Somehow the dreaded Apache was about to step out of the pages of Diana Ladd Walker's book and reenter their lives.
Gabe remembered reading in a newspaper article several months earlier that Andrew Carlisle was dead. That meant that if he was not coming in person, certainly the strength of the Ohb was coming, bringing danger to all of those people still alive who had once been connected with Diana Ladd and with Rita Antone-the woman Gabe called Ni-thahth, his mother's elder sister-in that other, long-ago battle. The fact that Carlisle was dead meant nothing. His spirit was still alive, still restless, and still bent on revenge.
Time passed. When Gabe at last emerged from his self-induced trance, the stars were growing pale in a slowly graying sky. Stiffly, Gabe Ortiz eased his cramped body out of the uncomfortable plastic chair. Before going back into the house to grab a few hours of sleep, he limped out to where the cars were parked and put both Looks At Nothing's deerskin pouch and Diana Ladd's offending book in the glove compartment of the tribal chairman's Ford sedan.
Once, long ago, when Looks At Nothing had first told him that Gabe had the power to be a great shaman, Gabe had teased the Gohhim O'othham — Old Man. He had laughed off the medicine man's prediction that one day Fat Crack, too, would be a great mahkai — a medicine man with a tow truck. That idea had struck him as too funny, especially since it came from a man who clung stubbornly to the old ways and who looked down on all things Anglo-with the single notable exception of that aging Zippo lighter.
Looks At Nothing had much preferred walking to riding in a truck. Gabe wondered now what the old shaman would say if he knew his deerskin pouch and sacred tobacco would be riding to town the next day in a two-year-old Crown Victoria. Looks At Nothing would probably think it was funny, Gabe thought, and so did he.
A few minutes later, still chuckling, he eased himself into bed. As he did so, Wanda stirred beside him.
'It's late,' she complained. 'You've been up all night.'
'Yes,' Gabe said, rolling his heavy body next to hers, and resting one of his hands on her shoulder. 'But at least now I can sleep.'
The sentence ended with a contented snore. Within minutes, Wanda fell asleep once more as well.
Lani had told the man that she would be late for work if she arrived any later than seven. That wasn't entirely true. The first two hours she spent at the museum each day, from seven to nine, were strictly voluntary. She went around on the meandering paths, armed with a trash bag and sharp-pronged stick, picking up the garbage that had been left behind by the previous day's visitors.
During those two hours, doing mindless work, she was able to watch the animals from time to time and simply to be there with them. Working by herself, without the necessity of talking with anyone else, she remembered the times she had come here with Nana Dahdand with her brother Davy.
Nana Dahd. Dahd itself implies nothing more than the somewhat distant relationship of godmother, but for Davy and Lani both, Rita Antone had been much more than that. Diana Ladd Walker may have owned the official title of 'Mother' in the family, but she had come in only a distant second behind the Indian woman who had actually filled the role.
Ambitious and forever concentrating on her work, there was a part of Diana Ladd Walker that was always separate from both her children. While Diana labored over first a typewriter and later a computer, the child-rearing joys and responsibilities had fallen mainly on Rita's capable and loving shoulders.
By the time Lani appeared on the scene, Davy was already eleven years old and Rita's health was becoming precarious. Had Davy not been there to pitch in and help out, no doubt it would have been impossible for Nana Dahd to look after a busily curious toddler. In a symbiotic relationship that made outsiders wonder, the three of them-the old woman, the boy, and the baby-had made do.
Long after most males his age would have forsaken the company of women, Davy stayed around. He, more than anyone, understood what it was Nana Dahd was trying to do, and he was willing to help. Whenever he wasn't in school, he spent most of his waking hours helping the woman who had once been his baby-sitter care for his little sister.
When the three of them were alone together in Rita's apartment-with the old woman in her wheelchair and with Lani on her lap while Davy did his homework at the kitchen table-it seemed as though they existed in a carefully preserved bubble that was somehow outside the confines of regular time and space.
