The beast v1 0, p.20
The Beast (v1.0), page 20
At the holy spot near the ruin, where I attempted to waken the Other with human passion, 1 pause and walk carefully around the hidden burial pit to avoid anguish caused by the relics. The power of such objects is in their absorbing and holding intact the time-space structure of some highly charged event, sometimes even that of a Conjunction. This burial pit must contain such a charm, for it is powerful indeed. I feel it calling to me as I walk warily around the perimeter of its force. The relic draws its power from the Outside through a kind of permanent opening. It is not a thing I wish to deal with. Ahead somewhere is the one I seek, the one I must awaken soon or let him be lost like the coyote, a beast, trapped on this world.
Several miles down the canyon, after slipping past two settlements of permanent hogans, I sense the three Indian men from my own camp. They are in their blankets under some cottonwoods, the horses hobbled nearby. The one named Johnny is awake, but he does not hear me as I make a wide detour of their camp. His anxiety affects me, and I feel compassion for his trouble, wondering if h might be possible to locate his uncle before he is found and killed by the whites. Perhaps I will catch his scent It will not hinder my purpose to be aware of it. The canyon grows very wide here, and against the high cliffs I see white moonlight striking, turning the edge of the canyon to a gleaming tracery in the night. A light wind flows down the canyon, carrying my scent for I am allowing myself to be known. I pause to rest beside some fallen boulders near the east wall, feeling out to the limit of my perceptual field for him. If I could only speak. But that is impossible until he wakens.
For what seemed hours, Bo lay on the sand just under the juniper branches, talking himself into it; telling himself he had done it many times before and he could do it now. But it was too early, or he was not tired enough, or he was in unfamiliar surroundings and worried by the night sounds of owls and wind in the trees. He could not get the relaxation going, and finally he slipped off to sleep by mistake. He woke what seemed only instants later, but the moon had leaped up the sky, so he knew he had been asleep more than an hour. He concentrated again and this time felt the relaxation beginning in his legs.
Carefully rolling out of his body when he felt the lightness, he stood above the moonlit desert, seeing the glow throughout his body, gazing around him with the peculiarly distorted vision typical of looking without eyes at the things of this world. He was intent on his guest but noticed Barry’s blanket was empty as he rose into the dark air and said the Indian woman’s name firmly to himself.
With a part of his mind, he wondered about the other man, but then he was startled by the direction of his movement. Instead of moving back up the canyon, as he had thought he would, he was hovering over the edge and moving directly downward along the cliff now luminous with moonlight. Could she be down the canyon this far? His glowing form settled into the darkness of the canyon as if he were some ocean denizen losing its buoyancy and drifting down to the floor of the sea. He said the woman’s name again to hasten the travel, but he did not move faster, only settled more and more slowly. And then he knew why, for just below him was the blue-gray Beast, lying under a tree, alert but unmoving. She has come down-canyon in that form, he thought, hovering above the big, tailless cat. But why?
He could not communicate with her. He had tried that before, but he could watch and perhaps learn something of her purpose down here. With more than starlight and reflected moonlight from the canyon walls, the Beast glowed faintly to Bo’s perceptions. It was her aura he was seeing, the glow of life surrounding her like the halo of a saint in some medieval painting. Bo settled his mind, thinking of nothing so he would not move from the spot. He would find out what brought the creature here. Perhaps there could yet be a confrontation and a solution.
But the etheric body is not a stable entity in the material world, and Bo had trouble just waiting. He could not keep his mind still and found himself drifting not only in the canyon but dangerously near to lifting out of this world altogether. He feared that more than any danger he had ever faced, including the threat of death, and he struggled to keep his thoughts channeled on the Indian woman. The Beast lay below him as if she had all the time in the world, and Bo finally decided he must move or go back to his body, so dangerous did it seem to try holding still with his thoughts constantly turning toward the one he sought.
