The Family at Serpiente

by Raymond Tolman

  “Almost all ancient peoples did something during the time when the leaves died and fell. Halloween or as in Mexico, celebrating Dia de Muerto, they’re victorious conquest over fears. Eventually Science won.” There was a long pause in the conversation. Hidalgo arose to rinse out his plate and get another cup of coffee then he turned around to face me, and interjected with a quizzical look, “Or did science win? I don’t think science won the battle here.”

  Stirring the powdered milk into his coffee upon his return to the camp chairs, he continued. “Many people who live here believe that the ceremonies didn’t just take a turn to the dark side. Long ago, either some shamans acquired real power or we are dealing with something that is not human at all. They could not be humans. There is something out there that is able to do things that no human should or could do. You know, this place is not unique; there are stories of many places all around the world where apparitions or monsters play havoc on humans. This is why witchcraft is so despised and feared by the native people who live here now.”

  “The pictograph I looked at was well off the beaten path,” continued Hidalgo. It depicted a large creature about six feet tall, thin but muscular and almost hairless. It was the head that bothered me, I felt like the eyes were following me. The head looked somewhat like a coyote but with large bulging red eyes, the entire pictograph had a ring of lightning bolts flying from it.”

  “Like the apparition we saw, I blurted out. “That had lightning bolts coming from it.”

  “That right,” countered Hidalgo, “Many believe that skin walkers are very real, there really is a creature or creatures out here that are skin walkers and shape shifters.

  “What exactly is a skin walker,” I asked?

  Hidalgo looked at me and answered, “Here in the American Southwest, the Navajo, Ute, and other tribes all have skin walker stories. A skin walker is a witch who can alter his shape at will to assume the characteristics of certain animals; usually coyotes, bears or birds. Particularly ravens are often labeled as witches because they are highly intelligent birds.”

  “Skin walkers are malevolent, transforming themselves into any shape that they want to assume. When the transformation is complete, the human witch inherits the speed, strength or cunning of the animal whose shape it has taken. The Dine people claim the skin walkers use mind control to make their victims do things to hurt themselves or others. Again,” says Hidalgo to emphasize the point, “They are purely evil in intent. Maybe all the stories that I heard as a child have a grain of truth to them, not just mythology. Maybe it explains why many of our neighbors, particularly the older ones, have a firm belief in shape shifters or skin walkers. Even the Navajo police take those beliefs very seriously; when bad things happen, the people around here are always blaming the shape shifters rather than other people.”

  “I don’t understand,” replied Corey with a hint of doubt in his voice. “Why would the police get involved in the supernatural?”

  “Let me give you an example,” countered Hidalgo. “When I was a boy growing up just south of here, a relative, Alan Begay had a flock of about sixty sheep that supported his family with their wool and meat. One day just like any other day he walked out to his field where he kept his sheep and discovered they were all dead. They were mutilated, appeared to have been torn apart like chickens after a coyote or dog gets in the pen, yet the police could not find any trace of coyotes or any other animals responsible for the deed. Besides, with that many sheep it would have taken a large pack of coyotes.”

  “Sure dogs do attack in packs but there had been no traces of any dogs in the area. A pack of dogs would have singled out a sheep or two, but never the entire flock. It simply made no sense. Begay had no enemies and none of the neighboring families even knew where he had pastured his sheep. He blamed shape shifters and the police had no choice but to agree with him.”

  “I am beginning to understand what a dear friend of mine was talking about several years ago,” said Hidalgo with sadness in his voice. “I laughed at him when he told me this story and now we are no longer friends. “ Alex Chee was driving a gravel road out in the country on patrol in a Navajo police car when he heard a loud thud against the side of his patrol car. Looking over he saw a creature that looked like a wolf with large glowing red eyes running alongside of the car. The problem was he was going about thirty miles an hour when he first noticed it, and sped up to about sixty. The animal kept pace with him for several miles until he finally pulled over, took out his service revolver and opened his door. The apparition was suddenly gone but the side of his car had scratches and dents all the way down it.”

  Naturally, when he returned to the station, the sergeant didn’t believe a word of his story. Neither did I when he told me, but he would never change his story nor would he admit he had hit something other than the eerie creature who tried to get at him.”

  Suddenly, despite the parade of tourist that was floating down the river we felt a little intimidated. We were alone with this knowledge and suddenly the canyon that loomed around the sharp bend in the river seemed much darker and spookier. That evening Corey built a small fire in the metal pan. Until that moment it had been a useless item. Why a fire? Maybe to drive away the shape shifters that hid in the encroaching shadows.

  The next morning while I cleaned up and guarded the camp, Corey accompanied Hidalgo back up Chinle Wash with camera in hand to document the unusual pictograph. A few people had left sets of tracks while wandering up Chinle Wash but they never went more than a short distance up the wash. In the soft sand it was easy to retrace and track Hidalgo’s route, to where the active pictographs were

  . To pass the time as they tracked the route Hidalgo had taken the previous day, they talked about all things Anasazi.

