House of Rain

by Craig Childs

  I did not want to make any unnecessary sound, having been alone and wishing to stay that way. I moved along deer trails and across fallen logs, obscuring my route. The trees lifted around me, heavy trunks and limbs. They were not humped into canopies like cottonwoods or alders, but were instead dark pillars, each making a line for the sky. They grew very close together in places, dog-hair forests of young pines and thickets of manzanita bushes.

  I looked for this person in tennis shoes as I moved, maybe an Apache hunter out to see the sunrise or someone keeping track of strangers. I ducked under a tree that had fallen into the arms of another, figuring no one else would choose this particular course. I crouched as I went, turning my shoulders through the gnarled branches, left hand touching the ground to keep my balance. I turned left where my senses told me to turn right, skirting through lichen-covered boulders and hulks of manzanita. I thought, This should dust my trail, going against the grain. We should be free from each other now.

  But the prints were there again. One tennis shoe track, then another. Surprised, I studied them, thinking, Male. He was not carrying a heavy load, not in a hurry, but moving easily.

  My eyes strained into the trees. Sunrise was falling through holes in the forest, long dashes of light touching the ground. There was no one. I looked behind. No one there either. But he had to be nearby.

  I returned my attention to the tracks, moving around them like a crab, careful not to scuff even a fleck of soil. I had never felt especially at ease on the reservation. A rock was always falling somewhere in the distance, a twig snapping. When I was a child, my father used to bring me onto the reservation with permission from the tribe, and we fished small creeks and built campfires at night. He told me stories about what he had seen deeper in the reservation, coming upon a lone saddle horse hobbled in the forest, no rider anywhere in sight. He told me he had seen young Apache men go by, walking along a creek, and they said not a word to him.

  Later, when I was older and traveling on my own in this high country, I waved to an Apache man standing maybe an eighth of a mile away below a block of cliffs. The man lifted a rifle, sighted it over my head, and popped off a couple of .22 bullets. He was just shooting across my bow, but it was enough to get me moving. I had the necessary permits, blessings of the tribal government, but there is no central authority to call upon deep in the forest.

  The first set of tracks I had seen this morning had been going with me, eastbound. This time they were turned around and heading west. It seemed like a strange way of walking, the same way I would walk if I were not trying to get anywhere, taking one path through the trees and then another. It was coincidence that we had run across each other this way, only coincidence. I rose and moved off at a sharp angle from the tracks, taking yet another unlikely passage down a steep slope of pines.

  Bits and patches of the forest revealed and withdrew themselves as I moved. My eyes fell on a conspicuous shape ahead, and I paused before placing my next step. It was the black hull of a trunk left from a forest fire long ago, not, I realized, a hooded man in a dark cloak. I had spent too many years in the desert, wearing tan-colored clothing in a tan-colored land, where no one could see me and I could see anyone; clear and open sky; escape hatches of canyons falling into the earth all around me. Now, in this green country, someone was tapping on my shoulder, whispering my name from behind. I kept turning my head but saw no one.

  I moved ahead but then stopped again. There was another track, wavy prints of the same tennis shoes. It was someone traveling alone. At least I imagined this to be true. The idea of coincidence drained away. But what else could it be? I was not being followed. In fact, I was the one following. But when you start tracking this closely to someone, the loop begins to close, and you start chasing each other’s tails. I turned and fled across a gully, keeping my steps light.

  Again the tracks were there, across dry pine needles, leading into a gap of crackled gravel. I felt as if time had doubled back on itself, a piece of paper folded so that we were walking on top of each other. I dropped to the tracks, outlining one with my finger, making a circle around it. Who are you? There must be a thousand different paths to take, I thought. You could walk in any direction, yet you are here again and again.

  Then I thought, Maybe there are not a thousand paths. Maybe there are only a few. Maybe only one. The earth contains inevitable confluences. We come back again and again no matter who we are or when we come. I thought of my stepfather taking gravity measurements of the earth’s surface, finding some places heavier than others, some more physically luring. Was this such a place? Had we been drawn into this forest, the two of us?

  I crouched over the tennis shoe prints, looking through a sunrise slant for a stranger among the pines. I noticed a fleck of white on the ground and moved toward it, digging up a potsherd with my fingertips. It was from a black-on-white jar, fine and stark paintings on the outside curve suggesting a specific cultural heritage: people from the north, perhaps a leftover from the twelfth century, when Chaco migrants came through. As I examined this sherd, time seemed even leaner. I could put my hand through it. The half hour or less between the tennis shoe person and me felt hardly longer than the centuries stacked between this pottery and me. Who was following whom?

  I looked around for a good climbing tree, a juniper with stout branches. It was time to get my bearings, to find my way out of this forest. An abandoned pueblo lay somewhere nearby. It was my destination this morning. If I could get high enough, I would be able to see it and make a quicker escape down to a free base, a pile of ruins that would be my safety.

