Forests of the Heart

by Charles de Lint

  The offerings reminded Bettina of a story one of the O’odham elders had told late one night around a campfire during the saguaro fruit harvest. “When you visit I’itoi,” he said, “you have to leave him something, whatever you have—a cigarette, a coin, a bracelet.” Then he told of a group who had visited the cave once. One of them was a Protestant priest who wouldn’t leave anything because what harm could come to him, a priest? When it was time to go, he turned around, following the voices of his companions. But the darkness deepened and the cave mouth shrank and shrank until it was far too small for him to climb back through.

  “Leave him something, Father!” his companions called.

  But still he hesitated. The opening kept shrinking until finally he took his hymn book out of his pocket and laid it on the floor of the cave. A strong gust of air blew him towards the tiny hole of daylight and the next thing he knew, he was tumbling out into the scrub where his companions were anxiously awaiting him.

  She’d repeated that story to Ban and her grandmother on the hike up the canyon.

  “I remember that,” Ban said. “Only it was a nun in the version I heard and she left behind her rosary.”

  Bettina reached into her own pocket, looking for what she would leave. All she had was some smooth pebbles she’d picked up on their climb and a piece of candy. She doubted I’itoi would need any more stones, no matter how pretty they were with their turquoise and quartz veining, so it would have to be the candy. She hoped it would be enough.

  It was hard to judge the size of the cave. As their eyes grew accustomed to the poor light, they were able to see about twenty feet ahead of where they stood, but the cave obviously went farther than that. Bettina thought of the spiraling designs of the O’odham basketweavers, how they were said to twin a much larger spiral that lay here under the Baboquivaris. She pictured its corkscrew shape, the slow coils tunneling through the rocks below her feet. In her mind, the spiral went on forever, as though she stood on the edge of a door leading into Abuela’s época del mito, with I’itoi’s lair at once only a step away and immeasurably distant.

  Though the air was musky and cool, she felt a sudden flush of heat. The weight of the cliffs above pressed down on her. The slight draft that came from deeper in the cave felt like I’itoi’s breath on her face. I’itoi breathing. I’itoi the Creator.

  She had to put a hand out against the wall for balance, suddenly dizzy. The darkness spun and fell away. She closed her eyes and slid down to her knees.

  “Abuela!” she heard herself cry, her voice coming to her as if from a far distance.

  But when she knelt, it was on rough gravel and sand, not the floor of the cave, and an impossibly bright light flared red-orange against her eyelids. Opening her eyes, she blinked at the sudden, stark sunlight. She was no longer in the cave, but out on the scrub slopes of the bajada, a great-aunt of a saguaro rearing tall above her, signaling some slow semaphore to her relatives on a distant slope.

  Bettina’s pulse quickened with panic. What had happened to the night? Where was the cave? Where were Ban and her abuela?

  Then she realized what must have happened and she grew more anxious still. Somehow she had crossed over into myth time, alone, without Abuela to help her back to the world she’d inadvertently left behind. She could be any-when. In the ancient past when the Anasazi were first building their cliff-side dwelling, north, in slickrock country, or in some unimaginable future when human beings no longer walked the world at all.

  She might never find her way back home. Everyone said la época del mito was a dangerous place to visit—especially for the inexperienced. Even her father, one of the few times he’d talked to her of what he called men’s business, had told her he never traveled into the mysteries on his own. He went in the company of his peyoteros with Mescal to show them the way and then bring them back home when their visiting was done.

  “Abuela,” she called, her voice no more than a hoarse whisper, her throat tight and dry with fear. “Papa.”

  She wanted to be brave, but courage fled, the harder she tried to grasp it. Turning, she searched for the opening of the cave once more, but the sun glared on the towering cliffs, washing away detail in a sheen of shimmering heat waves and light. Nothing looked quite the same anyway. The coloring of the rocks. The feel of the slope underfoot. The intense blue of the sky.