  “Did you know how an Anasazi knew who they were tracking?” asked Hidalgo?

  Not answering, but rather looking curiously up at Hidalgo, Corey waited patiently for the answer.

  “Most sandals that they made and wore were of a simple cross hatch design. They were utilitarian and they, like us, needed protection from everything from cactus to ants. But some were different. In Chaco, for example many wore sandals woven with extremely fine weave from a local plant, white dogbane. The thread count so fine a person could hardly detect any weave at all. The soles carry a protruding geometric design. Everywhere the person walked, the identification of the walker was in every track.”

  “Interesting, replied Corey, like your left boot there; the one that has a notch missing in the heel.

  “I guess so,” laughed Hidalgo. “We are there.” They had arrived at the first of the pictographs. The first one was there as Hidalgo had found it, not far from the San Juan River where undoubtedly many river runners had found it before, but the more bizarre of the two pictographs was not anywhere around the main trails, it was well up Chinle Wash deep in a side canyon which required a several mile hike. Hidalgo’s footprints were clearly visible in the soft sand of the canyon, but when they got to the panel wall where the pictograph was, it had vanished.

  Hidalgo was awestruck; he couldn’t say anything for several minutes. He could follow his own tracks up to the panel where he could clearly see where he had walked around examining it the previous day but it simply wasn’t there. He remembered it as a painted surface with no lines cut into the rock but the pigment, he thought, had been made of traditional pigments found around them in nature such as red ochre and yellow cadmium, all readily available colors except for blue. Blue is hard to produce from natural minerals. But the apparition had simply vanished making Hidalgo not only doubt his own sanity but everything he knew about reality. Something was very wrong.

  Corey did find one thing that was interesting about the blank rock panel. There, carved into the rock, not just painted on top of the surface, was a small zigzag line with the oval head and two lines representing a snake with its tongue out located along the lowest part of the rock panel. Hidalgo thought it strange that he hadn’t noticed this
part of the petroglyph the day before. In all, a pictograph had disappeared and a petrograph had appeared. Hidalgo couldn’t believe his own eyes.

  We settled into camp that evening with far more questions than answers and decided to lay over the following day so I could also make the hike in search of the missing rock art. Both Corey and I were worried. We had never seen Hidalgo in such a state of fear before.

  Hidalgo needed time to think, he had never been so perplexed in his life, and now, it was very personal. When Hidalgo refused to take the hike up the wash for a third time we understood and decided it was for the best and we changed the subject.

  Sphexishness

  Hidalgo could not sleep and was still mystified the next morning. Corey and I found him sitting on the ground next to the edge of the river. He was watching the patterns that the rivulets formed in the fast water. I handed him a cup of coffee, fixed just the way he liked it. He was brooding. On the one hand he felt a little like a fool. He had looked into the eye of a skin walker, and didn’t even know it. He should have immediately recognized what he was looking at and avoided its gaze, but he couldn’t remember being intimidated by it at all, in fact, he felt like he had been drawn into it. He had been so proud of himself, finding an undocumented glyph. It looked so real, just like what he expected an active glyph to look like. He had even noticed along the edge places that appeared old, as if the artist hadn’t repainted that part for a long time. He had stood as close as he could get in order to examine it.

  Over a breakfast that only I could eat, I tried to console him. “When I have problems that I cannot answer I always call upon Jesus for answers.”

  Hidalgo who was obviously not himself simply looked off into the distance and answered, “You are trying to be so kind, I truly appreciate what you are trying to say. Allow me to offer you some thoughts; from the earliest crusades in the middle east to the Spanish Inquisition both in Spain and here again in New Mexico, to modern American politics the name Jesus has been called upon as a rallying call for all kinds of power struggles. From the time Jesus was alive, the ignorant have always screamed the loudest and people have been herded and forced to do the bidding of the elite. Throughout history they have defended everything from worldly desires to wars while citing scriptures they hardly understood. They celebrated their victories with their intolerance of others peoples’ beliefs using scriptures as proof of their convictions. Now two-millennium later, mankind has managed to utterly erode everything that had once been so beautiful about Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I answered. I was somewhat flummoxed as to what to say, never having seen Hidalgo in such a dark mood.

  “I’m sorry,” said Hidalgo. “It is a human condition. It doesn’t really matter what culture you are talking about, in time all religions, including the beliefs of my own ancestors seem to have eroded. Right now, I don’t know who or what to believe, all I know is that what I saw, I saw.”

  A change of subject appeared as a large raft party floated past, conversation drifted to the tumult that had occurred just a hundred yards up river. There was nothing but questions about what had happened to the two boys, the character who had stolen everyone’s personal stuff and even more importantly, how all those people were going to get home after their river trip was over. Then I asked Hidalgo a simple question, “As a detective how do you solve crimes?”