Then he felt a hot rush of shame come over him. He had forgotten about the man they were hunting. He could find the Indian by simply saying his name. But before he had said it, he caught himself. What if Albert Chee was dead and the command of his name sent Bo hurtling off into the darkness between worlds where terrible fanged creatures hungered for souls? He held himself over the Beast below that seemed as peaceful as a genuine big cat lying in the sand thinking of nothing but its next meal. Without worrying more about it, be said the name: Albert Chee.
Thank God, Bo thought, as he felt his etheric body rising and moving up the canyon at increasing speed. He must be alive. But how could he be up the canyon? Bo held himself in tightly, ready for any swerve that might indicate a plunge into the realm of the dead, but he only moved steadily and easily up the canyon that was now filled with moonlight in the east-west stretches. The walls became higher as he sailed back toward the camp he had been at earlier that evening, and he recognized the cliff that held the hollowed-out place called Massacre Cave. Sure enough, he thought, as he floated upward until the valley was far beneath him. At the lip of the cave, which was indeed formed something like a mouth with a protruding lower lip, he paused and could see the glow of a human aura. Albert Chee lay curled up in the far corner, away from the white sticks and blotches that were bones and skulls scattered across the back of the cave, remnants of the people killed there a hundred and thirty years ago. Albert was alive, and a very brave or very desperate Indian to sleep in this place of uneasy spirits. Bo knew how desperate the man must be, for the Navajo have an almost ineradicable fear of night and of the dead they are so afraid that often they will abandon a house where a relative has died and move away rather than live there with the spirit
Albert’s breath came in short, uneasy gasps. He was not asleep, Bo realized, but lying curled up to keep warm, probably frightened almost to death to be there. Bo allowed his etheric body to drift back out over the lip of the cave, trying to pick out the toe and finger holds in the almost vertical cliff that Albert must have used to get up here. Sometimes there was a tiny ledge or outcrop that a man might hang to, but for most of the distance up the cliff there seemed to be only little pockmarks and cracks that a bird would have had trouble hanging on to.
He knew now where to look. It would be simple for the searchers in the morning. With the solution to that problem in his insubstantial hands, Bo felt relief that he could now get back to the Beast and his quest for Lilly. Without the necessary care as this thought occurred to him in other than words, he found himself burning with the need to find her now that he felt so close to the goal, and her name leaped into his mind. Instantly he felt as if, in his physical body, he had toppled backward and was falling down the face of that terrible cliff. Vertigo pulled his mind out of shape, the blackness closed around him with a crescendo of roaring. Fear surrounded his etheric body like a damning aura to draw demons from every dimension. He felt them like sharks around him as he fell into blackness, waited for the first bite while he tried to get his mind in place, tried to say bis own name in the whirl of infinity where the fragments of his personality fell like wreckage into the deep.
As I pick my way down the trail toward the bottom of the canyon, I find myself wondering over my motives. Certainly I would help Barry and his friends find this Indian, but I feel more than that altruistic impulse driving me down into the darkness. Time presses on my mind, as if I were a human running to catch a train. I do not recall ever feeling such urgings in my life.
A scent catches me off guard, a scent so pungent and beautiful that I miss my footing and roll down a hundred feet in a cloud of dust and loose rock. I scramble to my feet and cast about to find that smell again. I trot down the easier slopes near the bottom of the cliff now. Ah, there it is again, a thread of absolute beauty. I have to stop, lift my muzzle and savor that scent. It is languid yet dynamic, like my own odor but intensified into almost a palpable drift, like a warmer shelf of water within the cold water of a lake. 1 cannot tell what direction it comes from, but the wind is blowing gently downstream, so it must be back that way.
I angle across the sandy bottom of the gorge, my nose picking out the nuances of the scent so that I can home in on the source. But it is a peculiarly elusive trace. After going through its vapors three or more times in one crossing of the valley, 1 realize it will be nearly impossible to track directly. It has dispersed from some source, perhaps far upstream, and now is hanging in the night air in several different strands of odor, like gossamer trailing in the wind, invisible and yet unmistakable as it touches the skin. I listen and cast about with my spatial sense. The usual night creatures are moving about, a large owl sits on a cottonwood limb up ahead, there are no sheep or settlements within my range, but there are some large animals—coyotes, just on the edge of my perception, over in the open space that marks the beginning of another canyon. I believe Beaumont called it Twin Trail Canyon. But they are inconsequential to me now. I am frustrated by the nondirectional scent. It surrounds me rather than simply flowing to me from a source. It is maddening to smell this intriguing thing and not be able to find it.
