the body of Bernadette Manuelito, more formally known for Navajo ceremonial purposes as Girl Who Laughs, smashed into the riverbank below and became nothing more than a bunch of broken, loosely connected body parts.
Now this journey into her imagination was interrupted by Cowboy Dashee.
“Bernie, what’s your idea about that?”
“About what?”
“About what we’ve been talking about,” Dashee said, sounding slightly impatient. “Here we are, right where we were going, and Billy’s not here. So what’s next? How do we start conducting this search?”
Having no useful idea, Bernie shrugged. “Maybe Billy got here before we did and got tired of waiting for us. How about looking around for him?”
Bernie was looking around herself when she said that, seeing a vast wilderness of cliffs in almost every direction, hearing the roar of water tearing over the rapids and above the thunder of the river, the chorus of whistles, trills, and bong sounds that must have been caused by the various species of frogs that inhabited the canyon. Combined, it made her suggestion sound silly.
“Well, at least we could try,” she added.
“I guess that’s about all we can do now,” Chee said. “Somebody should wait here, where they could see him if he’s still coming down the trail, or if he’s already down, meet him if he comes back looking for us.”
He looked at Dashee. Dashee nodded. He looked at Bernie. “Bernie, you wait here. If Tuve shows up, keep him here until Cowboy and I get back.”
“Sergeant Chee,” Bernie said, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the river and the clamor of the mating- season frogs, and maybe even a little louder than that, “I want to remind you that I am no longer Officer B. Manuelito of your Navajo Tribal Police squad. I am a private regular citizen.”
“Sorry,” Chee said, sounding suitably repentant. “I just thought—”
“Okay. I’ll stay here,” Bernie said. Dashee was grinning at her.
“Thanks,” Chee said. “I’m going to suggest that I work my way downstream looking for that sort of side canyon Tuve mentioned, and get back here in…let’s say ninety minutes or so. Quicker if we’ve found something. And Cowboy, would you do the same upstream? Up to the confluence where the Little Colorado runs in to the big river and—”
“Got it,” Dashee said.
Bernie leaned her weary self against a convenient boulder, let her body slip slowly down it until she was sitting comfortably on a sandstone slab. She watched Cowboy working his way along the cluster of boulders upstream until he disappeared behind the curve of the cliff. She watched Chee moving downstream along the very edge of water, keeping his eyes on the ground. She found herself wishing he would look back, at least a glance, but he didn’t. Found herself wishing she hadn’t sounded so grouchy. Hadn’t
And after a lot of that, the shadows would be working up the canyon walls, and Jim and Cowboy would be back, and they would make a little fire, probably, and eat some of the stuff they had brought, and talk a lot and roll out their sleeping bags, and Jim would probably want to put theirs close together and a distance from Dashee’s, and she would have to deal with that. Her clan taught its daughters that too much intimacy before nuptial promises were officially and ceremonially confirmed before both clans and both families tended to have very bad effects in the married years to come. Therefore, as her mother had put it, “some sand should be kept between you and your police sergeant” until that had happened.
So she would sit here and watch the changing light change the colors on the cliffs, and wait, and think about how good it would be when all this indecision was behind her. But that sort of happy thinking kept drifting away into questions. Was Jim really the man she thought he was, that he seemed to be? Or was he the hard-voiced sergeant who would never, ever really be her man? Was what she was doing at this very moment—following his orders, waiting for the next instructions, waiting to be told what was going on—indicative of what she was getting into? She didn’t think so. In fact, she didn’t even want to think about it. She wanted to think about where she was—at the very middle of the stupefying grandeur of this canyon, surrounded by all its weird variations of the natural world she knew from the Earth Surface World a mile above her head.
About then the changing light must have touched off some sort of signal to the biology about her. Suddenly the violet-green swallows were out, doing their acrobatic dives, skimming the water for rising insects. Somewhere behind her an owl was out early, making some sort of call that only her oldest uncle could translate, and the spotted toads were adding their grunts to the general birdsong symphony.
Why was she just sitting here? Bernie asked herself. She zipped open the top of her backpack, got out her water bottle, hung her bird-watcher binoculars over her shoulder, then dipped back into the pack for her birder’s notebook. She tore out a blank back page, took out her pen, and started writing.
MR. TUVE—I AM WALKING UP RIVER A WAY. BACK SOON. WAIT HERE FOR US.
She left the note on the boulder where she had been sitting, put another rock at a corner to hold it down, and started walking—first over to the cliff-side tamarisk trees to investigate a bird nest she’d noticed there, and then down toward an outcropping that a long time ago (probably a few billion years ago) had formed a lava flow obstruction and a noisy little rapid in the Colorado.
The flotsam kicked out at the rapid revealed nothing she hadn’t expected, being mostly debris washed down one or another of the little streams that flowed in from the cooler, wetter mesa tops a mile above. She identified the hulls of pinon nuts, Ponderosa needles, twigs from Utah junipers, and a variety of grass samples, many probably blown in but some local needle grass which thrived in this hot, dry bottom. Nothing here she hadn’t expected.
Through her binoculars, she checked the place where Jim and Dashee had left her. No sign of them or of Tuve, nor did she spot anyone on the few points high up in the cliffs of the Salt Trail where she thought he might be descending. She focused in as sharply as she could on the boulder where she had left her note. She couldn’t see