In that room they had spoken, laughed, and joked together, speaking solely in the softly guttural language of the Tohono O'othham. It was there Lani learned that Nana Dahd's childhood name had been E Waila Kakaichu, which means Dancing Quail. Rita Antone's dancing days were long since over, but Lani's were only beginning. The child danced constantly. Her favorite game consisted of standing in the middle of the room, twirling and pretending to be siwuliki — whirlwind. She would spin around and around until finally, losing her balance, she would fall laughing to the floor.
Just as Rita had given Davy his Indian name of Olhoni — Little Orphaned Calf-Nana Dahd gave Lani a special Indian name as well, one that was known only to the three of them. In the privacy of Rita's apartment, the Tohono O'othham child with the Mil-gahn name of Dolores Lanita Walker became Mualig Siakam. Rita told Lani that the words mualig siakam meant Forever Spinning.
There in Nana Dahd' s room, working one stitch at a time, Rita taught Davy and Lani how to make baskets. Davy had been at it much longer, but Lani's tiny and surprisingly agile fingers soon surpassed her elder brother's clumsier efforts. When that happened, Davy Ladd gave up and stopped making baskets altogether.
Rita taught Davy and Lani the old stories and the medicinal lore Rita had learned from her own grandmother, from Oks Amichuda — Understanding Woman. Had Rita been physically able, she would have taken her charges out into the desert to show them the plants and animals she wanted them to understand. Instead, the three of them spent hours almost every weekend at the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, with Davy pushing Nana Dahd' s chair along the gently graded paths and with Lani perched on the old woman's lap.
For Rita, every display in the museum was part of her comprehensive classroom. As they went from one exhibit to another, Rita would point out the various plants and tell what each was good for and when it should be picked. And on those long afternoons, if it was still wintertime, so the snakes and lizards were unable to hear and swallow the storyteller's luck, Rita would tell stories.
Each animal and plant came with its own traditional lore. Patiently, Nana Dahd told them all. Some tales explained the how of creation, like the spiders stitching together the floating pieces of earth. Others helped explain animal behavior, like the stories about how I'itoi taught the birds to build their nests or how he taught the gophers to dig their burrows underground. There were stories that did the same thing for plants, like the one about the courageous old woman who went south to rescue her grandson from the warlike Yaquis and was rewarded by being turned into the beautiful plant, the night-blooming cereus. And there were some, like the stories of how Cottontail and Quail both tricked Coyote, that were just for fun.
As the children learned the various stories, Rita had encouraged them to observe the behavior of the animals involved and to consider how the story and the animal's natural inclination came together to form the basis of the story. What was observable and what was told combined to help the children learn to make sense of their world, just as those same stories had for the Tohono O'othham for thousands of years.
Rita-her person, her stories, and her patient teaching-had formed the center of Lani Walker's existence from the moment the child first came to Gates Pass, from the time before she had any conscious memory. When Rita Antone died, the day before Lani's seventh birthday, a part of the child had died as well, but there on the paths of the museum the summer of her sixteenth year-wandering alone among the plants and animals that had populated Nana Dahd' s stories-Lani was able to recapture those fading strains of stories from her childhood and breathe life into them anew.
And each day at nine o'clock, when she finished up with one shift and had an hour to wait before the next one started, she would make sure she was near the door to the hummingbird enclosure. For it was there, of all the places in the museum, where she felt closest to Nana Dahd. This was where she and Davy had been with Rita on the day Lani Walker first remembered hearing Rita mention the story of Kulani O'oks — the great Medicine Woman of the Tohono O'othham.
'Kulani,'Lani had repeated, running the name over her tongue. 'It sounds like my Mil-gahn name.'
And Rita's warm brown face had beamed down at her in a way that told Lani she had just learned something important. Nana Dahd nodded. 'That is why, at the time of your adoption, I asked your parents to make Lani part of your English name. Kulani O'oks and Mualig Siakam are two different names for the same person. And now that you are old enough to understand that, it is time that you heard that story as well.'
