River Marked (17 page)

“Mercy.”

“Mercy, wake up.”

I OPENED MY EYES, CONSCIOUS THAT I WAS BREATHING too fast and that I was drooling on Adam’s leg.

“Sorry,” I said groggily. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“I kept you up too late,” Adam said in a tone that was not at all apologetic. “Satisfied” might be a better word. Smug. We hadn’t been living celibate before we got married, but it was hard to get much privacy when Adam was pack Alpha and had a teenage daughter. Maybe we should buy a trailer of our own.

“Got to catch your sleep while you can,” Adam continued. “I didn’t get the full effect this time, but it sounded like another nightmare.”

“Oh yeah,” I agreed. The sick feeling in my stomach wasn’t leaving very quickly. “Creepy in that slow-motion I-can’t-stop-this kind of way. I think that Gordon’s little talk about the cut on my leg has me thinking about old horror movies.”

Coyotes don’t make good slaves,
he’d said right about the same time he’d said I was river marked. I’d forgotten about it in the oddity of his visit, but it must have stuck in my subconscious and given me that chilling little episode. I wonder what he thought had marked my leg. Maybe someone would tell us more that afternoon.

“I’m assuming since we aren’t there yet, I wasn’t sleeping for long.”

“About ten minutes,” he said. “Here’s our park.”

“It doesn’t say Horsethief Lake,” I told Adam, as he turned off the highway toward the river, and we started down a long, gently bending road after passing a sign that said “Columbia Hills State Park.”

“Name sanitized in 2003,” Adam told me. “Both the states and the U.S. Geological Survey are PCing geographical names all over the place. Just ask Bran. He’ll go on for as long as you want to listen about Jackass Creek—he claims he knew the jackass it was named after.”

“Good thing the USGS doesn’t speak French, or they’d rename the Grand Tetons,” I said.

Adam laughed. “You just know those French trappers were missing home when they named them, don’t you?”

The drive through the park took us past an Indian graveyard that was still being used—I could tell from all the balloons and items left on the graves. It looked almost like a birthday party had gone on there, and all of the guests had departed without taking away their presents. There was a tall chain-link fence around the graveyard with “No Trespassing” signs on it.

I can see ghosts. But I’ve never actually seen one in a graveyard. Graveyards are for the living. In my experience, ghosts tend to hang out in the same places they did while they were alive.

So what had my father been doing in a campground beside the Columbia all the way out here when he was supposed to be from Browning, Montana?

Calvin Seeker was leaning against a chain-link fence when we parked the car on a gravel lot next to a boating dock. He looked tired and older than he’d appeared last night—like almost twenty. Without moving, he watched us lock up the car and cross the road.

The chain-link fence he was leaning on ran until it met up with the railroad that went along the edge of the water, then it followed the track of the railroad out of our sight around the bluffs. There was a sign behind Gordon, but I couldn’t read it.

“Uncle Jim told me to meet you here at noon,” he said, a little more politely than his posture indicated. “I’m going to be your tour guide, apparently.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He shrugged. “No trouble. Sometimes I volunteer to guide people on tourist days during the summer.”

He scuffed his shoe in the dirt and gave Adam a wary look. “How did you manage to get in touch with Uncle Jim? He told me while we were waiting in the hospital to see how Benny was doing, but I didn’t see him pick up his phone—and I know you didn’t get his phone number while we were waiting for the ambulance last night.”

“We didn’t,” said Adam. “We talked to your grandfather.”

Calvin came off the fence and stood up straight, his eyes a little wide. “My grandfather?” he asked, sounding startled. “Which one?”

“He called himself Gordon Seeker,” I said. “He came by last night, said your uncle had sent him. He gave me some stuff that really helped with my leg.”

“Ah, that grandfather.” He didn’t seem too happy about it, and I was pretty sure it was the thought of Gordon Seeker that had jolted him off the fence. “I should have known.”

“Something wrong?” Adam asked.