After what might be hours, I find myself half a mile up the side canyon, still with that scent in my nostrils, still unable to find its source. I have not even gotten upwind of it. And then, as I trot zigzag up Twin Trails Canyon, it fades. I am about to turn and go back when a different perception catches me unaware. There is a camp of men and horses not more than a thousand feet ahead up this side canyon. As for the scent, I feel I can get back to it again. It has so frustrated me that my mind feels charred from thinking about it. I shake my head and trot on up the side canyon, keeping the men’s camp in my spatial sense. There are half a dozen horses hobbled off in the grassy slope to the left, and around a small fire in a hollow are lying the men who have come with the sheriff to find Albert Chee. I will take a minute here before going back to that elusive odor.
Two of the men are sitting with their back to a large boulder smoking cigarettes. Four or five are wrapped in their blankets, asleep near the fire. I creep close enough to hear their talk as the cigarette ends glow and subside. But they are talking of women and other things inconsequential to me. The jokes are softly told—crude, like schoolboy tales. 1 listen for a time and am prepared to move away when they stop their desultory conversation and one stands up and stretches.
“Go get Curtis. I got to get me some sleep.”
“Yeah, me, too. Hey, we goin* on back in the morning, you think.”
“Nah. We got to see if that old boy is at home. That’s the least we can do after riding all over this damn canyon.”
“He ain’t there,” says the voice of the one still sitting down. “He left that pony and went up on top. He’s in Gallup by now.”
“I dunno. He’s as tricky as any other Indian, and he ain’t likely to take off for the city like a white man would.”
“They wasn’t any tracks, Buddy said.”
“Hell, he didn’t look long enough up there, I tol* the sheriff I ought to gone with him. Buddy don’t give a shit. That old boy coulda walked along the edge on the rocks or something. I say he’s gone home or hidin’ out somewhere up in del Muerto.”
The other man stood and stepped on his cigarette. They walked back to the fire and wakened another man, who then got up to sit behind the same boulder and smoke his cigarettes. 1 moved back down the side canyon into the open space at the junction. So, Albert had left his horse in the side canyon and gone on foot in some unknown direction. But the feeling seemed to be that the sheriff would want to follow the main canyon back to Chee’s home in the morning.
In the wide opening that is almost a mile across and flat sand for most of that distance, the moon is now flooding the whole valley with silver. I trot out across the sand, my muzzle up to catch the scent. I cross the entire valley and start back, but not a trace of it can I find. How strange that it would completely disappear in the few minutes I have been up the side canyon. It is frustrating, and I run back and forth like a stupid dog in the broad, sandy area, trying to pick it up from the ground or in the air; but nowhere can I find the trace. It seems now like a dream, something only in my mind. Finally I give it up and begin trotting upstream. Perhaps I can pick up Albert’s scent. It would not be difficult if he had walked this way, but I suspect he did not come through the canyon, for I cannot catch anything like his odor, even though 1 traverse the canyon floor wall to wall several times.
Hours have passed this night with nothing accomplished. The maddening scent has completely disappeared, I have found nothing more about Albert. I have located the sheriff and his bunch of men, but they would have made themselves obvious in the morning anyway. All I have done tonight is wear myself out and establish to my own satisfaction that Albert has not walked through this part of the canyon. I And the trail up again and climb it wearily. Something drops down inside my mind like a heavy weight falling against a closed door that might have been opened. I feel more than tired—depressed, I suppose. I am not used to feeling like this and think it might have something to do with that elusive and beautiful scent that I have lost.