  The vegetation was different, too—some of the saguaro were taller than she remembered, others smaller. The prickly pear grew in changed patterns. There were no jojoba bushes close to the cliff itself.

  “Por favor,” she said, meaning to address the spirits of this place, to beg their indulgence and ask for guidance, but then she heard something odd.

  She sat up straighter, head cocked to listen. The sound she heard was singing, a singing that seemed to be a mix of high-pitched children’s voices and coyote yips. It came from just over the next rise where a flush of prickly pear clustered at the base of another tall saguaro, the same piece of nonsensical verse repeated over and over with an innocent exuberance that pulled a smile from her tight lips:

  No somos los lobos

  no somos los perros

  somos los cadejos

  cadejos verdaderos

  Fearful still, but too curious now to be cautious, she clambered up the slope to peek over the other side of the ridge. Her smile broadened into a delighted grin and all fear fell away when she saw the improbable singers. They were dogs, a small pack of gamboling, dancing, warbling beasts, not one of them taller than her knee in height; six, perhaps seven—it was hard to count, they moved so quickly. That they could sing was surprising enough, but their colors were what took her breath away. Their short fur was the startling hue of Mexican folk art: a mottled rainbow of bright blues and yellows, lime greens, deep pinks, purples, and oranges. A child’s palette that filled her gaze with the same potency that a particularly hot chile salsa brought to the roof of the mouth—almost painful in its intensity, yet ever so pleasurable all the same.

  What would such fur feel like? she couldn’t help but wonder. Soft, or stiff like a terrier’s?

  Because there was something of a bull terrier in the shape of their heads, long and rounded like a bullet. But they weren’t quite as barrel-chested. Looking more closely, she saw that instead of a dog’s paws, they had the feet of goats. The sound of their little hooves on the rocks as they danced added a counterpoint rhythm to their song.

  Clickity-clackity-click.

  We are not wolves, we are not dogs.

  Clickity-click.

  We are cadejos.

  Clackity-click.

  Cadejos, truly.

  Clickity-clackity…

  She started to stand, wanting to go down, to join them and make a joyful noise. To be a cadeja to their cadejos, whatever a cadejo might be. It didn’t really matter. She could be happy to paint her skin a dozen bright colors and dance in the sun with them.

  “I wouldn’t go down there,” a voice said.

  Startled, she slipped a few steps back down her side of the slope and turned to see a roadrunner lolling on a nearby rock. She looked around, but there was no one nearby who could have spoken unless it was an invisible spirit.

  She shivered at the thought and returned her attention to the roadrunner. It was lying with its back to the sun, tail dropped, wings spread wide, the speckled feathers lifted on its back and crest to expose a “solar panel” of jet black underfeathers and skin. Bettina had seen them do this before, absorbing heat from the sun, but usually this was only in the winter when their body temperature dropped overnight. The birds used the sun’s energy to warm themselves up, rather than increasing their metabolic rate the way hummingbirds or poorwills might, reducing their caloric needs by as much as forty percent—the equivalent to her skipping breakfast or lunch. In the winter, when food was in short supply for the birds, it was an efficient way to heat their bodies.

  She shook her head. Why was she thinking such things? She wasn’t in school, or learning
lessons while out hiking with her abuela.

  She looked again past the sunning roadrunner, out over the rough scrub of the bajada. Singing dogs were one thing—especially when they seemed so full of fun—but she wasn’t sure she was really prepared for invisible spirits.

  “¿Quién habló?” she asked, pitching her voice low so that it wouldn’t carry to the strange dogs cavorting on the other side of the ridge. Who spoke?

  The roadrunner cleared its throat.

  “Are you always this rude?” it asked when it saw it had her attention.

  Bettina regarded the bird for a long moment. The dogs should have prepared her for this. This was la época del mito, after all. The place where, according to Abuela, what passed as folktales in their world were no more than matter-of-fact occurrences.

  “Perdona,” she said finally. I’m sorry.

  “I should think so. What would your grandmother say?”

  “ My grandmother ?”

