In the tent Nick pulled Soba a little closer to him, and whispered into her ear, “Think I should let them know I managed to find my way home?”
Soba rolled over and rubbed noses with him. “Naw, I think a few morning calisthenics would do them all some good. Such naughty boys, teach them a little lesson.” With that she curled up in the nook of his arm, and they both drifted off back to sleep.
Chapter 20 – Early Morning, June 23
Bidzii circled around where the blanket was on the rise, looking for signs of tracks in any direction. He couldn’t find any, and yet Nick couldn’t have just disappeared. He might have flown away in his mind, but not with the body too. “Anyone see anything yet?”
Atsa, Yas, and Tahoma were all circling around farther out, looking for clues, calling for Nick. The sun was creeping up in the sky, the air dry and dusty, a warm breeze starting to stir. In their haste no one had eaten anything or thought to bring water, and they all started to get hot and thirsty. But most importantly, no one had seen anything of Nick yet.
Bidzii squatted down to gather his thoughts for a moment, and then saw a rock cairn, a small pyramid of rocks often used to indicate direction, nestled at the foot of the tallest cactus in sight. In the smooth sand in front of the cairn small pebbles outlined a hand, with the middle finger extended. Bidzii couldn’t help himself and laughed loudly. “A clever one, this Bilagáana.” He called his posse over, showed them the cairn, and said, “We need to find the next one, but I think I know where they are leading.” One by one they found them, irregularly spaced but zigzagging back toward the camp, not a footprint anywhere near them.
Outside of Soba’s tent they saw the last cairn next to Nanook, with small pebbles in the sand in the shape of a happy face. Together the sweaty group started slow clapping until Nick stuck his head out and smiled at them all. “This probably would have been a good place to start, don’t you think?” He chuckled, as he got out to join them.
“Alright everyone, since you worked so hard this morning, a nice traditional Navajo breakfast is on me.” Soba shooed them all away and went over to the fire pit. There she made small cakes of flour, which she cooked directly in the embers. While those were toasting, she ground piñon pine nuts with corn meal to create a nut butter paste for the cakes and finished with goat meat grilled over the fire. Being favorites of any true Navajo, everyone was lined up and looking famished as she finished cooking.
Plates of food on their laps, everyone dug in hungrily and waited expectantly for Nick’s Vision Quest download. Maybe he would disclose some Salvador Dalí type of melting cacti or landscapes, a Jimi Hendrix hallucinogenic charged dream, or perhaps a visit by his true spirit animal. Some had seen things even stranger than that.
Atsa couldn’t help himself and blurted out, “We heard you meet your spirit critter, and it turned out to be a dung beetle. That had to be disappointing!” A chorus of guffaws followed all around.
Soba looked at him and grinned, “Nothing like dining with the Diné, eh?” Diné was the Navajo word they had for themselves, which simply meant The People.
Nick smiled back at her, relieved to finally be feeling completely like himself again. He held one hand out in front of his face and flexed all the fingers. “No, nothing like it anywhere in the world.”
“OK, Lawrence of Arabia, time for the play by play,” Bidzii said, anxious to hear what the currents of the cosmos had revealed last night to Nick’s psychedelically expanded mind. Nick sat there silently for a while, composing his thoughts, amalgamating them back together into a cohesive narrative.
“I wasn’t sure what to expect, and at first I thought it would be nothing at all. That you just gave me some shitty tasting cactus to eat as a gag, to see if you could make me stay up all night. An initiation ritual, a little hazing for the gringo, for the Navajo wanna be. And frankly that would have been pretty funny. Hilarious actually. And then time actually changed, I never even had a chance to realize anything differently, I was already swept up in it. It wasn’t different experiences, it was only one. And it was so vivid I knew it wasn’t made up, not my rambling imagination turned loose, but rather my unconsciousness suddenly and profoundly focused. With laser like intensity, on something I had all the disconcerted pieces to all along. I was there, right there, and I saw how my father was killed.”
