County 7760. They had left the vast desert plains of the Chuska Valley and had wound north into a maze of low, decaying mesas and crumbling buttes. Eons of wind and water had ground the land into freestanding forms of sandstone topped by a harder mantel of black rock, leaving grim, crumbling pillars, undercut mushrooms, shapes like castles and creatures. It was so dry that in places dunes of blown sand had drifted across the roads. Uncle Joe carefully navigated his truck over the uneven track. He steered with his cigarette between his knuckles, frowning at the occasional faint tire tracks that led away on the right. Many were barely visible in the brown grit, or disappeared as they crossed sandstone shelves higher up. Joseph couldn't imagine how anyone could find the right one.
'I have to piss again,' Uncle Joe said abruptly. He stopped the truck in the middle of the track, shut it down, and got out. He walked down the track a way, selected a rock to water, and unzipped. Joseph got out and joined him.
It was completely silent here. The only sound was the tick of the truck's engine and the flow of their urine. They were in a hollow in the land where the surrounding buttes and humps cut off any long views. No wind stirred. After a long moment Uncle Joe finished and zipped himself up.
Joseph was halfway back to the truck before he realized Uncle Joe wasn't with him. He looked back to see the old man still over there, standing with one boot up on the rock, hands on his knee, staring ruminatively toward the northwest.
When Joseph walked back to him, Uncle Joe dug a wrinkled cigarette pack out of his jacket pocket, withdrew a bent Marlboro. He scowled deeply at it before he lit it.
'Just up ahead, you see where that outcrop comes near the road?' Uncle Joe blew smoke to indicate where to look. 'Back forty years ago, used to be a little track went up just the other side. Nobody goes there now, can't even see where it was, but I went up there one time. This was about ten years after I got back from the war. I was hawking a new sheep-dip formula to my customers out this way, had a good deal going with the manufacturer. I was driving an old Willys, everybody thought I was rich to have a car, most people still got around on horses. Best little chitty I ever had, but it died on me right about this same spot. Couldn't get it going again. Out here, I knew nobody was going to come by for a long time, so I started walking and when I saw that track, I went up it. I thought I'd ask to borrow somebody's horse, or hitch a ride to where there was a phone. But there was a Wolf lived up there.'
Joseph didn't ask what kind of wolf. Looking up at the black-topped, austere outcrop and the invisible country beyond, he felt a little quake inside. The day wasn't hot enough to make an inversion layer, but the air seemed to quiver over the land in that direction.
'He was very old, eighty, ninety, who knows. He probably would have died by himself but later I learned he had a daughter who checked in on him sometimes. Even she was old, even she was afraid of him. Nobody else would come near him. I had heard stories about a Wolf somewhere around here, but I didn't know it was the same guy until I saw him.'
Obviously, Joseph realized, Uncle Joe hadn't stopped at this spot by chance. 'What did he do?' he asked.
'He was bad. He took other people's animals. Sometimes he'd steal sheep to eat them, but sometimes he'd kill someone's horse or sheep just to do bad for them. Anything anybody did that he didn't like, he'd become their enemy. He dug up dead people from their graves, made poisons of their flesh, and some people said he ate it, too. People said he made their children sick, made them die. Made women have deformed babies.'
'How would anyone know it was him who made the kids sick?'
'So this time I went up there, I'm going up the track and about, oh, two miles up I come to a hogan and back behind it a couple of pole sheds and a stock pen up near one of these little buttes, right up against the cliff. It's a real beat-up place-trash, rags caught in the bushes, tools on the ground, roof no good. I call hello and no one answers, but I know someone's there, I can smell smoke. The hogan's door is open, and after I stand there for a few minutes, I go closer to it and look inside. First thing I see is that the north wall is broken down. It's a dead person's hogan. But it looks like somebody lives in there anyway, inside it's a mess of dishes, blankets, food bones, the fire on the floor's smoldering a little.'
The cigarette was trembling between Uncle Joe's fingers. He gave Joseph a round-eyed look, and Joseph nodded. Only an extremely antisocial, possibly even sociopathic, person would live in a death hogan. You didn't have to believe the superstitions to be frightened of someone who would commit such a grave offense against social norms.