  “¡Claro! Everyone in this place has heard of her: Dorotea Muñoz—la curandera de pequeños misteriós.”

  “How do you know her?”

  “Let’s say we have shared certain … intimacies.”

  Bettina’s eyes widened. “But you … you’re a bird.”

  “Is that what you see?”

  As Bettina began to nod, the roadrunner folded up its short, rounded wings and rose onto its feet. A heat wave traveled the length of its speckled black and white plummage, heightening the greenish iridescent cast the feathers already held. Bettina found her gaze caught by the bright blue around its eyes where the heat wave shimmered the strongest. The intensity of those blue feathers brought a return of the vertigo she’d suffered in I’itoi’s cave and she had to close her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, the roadrunner was gone.

  A small, dark-skinned man sat in its place.

  “¡Dios mío!” Bettina managed to squeeze from a suddenly dry mouth.

  In any other circumstance, she would have given him no more than a passing glance. He was short in stature, certainly shorter than herself, but otherwise he could have been any middle-aged O’odham on the rez. Scuffed cowboy boots, worn blue jeans, white cotton shirt, baseball cap. But his eyes were almost black, with bird-bright highlights and circles of blue shadow, his face long and lean, especially his nose. There was a roadrunner speckling of black and white in his dark brown hair, and he carried enough weight around his waist to give him the body shape of a bird.

  “Where did you come from?” Bettina asked, though she already knew.

  The man smiled. “Where did any of us come from?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Perhaps not. But I believe the most important questions only lead to more questions.”

  “Now you sound like mi abuela” Bettina said.

  “A fine woman. You must give her my regards.”

  “Who shall I say is sending them?”

  “Tadai.”

  “You mean Tadai Namkam? ¿Cómo un apodo?”

  “No, not a nickname. Just Tadai, nothing more …”

  Bettina shook her head. Tadai was simply the O’odham word for road-runner. It was as if Bettina were to call herself Chehia. Girl. Then she found herself wondering if her present experience was like Ban’s meeting with the coyote that had given him his tribal name. Perhaps now she’d be called Tadai Namkam. It was all very confusing. But one thing her fifteen-year-old wisdom told her:

  “That’s not a regular name,” she told him.

  “And yet it’s the only one I have,” Tadai said.

  Bettina gave him a considering look. “¿Es verdad?”

  “Más o menos.” More or less.

  Aha. But she decided not to press him on it. She was more interested in the singing dogs.

  “Why did you warn me away from the dogs?” she asked, hoping to get a straightforward answer for a change.

  “Not dogs,” Tadai said. “Cadejos. Weren’t you listening to their song?”

  Which had now stopped, Bettina realized. She hoped her conversation with Tadai hadn’t driven them away. She tried to listen for some sound on the other side of the ridge. A click of goatish hooves on stone. A murmur of song. There was nothing.

  “They seemed like such fun,” she said, not even trying to hide her disappointment.

  Tadai nodded. “But they are dangerous. Cadejos are the children of volcanoes. How can they not be dangerous with such powerful entities as parents?”

  “I’ve never heard of them before.”

  “In your world they are invisible … and mostly forgotten.”

  “But why are they dangerous?”

  “Bien. For one thing, they are doorways and can pull you between worlds.”

  “Is that how I got here? Did the cadejos bring me?”

  Tadai gave her a tired look. “Either that, or you were sent here by someone weary of your endless questions.”

  “Now who’s being rude?”

  “Me perdona. But you are a most conversational child.”

  Again the child business.

  “I’m almost sixteen.”

  “Ah.” As though that explained everything.

  “In the old days I’d be married now, with children.”

  Tadai shook his head. “Children having children. What a sad world you come from.”

  Bettina decided she had listened long enough to this sort of talk. It was bad enough that Ban ignored her, without complete strangers voicing their opinions on how young she was. She stood up and with great dignity carefully brushed the dirt from her jeans.

  “Where are you going?” Tadai asked as she started up the slope.

