Ancient Enemy (2 page)

The following night, it got one of our dairy goats. There was hardly enough of it left to even contemplate scraping the meat off of the disarticulated bones, so I’d gathered all of the pieces I could find, drove up to the pit, and burned them with the trash. As a precaution I’d turned the earth where it bled out to smother the scent and herded the rest of the goats into the pen where we housed them during the winter and closed them inside their stall before night descended. I’d fallen asleep content in the knowledge that I’d done everything I could to keep them safe and slept fairly well right up until I awoke to Yanaba’s whinnying.

This was harsh land, definitely not for the weak of spirit. The predators that stalked it spent months at a time on the verge of starvation, so when they encountered prey, they attacked with staggering speed and ferocity. Yet rarely did they attack domesticated animals. It was something of a hard-struck truce negotiated through centuries of bloodshed. The largest were the bears, although they rarely strayed this far to the south, and they’d grown soft through a century of living on the fringes of civilization and rummaging through garbage barrels. The mountain lions were by far the most dangerous and feared man so little they hunted during the daylight hours. They’d been known to abscond with dogs and small children who strayed into their range, but rarely did they venture into the inhabited regions. The coyotes, on the other hand, preferred the darkness and went wherever they pleased, but I’d never known them to be this aggressive, especially with livestock and so close to human settlement.

What troubled me most was the nature of the slaughter. The chickens had been fully consumed and the goat had been effectively butchered, but no effort had been made to consume the sheep. Their bodies—even their viscera—had been untouched and left to rot where the animals fell, which was almost unheard of in the natural world. Predators killed because they were hungry and then consumed their prey. The concept of killing for sport was one unique to man, and there was no species around here that ripped its prey apart for no other reason than to listen to it bleat in terror and savor its blood.

And the most frightening thought of all was that when I got home I was going to have to tell my mother what happened.

THREE

A thousand years ago, the Anasazi inhabited this land. Technically, they were called something else, but whatever name they chose for themselves vanished into the annals of time with them. It was the Navajo who called them
Anaasází
, Ancient Enemy, and since they weren’t around to defend themselves, that was the name that stuck. They were the ones responsible for all of the cliff dwellings around here, the famous pueblos built right into the canyon walls, like Cliff Palace, Balcony House, and Long House, just a couple of miles to the north of here in Mesa Verde National Park. They were long gone when the Ute and Navajo converged upon this area, and a distant, fading memory by the time Mexico ceded the combined lands of both tribes in New Mexico and Southern Colorado to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War.

The Ute were the first to formally recognize US authority and were recruited to fight against the Navajo, who resisted the outright theft of their tribal land. Navajo prisoners were taken and sold as slaves, many of them women and children. Men on both sides of my family tree were killed, more from starvation than actual battle. It was a war of attrition, and one both sides lost. When the dust settled, the Navajo and Ute tribes found themselves confined to reservations with boundaries that seemed to shrink with each passing year, left to wonder how they had essentially been coerced into doing this to each other when together they could have stood against a common foe and defended what was rightfully theirs.

And all on the blood-red sands once occupied by the most ferocious of warrior tribes, who abruptly abandoned this region sometime during the thirteenth century, leaving behind entire fortified cities nearly impossible to reach without wings, cities that will still be standing long after the tallest of skyscrapers has fallen.

My name is Sani Natonaba. My father insisted I be given a traditional Navajo name, although I had no idea why. My best guess was it was an effort to placate his father, who undoubtedly objected to his son sullying his bloodline with a Ute like my mother. Maybe one day I’d track him down and ask him. Literally translated, it means “The Old One War Leader,” but taken in the context of a tongue no one around here has spoken in at least two generations, it means “Leader of the War Against the Old Ones.” I don’t really know the significance of it, or even if there was any. My best guess is it was my paternal grandfather’s way of making sure every Ute who said it aloud felt the twist of the knife. The older generations clung jealously to their prejudices, as though to release them would be to dishonor their ancestors, who were
surely
looking down on all of us with pride as it was.

My father left us when I was barely old enough to remember him doing so. Just drove off in the middle of the night with our car and what little money we had. All I really remember were the long days watching my mother sitting on the porch with the phone in her lap and her teary eyes on the long dirt driveway. When the phone finally did ring, it rang all the time and my mother stopped answering it. Even went so far as to unplug it. She started drinking when they turned off the electricity. It wasn’t long after that before her father, my maternal grandfather, picked us up in the very truck I’d used to collect the carcasses of the dead sheep and brought us up here to the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation in Colorado.

Last I knew, my father was somewhere on the Diné Res near Shiprock, dealing cards at one of the casinos. I waffled between wanting to go down there so I could tell him all of the things I’d been building up through the years and not wanting to relinquish the hatred I felt for him, for fear I would find it was the only thing that bound me to him.

Sometimes I think I know how the Anasazi must have felt. There were days when I wanted nothing more than to run as far away as I could get from here. I was surrounded by people who either struggled to keep the old traditions alive or were consigned the hand they’d been dealt and subsisted upon the scraps cast aside from the federal government’s table. There were times when I could feel the pride and indignation of my ancestry coursing through my veins and wanted to rage against this fate, but there were other times when I simply wished to be like all of the other kids I saw on TV, wearing fancy clothes and driving expensive cars and living in a moment not beholden to the actions taken hundreds of years ago by people they never knew. And then there were times when I just felt tired of fighting a battle lost before I was even born and realized just how easy it would be to cash my government stipend and casino checks and blow it all on a numbing whiskey fugue, like my mother.