“Something’s always wrong when Grandpa Gordon stirs up the water,” Calvin said. He looked at me, then looked at Adam. “Werewolf, huh?”

Adam nodded.

“Okay. Well, if Grandpa Gordon sent you, I’m going to do this a little differently. Did he say why he sent you?” He shook his head before he answered. “What am I asking? Of course not. He’d rather watch us all run around like chickens when the fox comes calling. I guess he thinks it’s funny.”

“You were at the hospital last night?” I asked. “Is Benny going to be all right? Did he tell you what happened?”

“Yes,” Calvin said. He squinted against the sun, and the little gesture let me see the family resemblance between him and the old man who’d come to my trailer. “Benny’ll survive. I think . . . I think I should tell you his story after I’ve played guide if you don’t mind. I don’t know that it will make more sense that way, but at least you’ll know why he wanted you to come out here.” He frowned at me and Adam. “I’m not sure why he thinks it’s important that you know anything. I might question Uncle Jim, but only a fool asks Grandpa Gordon anything: He just might answer.”

He looked out across the river as if for inspiration, and when he spoke again, his voice was low. “My uncle Jim is a medicine man. It runs in the family, usually in sibling lines. None of his kids have the ability to become what he is, and neither did his father. But his uncle did. It runs like that.”

“Is Gordon a medicine man?” I asked, trying to work out the lineage. The answer should be no, if Gordon was his grandfather and shared his last name—unless Jim was Calvin’s uncle on his mother’s side. Which, I suddenly thought, was probable since they didn’t share last names.

“Is the night dark?” Calvin grinned, which robbed his face of its sulky cast and made him look likeable. “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on what you mean and in whose eyes. He is something, that’s for sure. Anyway, I’m Uncle Jim’s apprentice. I’m going to start this tour just like I would if you were a pair of tourists, but if I’m doing it right, some things might change along the way.” He cleared his throat, looked a little embarrassed, and said, “As inspiration strikes me. Or not.

“So.” He took a deep breath. “Welcome to this sacred ground. Speak softly and show respect while you are here, please. Twenty years ago, we fenced it and closed it to strangers because of vandalism. But that made no one happy because these were left behind to share the stories of those who have gone before with those who are now. So the decision was made to make it accessible, but under specific circumstances. If you were to come on your own . . .” He paused and looked at me, and when he continued, he’d lost the practiced flow of his voice. “
You’d
probably be okay. You look Indian. But people here without permission get jail sentences; we are serious about keeping this place safe.”

He turned and started walking on a trail, and we followed him through the gate. It was almost like being in a maze except the hedges were walls of lava and huge rocks.

“This is the Temani Pesh-wa trail,” Calvin said, leading the way, though there was really no need for a guide because the path was obvious. “Which means ‘written on rock.’ The pictograms here were probably painted between five hundred and a thousand years ago.”

He took us up a fairly brisk climb, speaking as we walked. “In earlier times, there were a lot of Indians in this area. Lewis and Clark mention stopping very near here, and from their journals, people estimate that there were nearly ten thousand Indians in the vicinity. We do know that one of the many villages was over there.”

He pointed back the way we’d come, where, in the distance, a rounded section of land jutted out into the river. From its edges, basalt cliffs dropped several hundred feet to the water below. I couldn’t tell from where we were whether there was a body of water between us and the land he’d pointed to. The landmass looked like nothing so much as a wedding cake, complete with a second, much smaller layer in the center.

Just as I was turning to look back at Calvin, I noticed that we weren’t the only ones on the trail. The Native American woman who had been in the museum was taking a fork in the trail that we had not. Even as I watched, she crossed behind a big bunch of rock and disappeared into the landscape.

“Twice a year they’d hold a potlatch,” Calvin was saying, “a party, to which they invited people from near and far. As part of the potlatch, young men and women of twelve or thirteen would hold their vision quests. Afterward, they would come here and record a reminder of their vision quests upon the rock.”