Nick recapped first all his suspicions about his father’s death, and how the police had thought them unsubstantiated conjecture, how he had started to doubt them himself. He told how he then found more clues, the cut branches which could have covered tracks, that Debbie at the diner told of an ice auger sold to strangers in the winter who didn’t know how to fish. And how one journal had come up missing, the key journal.
Pausing and taking a deep breath he calmly comported himself. Looking only at the fire he launched into a recounting of the peyote induced trance, the mescaline activated dream. He recounted the flight, the arrival of the two men, the struggle, the death, and his return. “I know what they did and how they did it, I saw all that with great clarity. But I still don’t know who they were and why they did it.”
Nick paused for a moment, struggling internally with what was right to do, and what he needed to do. “But even if my dad had somehow stumbled onto something they had to have, they didn’t have to kill him for it. I am going to find them someday, I promise you that.”
When Nick finished he looked up, and saw that everybody had stopped eating, and were sitting with open mouths, incredulous.
Bidzii slowly shook his head and finally broke the silence. “Over time, many unexplainable insights have come out of our people fasting and doing a vision quest or doing peyote like you just did. The accuracy is often inexplicable, there is simply no rational explanation. My grandfather did it in his youth, saw himself in a foreign land he had never been with black sand and explosions all around him, yelling into a strange box with a stick coming out of it. Ten years later he is on Okinawa, he had become a Windtalker, and was almost killed by artillery fire off Mount Suribachi. He found himself calling in reinforcements, then counter battery coordinates on a walkie-talkie to destroyers offshore in Navajo code, because the Japanese could never decipher the language.”
“And I have to tell you,” Soba injected, “that the grandfather Bidzii is talking about had a big influence on me. His knowledge of the traditional ways of the tribe, his war experience with language as a Windtalker, all influenced me in my pursuit of linguistics. He was one of those fountains of knowledge I wanted to make sure were captured for the posterity of our people.”
Nick nodded his head, appreciating the insight they both provided. “I can’t explain what I saw, I won’t even try. But I have you to thank for lifting the veil from my eyes. I now have a quest of my own to complete.”
Nick looked at Bidzii with an upturned eyebrow. “So what do say Sitting Bull, do I have your blessing to drive Soba south with me?”
Bidzii paused, his brow furrowed, wrestling with conflicting emotions. “You are headed into troubled times. I do not know where your path ultimately leads. But keep Soba from harm, remember that this is your path, your quest, not hers.”
With that he rose and offered his hand, which Nick stood and accepted. The two then exchanged a man hug, with Bidzii whispering in his ear, “Be careful out there my friend, I want both of you to come back safely. And remember, my posse is always just a phone call away.”
With that Nick looked over Bidzii’s shoulder at Soba and winked. “Road trip!”
Chapter 21 – Morning, June 23
As Soba threw her things in the back of the old Chevy pickup, she realized she had never even asked Nick if Nanook could accompany them. Before she could he patted on the tailgate, and the large animal nimbly jumped into the back bed, the shocks squeaking audibly in protest.
“Sweet ride for man and beast alike,” she teased. Nick crawled in and made sure the side windows of the cap on back were opened for circulation, and that the c-clamps that held it in pl
ace were secure. There was a window in the front of the cap and in the back of the truck cab, which were both opened. Nanook immediately figured out he could just barely squeeze his massive head through to see what was going on in front or give Nick’s ear the occasional sniff and lick.
As they jumped in and sat in the front, Nick turned and asked, “So we’ve got a little time to kill before you have to be in Cuernavaca, right?”
Soba looked at him and smiled, batting her dark eyes playfully and nodding yes.
“Then it’s off to Hawikuh with my voodoo medicine woman.” Nick pulled out of the parking lot and gave a honk on the horn. Soba leaned out the window and waved and shouted, “Hágoónee,” to Bidzii and her friends. “See you later!”
“You know he really likes you, don’t you?” Soba asked.
“Yeah, Nanook’s a great companion,” Nick replied, as he felt a cool nose and a huff of breath in his ear.
