Hour of the Hunter

fun.”

“We’ll see,” she answered, shifting down while the pickup lurched drunkenly to one side.

“How come my mom stopped liking rodeos?” Davy asked. “She used to like them, didn’t she?”

Nana Dahd looked at him shrewdly. “Why do you ask that?”

The boy shrugged and bit his lip, thinking about the picture that hung in the hallway. Smiling and surprisingly beautiful, his much younger mother was dressed up like a cowgirl with a jeweled tiara overlaying the feathered hatband of her Stetson. Looking at the picture, it was easy for Davy to imagine that long ago his mother had been a princess-a rich, happy princess. Of course, they weren’t rich now, and his mother didn’t seem to be very happy, either. He wondered sometimes if her unhappiness was all his fault.

“I saw her boots once,” he added after a pause. “Pretty ones with diamonds on them. Bone and I found them in the back of her closet. They’re gone now.”

The last was said matter-of-factly, but Rita heard the hurt beneath the words. Rhinestones, she thought to herself, not diamonds, but rhinestones. And yes, the boots were gone now, put away in one of the stacked boxes in the root cellar off the kitchen where Davy wouldn’t see them again and be tempted to ask more questions. Only Olhoni’s impassioned pleading had spared the picture of his mother as a seventeen-year-old rodeo queen from disappearing into the same box.

Davy lapsed into uncharacteristic silence, his endless stream of questions quieted for the moment. Rita understood that many of the boy’s questions were still too painful for his mother to face or answer, but it was time they were asked.

“You’ll have to talk to your mother about that,” Rita said.

Davy sighed. If Nana Dahd wouldn’t tell him, he might never know. “I did ask her,” he said. “She was too busy.”

The truck’s turn signals hadn’t worked for years. Rita stuck her arm out the open window, signaling for a left-hand turn. Davy sat up straight and peered out the window. “Where are we going now?” he asked.

“Up this road,” Rita replied, turning onto a rutted, hard-packed dirt track that led off through the underbrush. Barely one car-width wide, the narrow trail wound through thick stands of newly leafed mesquite and brilliantly yellow palo verde, up a slight rise, and then down through a dry, sandy wash. As the tires caught in the hubcap-deep sand, the steering wheel jerked sharply to the left. Rita clung to it with both hands and floorboarded the gas pedal, barely managing to maintain the truck’s forward momentum.

Engine rumbling, the pickup emerged from the wash. Ahead of them, the road gave little evidence of day-to- day use. Whatever faint tire tracks may have preceded theirs had long since been obliterated by the hoofprints of wandering herds of cattle. A second dip in the road took them through a second dry wash. Beyond that, the faded ghost of another road forked off to the left and meandered along beside an empty streambed through clumps of brittle, sun-dried grass and weeds.

They drove past a place where the remnants of several adobe houses were gradually melting back into the desert floor. “Did this used to be a village?” Davy asked.

Rita nodded. “It was called Ko’oi Koshwa.”

“Rattlesnake Skull?” Davy asked.

The old woman smiled and nodded. The Anglo child’s quick grasp of Rita’s native language always pleased her.

“Where did the people go?” he asked.

“Long ago, the Apaches came here. They surprised the village and destroyed it. They took most of the women and children away, although two-a boy and a girl-escaped. They hid in a cave up there in those hills.”

Rita pointed to where the base of the mountain Ioligam, Kitt Peak, abruptly thrust itself out of the flat desert floor.

“After that, people said this was a bad place, a haunted place. No one wanted to live here anymore. When they made the reservation, they left the charco which once belonged to the village outside the boundary.”

Davy immediately began looking for the charco, a man-made catchbasin used by the Papagos to catch the nutrient-rich summer-rain flash floods. For centuries, water captured in these isolated charcos irrigated Indian fields and watered livestock.

“But why are we going to a charco, Nana Dahd? I thought we were going to a dance.”

Rita stopped the truck where a barbed-wire gate barred their way. “To the charco first. Go open the gate,” she said.

Proud to be assigned such an important task, Davy did as he was told. He stood to one side, holding the gate until Rita had driven through. Once the gate was closed and he was back in the truck, they continued to follow the faint track, stopping at last just outside a shady grove of towering cottonwoods clustered around the man-made banks of an earthen water hole.

Hard-caked mud, baked shiny by an unrelenting sun and shot through with jagged cracks and the hoofprints of thirsty cattle, was all that remained from the previous summer’s life-sustaining rainstorms. It was June and hot. Both people and livestock hoped the rains would come again soon.

Davy looked around warily. For some reason he couldn’t explain, he didn’t like this place. “Why are we stopping here?”

“We have work to do, Olhoni. Come. Bring the rake and shovel.”

Carrying the wreath and the candle with her, Nana Dahd slid heavily out of the pickup and trudged toward the base of the largest of the cottonwoods.

The rake and shovel, half again as tall as Davy himself, were unwieldy and difficult for a six-year-old to carry, but he struggled manfully with them, making his way without complaint over the rough track from the truck to where Nana Dahd stood staring down at the ground.

It wasn’t until Davy reached her side that he saw what she was looking at-a shrine of sorts, although he didn’t know to call it that. In the middle of a circular patch of barren ground stood a small wooden cross. On it hung a faded plastic wreath, and before it sat a smoky glass vase that had once contained a candle. Both cross and glass were framed by a broken circle of smooth white river rocks.

“What is this, Nana Dahd?” Davy asked. “A grave? Is this a cemetery?”

He looked up. Nana Dahd’s usually impassive face was awash with emotion. A single tear glistened in the corner of her eye. In all his six years, Davy Ladd had never before seen his beloved Nana Dahd cry. Tears were precious and not to be spilled without good reason. Something must be terribly wrong.

“Let’s go,” he begged, reaching up and tugging at her hand. “Let’s leave this place. It’s scary here.”

But Nana Dahd had no intention of leaving. His touch seemed to jar her out of her reverie. Patting his shoulder, she reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a huge, wrinkled hanky. She blew her nose and wiped her red-rimmed eyes.

“I’m okay, Olhoni. We will leave, but after, not right now. First we work.”

Nana Dahd showed Davy how animals had scattered some of the white border stones into the brush. She directed him to find and rearrange as many as he could. Meanwhile, she retrieved the hoe and began scraping the small circle clean of all encroaching blades of grass and weed. As soon as the clearing satisfied her, she carefully removed the faded wreath from the cross and replaced it with the new one.

It was summer, and the harsh early afternoon sun beat down on them as they worked. Davy rebuilt the stone circle as best he could. Rita nodded with approval as he moved the last piece of border into place.

“Good,” she said. “Now for the candle.”

While Davy watched, she placed the new candle before the cross, bracing it around the base with a supporting bank of rocks and dirt.

“This is to keep the candle from falling over by accident,” she explained. “It would be very bad if our candle started a range fire.”

Finished at last, she knelt before the cross one last time and examined their handiwork. It was good. She motioned for Davy to join her.

“Light the candle, Olhoni,” she said gravely, handing him a book of matches.

Davy scratched his head in exasperation. How could grown-ups be so stupid? “But, Nana