When he reached them the rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun. McKee dropped Canfield's blankets and cautiously inspected the slice of sky visible above the canyon. Up canyon it was blue-black, with a continuing intermittent rumble of thunder. Directly overhead, the clouds were a mixture of gray and white. Down canyon to the south and east there was the dark blue of open sky and, nearer the horizon, the violent reds and yellows of the setting sun. The breeze had shifted back to the southwest now and he saw the rain was drifting across the canyon higher in the mountains. Only the trailing edge of it had touched here.
McKee decided it would be safe to leave the bedrolls out. He walked back to the butane cooker, forked an egg onto a piece of bread and folded it into a sandwich. The sunset now was flooding the canyon with eerie rose light, which made the eroded sandstone and granite of the cliff seem to glow. McKee heard the water then, a small sound, moving down the canyon floor below him. The rain had been little more than a heavy sprinkle here but northwestward on the mesa it had been heavy enough to send runoff down the network of washes which fed Many Ruins Canyon. It would have to rise into a torrent eight or ten feet deep before it topped the high mound of talus where the camp was and McKee estimated the stream, now spreading across the flat sand on the canyon bed below him, was no more than six inches deep. It was muddy, carrying a burden of sticks, pine needles, and assorted debris, but it wouldn't get much deeper unless the rain upstream turned into something like a cloudburst. If that happened, it might be a little tough driving on the canyon bottom tomorrow. That turned McKee's thoughts again to Canfield.
Ever since his return to the camp he had alternated between uneasy worry that some inconceivable something had led Canfield to sign a false name to his note, irritation at himself for such foolishness, and then irritation at Canfield for causing this uneasiness. He was all the more irked by the thought that, when Canfield returned and explained the signature had been inspired by some ridiculous Canfieldian whim, the whole affair would seem too asinine and trivial for complaint.
'Silly bastard,' McKee muttered. He folded the third egg into a sandwich, poured himself a mug of coffee, and scrubbed out the frying pan with sand. By now the light in the canyon had faded from rose to dusky red and McKee's mood had shifted with it, back to irritation with himself for being nervous.
It was about ten when he finished going through his accumulation of notes in the tent and planning his activities for the next day. He would have to stay in camp at least until Canfield returned because tomorrow Miss Leon was supposed to arrive. If Canfield was finding anything interesting in his digging, he wouldn't want to stop- and someone should take the girl up into the labyrinth of canyons to try to locate the van truck. It might, or might not, belong to her electrical engineer, but it shouldn't be too hard to find. Not if it was still parked in Hard Goods Canyon, and not if, as Old Woman Gray Rocks had said, the canyon ran into Many Ruins nine miles up from the mouth. That would make it only about four miles up from their camp.
He turned off the butane lantern and stood at the tent flap a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the night before walking back to the bedrolls. He felt tired now, ready for sleep. He left his boots beside the bedding, rolled his shirt in his trousers for a pillow and slid into the blankets. The storm cloud had drifted away and he heard, far to the northeast, the faint suggestion of thunder. His side of the canyon was in total darkness but the top of the sheer cliff on the west side was tinged now by the dim yellow light of the rising moon. It would be about three-quarters full tonight, McKee thought, and he felt a sudden inexpressible loneliness, a loneliness almost as intense as in a dream he sometimes had. In the dream he floated in a great airy blackness, wanting to shout, but remembering-dream fashion-that he had shouted before and his voice had been lost in an infinite echoless distance. Remembering this would sadden him because it told him there was no one anywhere but him. When he had this dream, sometimes when he was overtired and depressed, it would awaken him and he would sit on the side of his bed and smoke a cigarette, and sometimes two or three.
A whippoorwill sounded its whistling call far down the canyon and was answered by an echo. And then it was eerily silent.
Directly overhead McKee picked out the stars of the Pleiades-six in two parallel rows and the seventh trailing to close the double line. From these, McKee remembered, the seven Hard Flint Boys of the Navajo myth had descended to follow Monster Slayer on his heroic odyssey among the evil things. And to spread their own mischief among the Dinee. And to receive ceremonial offerings of cornmeal every spring from a thousand sheepherders in a thousand little sacred shrines on a thousand mesas and mountains across the Reservation. McKee located two stars, each surrounded by the hazy light of a nebula, which represented the Hard Flint Woman and a contestant in the Bounding Stick Game. He couldn't dredge up the name of the other Holy Person but he vaguely remembered that in the myth there was an argument over the outcome and a solution based on the trickery so inevitable in both Greek and Navajo myth. Far up the west rim of the canyon, a coyote yipped twice, and then poured out its soul in a full-throated bay. The sound seemed to float down from the stars, the voice of some primeval hound drifting infinite sorrow across the sky.
It might be my coyote, McKee thought, the one that got into Yazzie's ram pen. He would go back tomorrow to find out how, if his guide duties with Miss Leon allowed. He shifted his weight on the packed sand and felt suddenly less sure that he would find any way a coyote could have invaded that tight little enclosure. In this silent darkness mystery seemed suddenly natural, almost rational. Down the canyon the whippoorwill called again and then there was the odd, rasping cry of a saw-whet owl, sounding, McKee thought, like an ogre filing off his chains. He reached for his cigarette pack, decided against it, and thought again of the note Canfield had left, and why Jeremy Robert Canfield, whose first name was part of a private anthropology faculty joke, would sign 'John' to this note. He drifted uneasily on the margin of sleep.
The sound jerked him abruptly up from the blankets, wide awake, staring across the canyon. It had been the clatter of a falling pebble, bouncing down the eroded cliff and dislodging a small shower of other pebbles. The residue of faint echoes lingered a second in the stillness and then faded. McKee sat stock-still, listening, feeling the tenseness of muscle fiber flooded with adrenalin and the taste of primitive fear in his mouth. He slid his legs out of the bedroll and slipped them into his trousers, put on his boots, picked up his shirt, and stood. The moon had risen halfway up the sky and the west wall of the canyon was flooded now with pale light. McKee stood in a rigid crouch, listening, studying the worn outcroppings of sandstone from which the sound had come. There was nothing but the silence. A sinister shape half hidden by juniper at the foot of the outcrop became, as McKee's eyes better adjusted to the half light, an oddly eroded boulder. McKee relaxed slightly, feeling the panic leaving him. It could have been an animal. And, as he thought this, it seemed ridiculous to think it could be anything but an animal-perhaps a night-prowling porcupine. He stood there, feeling suddenly slightly weak and very foolish. But still there was something primitive within his mind signaling danger and urging caution. Five black rams with bloody throats and the wrong name signed to a simple note. A burrowing owl glided slowly down the moonlit side of the canyon floor, scouting for night-feeding kangaroo rats. It swerved suddenly away from the outcrop, flapped its wings wildly, and disappeared in the darkness down canyon from McKee. And, as it disappeared, his fear returned. Something had startled the owl. It would not have been frightened by anything small.
He moved cautiously away from the bedroll, farther back into the darkness up the talus slope toward the east cliff, taking each step carefully, climbing slowly over the smaller boulders, carefully skirting the larger ones. In a pocket of water-cut rock directly under the overhanging cliff he stopped and turned back to look behind him, surprised that he was panting from the brief exertion and fighting to keep his breathing silent.
The light of the climbing moon had moved halfway across the canyon floor. Nothing stirred. The canyon was a crevice of immense, motionless, brooding quiet. McKee studied the outcropping carefully, shifted his eyes slowly down canyon, examining every shape under the flat, yellow light, and then examining every shadow. He felt the