  I let my pack down and climbed the branches of a stocky tree, going up to the light fist by fist. At the top I found myself on the side of a mountain looking down into a bald spot, a place where pine trees gave way to junipers that opened into a dry pastureland. There a partly ruined pueblo stood in the first long bolts of the sun. This was Kinishba, one of the great fourteenth-century pueblos of the Mogollon Highlands. Two stories tall, Kinishba’s shadow ran long through sage exactly on the margin where the juniper trees ended, as if the pueblo had been intentionally positioned in an environmental surf.

  It was miles away. With legs tucked under a heavy branch and my back against the scaly juniper trunk, I relaxed. It was good to be in the open. I was a desert animal in need of the sky. My senses unpacked their bags, put things back where they belonged, and took stock of the geography. I was surrounded by low hunches of mountains, the solid green of ponderosa pines. In just about the center, in waves of sage, the pueblo grew brighter beneath the rising sun, shifting from black-and-white to color as I watched.

  I climbed out of the tree, boots descending one branch to the next. I jumped the last eight feet, landing in a crackling sponge of pine needles. With my weight hunched to the ground, I stopped and listened. I had clattered the twigs coming down. Anyone within fifty feet would have heard me. I peeled my eyes through the pines and the alligator-skinned juniper trees. No one.

  It used to be only hunter-gatherers lived here. The northern migrants who showed up in the fourteenth century were out of place. They were master farmers from the desert, people of wide-scale social organization, pueblo builders. By contrast, the Mogollon culture that had occupied this region for centuries, if not millennia, was one based on an older, more rural lifeway. When foreigners arrived looking for water, for good places to grow crops, expansive pueblos suddenly appeared at crucial intersections of travel. Hunting rose to a feverish pitch. The deer bones found in these pueblos show certain butchering marks, signs that the game animals were quartered in the field, then brought to local pueblos for processing. The hunter-gatherers were probably feeding meat to the pueblos, and in return they may have received ceramic vessels, imported stone tools, and loom-woven textiles. Maybe they earned sleeping quarters, fine rooms. Eventually, the hunting grounds went vacant. Deer were hunted clean off the land, and within ten years natives living in the highlands were forced from mobile hunting and gathering t
o a life dedicated almost exclusively to farming.

  Some must have remained in the backcountry, though. They would have shrunk back and camouflaged themselves, eating what they could, and occasionally taking down a traveler for his goods. Only the wildest people would have stayed in the forest as these masonry capitals grew all around them with high walls and restricted interior plazas.

  Crouched at the base of this tree where I had landed, I looked out through the shadows, thinking, Who is this person walking in tennis shoes? Hunter-gatherer? I was coming out of one of the dark places on the map, unoccupied territory, which is becoming scarcer year by year. Who still lives out here?

  I pulled over my pack, unzipped a pouch, and took out a sack of almonds. I gathered a handful and placed them in my breast pocket. I put the bag away, shrugged on my pack, and started moving again.

  I once spent a summer evening out here with several archaeologists sitting in the dark, the air cool. Fire bans were in effect then, the tinder dry. We sat around a cold ring of stones where a campfire would otherwise have been started. The starry sky was broken by black jags of pine trees.

  Jeff Reid was doing the talking. With the bold presence of an orator, his southern accent theatrical, Reid commanded the night.

  “The original Mogollon people were people of diverse resources, not like those northern folk coming in on them,” Reid said. “They preferred deer and rabbits in their stew rather than corn, corn, corn, corn, like the Anasazi did. They added some cactus, some mesquite beans, because within a short linear distance you could get a lot of different cuisines in the mountains. You could be down low in desert vegetation and desert resources in no time. It was good country for moving around, for getting places.”

  None of the other archaeologists sitting around the cold fire ring had Reid’s seniority or stature. Any comments they offered were brief, questions of only four or five words. They listened quietly to Reid, an icon among them. He had come to visit an archaeological field camp. Everyone else had been toiling all day, sorting potsherds or walking survey lines under the afternoon sun, while Reid had driven from his home in Tucson in an air-conditioned car.

  Reid had done his time in the field. Most of his career had been dedicated to a single pueblo, nearly a thousand rooms of masonry known as Grasshopper Pueblo, a highland sister to Kinishba. Like so many sites from previous centuries on the Colorado Plateau, Reid found unequivocal evidence of multiple ethnic groups living together at Grasshopper. Migrants and locals had come together to set up one of the largest pueblos in the Mogollon Highlands.

  Reid called the locals he uncovered at Grasshopper “the home team.” A second group that he was able to decipher he called “Anasaz-ized Mogollon,” then offered “Mogollon-ized Anasazi” as an alternative: people who at some point left the highlands for the Colorado Plateau, where they picked up pottery, habits, and probably northern bloodlines through marriage and then brought everything back here. A third group Reid recognized as a pure strain of northerners, those he explicitly called Anasazi.

  “I believe in a high degree of mobility,” Reid said. “During the seventies, when archaeologists were into the concept of trade, we started playing around with the movement of people—not simply migration as a one-way event, but chronic movement: joint use of regions, a lot of residential mobility and temporary occupation of sites. Even these large pueblos were fairly short-lived.”

