I answered with a timid, “Just fine and you?” Meanwhile I was looking for an escape route but realized that I didn’t have a chance of outrunning a man on a horse.
“Me nombre, eh...my name is John Luna. I live over there.” He pointed to the distant rolling hills crisscrossed by many small arroyos. Then he asked, “How are June and Ken doing?”
Instantly I felt safer. “They are doing fine. Do you know them?”
“Oh sure, they are old friends.” He paused for a moment and stared at me making me feel a little uncomfortable. “What is a good looking girl like you doing wondering around in this God forsaken place?”
I walked over to him and explained that I was staying with the Andersons until I could live with my father, Tim.
“Oh I know your father; he is a very good man. A hardworking man, I really like him. He has always said kind things about me.”
This gave me a little more confidence and so I walked even closer to him. He looked down at me and with a grin on his face and says, “You are not afraid of me?”
“Not really I said; if you make a move for your gun I will be all over you. You will be blind for the rest of your life and feel like a castrated cow.” This threat elicited a rumble of laughter from deep inside of him. He dismounted and we sat together on a large fallen limb from a cottonwood tree.
“It is true that I love beautiful women, and you are certainly beautiful, but...” He patted his chest, pausing to form the correct words. “I am really just a big teddy bear who loves to talk to all women, especially those who are not afraid to talk back to me.”
By this time I was feeling pretty good. I had never been complemented on my looks by anyone outside of the immediate family and of course Turner who was nothing but a vague memory. I asked John Luna again, “Just who are you?”
“Well, he answered, I am a borrachon veijo.” As he said it he stood up reaching for his saddle bag where he produced a pint bottle of whisky. He took a long pull from it then offered it to me. I shook my head no and starting to get up. “Stay around for a while and talk. I am harmless. Trust me I wouldn’t hurt a friend of Ken Anderson. He would shoot me, muy pronto,” he said with emphasis. “Besides I have no one to talk to out here except this stupid horse. He has a brain about the size of a walnut and is very short on words but big on sneaking back to the horse stall for his oats.”
“What are you doing out here?”
I began to explain what the situation was at the ranch house choosing my words carefully not to tell him everything but rather trying to turn the conversation into questions about the disappearances.
Luna gave me his point of view on it all, “Oh, I don’t believe that all this has anything at all to do with rattlesnakes. First of all there are no snakes out at this time of year and to tell you the truth I haven’t seen a rattlesnake out here for at least two years. In years past, they were all over the place. One small hill next to my creek used to have a den of snakes that lived in it. When one of my cows stumbled over it she fell though. When her head came back up she looked like she had whiskers which turned out to be rattlesnakes. The cow lived but lost a lot of weight and walked around with a huge swollen head for a month or so.”
“The thing is,” he paused for a short moment to allow the thought to sink in, “all the snakes have disappeared around here. Something else is killing animals including many of mine.” He thought about it for a minute, took another pull off the pint bottle of whiskey adding, “They sure look like rattlesnakes got to them though. I have even found the two puncture marks on them; they swell up and then die. If it is rattlesnakes killing them they must be very venomous because normally a larger animal doesn’t die from a rattlesnake bite, but these animals surely died. The problem is I can’t find any traces of rattlesnakes around here. It is a mystery to me. Where did the rattlesnakes go, and if the snakes are gone what is killing the animals around here now?”
I asked him, “How do you protect yourself at night?”
“From what,” Luna answered with a laugh.
John Luna got back on his horse asking me if I would like a ride over to the ranch house. I answered him “Maybe next time, right now I just want to finish my walk.”
John Luna repeated his motions with his sombrero and yelled “Vayo con Dios as he galloped off toward the Anderson ranch house. I knew what that Spanish saying meant and truly appreciated it.
The Cliff Dwelling
Armed with the knowledge Corey and I ferreted out of the library, we began to explore further and further into the Serpientes, until finally we began spending the nights camped out in the canyon lands. Each canyon was different, despite the monotonous yellow and red sandstones that made up the walls of the canyons. It was a wet winter; snow that had accumulated from many small snowstorms was slowly melting in deep canyons. All of the canyons had tiny streams in their valleys that fed large pools as the water collected behind rock falls. After heavy rains those tiny streams could become raging rivers which is how most of the canyon carving occurred. Usually, during the late summertime the canyons would be bone dry, except for the largest of seeps or pools. We were able to see all manner of wildlife around these pools.
Everything seemed normal out in the countryside away from the ranches, but everywhere humans lived something strange was happening. Around ranch or farm houses, virtually all the farm animals and wildlife had vanished. It was as if the ranch houses where the humans lived were being purposely selected.
While we explored the canyons, it became clear to Corey and me that there had been many people here before us. Granaries and small Indian ruins were everywhere. Also, the floor of the canyons had obviously been shaped to a degree by ancient humans who grew corn and squash and all manner of food there. We made a game of studying the rock carvings, or pictographs, which covered the rocks near these ancient ruins.
