AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, THE expedition was uncharacteristically silent. Nora felt a mood of doubt. All too clearly, Black’s comments from the night before had made their mark.
They proceeded northwest, up a harsh, brutal canyon destitute of vegetation. Even at the early hour, heat was rising from the split rocks, making them look airy and insubstantial. The unwatered horses were irritable and difficult to control.
As they continued, the canyon system grew increasingly complex, branching and rebranching into a twisted maze. It continued to be impossible to get a GPS reading from the canyon floor, and the cliffs were so sheer that Sloane could not have climbed to the top to take a reading without putting herself in danger. Nora found she was spending as much time consulting the map as traveling. Several times they were forced to backtrack out of a blind canyon; other times, the expedition had to wait while Nora and Sloane scouted ahead to find a route. Black was uncharacteristically silent, his face sick with a combination of fear and anger.
Nora struggled with her own doubts. Had her father really gone this far? Had they taken a wrong turn somewhere? A few swales and scatterings of charcoal were visible here and there, but so faint and infrequent as to be background noise; they could easily be the result of wildfires. There was a new thought now she barely dared to consider: what if her father had been delirious when he wrote the letter? It seemed impossible for anyone to have successfully navigated this labyrinth.
At other times, she thought about the broken skull and dried blood, and what it could possibly mean. In her mind, Pete’s Ruin had changed from an unremarkable set of roomblocks to a dark, unnerving little mystery.
By midmorning, the canyon had ended in a sudden puzzle of hoodoo rocks. They squeezed through an opening and topped out in a broken valley, peppered with scrub junipers. As she went over the rise, Nora glanced to the right. She could see the Kaiparowits Plateau as a high, dark line against the horizon.
Then she faced forward, and the vista she saw both horrified and elated her.
On the far side of the valley, raked by the morning sun, rose what could only be the Devil’s Backbone: the hogback ridge she had been anticipating and dreading since they first set out. It was a giant, irregular fin of sandstone at least a thousand feet high and many miles long, pocked with vesicles and windblown holes, riven with vertical fractures and slots. The top was notched like a dinosaur’s back. It was hideous in its beauty.
Nora led the group over to the shade of a large rock, where they dismounted. She stepped aside with Swire.
“Let’s see if we can scout a trail up it first,” Nora said. “It looks pretty tough.”
For a moment, Swire didn’t answer. “From here, I wouldn’t exactly call it tough,” he said. “I’d call it impossible.”
“My father made it over with his two horses.”
“So you said.” Swire spat a thin stream of tobacco juice. “Then again, this ain’t the only ridge around here.”
“It’s a fault-block cuesta,” said Black, who had been listening. “It outcrops for at least a hundred miles. Your father’s so-called ridge could be anywhere along there.”
“This is the right one,” Nora said a little more slowly, trying to keep the tone of doubt out of her voice.
Swire shook his head and began to roll a smoke. “I’ll tell you one thing. I want to see the trail with my own eyes before I take any horses up it.”
“Fair enough,” Nora replied. “Let’s go find it. Sloane, keep an eye on things until we get back.”
“Sure thing,” came the contralto drawl.
The two hiked north along the base of the ridge, looking for a notch or break in the smooth rock that might signal the beginnings of a trail. After half a mile, they came across some shallow caves. Nora noticed that several had ancient smudges of black smoke on their ceilings.
“Anasazi lived here,” she said.
“Pretty miserable little caves.”
“These were probably temporary dwellings,” Nora replied. “Perhaps they farmed these canyon bottoms.”
“Must’ve been farming cholla,” Swire muttered laconically.
As they continued northward, the dry creek split into several tributaries, separated by jumbled piles of stone and small outcrops. It was a weird landscape, unfinished, as if God had simply given up trying to impose order on the unruly rocks.
Suddenly, Nora parted some salt cedars and stopped dead. Swire came up, breathing hard.
“Look at this,” she breathed.
A series of petroglyphs had been pecked through the desert varnish that streaked the cliff face, exposing lighter rock underneath. Nora knelt, examining the drawings more closely. They were complex and beautiful: a mountain lion; a curious pattern of dots with a small foot; a star inside the moon inside the sun; and a detailed image of Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player, believed to be the god of fertility. As usual, Kokopelli sported an enormous erection. The panel ended with another complicated grid of dots overlain by a huge spiral, which Nora noted was also reversed, like the ones Sloane had seen at Pete’s Ruin.
Swire grunted. “Wish I had his problem,” he said, nodding at Kokopelli.
“No you don’t,” Nora replied. “One Pueblo Indian story claims it was fifty feet long.”
They pushed a little farther through the cedars and stumbled on a well-hidden ravine: a crevasse filled with loose rock that slanted diagonally across the sandstone monolith. It was steep and narrow, and it rose up the dizzying face and disappeared. The trail had a raised lip of rock along its outer edge that had the uncanny effect of causing most of it to disappear into the smooth sandstone from only several paces off.
“I’ve never seen anything so well hidden,” Nora said. “This has to be our trail.”
“Hope not.”
She started up the narrow crevasse, Swire behind her, scrambling over the rocks that filled its bottom. About halfway up it ended in a badly eroded path cut diagonally into the naked sandstone. It was less than three feet wide, one side a sheer face of rock, the other dropping off into terrifying blue space. As Nora stepped near the edge, some pebbles dislodged by her foot rolled down the rock and off the edge, sailing down; Nora listened but could not hear their eventual landing. She knelt. “This is definitely an ancient trail,” she said, as she examined eroded cut marks made by prehistoric quartzite tools.
“It sure wasn’t built for horses,” Swire said.
“The Anasazi didn’t have horses.”
“We do,” came the curt reply.
They moved carefully forward. In places, the cut path had peeled away from the sloping cliff face, forcing them to take a harrowing step across vacant space. At one of these places Nora glanced down and saw a tumble of rocks more than five hundred feet beneath her. She felt a surge of vertigo and hastily stepped across.
The grade gradually lessened, and in twenty minutes they were at the top. A dead juniper, its branches scorched by lightning, marked the point where the trail topped the ridge. The ridge itself was narrow, perhaps twenty feet across, and in another moment Nora had walked to the far edge.
She looked down the other side into a deep, lush riddle of canyons and washes that merged into an open valley. The trail, much gentler here, switchbacked down into the gloom below them.
For a moment, she could not speak. Slowly, the sun was invading the hidden recesses as it rose toward noon, penetrating the deep holes, chasing the darkness from the purple rocks.
“It’s so
Swire didn’t reply.
From their vantage point, Nora took in the lay of the landscape ahead. The Devil’s Backbone ran diagonally to the northeast, disappearing around the Kaiparowits Plateau. A vast complex of canyons started on the flanks of the Kaiparowits wilderness and spread out through the slickrock country, eventually coalescing into the valley that swept down in front of them. A peaceful stream flowed down its center, belying the great scarred plain to either side that told of innumerable flash floods. Scattered across the floodplain were boulders, some as large as houses, which had clearly been swept down from the higher reaches of the watershed. Beyond, the valley stepped up through several benchlands, eventually ending in sheer redrock cliffs, pinnacles, and towers. It looked to Nora as if