Strange the things that go through your head while you’re trying to think about anything other than what’s going on right in front of you.

I flipped over the pelvis, held one of the skinned legs by the severed knee, and brought the hatchet down on it, just beside the spine. Threw the leg into the pile. Switched sides, swung again, and separated the remaining rump from the vertebrae.

The heat of the sun on my bare back as it descended toward the mountains, in contrast to the cold air, gave me goosebumps. The eastern horizon was dark with storm clouds that would take hours to make it this far. All I had left to do was wrap the cuts in paper for freezing and salt the hides for tanning and I could finally pour myself a bath, which had never sounded so good in my entire life.

The screen door swung open behind me with a screech. I froze and listened to my heartbeat thunder in my ears. I couldn’t bring myself to turn around.

“What’s all this?” The words weren’t slurred, which meant my mother was about as sober as she got. It also meant her head was undoubtedly pounding and her rattlesnake temper was wired to a hair-trigger. “The hell you doing out here?”

I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath. Sank the hatchet into the flat trunk we used as a cutting block. Turned around and shaded my eyes with my hand, as though the sun were the reason I couldn’t make eye contact.

“Coyotes got them last night. I figured—”

“You figured what? I’d want to eat their leftovers?”

“No, I thought—”

“You didn’t
think
is the problem. Your father was the same way. Never thought about anything or anyone other than himself.”

I turned away and busied myself with the sack I’d brought out for the innards. I listened to her breathing, which grew more labored by the day thanks to the cigarettes and her increasing weight. There was a rhythm to it, one that often betrayed her thoughts before she spoke them.

“Just finish up and bring the meat inside,” she finally said. “I’ll see if I can find something to go with it.”

The porch planks creaked and the screen door closed behind her with a screech-slam.

I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I released it and nearly had to double over to catch it again.

FOUR

I told Grandfather about the sheep while I helped him eat his
atoo’
—a traditional Navajo soup made by boiling vegetables with the salvaged viscera of the sheep and one of their heads. All prejudices were checked at the door when it came to food. Eating the head was an acquired taste, or so I was told, and one I’d decided long ago not to acquire. Give me a steak or a chop—the bloodier the better—and I’m a happy guy. It was all I could do to keep the expression of revulsion from my face as I tipped each spoonful to his lips. Precious little actually made it into his mouth, but I was careful to dab the mess from his chin and neck. I chose to believe he enjoyed it. Or maybe he simply enjoyed having someone sitting in his dim room talking to him.

He hadn’t spoken a word since his stroke, nor had he managed to get out of bed since he returned from the hospital. We all knew he was going to die soon. The doctors hadn’t come right out and said it in so few words, but everything they did say pretty much added up to that conclusion. The paralysis would likely be permanent. As would the incontinence and aphasia—a fancy way of saying that the area in his brain responsible for verbal communication was fried. And that was the problem. When it came to acute ischemic strokes—the sudden formation of a clot in one of the arteries of the brain that cuts off circulation to the tissue—there was a one-hour golden window to treat the patient with clot-busting drugs. It was probably somewhere between three and four hours by the time I found him and five by the time I got him to Southwest Memorial in Cortez, where I knew the doctors were better prepared to handle emergencies than they were at the clinic in Towaoc. They’d pumped him full of what they called a tissue plasminogen activator and told me the goal from there was to try to save the areas of the brain surrounding the tissue adjacent to the clot, which had already been deprived of oxygen for too long. What they meant was things might have turned out differently if I’d gotten him there sooner.

Grandfather had been there for us when we needed him most, and where were we in his time of greatest need? I’d been killing time in the hills because I wanted to come home so little and my mother had been unconscious on the couch, maybe twenty feet away, when he dropped right there in the dirt in front of our trailer.

The right side of his face drooped in what had come to resemble permanent sadness, while the skin on the left side had been pulled tighter. The combined effect made his eyes look wider, as though he existed in a perpetual state of terror. I could still see him inside them, though. Deep in those brown eyes. I could see him, trapped like a fox in a snare. The sparkle of cunning remained, a heartbreaking reminder of sentience, the last remaining glimmer of the man who had been both a mother and a father to me when neither of those who’d been cast in the role wanted the part.

The framed photographs above his head were crammed together so tightly that I couldn’t see the wall between them. Most were old and faded by the years, others from an age before the advent of color film. The older ones featured a younger version of my grandfather, one I barely recognized. With his parents and his brothers. With my grandmother, who died a good decade before I was born. With my mother as a baby and as a child and as a young woman with her whole life in front of her. There were pictures of her with my father, when times had been better and before the glow of happiness in her eyes had been replaced by the shine of alcohol. And then there were pictures of me as a toddler in the arms of my mother, wearing clothes that looked like they’d been donated to our tribe from another era. Photos of grandfather and me posing with trophy bucks and stringers overflowing with trout and wild game of all kinds. And that was where the photographs ended. Where the timeline of my grandfather’s life reached its tragic denouement.

I once asked him why there were no pictures of me as a baby. He said it was because those years had been sacred to my mother and the memories belonged solely to her, and her alone. And then he’d asked me if I remembered anything about those years. When I said I didn’t, he merely smiled and said they must not have been worth remembering then, that my best years still lie ahead of me and I could make them whatever I wanted them to be.