  This question brought about a long pause in the conversation, followed by a “Well...” Hidalgo refilled his coffee cup from the coffee pot that was precariously balanced on some burning wood in the fire pan. “Most criminals are creatures of habit and are really dumb.”

  “I know they are dumb, at least the ones that are caught, but what do you mean by creatures of habit?” I asked.

  “Sphixishness,” answered Hidalgo.

  “What in the world are you talking about,” I asked?

  “Take for example, that dog that we watched retrieving that stick in the rapid back in Farmington. The owner tossed the stick, probably the same stick over and over, into the rapid. The dog plunged into water, found the stick then returned it to his master to do it all over again. The dog did the exact same motions, flawlessly, over and over. But change the rules such as a different stick thrower or a different rapid and the dog gets stuck. This is because of internal rules that the dog has.”

  “Internal rules,” Penny asked?

  “Its’ like the female sphinx wasp”. Hidalgo was remembering what he had learned while taking a class at Fort Lewis College in Durango. “The wasp will sting and paralyze an insect, stash it in a hole in a tree, and lay her eggs on it. When the eggs hatch, the baby wasps have a fresh meal waiting for them. However, the female sphinx has an internal rule. When she brings the insect to the opening of the hole, she always goes inside for a look around before she drags the meal in. If someone moves the insect a few inches away while the wasp is in the hole, she will leave to get another insect, repeating the process. Like the dog retrieving the stick, the wasp will repeat the process over and over. It’s fun to observe this behavior in animals. The trick of course is to be able to recognize it in ourselves, and then apply what you have learned to catching bad guys.”

  “People have internal rules that they follow, even groups of people like the group called Americans. For example, why is it that Americans, no matter how crazy it should be, are able to purchase a gun to solve problems? Sometimes our internal rules completely overcome common sense. A bank robber will go through the exact same steps in order to rob the next bank despite the fact that an obvious pattern has been established that the police can pick up on. We are creatures of habit.”

  Hidalgo took off his hat and ran his fingers through his long black hair. “Do you know what locks are for?”

  “Sure,” answered Penny, “to keep a thief out.”

  “No”, answered Hidalgo, “To keep an honest man honest. A lock never stopped a thief.”

  Corey entered the conversation with an observation, “You know if a frog is paced in hot water it will immediately jump out. But, if you place him in cool water and slowly heat it up, the frog will stay in it until it dies.”

  Hidalgo raised his eyebrows and said again, “We are creatures of habit.”

  I reentered the conversation with, “I remember something that Mr. Dale taught us in science class, He wrote five words on the board and asked us what it meant, ‘Then they came for me.’ The only answer he got was from a kid in the back of the class who was actually talking about a relative who was on death row at the penitentiary. The kid hypothesized that Mr. Dale might be talking about the feeling that his uncle had each time another prisoner was taken to be executed.

  Actually as it turns out Mr. Dale was talking about people who lived in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. First in Germany, then in Poland, then all over Europe, people refused to believe that anything could happen to them. Usually they were the most professional or wealthy people and certainly not just Jewish people. In time the Nazis brought everyone down including their own people.”

  Hidalgo continued his point, “Criminals get caught because they do stupid things. That fellow who stole everyone’s personal stuff should have known that there was only one way to escape, that being down the river. He is headed toward a bottleneck at Mexican hat. Even if he has a car waiting for him there, there are only three or four places that he can get off the river. The police will be there waiting for him.”

  Hidalgo said nothing for a few minutes then said, “I remember something a man said to me when I was a small boy.”

  “What was that” I asked?

  He looked straight at me and said, “Indians don’t have souls. It bothered me for weeks.”

  I said, “Obviously this person did not have a soul. The truth of the matter is that you are one special person. Everybody knows it, particularly the members of this family. Somehow, I feel there is a special plan for you. You and I both know that you saw something on that rock. It wanted you to see it. Perha
ps you had better think about that. “

  Hidalgo smiled and replied, “I have, it’s the only logical solution, but for the life of me I can’t imagine why it would pick me to reveal itself too.”

  I looked at him and suggested, “Well, you are a native, you have family roots in this community; you are studying the ancient culture here and deciphering their messages, and again, you are a very special person. Maybe more special than you realize.”

  Hidalgo paused for a minute then admitted, “This place is making me spooky, let’s go down the river.”

  Eight Foot Rapid

  A measure of San Juan River charm requires a psychological test which some pass and there are certainly casualties not up to the task. While floating down river the observant river runner can see signs of lost canoes, kayaks or rafts and occasionally the lost occupants. They can be found puzzling over such trivialities as lost keys, wallets, paddles and bail buckets. After some gentle persuasion they usually consider the situation all with a good nature; an adventure and figure out a way of getting down the river.

  They cannot walk out because of the shear canyon walls and unless a raft party comes floating by that agrees to rescue you, the learning of life skills may take on a whole new dimension. After several tumultuous attempts and with great anticipation we historical detectives finally set out down the river entering the Mexican Hat Anticline where the first real whitewater was located.