In an earlier conversation, Hidalgo had explained that contrary to common belief most of these symbols were not simply doodling, writing, nor were they necessarily spiritual in nature. Some symbols were simply directional signs, placed to mark a trail, identify territory, or perhaps to show the way to water, important places, or some other natural or cultural feature. Other symbols identified tribes or clans; some symbols were used to record important events in the life of the clan, such as a memorable hunt or an extraordinary deed, the way we might write a newspaper article or send a greeting card. Furthermore, unlike most pictographs that are merely scratched on the rock, these pictographs were not merely scratched but rather were chiseled into the rocks forming petroglyphs. Someone had spent considerable time carving these figures. They were meant to last for all time.
Two symbols were common in the pictographs: one was a glyph that looked like clasped hands; easily seen by putting one hand inside the hand of a partner and looking down at the design it makes, a universal symbol for friendship used by all cultures throughout history.
The other was rattlesnakes. In one bizarre case, Corey discovered the clasped hand symbol with one hand being a rattlesnake. This seemed creepy to me, I could not imagine a situation where humans and rattlesnakes would be friendly to each other.
The more we explored the windswept canyons, the more of these rattlesnake motifs we discovered. “We must be entering the clan of the rattlesnake people,” I joked, not realizing just how true my statement was.
Besides the many small Anasazi ruins we found a multitude of granaries where the ancients stored their food, usually well up on the canyon walls, in inaccessible places where animals couldn’t get to them. It was on one of those trips that we discovered, by a serendipitous event, a collection of Indian ruins, high up in the cliffs in a natural cave enclosure. Finding the ruins was a story in itself.
Trying to find a bit of privacy to answer a call of nature was my least favorite part of camping trips, so I had climbed up the side of the canyon into what appeared to be a jumble of rocks while Corey waited patiently below. Instead of the semi-private natural ladies’ room I ex
pected, I found a tiny slit opening going back into the sidewall of the canyon. My curiosity got the best of me and so I decided to see if I could climb through the slit and see what was on the other side.
The slit in the rock was so narrow I had to walk sideways past the sheer rock walls that towered above me on both sides. Only a few feet further in, the canyon opened up. Then around a curve in the rock cliffs, high up on a sheer cliff, was a vast cave-like structure with Indian ruins.
It was a huge flat shelf about twenty feet deep in the middle, tapering out on the ends until there was not enough room for a foothold. Covering the entire maze of ruins was an overhanging rock roof. The entire cave was south-facing, allowing the sun to warm everything on frosty but clear winter days, while in the summertime the cave would be shielded from the sun, which was higher in the sky at that time of year. This ingenious solar heating would make the cave a great place to live, I thought if you didn’t mind having to climb a sheer cliff just to get into your house!
I could not wait to go to tell Corey what I had found. Making my way carefully back though the slit in the rock walls I shouted, “Corey! Quick, come up here!”
Corey burst into the opening wild-eyed and panting, clutching the .22 rifle he had brought to shoot small game for our suppers. “Penny! What’s wrong?!” he gasped.
“No, silly,” I giggled, “Nothing’s wrong! Look!” I pointed up at the slit in the rock.
“Dang, gal, you nearly scared me to death!” Corey began grumbling, but then he looked, really looked, through the slit in the rock.
“Who...how?” he began, and then just stopped and stared at the slit in the rock that I was pointing at. Coming into the canyon at such an extreme angle it would have been invisible from the canyon floor
After Corey went back to tie off the horses that he had been holding, he retraced my original path and climbed until he was at the base of the sheer cliff, where I was waiting for him.
We searched the cliff bottom until we found what we knew must be there; footholds that were carved into the face of the cliff; the only way up. The problem was that the footholds didn’t start at ground level. A solitary person would have to pull himself up with his arms to gain that first foothold, which was about six feet up. Obviously, one of two things had happened at some time in the past: either the floor of the canyon had eroded and dropped down, or the people were afraid of something or someone climbing up to their homes. They had made it as difficult as possible for anyone, or anything, to access their homes. Luckily for us we could help each other to climb up.
Corey carefully lifted me up to the first of the footholds, where I worked my way up to the floor of the ruins. Then I lowered a rope down to Corey, who just as carefully worked his way up the face of the cliff. We were amazed at what we discovered there; unexplored ruins. Not a footprint could be found, only a fine dust that covered everything. These ruins were very different from other ruins we had explored, where everything of use or value had been stripped from the ruins by those thieves of time, pottery hunters.
I had learned many accounts of these antiquity thieves, or pottery hunters, in our studies at the library and from Aunt June. They are unscrupulous people who locate sites where ancient peoples lived and strip them of any artifacts that appear to be of any value. They then sell the artifacts to collectors. By taking this evidence of past civilizations away from where it was originally found, these thieves of time interfere with legitimate exploration that would extend our understanding of these ancient people. Antiquity thieves have always been despised by real archeologist.
There appeared to be many rooms, tiny by modern standards but cozy as well as functional. I walked up to one of the T shaped doorways, so low I had to bend at the waist to enter. I remembered what June had shared with me about Anasazi ruins. The first T shapes were at Pueblo Bonito, and later they spread to the remainder of the Colorado Plateau. The T door appeared later in Mayan sites such as Palenque in southern Mexico. A number of sites with the strange doors have been discovered in Peru. They appear to designate privileged space, perhaps something ceremonial.
