Death. Grandmother Walks was dead.
For some reason, Caroline remembered the winter solstice last year, walking and climbing through the frozen hours before sunrise, the smell of stone damp with the winter cold and scattered windblown snow, deep in a canyon narrow enough, overhung enough, to be next thing to a cave. Darkness and icy stars in the fog of her breath and then the wash of false dawn. Silence, broken only by the night calls of owl and coyote and the furtive rustlings of small bodies fleeing through dry brush. The bitter sweetness of herbs smoldering in a bowl, sage and juniper and the sweetgrass she'd brought from Maine that told the spirits a new People had joined the quiet waiting.
Standing. Waiting. Her fingers and toes turning numb just like December at home. And then a single ball of light, the first rays of the sunrise, red on red sandstone, dropping in birth from the belly of a pregnant petroglyph that could have sheltered there for twice a thousand years. Five women chanted the songs that welcomed a new child, a new season and year, into the world. That was how Caroline remembered Grandmother Walks.
She'd never told that tale, never written it up for a paper in some anthro journal, points toward her Ph.D. Never mentioned it to Professor Stevens or Dean Johnson. 'That young woman needs to decide whether she wants to be an anthropologist or an Indian.' Well, that ritual was Indian business, not for publication.
Wasn't the only secret she'd kept. The official reason for her trip was collecting data for Professor Stevens' study on pottery diffusion. He'd fry her ears if he knew about a couple of complete bowls she'd seen. Including the one that had held the herb smudge for that ceremony. Whiteware, clay fired in a reducing atmosphere rather than the more common red that came from excess oxygen working on trace iron in the clay. Black figuring.
Most of the whiteware, redware for that matter, any decorations were geometric and sharp — straight lines, bands, zig-zags, triangles, that sort of thing. One particular potter or small group of potters, one site, had done curves. Had done incised figures using a cactus spine. Had worked subtle differences in the form and substance of the pot, the bowl, might even have used something like a potter's wheel instead of building coil pots and smoothing them.
They'd done chemical analysis on some shards, proving the work all came from the same clay bank, the same pigments in the decoration. It had been almost an industry, for a short time and long ago, a single source and enough production to give her data. And the wares had been prized enough to become trade items before the industry, the family, died out. Prized enough and distinct enough that a trained eye could spot them at a glance. Her trained eye.
Working from shards, she was plotting the distribution of the work of a single pottery rather than a culture. Trade routes, contacts and alliances, common ritual, those shards might speak insights about forgotten people far beyond a common piece of fired clay. Professor Stevens obsessed over that study to a point just shy of psychosis. Or maybe past it.
She'd seen bowls by that hand, complete bowls, well outside the distribution pattern they had plotted. And she'd never mentioned them to him, because their location and use were no white man's business. No man's business, no matter what his skin color.
“That young woman needs to decide whether she wants to be an anthropologist or an Indian.” Well, on some things she was going to stay Indian and they could just go fuck themselves.
Anyway, the study made the official reason for her trip. For unofficial reasons, she had a swarm of motives for flying a few thousand miles on her own dime so she wouldn't feel guilty about wasting scarce grant money on chasing wild geese. In no particular order, there were the hunt for the Hunter, a dozen problems of Aunt Alice's including a lover's spat with Aunt Kate, Gary feuding with various parental Morgans and maybe hurt and hiding. Ol' Tomcat Ben was acting weird, tangled up with eldritch relics of the elder gods, probably involving tentacles. Bad string of emails and phone calls.
And she needed thinking space. With Grandmother Walks dead, Arizona had lost a lot of its savor. Grad school had lost a lot of its savor. All that petty-ass politics and pressure, all those elbows in her space, the sense of being an Alabama sharecropper going hat-in-hand to beg seed money for next year . . .
And everything was dry and dusty and hot. Did Kenny Grayeyes make up for that? Grandmother Walks sure hadn't thought so.
Thinking space. She squirmed away from the sweaty bulk overflowing the next seat and dreamed about paddling to an island in a crystal mirror lake, loons calling, clear icy water you could dip up in your hand and drink.
They'd just taken off, she still felt Kenny's good-bye hug warm on her ribs and back and butt, and already she missed him. This was going to be hard.
*~*~*
"Look, they've got me covering two jobs. Okay if I just lock you in and come back in a couple of hours?" Anita Schwartz looked harassed, a typical grad assistant's expression. "Say, twelve o'clock? Lunch?"
Caroline wrinkled her nose in sympathy, glanced at her watch, and nodded. "Yeah, that'd be fine. The shelving system looks straightforward, and I have the catalog right here."
Anita was a stroke of luck. Caroline actually knew her, they'd taken undergrad courses together back at the good ol' alma mater before following different grad school tracks, and she wasn't a university bureaucrat or a rules-bound docent volunteer whose time cost nothing. The anthro world tended to be something of a small town clique, always tripping over old friends and enemies. That hadn't stopped Anita from searching Caroline's laptop bag and satchel, pausing for a moment to drool over the fancy digital camera.
But
