Dance of the Bones

This made Coyote very angry. He said that if Beautiful Girl did not marry Big Man, then the man would come along with the -people from his village and kill both Beautiful Girl and her brother. Then Coyote went away.

The brother and sister talked things over. Beautiful Girl said she did not want to marry Big Man. She said she did not want to marry anyone. She said that if trouble came, she would run away to the Eastern Sky—-Si’al tahgio Kahchm. She said that she would stay up there in the Eastern Sky and only show herself to those who rose early in the morning to do their work. She said she would smile on the -people who rose early and make them smile in return.

The brother, too, said he would rather live in the air, but he said that sometimes he would like to come back to the earth. He said he would like to come back with a bounce and a shake so -people would know he was there.

When Coyote went back to the village and told his story, Big Man was very, very angry. He called all his friends together. The next day Big Man and his friends took their bows and arrows and went looking for Beautiful Girl and her brother. The girl saw them coming and tried to warn her brother, but he didn’t seem to care very much.

As Big Man and his friends came closer, Beautiful Girl saw there was no hope, so she hurried off to the Eastern Sky just as she had said she would do.

THE RATTLE OF AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE echoing across the landscape startled Lani awake. The rest of the desert had fallen eerily quiet. Lani held her breath, listening, but she wasn’t the only one who sensed danger. So did the Little -People—-Ali--chu’uchum O’odham—-and the insects fell quiet as well. It was oppressively dark. The fire had died down, and the moon had crossed over to the back of Ioligam, leaving that part of the mountain entirely in shadow.

Lani had heeded her husband’s advice. She had come on the campout armed and had slept with her Glock under her bedroll. Retrieving it, she stood up and crept over to the edge of the clearing. Concealed by the sheltering manzanita, she peered down at the desert below. For a time—-she wasn’t sure how long—-nothing happened. A long time later another blast of distant gunfire made its way up the mountain.

Lani darted to her backpack and dug through it until she found her cell phone. Although she had confiscated Gabe’s phone, she had kept her own, turned off and tucked securely in an outside pocket. It seemed to take forever for the device to finally come online, but when it did, there was no signal, as in zero. She tried sending a text to Dan, but it bounced back as undelivered. The population in this part of the reservation was too scarce to warrant the building of private cell towers, and the tribe couldn’t afford to install them, either.

Shaking as much from fear as from the cold, Lani wrapped the bedroll around her shoulders and returned to her lookout point. Even though the phone hadn’t worked, the bright light from the screen had momentarily left her night blind. Once she could see again, she spotted a pinprick of light, bouncing here and there in a back--and--forth movement across the desert landscape far below.