“No, Bidzii, I mean, silly,” she said, petting the big snout of Nanook. “I’ve seen him tolerate white folks, even make some friendships, but you he really seems to like on a different level. That’s why he’s always busting on you.”
Nick glanced over and smiled. “I gotta tell you, Bidzii is a rock-solid guy. You can tell the water runs deep, much deeper than he lets on. I think he uses his humor to cover up a lot of scar tissue.”
Soba looked out the side window at the view, listening but softly humming to herself. “You have insight Nick LaBounty, you would make a good shaman.”
They drove on in silence for a while, enjoying the excitement of the start of a road trip, and the serenity of being alone. “You know why he’s so quick witted with obscure pop culture trivia?” she asked rhetorically. “It’s because there isn’t a lot to do on the reservation, few meaningful opportunities. Not everyone wants to work at a casino or do menial jobs. Subsidizing just creates a cycle of dependency that’s hard to break. Young men with time on their hands usually end up in trouble, going down a dark path and then not coming back.”
“Bidzii doesn’t strike me as someone seeking cheap thrills. He is a lot of fun, but I catch a serious undercurrent within him, a deeper purpose,” Nick observed.
“He definitely wasn’t like the others, he wasn’t easily influenced. On the res you work on your English by watching television, old movies and the like. Cable TV doesn’t reach everywhere, and cable and satellite TV costs money. DVD’s are cheap, especially older ones. So you watch them, again and again, and then quote them with your buddies, again and again. That’s where a lot of the raw material he uses on you is from, from some dark days in a trailer with nothing to do but watch reruns of the same handful of old movies and shows everyone passes around.”
“And then he found music,” Nick said.
“And God saw that rock was good,” Soba laughed. “Bidzii always had a way about him, people were attracted to him even when he was young. He and his gang saw a few acts back in the day and started banging around and playing little gigs. So of course he enjoyed the white girl groupies who found him kind of exotic and following an Indian band kind of trendy. But then something happened. They actually started getting pretty good. Bidzii decided to stop screwing around and trying to be everything to everyone and said, ‘this is what we’re going to do guys, we’re going to do the blues.’ And of course they all went along with him, and now they are slowly working their tails off and their way up. Maybe something will come of it or maybe not. But even if it doesn’t, it kept them out of the dark places all these years.”
Nick glanced sideways and saw that her own words were painful to her. There was more to this story.
They continued cruising, the breeze of the open windows feeling good on them, Nanook now sound asleep to the monotonous drone of the engine. At a truck stop Nick gassed up, and Soba let Nanook out of the back to relieve himself. He spotted a pay phone and went over and dialed Charlie’s office phone. Nick got voice mail and told Charlie he was avoiding using cell phones. He was a little paranoid and disclosed all that had unfolded the past few days, especially the details revealed to him from his peyote induced trip. And of course, the fact that Soba and Attila the Hound had accompanied him.
The drive to Zuni would be about another two hours, with the Hawikuh Ruins just down the road from there. There was time for some deeper conversation between them, and Soba let her natural curiosity show.
“Mesoamerican Migrations, pretty fascinating stuff, at least to me. But I’m Mesoamerican. That couldn’t have made you popular with the ladies back in the upper peninsula of Michigan,” Soba playfully kidded.
Nick’s Trek South
“Mesoamerican Migration Patterns, actually. Yeah, I was always the life of any cocktail party. Thank goodness for Charlie, I could always look good, at least in comparison to him.”
“What compelled you down that path, of all possible paths?”
“Well, I was already hooked on history and adventure, thanks to my dad. That led to archeology and anthropology, just dialing the clock back a little further. And as I started to dig digging, my mind started wrapping itself around bigger issues and patterns.”
With that he pointed to his t-shirt, which read “Archeology 101 – Rock, Tool or Relic?” Soba could only grin and shake her head, it took a true archeology nerd to have such a collection of outwear.
