Eye of The cat, page 2
As he made his camp, the coyote limped after him, its left foreleg still bound. Tonight was the night to take care of that, too.
He built his fire and prepared his meal, the pinon smoke redolent in his nostrils. By the time that it was ready the day was gone, and the mesa and the ridge were but lumps of greater darkness against the night.
“Your last free meal,” he said, tossing a portion of the food to the beast at his feet.
As they ate, he remembered other nights and other camps, a long trail of them stretching back over a century. Only this time there was nothing to hunt, and in a way this pleased him.
Drinking his coffee, he thought of the hundred-seventy years of his existence: how it had begun in this place, of the fairylands and hells through which he had taken it and how he had come—back. “Home,” under the circumstances, would be more than an irony. He sipped the scalding brew from the metal cup, peopling the night with demons, most of whom now resided in San Diego.
Later, with his hunting knife, he removed the dressing from the animal’s leg. It remained perfectly still as he did this, watching. As he cut away at the stiff material, he recalled the day some weeks before when he had come upon it, leg broken, in a trap. There had been a time when he would have acted differently. But he had released it, taken it home with him, treated it. And even this, this long trek into the Carrizos, was for the purpose of turning it free at a sufficient distance from his home, with a full night ahead to tempt it into wandering back to its own world, rather than prolonging an unnatural association.
He slapped its flank.
“Go on. Run!”
It rose, its movements still stiff, leg still held at an awkward angle. Only gradually did it lower the limb as it moved about the campsite. After a time, it passed into and out of the circle of firelight, remaining away for longer and longer periods.
As he prepared his bedroll, he was startled by a buzzing noise. Simultaneously, a red light began winking on the small plastic case which hung from his belt. He switched off the buzzer, but the light continued to blink. He shrugged and put it aside, face down. It indicated an incoming call at his distant home. He had gotten into the habit of wearing the unit when he was near the place and had forgotten to remove it. He never wore the more elaborate version, however, and so was not equipped to answer the call from here. This did not seem important. It had been several years since he had received anything which might be considered an important call.
Still, it troubled him as he lay regarding the stars. It had been a long while since he had received any calls at all. He wished now that he had either carried along the unit’s other component or had not brought anything. But he was retired, his newsworthiness long vanished. It could not really be important…
.…He was traversing an orange plain beneath a yellow sky in which a massive white sun blazed. He was approaching an orange, pyramidal structure covered with a web work of minute fractures. He drew near and halted, hurriedly setting up the projector. Then he commenced waiting, occasionally moving to tend another machine which produced a continuous record as the cracks grew. Time meant very little to him. The sun drifted slowly. Abruptly, one of the jagged lines widened and the structure opened. A wide-shouldered form covered with pink stubble rose up suddenly out of it, swaying, a raw, bristle-edged opening facing him forward of the bulbous projection at its top, beneath a dazzling red band of jewel-like knobs. He triggered the projector and a gleaming net was cast upon it. It struggled within it but could not come free. Its movements came to correspond with a faint drumming sound which might be his heartbeat. Now the entire world crashed and fell away and he was running, running into the east, younger self of his self, beneath a blue sky, past saltbush and sagebrush, clumps of scrub grass and chamisa, the sheep barely noting his passage, save for one which suddenly rose up, assuming all the colors of the dawn, swaying…And then everything swam away on dark currents to the places where dreams dwell when they are not being used…
Birdnotes and predawn stasis: he was cast up onto the shoals of sleep, into a world where time hung flexed at the edge of light. Frozen. His emerging awareness moved slowly over preverbal landscapes of thought he had quitted long ago. Or was it yesterday?
He awoke knowing that the call was important. He tended to his morning and removed all signs of his camp before the sun was fully risen. The coyote was nowhere in sight. He began walking. It had been a long time, too long for him to go further into the portent. His feelings, however, were another matter. He scrutinized them occasionally, but seldom examined them closely.
As he hiked across the morning, he considered his world. It was small again, as in the beginning, though this was a relative matter—relative to all the worlds he had traveled in. He moved now in the foothills of the Carrizo Mountains in Dinetah, the land of the Navajos, over twenty-five thousand square miles, much of it still grazing land, over a million and a half acres still wildland, bounded by the four sacred mountains—Debentsa in the north, Mount Taylor in the south, San Francisco Peaks in the west and Blanco Peak in the east, each with its stories and sacred meanings. Unlike many things he had known, Dinetah had changed only slowly, was still recognizable in this, the twenty-second century, as the place it had been in his boyhood. Returning to this land after so many years had been like traveling backward in time.
Yet there were differences between this day and that other. For one, his clan had always been a small one, and now he found himself its last survivor. While it was true that one is born a member of one’s mother’s clan but in a sense is also born for one’s father’s clan, his father had been a Taoseno and there had been very little contact with the pueblo. His father—a tall, sinewy man, an unusually gifted tracker, with more than a little Plains blood—had come to live in Dinetah, as was proper, tending his wife’s flocks and hoeing her corn, until the day a certain restlessness overtook him.