Uncle Joe fell silent, staring at the sandstone outcrop. From here, its profile resembled a huge dead iguana, angling up from the rocky desert floor.
The old man was shaking his head regretfully. 'I should have known better. Because on the way in, before I got to the hogan, I'd seen a couple of dead animals. Dead coyote. Dead crow. Dead rabbit. That's how a Skinwalker moves around. This one was too old to get around in his human body, but he could still use theirs. The Skinwalker projects his chindi into the animal, gets all the animal's powers-see in the dark, walk with no sound, smell people out, fly. When he's done using it, he goes back to his own body and the animal body dies. That's what those animals were. What he'd cast off.'
The silence pressed around them again. Joseph felt unaccountably exposed out here, under the naked sky, the truck sitting in the middle of the track in the certain knowledge no one would come by.
'Maybe we should get going, Uncle Joe. What is it, another ten miles or so, right?'
'But at the time I just thought, okay, whoever lives up here was shooting pests or something. Then up at the hogan, I'm thinking, I don't know, maybe somebody died here just yesterday, the family's got another hogan, maybe back beyond the sheds and the little cliff, out of view. I'm still hoping I can borrow a horse. So I head back to the sheds, I'm thinking maybe somebody's working over there and doesn't hear me yet. And when I get over there, I see there's a sort of a cave in the ledge, the opening's about ten feet wide, half hidden behind a shed and a dead pinon tree. I looked into that cave.'
Even resting on his knee, Uncle Joe's cigarette hand was shaking so hard the ash scattered. He paused for so long that Joseph thought he wouldn't go on, and he realized suddenly what a huge effort it required for Uncle Joe to tell this.
At last the rasping voice continued, quavering yet determined: 'I ducked my head to look inside. Wasn't really a cave, more of an undercut-maybe only ten feet deep. The back wall sloped up to meet the ceiling, real rough, just broken rock. It took my eyes a second to adapt to the darkness under there, but the first thing I see is clumps of dark shapes up where the wall meets the ceiling. Took me a second to see it's bats, maybe fifty, a hundred of them. Then I see that part of the rock wall isn't a rock wall, it's a naked dead man, hanging upside down like the bats. He's as dried up as a mummy, just skin over bones, he's the same color as the rocks, he's streaked with guano same as the wall. He's got his ankles hooked into a loop of rope pegged in up near the ceiling, hands folded across his chest.'
'What the hell-'
' 'And just when I realize what I'm looking at, the fingers of his hands start to spread! Then his eyes open, he looks straight at me and bends at the waist so he sits partway up, sticking out from the wall. He spreads his arms wide, he's still being a bat. All this took maybe three seconds total elapsed time since I first looked in there. My heart stopped dead. I had actual, medical cardiac arrest. And then I went running down that track. I ran all the way back to where we are now and maybe two miles back toward White Rock.'
Joseph felt sick. From Uncle Joe's trembling voice, the quiver of his jaw, it was clear that the old man was telling it factually. Some senile old hermit, gone crazy, maybe nearing death, morbid with Alzheimer's, lost in sick fantasies, violating taboos. No one to supervise him, bring him back home to his humanity.
'I wish I'd never looked into that cave,' Uncle Joe said, voice hollow with regret. 'I wish I'd never seen that. It was bad enough when I thought he was a dead man, a mummy like over in Canyon del Muerte. But what I felt when those fingers began to spread… I don't like to think fear can be that strong.'
'Whatever happened to him?'
Uncle Joe swiveled his face toward Joseph's, looking very old, wrinkles swarming his eyes and brow like some fantastic design of ornamental scars.
'Not long after, they killed him. People from around here got together. Six men went up, six good men. Old Hastiin Keeday, the grandfather we're going to see, he was one of them. Killed the Wolf, then burned him and the hogan and everything up there. Nothing left, I hear. No trace.'
A horrible thought occurred to Joseph. 'Because you told them-'
'No. It had been building up for a long time, people were scared, something had to be done. I never told