“Not that unearthing a wooly mammoth skeleton isn’t exciting, it is, it’s a real rush. But when you find a precisely crafted arrowhead imbedded in the rib cage, cut marks on the bones, it sets your mind to wondering who killed it, what skills they had to orchestrate bringing down such a big animal, and where they came from in the first place. Which, if you follow the logic trail backward, would ultimately lead to where you came from, where I came from. Ultimately it was all from one original group on an ancient savannah in Africa, we have just been doing a lot of migrating and splintering all these millennia since.”
“Big questions, so does your path to enlightenment lead to a scientific or religious answer?”
“I am the first to admit my path is incremental, my knowledge and beliefs evolving. I can’t say that science and religion exclude one another, it is more a matter of interpretation and time span. I only have one lifetime to solve pieces of what to me is the mystery of being human, and the piece I am currently focused on is Mesoamerican migration patterns. That in turn seeks to answer how people first came to North and South America, who were they and how they mixed to form pre-Columbian civilizations. All well before the European’s ever ‘discovered’ them.”
Soba furrowed her eyebrows. “You know that is a sore spot with my people, with any of the tribes. The Spanish didn’t discover a new world. It was already here, with all of us in it. That is why so many origin stories of native tribes deal with coming from the earth. We discovered it an epoch ago, when there was not a single human upon it. They didn’t discover anything, they bumped into a continent they didn’t know existed.”
Nick couldn’t help himself and smiled at her passion. “And ironies of ironies, Columbus thought he had landed in the Indies, and henceforth and evermore you were all known as Indians. By the way, did you know Columbus Day is October 12th this year?”
Soba rolled her eyes at that one. “So educate me, Nick LaBounty. Defend your thesis to me, where did we Indians originally come from?”
“Well, not from the earth as your Hopi cousins believe. At least not the earth of the Americas. First, let’s agree to a couple of assumptions. That there was at one time a single supercontinent, called Pangaea. That the forces of plate tectonics broke apart our jigsaw puzzle of the world and caused the continents to drift to their current approximate positions. And that ice age glaciers soaked up a lot of water and brought about lower sea levels, which created a land bridge between Asia and North America, near the Bering Sea Strait. With me so far?”
“We concede to you your assumptions for the purpose of this exercise. Please continue with the defense of your position,” Soba joked in her best s
erious, academic voice.
“There are two primary indicators which reinforce each other, with additional evidence that continues to accumulate. The first is following the fossil record, including the trail of spear points. How they were made, how they evolved, what animal remains they were found in, and even the protein preserved within their porous surfaces. Clovis is a term used for a particular type of spear point, characterized by grooves within it. You can follow the spread of these and other types of spear and arrow heads like trails across the continents. Combine that with remains of camp sites, butchered and discarded bones, cave habitations and the like, and you get a reasonable migration map across North and South America.”
“And the second indicator, what might that be?” Soba inquired, batting her dark eyelashes in his direction.
“Why you, of course,” Nick stated, thinking it was obvious.
“I think I follow, but please expound on your position.”
“DNA. DNA doesn’t lie. And the science behind it has only gotten better, more refined, more conclusive. Plus, there are ever more ways of recovering it, things that a decade ago didn’t exist, and ones we can’t imagine today that are yet to be revealed. Then melt the ice sheets and bring all kinds of new samples to light. We find Wooly Mammoths preserved in permafrost with spear points in them, and preserved hunters with mammoth meat in their stomachs.”
Nick was warming up to his subject. “Toss in mummies well preserved by accident or by certain cultures like the Inca, and we have access to lots of tissue. The soft tissue record compliments the fossil record. And all this accumulated data shows Siberians and related Asians walked or boated the kelp highway along the Bering Strait to Alaska. Pacific Islanders island hopped and drifted to South America, Hell, even some wayward Europeans far back in time somehow drifted over, as evidenced by trace amounts in the blood lineage. All these went into an empty continent and mixed into the pre-Columbian man. Or woman.”
Aztec Odyssey Page 16