Dawn is not far away when I approach the sleeping Beaumont and the blanket where Barry will sleep again. As I walk by the other man, I notice he is very still, and in my spatial perception I am startled to find that his vibrations are almost nonexistent Is he dead? I walk over to him cautiously, sniff at his form. He smells sick, or … no, like something not quite alive. I touch him with my nose and he is cool, inert. Something is definitely wrong.
I shift.
“Bo!” Barry shook the big man’s shoulder. He was limp, like one dead. “George, George Beaumont, hey, George!”
To Barry’s intense relief, the older man’s eyes fluttered and came open. They had no life in them for a minute or so, and then the man’s chest gave a great heave as he drew in his breath. He uttered a strangled sound, as if he was trying to scream while someone choked him.
“Bo? Hey, wake up. What the hell is the matter?” Barry was scared now. Was the man an epileptic?
But then his eyes came alive again and he gave a great burst of breath, his arms coming up to his face, covering his eyes.
“Oh, ah, God,” Bo said.
“Hey, now, come on out of it,” Barry said, his hands on the man’s shoulders.
“All right, all right, okay, now,” Bo said, finally seeming 174
awake. He sat up, holding his head in his hands, his eyes wild and looking around in the faint dawn.
Barry sat beside him, looking at the stricken, white face. Off in the trees some birds were quarreling about waking up so early.
“I think you saved my life,” Bo said, looking at Barry with haggard eyes.
Barry thought the older man looked as if he had been climbing mountains all night. “That must have been some nightmare.”
“Yeah, that’s what it was all right.” Bo lay back, breathing hard through his nose. “I’ll be okay now. Tell you about it later.”
“Well, if it was just a dream, I guess it’ll keep,” Barry said, grinning.
“More,” Bo said. “More. But one thing 1 found out.” He raised himself to one elbow.
“What’s that?”
“I know where Albert Chee is.”
In this night when spirits and beasts and men creep about the canyon, there are others who move with purpose through the late moonlight. Below the house ruin where Barry and Sarah spent yesterday morning lies a hidden burial pit, round, sided with flat sandstones set on end, covered with a basketweave of saplings that have held the earth for a thousand years. In the dry pit lies the body of a chief, doubled on itself, the skin and rags of clothing long withered and ready to fall into dust, the bones lying in the foetal position, a pair of new sandals for feet that have never moved again. And in a clay pot, itself inside a basket, lies a bag of magic tools: feathers, bone whistles, carved stones. Among these dusty objects is a finely carved figure that looks like mother of pearl. It glistens as the moonlight strikes it, the iridescence of the ocean in its facets and planes. Dirt falls around it as rapid pairs of paws dig away stones and saplings and sharp teeth tear into the basket and the pot itself. The figure gleams as it is laid bare to the light of the moon it has not seen in a thousand years. Heedless paws scatter the bones of the chief as they scramble about in the pit. They are purposeful, these two coyotes, acting on the orders of another who stands a hundred yards away, his tongue hanging out as if he were grinning. One of the subordinates picks up the carved figure and trots off down the stream with it in his mouth. The one who has stayed back keeps his distance, trotting along behind. When they find a trail to the top of the canyon, they go up, purposeful in the late moonlight.
After a sketchy breakfast, the two men shook out their blankets and prepared to drive back up the canyon to the trail near Massacre Cave. Barry had just rolled up the blanket and turned toward the car when Bo cried out.
“Hey, what’s this?” He walked over to pick up something at Barry’s feet. “It fell out of your blanket, or maybe it was under you in the dirt. Look at that.” The jeweler held up the glittering, pearly object for Barry to see.
“It’s nothing I ever saw before,” Barry said, holding his blanket in a roll against his chest and peering at the figurine. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
“I’ll say. it’s a real beauty.” Bo turned it over and over in his hands. The figure was of some standing animal, bear probably, with its muzzle lifted, head thrown back as if crying out. The carving included a portion of rough, grayish shell that formed the back of the figure, dark and knobby as tree bark. Around the middle of the animal ran a band of lighter color, like a belt cinched around it The forepaws of the animal appeared to be held down by the belt.