Even so, it was not the lack of clan affiliation which had altered his life. A Navajo has great potential for personal contacts through the complex network of tribal interrelationships, so that even though all of the people he had known in his youth were likely dead, he might still find ready acceptance elsewhere. But he had returned with an Anglo wife and had not done this. He felt a momentary pang at the thought, though more than three years had passed since Dora’s death.
It was more than that. A Navajo alone, on his own, away from the People, is said to be no longer a Navajo—and he felt that in a way this was true, though his mother, his grandmother and his great-grandmother were buried somewhere near the place where he now lived. He knew that he had changed, changed considerably, during the years away. Yet so had the People. While the land was little altered, they had lost many of the small things he remembered, small things adding up to something large. Paradoxically, then, he was on the one hand of an earlier era than his contemporaries, and on the other…He had walked beneath alien suns. He had tracked strange beasts, worthy of Monster-Slayer himself. He had learned the ways of the bellicanos and was not uncomfortable among them. There were degrees after his name, some of them earned. There was a library in his head, held firmly in the trained memory of one who had studied the chants of yataalii. More traditional yet more alien he found himself. He wanted to be alone, whatever he was.
He broke into an easy jog, telling himself that its purpose was to get the cold out of his bones. He ran past walls and outcrops of granite and sandstone, hillsides of pinon and juniper. Dead yuccas, their leaves touched with ice, lay like burned out stars nailed to the ground along his trail. The snow glinted on distant mountain peaks beneath a perfectly clear sky. Even after the cold had left him, he maintained his pace, deriving a kind of joy from the exertion.
The day wore on. He did not break his stride, however, until midmorning, when he halted for a brief meal upon a hillside commanding a long view down a narrow canyon where sheep grazed on dry grasses. In the distance, smoke rose from a conical, dirt-insulated hogan, its Pendleton-hung door facing him, there in the east.
An old man with a stick came out from behind a cluster of rocks, where he might have been resting while watching the sheep. Limping, he took a circuitous path which eventually brought him near.
“Yá’át’ééh,” the man said, looking past him.
“Yá’át’ééh”
He asked the man to share his food, and they ate in silence for a time.
After a While, he asked the man’s clan—it would have been impolite to ask his name—and learned that he was of the Rabbit Redwater People. He always found it easier to talk with the older people than the younger ones, those who lived far out rather than near the cities.
Eventually the man asked him his own clan. When he told him, the other grew silent. It is not good to talk of the dead.
“I am the last,” he finally said, wanting the other to understand. “I’ve been away a long time.”
“I know. I know the story of Star Tracker.” He pushed down upon the crown of his wide-brimmed black hat as a gust of wind struck them. He looked back along the trail to the north. “Something follows you.”
Still smiling at the way the old man had named him without naming him, he turned his head and looked in that direction. A large ball of tumbleweed bounced and rolled along the foot of the hill.
“Russian thistle,” he said.
“No,” the other replied. “Something more dangerous.” Despite his years, the fear of the chindi rose for a moment out of his youth. He shuddered beneath the touch of the wind.
“I see nothing else,” he said.
“You have been gone for many years. Have you had an Enemyway?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you should.”
“Perhaps I will. You know a good Enemyway singer?”
“I am a singer.”
“Perhaps I will see you again on this before long.”
“I have heard that Star Tracker was a singer. Long ago.”
“Yes.”
“When you come by again we will talk more of these things.”
“Yes.”
The man looked back once more, along the trad.
“In the meantime,” he said, “follow a twisted path.”
“I will do that.”
Later, as he passed along the streaky blue shale and frozen crimson clay of a dry riverbed, naked cottonwoods flanking it like fracture lines against the cold blue of the sky, he thought of the old man’s words and the things of which they reminded him—of the sky creatures and water creatures, of the beings of cloud, mist, rain, pollen and corn which had figured so prominently in his childhood imagination—here in the season when the snakes and the thunder still slept.
It had been a long while since he had considered his problems in the old terms. A chindi …Real or of the mind—what difference? Something malicious at his back. Yes, another way of looking at things…
The day wore on to noon and past it before the butte near his home came into view, a high-standing wind-sculpture reminiscent of something he had once seen in a seaweed-fringed valley beneath the waters of an alien ocean. He halted again at this point to eat the rest of his rations. Nature had long moods in the Southwest, he reflected, as he looked off in that direction. While it was true that the land was little altered, there had been some change between the then and the now. He could just make out stands of blue spruce near the monolith’s base, a tree he had not seen in this area a century and a half ago. But then the climate had also altered somewhat during the span, the winters becoming a trifle more clement, coming later, ending a bit sooner than they once had.
