that, either. That either meant that one of the men had come back, found it, and was now (she hoped) awaiting her, or that Tuve had arrived, taken it, and went on his way. Or it meant that these lenses were just not potent enough for her to make it out from where she was standing.
She focused down the cliffs. The angle of the sunlight now made it clear why one of the early explorers she had read—John Wesley Powell, she thought it was—had described them as “parapets.” They formed a seemingly infinite row of light and shadow, sort of like looking down a picket fence, with each shadowed space representing a place where drainage from the mesa top had—down through a million or so years of draining off snowmelt and rainwater—eroded itself its own little canyon in its race to get to the Colorado and on to the Pacific Ocean.
Those canyons would be more interesting than the scene at the riverside. And a side canyon was what both Jim and Cowboy were looking for. An undercut place where their fantastical dispenser of diamonds was living, or had been living. Presuming he had ever existed, which had always seemed doubtful to Bernie.
She skirted past the rapids outcrop and walked downstream. The first opening in the cliff was a dead end for her purposes, blocked with brush and a jumble of boulders swept down by some long-past flash flood. She pushed her way through the barrier far enough to see it offered not much possibility of a cave large enough for occupation.
More walking, with brief checks into four other drain-off cuts in the cliffs, brought her to a more promising- looking drainage mouth. She had been noticing now and then the tracks left by Jim’s boots, mostly in the damp sand very close to the putty-toned water of the Colorado. Now she saw them again. They led across the blow sand leading into the mouth of the same opening that attracted her. They went in, out again, then back toward the river, and on downstream.
Ah, well, Bernie thought, he’d be coming back after a while, and when the shadows were longer, the temperature would drop. Her schoolgirl trip into the canyon had been made in the cooler days of late autumn. She’d read that summer heat at the canyon bottom sometimes soared as much as twenty degrees above the temperature on the mesa a mile above. Now she believed it. Even in the shade, it seemed dangerously torrid. She walked up the slot far enough to find a spot where the interior cliffs hadn’t been cooking all day under the Southwestern sun. She’d rest awhile and cool off.
Typical of Bernadette Manuelito, the rest period was brief. She noticed tracks of Chee’s boots again, scuffing across the thin layer of blow sand near the opposite wall. She’d test the tracking skills she’d been taught in her tour with the Border Patrol.
The tracks disappeared in a tangle of dead, dry tumbleweeds and assorted other sticks and stems, then showed up again where the most recent runoff had left the stone floor bare and subject to scuffing marks. It was, of course, a strictly up-slope walk, and it soon came to a junction where a smaller post-rainstorm stream joined the major flow. She was able to find Chee’s tracks only a few yards up the narrower canyon, and then they resumed their climb up the bigger one and came to another junction, this one through a very narrow cut in the cliffs, at which point there was another very short side trip of boots marks.
From this, a comparatively cool downdraft flowed, bringing with it the aroma of the high-country flora—pinon resin, cliffrose, and the slightly acid smell of claretcup cactus. It was comfortable and pleasant here. The bedrock under her feet was damp with a minuscule trickle of water from a narrow horizonal seepage between layers of stone on the opposite wall. A swarm of midges was dining on a growth of moss there, and below them squatted one of the spotted toads common to the deep canyon. He sat so utterly motionless that Bernie wondered for a moment if he was alive. He answered that question with a sudden leap, and scuttled across the stony floor.
Why? Bernie quickly saw the answer. The head of a small snake emerged from under a fallen slab, slithered onto the bedrock floor after the toad. It stopped. Coiled. Swiveled its head and its tongue emerged, testing the air for the strange odor of Bernie, a new species of intruder in the snake’s hunting ground.
Bernie had been conditioned from toddling years to look upon everything alive as fellow citizens of a tough and unforgiving natural cosmos. Each and all, be they schoolgirl, scorpion, bobcat, or vulture, had a role to play and was endowed with the good sense to survive—provided good sense was used. Thus Bernie was not afraid of snakes. Even rattlesnakes, which this one obviously was, because after coiling he had raised his terminal tip and sent his species’ nameplate warning signal.
But this one was pink, which brought a huge smile to Bernie’s face and the immediate thought of Dr. William Degenhardt, her favorite professor at the University of New Mexico. Degenhardt, an internationally acclaimed herpetologist, was an authority on snakes, salamanders, and other such cold-blooded beasts, and was known, in fact, as their friend, with a huge portrait of a coiled rattler on his living room wall. Bernie remembered his lectures fondly, and in one the Pink Grand Canyon Rattlesnake was the subject—not just because it was rare but because it was such a wonderful demonstration of how a species could adapt itself in size, color, and hunting techniques to the weird environment the Grand Canyon offered.
Bernie found herself wishing she had a camera. She could hardly wait to tell Degenhardt about this. Maybe she could catch the thing and take it back to him. But the professor would never approve of such a disruption of nature. Besides, she couldn’t keep it alive in her backpack. So she simply stared at it, shifting her memory into the Save mode, and recorded every variation in color, shade, and tone, size and number of rattles, shape of head, and so forth—all of the features the professor would want to compare with the illustrations in his textbook on such beasts. But the snake tired eventually of this scrutiny, thrust out his tongue to test the air a final time, and slithered away to hide himself again back under a stone slab.
The cry of a peregrine falcon snapped Bernie out of thinking about snakes and professors, and back into the duty to which Sergeant Chee had assigned her. It was time to climb out of this slot and find a place from which she could see if Tuve had climbed down the Salt Trail to join this expedition. Or if Chee, or Dashee, or both were awaiting her down at the Salt Woman Shrine.
Reaching the spot that looked most promising as a lookout post involved scrambling up a broken section of the opposing wall of the canyon she had followed up from the river. It was a tough climb, made even slower because the Pink Rattler had reminded Bernie that snakes like hanging out in hidden little spaces under rocks. She was very, very careful where she put her hands while pulling herself up to the shelf she had chosen.
It was a good choice. From that vantage point, her binoculars could scan down into a substantial stretch of the Colorado River, and two small waterfalls flowing out of cliff-side drainage across the river. Upriver her view took in the stream flowing in from the Little Colorado, forming the deep, cool pool of bluish water near the Salt Woman Shrine and lightening the muddy tone of the Colorado.
More important, she could see the spot where Sergeant Chee had commanded her to await his return. Well, the sergeant hadn’t returned from his hunt downriver. Nor did Cowboy Dashee seem to be back from his excursion up the river. No sign of Tuve, either. Unless he had come and gone again. For that matter, maybe Chee and Dashee had been back and were off again hunting for her.
Bernie felt a touch of uneasy guilt. Jim really hadn’t asked much of her. Just to help out a little on their mission of mercy for Billy Tuve. She could have postponed her botanical research project. Jim’s opinion of her would be dented some if he returned and found her missing.