“These people certainly did live in fear,” I said. “I realize that Anasazi people were much shorter than we are but the only way to enter these rooms is by getting on my knees. If someone was inside and they wanted to, well, an intruder would be a sitting duck for a tomahawk to the head. You can’t go in without exposing the back of your head.
Corey answered with, “Yeah, that’s obvious. I wonder why, or what, or even who they were so scared of?”
“And what’s the deal with the T-shapes?” Corey never answered the question. He didn’t know the answer. No one does.
Inside, the rooms looked as if the people had just walked away and left them without looking back. Make shift tables still had beautiful pottery with petrified food in them. Tiny cores from ears of corn were strewn everywhere. Along the walls was bedding that had turned into a mat of rags and dust. Bits of clothing made from plant fibers were still hanging from pegs in the walls, with piles of tattered lumps of woven cloth on the floor under them. In one room I discovered a pile of black obsidian rock that would have been shaped into arrowheads or stone implements with edges sharper than surgical steel. Corey, being a student of geology like his late father, identified it as obsidian from Jemez Volcano. Jemez produces perfect black glassy rock that was perfect for making arrowheads. The nagging thought that came to Corey was why they would bring obsidian all the way from Jemez Volcano which is located well above present day Albuquerque. “That was a long way to walk just to get chunks of rock,” he thought. Surely there was perfectly good obsidian somewhere in the volcanic hills surrounding Serpientes that could be found.
On reflecting, Corey remembered June telling him of a mystery she had encountered. They had found proof that the people from Midwestern settlements had traveled by canoe over two hundred miles into Yellowstone to collect peculiar pure black obsidian. He also thought of something Aunt June had said to him about Jemez obsidian rock; it has been found in the form of arrowheads as far away as the east coast. In Corey’s mind he felt that there must be something else to it, there are too many other materials which can be made into arrowheads.
Then, in a small natural alcove just above the floor, in the wall, Corey found a tiny shrine with pieces of raw turquoise. Picking up the turquoise he thought he recognized it as some he had seen before from Arizona. Turquoise can be easily identified by the matrix, that is, the patterns formed by other minerals. Each turquoise mine produces its own particular patterns and colors.
There were also several small green crystals he wasn’t sure about. They looked like emeralds but Corey had never heard of emeralds being found in this part of New Mexico. From his knowledge of the history of New Mexico he had learned that Cabeza de Vaca had written that while in southern New Mexico his party was presented with five emeralds, shaped like arrow heads. The Indians had said that they were from high mountains toward the north, where they traded for them with feather brushes and parrot plumes and they said that there were villages with many people living there. But the only place he could think of where emeralds were actually found was North Carolina where spectacular deposits had recently been found. There were also some small figurines, about an inch and a half wide that had been sand cast from gold. All but one looked like animals in nature and of course the most common was of snakes. The odd one had the cast of a head with tinier heads hanging like ear rings from the ears.
Since it was late, we made camp in the ruins for the night. Early the next day, we climbed above one of the ruins and examined some pictographs along the back wall. The rock carvings showed fifteen strange human like creatures of all sizes, with broad shoulders tapering down to tiny feet. To me, they looked bizarre with zig zag lines and spirals superimposed on the bodies. Completely surrounding them in an arc over them was the serpentine figure of a rattlesnake.
The image struck both of us as strange. What could it possibly mean and why was the r
attlesnake carving so boldly and prominently displayed? We looked at each other. Did this carving mean something? Was there a connection to the current problems at the ranch house?
During the journey into the canyon, we had found small rattlesnake pictographs everywhere, but this pictograph was huge! Clearly these people were obsessed with rattlesnakes, but why? Finally Corey nervously turned to me and said, “Uh, Penny, have you noticed anything particular about the rattlesnakes on this trip?”
I thought a minute, and then a feeling of puzzlement came over me, “We’ve been exploring these canyons for some time now and we’ve seen hundreds of rock rattlesnake pictographs, but we’ve yet to see a single skin shed from a rattlesnake much less a live rattlesnake!”
Corey agreed with my point with, “At this time of year they are all hibernating. I wouldn’t expect to see snakes out here but I sure would expect to find traces of them, mostly where they would shed their skin, adding another button to their rattlers. I haven’t seen a trace of a real snake out here.”
An Attack by the Antiquity Thieves
During the afternoon the winter air turned chillier and the first small flakes of snow began to fall. Corey and I explored a bit further, but we knew we would soon have to return to the ranch house. Just a short distance down the main canyon we were following, we came across another set of ruins. These were easily spotted, with granaries clearly visible on the canyon ledges above. Stopping and tying off the pack animals, we explored these ruins room by room. But these ruins had been picked clean, with nothing but shards of pottery lying around.
We were just turning to leave when the rocks above Corey’s head seemed to explode. A sharp crack shattered the silence as the sound of the bullet caught up to it. Corey pulled me down as we dived behind the walls, fervently wishing he hadn’t left his rifle with the horses. Corey’s face was bleeding from a tiny crystal of rock that was ejected from the impact of the bullet. Who could possibly be shooting at us and why?
The Family at Serpiente Page 8