  Against a background of evening crickets, Reid sounded like half poet and half sports commentator. His pauses were expertly paced, some words clipped, some drawn out.

  “Now, almost all Pueblo archaeologists believe in movement,” Reid continued. “You can get out of the woods just like that. I’m a firm believer that you’ll freeze your ass up here. Gotta be cutting firewood all the time. It’s much easier to go up over the rim back toward the Little Colorado when it’s cold, up to Winslow and you’re back in the desert. Or go south or east or west. Any direction. You can go to Sedona—very chic for an Indian—you can move back and forth and take advantage of resources that are fairly close together. This was a key location, the center of everything you’d ever need. I actually don’t think the ponderosa pine forest itself provides a lot of resources for a long-term occupation.”

  One of Reid’s colleagues working at Grasshopper, a researcher named Joseph Ezzo, had uncovered fine-grained details of these migrations. The same way ceramicists look at atomic structure to determine where a pot was made, Ezzo analyzed bone chemistry and tooth enamel from burials to determine where exactly people were born. A chemical signature of local soils passes through nutrients in food and is imprinted into certain molars, forming an indelible birth certificate. By contrast, the cells of skeletal bones are completely replaced every decade. Ezzo examined isotopes from burials and from the soil samples and was then able to tell where a person was born and where that person spent the final decade of his or her life. In people’s teeth and bones Ezzo discovered an itemized map of migration.

  A certain block of rooms at Grasshopper Pueblo was found to contain the burials of people who had traveled from the Colorado Plateau where they were born, then settled in east-central Arizona long enough to acquire a new isotope signature in their bones. They were interred near a second neighborhood whose residents had all been born locally. Beside this neighborhood was a third compound belonging to people who were born here but whose artifacts and architecture are strikingly reminiscent of northern traditions. These were the same three groups Reid believed he had uncovered in his years of research, proof of an ethnic convergence in the highlands—and proof that different people were strictly keeping to their own precincts within the larger pueblo, much like what had been done in Chaco Canyon three hundred years earlier. Only here the genetic origins of these people were from a much larger realm than just the Colorado Plateau. All of the Southwest was drawn together.

  Ezzo took his findings a step further and identified marriages between these different groups. Women with northern isotopes in their molars were showing up buried in neighborhoods belonging to people with local isotopes. Curiously, these women seem not to have given up their northern heritage. They were all found buried with a similar suite of artifacts, pottery that stands out among all the other graves: large vessels and styles that clearly descended from the Colorado Plateau. Women from the north were marrying into local families, moving into in-law residences, and at the same time maintaining their own imported traditions.

  This is why the supposed “disappearance of the Anasazi” is so easily revealed as a misreading of the past. Pueblo people from the Colorado Plateau kept their identities and carried them into the distance, easy to pick out among the smaller rooms and the generally less elaborate pottery of southern people. The rooms belonging to these northern migrants are built with more stonework, less mud, and larger floor plans. The clay used for their pottery was frequently imported from more than a hundred miles to the north, and even some of their pigments were brought specifically from homeland sources on the plateau itself. The kinds of wood they preferred for their fires were different even when they all lived in the same environment.

  Sitting in the dark, surrounded by cricket song, Reid said that his excavations brought to light a whole new way of seeing migration in the Southwest. His crews had found northerly, T-shaped doorways leading into rooms where migrants were living, signs coming directly from Kayenta or Mesa Verde or even Chaco. Reid waved his hand in the air, explaining how people had gone this way and that, surges of humanity abandoning one place, building another. And always they kept their identities, easily visible centuries later. He thought the people from the north must have seemed pushy with their big architecture and big pots, probably religious zealots of some sort. The local hunter-gatherers were no match for these invaders, these travelers. Northerners were marrying their way in, inundating local traditions with their own, changing the whole show.

  I walked down out of the forest, leaving the tennis shoe prints behind. Pines thinned into juni
pers. I came across shattered red pottery, pausing to nudge out a few of the larger pieces with a finger, turning them over to see their painted sides. Like putting them back to sleep, I turned each sherd back to the position in which I had found it. Several feet down the slope a rodent had discarded from its burrow an apron of plain colored sherds, unearthing prehistory as steadily as it would any stone or root.

  These signs of habitation increased as I descended into a sunlit basin filled with squat juniper trees. Small mounds of former buildings appeared among the trees, outpost sites with pottery scattered all around their flanks. These had probably been satellite houses, what today would be specks of night lights out past some rural town, farmhouses and isolated ranches. I noticed a wide variety of ceramic styles at these outlying sites, some of the sherds black-on-white, leftovers from an earlier time; some brownish corrugated vessels that were in vogue for centuries; and some decorated wares in scores of fourteenth-century designs and colors, each style evidencing the changing fancy of the day.

  The ground bared its chest to the sky, open for all to see. Canes of high-elevation cacti grew all around, along with slender knives of narrowleaf yuccas. I was passing from the terrain of hunter--gatherers into an agrarian landscape on my way to the crowded municipal center of Kinishba—a massive inward-facing pueblo that once had at least eight hundred rooms and stood three stories tall.