soon.”
“Was he a man? He’s already there.”
Jim had come back! Bernie felt a wave of relief. Followed immediately by apprehension. “A handsome young Navajo policeman? But not wearing his uniform?”
The old woman laughed. “Not any Navajo policeman,” she said. “Not unless you have big white-haired Navajo men with blue eyes. But he had a gun like a policeman.”
“You saw a gun?”
“A pistol. He was looking at it. Then putting it back under his belt.”
“Oh,” Bernie said. She looked at the old woman, and the old woman looked at her. Nodded.
“Some sort of trouble?” the woman said. “Maybe man trouble. That’s usually it. So you don’t want to go up there right now, is that right? Until the right man comes to meet you.”
“Something like that,” Bernie said.
The woman smiled. “Then I should give you some more drinking water, daughter. Give you some more time to wait before you dry up. But you should go back down to the big river to wait for your Navajo policeman. Up here it is dangerous.”
Bernie nodded.
The woman swung the bag off her shoulder. It was one of those canvas canteens that dry-country cowboys and sheep herders hang from their saddles. She pointed to Bernie’s bottle, said, “I will share with you.”
“Thank you, Mary,” Bernie said. “Do you have enough?”
The woman laughed. “I’m not waiting for a man,” she said. “I’m going home. You should be doing that. Not staying so close to where the danger is.”
Bernie held out her bottle. Thinking while the woman filled it about the pistol she had seen, and about what she, Bernie, seemed to be getting into here.
“This danger,” Bernie said. “Could you tell me what it is?”
Mary considered this. “Have you heard about the Hopi? How we came to be on this Earth Surface World? About our kachinas? Any of that?”
“Some of it,” Bernie said. “My mother’s father told me something, and my uncle knew something about it. He’s a hatalii. A singer.”
Mary looked skeptical.
“I guess it was just what they had heard from friends,” Bernie said. “Nothing secret.”
“You know about Masaw? The one some people call the Skeleton Man?”
“I heard he was the Guardian Spirit of the Hopis on this Earth Surface World.”
Mary nodded. “This Glittering World,” she said.
“Wasn’t he the spirit who greeted the Hopi people when they emerged out of the dark worlds into this one? The one who told you to make migrations to the four directions and then you would find the Center Place of the World? And you should live there? Up on the Hopi Mesas?”
Mary was smiling. “Well,” she said. “I guess that’s a version of a little bit of it. The way people in the Bear Clan tell it, anyway. What else have you heard?”
“I read in the book Frank Waters wrote that when Masaw met the people emerging from the underworld, his face was all bloody. That he was a fearsome-looking kachina. And that he taught you not to be afraid to die. I think you called him the Death Kachina.”
Mary nodded. “Or sometimes the Skeleton Man. And some of the old people tell us that in another way,” she said. “In those dark first three worlds we were forced out because of horrible crowding. People kept making babies but nobody ever died. We were jammed in together so tight, they say, that you couldn’t spit without spitting on somebody else. Could hardly move. People just kept creating more people. Twin brothers were leaders of the people then. They found a way to grow a reed through the roof of the first dark world for us to the second one, and then, when it got too crowded, on into the third one, and finally into this one. But still nobody ever died until Masaw taught people not to be afraid of death.”
Bernie had heard something like this in one of her anthropology classes, but not this version.
“How did he do that?” she asked.
“One of the clan leaders had a beautiful daughter who was killed by another little girl. Out of jealousy. And that caused trouble between families. So Masaw opened the earth so the clan leader could see his daughter in the world beyond this one. She was laughing, happy, playing, singing her prayers.”
“That sounds like the Christian heaven,” Bernie said. “Our Navajo beliefs—most of them, anyway—aren’t so specific. But you were going to tell me why it’s dangerous for me here.”
“Because up there…” She paused, shook her head, pointed up the canyon. “Up there, they say, is where the Skeleton Man lives. Up there in the biggest canyon that runs into this one. Comes in from the left. They say he painted a symbol on the cliff where it enters. The symbol for the Skeleton Man.” Mary knelt, drew in the sand with her finger. The shape she formed meant nothing to Bernie.
“Is the danger because that place is where Masaw, or the Skeleton Man, is living?” Bernie asked, feeling uneasy. “Is that spirit dangerous to people like me?”
Mary shook her head, looking troubled. “Everything gets so mixed up,” she said. “The Supai people have their ideas, and the Paiutes come in here with different ideas, and the priests and the preachers and even the Peyote People tell us things. But I’ve been hearing that it might be some man, even older than me now. Nobody knew who his parents were. He used to come to Peach Springs and kept telling stories about how Masaw was the one who caused all those bodies to come falling down here into the canyon. Said Masaw made those planes run together.