He filled his pipe and lit it. Shadows like multitudes of fingers stretched slowly out of the west. To run all this way, then sit and rest when the end was in sight—it seemed the thing to do. Was he afraid? he wondered. Afraid of that damned call? Maybe that was it. Or did he want a last slow-moving view of this piece of his life before something happened to change it? There had been a song…He could not remember it.
When he felt that the time was proper he rose and began walking through the coolness and shadow toward the large, distant, six-sided house with the door to the east, his hogan that was not exactly a hogan.
* * *
The sky was darker by the time he reached the neighborhood of his dwelling, and the trees curtained off even more of the light, casting an as yet starless evening over the raised log-and-stucco structure. He wandered about it for several minutes before approaching from the east and mounting the rough-cut decking with which he had surrounded the place. He entered then and turned on the light. He had his own power supply, rooftop and below-ground.
Moving to the central fog on, he arranged some kindling and struck it to fire. He disrobed then, tossing his Levi’s and red-and-white flannel shirt into a hamper along with the rest of his clothing. Crossing to a tall, narrow stall, he entered and set the timer for a three-minute UHF shower. Water was not a thing to be expended lightly in this region. When he emerged, he drew on a buckskin shirt, khaki bush pants and a pair of soft moccasins.
Activating his news recorder and display screen and adjusting it to some of his general interests, he passed to the small, open kitchen area to the right and prepared a meal, amid hanging ristras of chilis and onions.
He ate in a low, fur-covered chair and the walls about him were hung with rugs from Two Gray Hills and Ganado, interspersed with framed photographs of alien landscapes. A rack of weapons hung on the far wall; a meter-square metal platform enclosed by shining vertical bars of varying heights stood nearby, a large console with a display screen to its right. Its message light was still blinking.
When he finished eating, he toyed with his belt unit and put it aside. He went to the kitchen and got a beer.
DISK 1
CHILEAN QUAKES ABORTED
TAXTONIES ARRESTED
and three demonstrators were apprehended after reportedly setting fire to the car belonging to the official responsible for the ruling
PETROCEL DENIES PATENT INFRINGEMENT CLAIMS
“GREW OUR OWN,” DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH INSISTS
A MILD SPRING FOR MUCH OF THE NATION
EARLY FLOOD WATCHES IN MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
CHIMPANZEE COMPLAINS OF ART THEFT
References to a drugged banana figured prominently in the bizarre statement taken today by Los Angeles detectives
KILLED THEM “BECAUSE THEY WERE THERE,”
MOTHER OF THREE EXPLAINS
It’s been a long time since you left me.
Don’t know what I’m gonna do.
I look up at the sky and wonder—
Earthlight always makes me think of you.
COLUMBIA STUDENTS SKYDIVE FROM ORBIT
TO SET NEW RECORD
“Naturally the university is proud,” Dean Schlobin remarked, “but
STRAGEAN AMBASSADOR CLOSETED WITH
SECRETARY-GENERAL
Stragean Ambassador Daltmar Stango and Consul Orar Bogarthy continue a second day of talks with Secretary-General Walford. Speculation on a breakthrough in trade-agreement negotiations runs high, but so far the news community
W. COAST DOLPHINS PRESS CLAIMS
A-1 CANNING BELIEVED READY TO SETTLE
BAKIN M’BAWA PREDICTS END OF WORLD AGAIN
I sip the beer and hear the music,
Watch the ships as they arrive.
You packed your bag and went away, love
I feel like H-E-L-L5.
CHURCH OF NATURAL LIFE RADICALS SUSPECTED
IN SPERMOVA BANK BOMBING
MAN SUES TO RECOVER FORMER PERSONALITY
Relying on a district court order, Menninger officials performed
BANK OF NOVA SCOTIA COMPUTER CHARGED WITH
FELONY IN BONDS MANIPULATION SCANDAL
Oh, I’m sittin’ here and hurtin’
In this slowly turnin’ dive.
If you ever want to reach me
Just dial H-E-L-L5.
hate somewhere he still exists and there is no force great enough to keep me from him forever it has taken a long while to learn the ways but soon i will be ready i am ready eight days and had i known then what i know now he would be gone i would be gone burned? burned they say? nevermore amid the slagheaps to chase the crawling tubes and crunch them for their juiciness? but this air too i breathe and only the jagged and the straight lightnings hold me here i know the way beyond them now and the trees outside the walls visions of cities the lesser ones bear i know the ways i know the forms wait the lesser ones’ twisted minds tell me what i need one will come one day who will know of the one who is not like the others who still exists i will leave for that somewhere he exists eight days i died a little he will die wholly nothing can keep me from him forever i will talk first now i know of it words like the crawling things crunch them taste their juiciness strike now and see the lesser ones draw back now i know them i will use them words to tell him the why of it now i will be a sphere and roll about ha! lesser ones! hate i will talk it that when tell it then eight days burned hate
