a pathetic little half-strangled sob at the end of each deep breath.  Several times, he got up and went outside – to urinate in the river, I supposed. 

Once, I looked outside and saw the prism-shaped tent that Cassandra had pitched glowing in the dark.  She must have still been reading because the lantern inside her tent made the canvas shine like an emerald. 

I must have fallen asleep.  Then, I heard McMurray crying. 

“Are you okay?”

“I’m back in that pit,” McMurray gasped.  “The ghosts are here.  I can’t breathe.”

His voice was strange and hoarse.  It was as if something evil were speaking from within him.

“The ghosts are on my chest and squeezing me.  They’re squeezing the life out of me.”

I asked him if he had his inhaler.  “There was a lot of pollen up on the hill,” I said.  “The desert is in flower.”

“Had the inhaler in my pocket,” McMurray said.  “But it must have dropped out in the sand.  Can’t find it.  Can’t find it anywhere.”

I asked him if he wanted me to look for the inhaler. 

“No, no,” he said.  “Don’t leave me alone.  It’s killing me.”

“What is it?”

“I keep seeing those bodies all cut-up like jigsaw puzzles,” McMurray said.  Then, he began to sob.  His breath rasped in his throat and it was painful for me to hear.

McMurray thrashed himself upright.  He writhed, making a big shapeless heap near the tent-flap.  Then, I heard the zip and he dived face forward out of the tent.  I followed him outside.

It was now very cold and the wind was roaring in the canyons and the river was ink so black that it couldn’t reflect the lurid stars in the sky. 

McMurray fought to his feet and cried out that he was suffocating.  “I can’t breathe,” he said.  He staggered toward the river and, then, plunged into the water.  The current rotated him, pulling him in a tight circle, and I saw his wet face framed by a black wave. 

I stepped into the river, but it was deeper than I expected and I almost lost my footing.  The icy water yanked at my feet, trying to tackle me the way a football player pulls down an adversary.  I spun around, nearly fell, and, then, climbed onto the cold sand.  My feet were numb.

There was no trace of McMurray in the river.


10.
Everyone gathered by the rafts.  Cassandra pointed her flashlight at the black water.  The beam fell apart over the ebony flood veined with white foam.  She lit her lantern and we stood in that circle of light.

“We have to take a raft and look for him,” Gordon said.

“I’m not taking a raft out in the darkness,” Cassandra said.  “We’ll just have another couple of you drowned before the sun comes up.”

“But he was swept away,” I said.

“The man was completely drunk,” Cassandra said.  “I’m not gonna risk other lives in the dark like this.”

Dr. Willoughby spoke in an angry voice: “The man was finished.  You heard him last night.  Done for.  People were coming to get him.  We can’t take chances now just because he decided to commit suicide.”

“I don’t think it was suicide,” I said.  “It didn’t seem that way to me.”

“It was suicide,” Dr. Willoughby replied.  “A chicken-shit thing to do.”

“We can’t put ourselves at risk because of someone’s irresponsible decision to kill himself,” Dr. Willoughby’s boyfriend said.

“It’s a moot point,” Cassandra said.  “These are my rafts.  This is my equipment.  We don’t move until it’s light.”

Dr. Tabaaha shook his head.  “I said we shouldn’t have camped here.  This isn’t safe.  This is a bad place.”  He lit a cigarette and wearily trudged back to his tent at the river’s edge.


11.
Dawn never dawned.  The darkness turned dirty grey and, then, the river and its bedraggled fringe of trees emerged from the shadow.  Clouds were screwed down tight over the canyon and buttes.  In darker quadrants of the sky, black pillars of rain moved slowly over the countryside.  The air was clammy and cold.

We rafted downstream.  The river cracked apart and flowed among stony islands.  The cliffs were stained with water and seemed to be weeping.

Around a bend, we saw that the lead raft had drawn ashore at one of the gravel-strewn reefs in the stream.  McMurray was sitting on a big rock, one of his pant’s legs torn off and barefoot.  Dr. Tabaaha and Cassandra approached McMurray and spoke to him.

Gordon pulled our raft ashore.  Dr. Willoughby climbed over the side before we had landed the raft and splashed through the shallow water to reach McMurray.  She bent over and hugged him.  He winced.  “I think I’ve got a broken rib or something,” he said. 

McMurray was trembling with cold.  He had the landscape of scalloped cliffs, slippery-looking finned red-rocks, and canyon rims draped over his shoulders like a wet blanket.

“I don’t know how I ended up in the water,” he said.  “I woke up drowning, but I didn’t drown.”

“You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” Dr. Willoughby said.

“I must have swallowed half the river,” McMurray said. 

Dr. Tabaaha said: “That’ll be in trouble, e.coli.”

“I’ve already got a belly-ache,” McMurray said.

“You were always full of shit, old man,” Dr.Tabaaha said.

The river seemed to be rising.  Sheets of cold water tickled the little shoal where McMurray was sitting on the rock, water now flooding over his bare feet.  Cassandra laced him into a life-preserver.  Dr. Willoughby helped him to the lead raft.  He said that he had twisted his ankle somehow.

The river’s channel was a little tricky and our raft was hung-up for a few minutes on a snag.  The lead raft continued downstream, a thousand meters ahead of us.  After an hour, we came to the landing.  The vans that were supposed to pick us up hadn’t arrived yet.  Of course, we were several hours early. 

A square, pale concrete bridge spanned the river and the asphalt highway glistened like a snake in the drizzle.  Salt-colored dunes crowded the river, some of them impounding pale green ponds.  Cassandra stood under a metal shelter curved over a picnic table to protect it from the sun.  She was talking on the phone.  One of the turquoise-colored portapotties on the hillside was knocked over and lay on its side. Beyond the concrete slip, Dr. Tabaaha had made a small conical fire and some flame was darting there, bright against the gloomy day and oozing greasy smoke upward when the drizzle hissed into the fire.  McMurray sat on the sand near the fire, white-faced and shivering.  He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.  Dr. Tabaaha took some sage from his backpack and opened a little pouch of tobacco.  He took off his jacket and used it to fan smoke from the pinches of burning sage and tobacco into McMurray’s face.  The smoke irritated his eyes and made them moist.