  “Home,” she told him without turning. “If you haven’t scared them off with all your talking, I’m going to ask los cadejos to send me home.”

  “But—”

  Bettina paused to look back at him. “You’re the one who said that they’re doorways between worlds.”

  Tadai scrambled to catch up to her.

  “Si,” he said. “But you don’t necessarily get to choose which world they will send you into.”

  Bettina wasn’t interested in listening to him anymore. She quickly gained the top of the ridge and was half walking, half sliding down its far slope before Tadai could stop her. The cadejos were below, sprawled out in repose like a pack of javelinas.

  “¡Por favor!” she called to them. “Send me back home.”

  They rose in a wave of color, yipping and laughing, blue and green and bright pink tails wagging, and surrounded her as she came the rest of the way down the slope, arms pinwheeling to keep her balance.

  “¿Dónde está tu casa?” one of them cried. Where is your home?

  “¡Tu casa, tu casa, tu casa!” the others took up.

  “¡Qué suerte! Tienes una casa.” How lucky. You have a home.

  “¡Tu casa, tu casa, tu casa!”

  “Somos los homeless.”

  “No tenemos casa.”

  “Verdaderos, verdaderos.”

  “¡Somos los cadejos!”

  They ran around and around her as they yipped and barked and made a bewildering noise. Bettina grew dizzy as she turned around herself, trying to focus on one of them long enough to make herself understood. But the cadejos danced around her like so many spinning carousel animals, with her at their hub, unable to move, while they were always in motion, Catherine-wheeling finally into a blur of color and sound.

  “Bettina!” she heard Tadai call.

  She tried to see where he was, but there were always cadejos in front of her, yapping, chattering, laughing. The vertigo rose up again, a huge dark swell of it, and this time she didn’t fight it. At least it would take her away from the blur of motion and their voices. Except the dogs leapt up at her now, not attacking, not even playing, but jumping at her all the same, little cloven hooves scattering dirt behind them, and into her chest they went, swallowed into her skin, and she could still hear their voices as she tumbled towards unconsciousness, only n
ow they were echoing inside her head.

  As everything went black, Tadai reached the place where she’d been standing.

  “And sometimes they make you into a doorway,” he said, but he was alone on the bajada now, Bettina and cadejos, both gone.

  Bettina’s spirit rose up from the darkness to find a hundred faces peering down at her, all of them spinning and turning like the carousel of cadejos had earlier. But slowly they resolved into two faces, Ban’s and her grandmother’s.

  “Chica, chica,” Abuela said. “You’ve made us so worried. I thought my heart would stop when you disappeared the way you did.”

  Ban put his arm around her shoulders and helped her sit up when she couldn’t quite manage it on her own. The sudden movement made her head spin once more, but the vertigo quickly ebbed. Candlelight filled her sight, flickering on the offerings stuck into the cave’s wall niches and hanging from its roof. When she saw them she realized that they were still in I’itoi’s cave. So it had all been a strange dream. Except…

  “I… I disappeared … ?”

  “Sí,” Ban said. “One moment you were here, the next you were gone.”

  “I thought it was a dream …”

  “What did you see?” her abuela asked.

  Bettina didn’t answer for a long moment. She felt surprisingly clearheaded and was enjoying the sensation of being so close to Ban. See? she wanted to say to him. Does this feel like a child you hold in your arms?

  “Bettina?” Abuela said.

  Bettina sighed and looked at her grandmother.

  “I met Tadai,” she said.

  “Aroadrunner?”

  “No. Yes. At first. Then he became a man. He said he knew you, Abuela. That you had been lovers.”

  Abuela’s eyebrows rose. “Did he now.”

  Bettina could feel herself blushing. “Well, he said you had shared intimacies.”

  “I see.”

  “And that I should give you his regards.”

  “Very thoughtful of him.”

  “Do you know him?”

  Her grandmother smiled. “I know a rather short, shape-shifting curandero whose imagination often gets the better of him. Did he … harm you in any way?”