River Marked (18 page)

He took us up to a basalt wall of cliffs—a baby cliff compared to the one he’d just pointed out. He stopped but didn’t say anything, so I looked up. It took a moment to understand what I was seeing, even though I’d been looking for them. The old paint blended into the rocky cliff as if it belonged there, and I was the outsider. As soon as I saw one, I saw that they were everywhere.

There were dozens, parts of dozens at least. Some of them were clearly identifiable as human or various other animals. Others were impossible to decipher, either because some of the paint had grown too faint or because whatever symbolism they’d used was too alien for me to understand. There were some symbols that were obvious—like flowing water was a series of parallel squiggly lines. Some were less obvious: a red and white target, long wavy lines, circles.

I stepped close, my hands behind my back like a child told not to touch. Hundreds of years ago someone had stood where I was and touched their fingers to the rock. Five hundred years ago. A thousand years ago.

I had the odd thought that Bran the Marrock had been alive when these were painted. Five hundred years I was certain he was. I was almost sure of a thousand.

Still. I wondered if the long-ago girl or boy who had drawn the bold red and white target had known how long their artwork would remain, the last testament that they had once walked the earth.

Beside me, Adam stiffened and took a deep breath. He turned slowly until he looked down where we’d been standing a few minutes ago. I followed his gaze until I saw it, too.

Crouched on a rocky promontory that overhung the lower part of the trail, a red-tailed hawk stared at us. Like the pictograms, it belonged there. But there was something odd about its interest in us. It reminded me a little too closely of the woman in the museum. The bird took flight and passed right over our heads before veering off over the river, then out of sight.

As it flew, I realized that the unease I felt reminded me of my vision quest and the animals who had hunted me, making me unwelcome, until I’d come upon Coyote. A vision quest like those of all the long-ago artists. Maybe, I thought in sudden whimsy, I should draw a La-Z-Boy on one of the rocks. Somehow, I was pretty sure no one would understand that I wasn’t vandalizing—just continuing tradition.

If Calvin hadn’t been there, I’d have told Adam. I looked over at him and found him watching Calvin with gold eyes that danced with temper.

I put my hand on his arm. Gold eyes weren’t a good thing when we were among friends.

Adam put his hand over mine and took a step so he was between me and Calvin. “In your ongoing education as a medicine man, have you ever heard of people who can change into animals, Calvin?” he asked in a surprisingly civil voice.

I frowned at Adam and gave his arm an invisible squeeze. I didn’t know Calvin; there was no reason to make him question what I was. Something had happened that I’d missed while my eyes had been on the hawk, and I wasn’t sure what it was.

Whatever it was, Adam was pretty mad at Calvin. I wondered if he pulled me behind him to protect me—or to keep me from protecting Calvin.

“No,” said Calvin—which was a mistake. He should have learned how to not-lie from his grandfather. Besides, I knew enough Native American legends to know that there were lots of stories about people who turned to animals—and animals into people, for that matter. And he knew about Adam, who was certainly a person who changed into an animal.

Adam smiled, showing his teeth. I couldn’t actually see him do it, but Calvin’s face told me he had clearly enough. Adam had put away his civilized face and let Calvin see the real one.

“Can’t lie to werewolves,” I told the young man. “You might as well have shouted, ‘Yes, but I don’t want you to ask me about it.’”

Calvin swallowed, his fear pressing on my nose like perfume.

“Mercy?” asked Adam.

He was going somewhere with this—and I trusted him as long as his temper held. Werewolves are monsters. I grew up with them, and I loved Adam—and he would never hurt me. That did not apply to people he didn’t care about. The faster the situation—whatever the situation was—was defused, the safer for everyone.

Information can sometimes be gotten when the opponent thinks you know all about it anyway. That was what Adam had been asking me to do—tell Calvin who I was.

“I can turn into a coyote,” I said. “My mom tells me I must get it from my father.”

Calvin’s jaw dropped, then his face froze. “Your mother was a white woman,” he said urgently. “You can’t turn into a coyote.”

“Can, too,” I said indignantly. It was one thing for me to tell him he was lying—I knew I was right. It was an entirely different matter for him to tell me I was lying.

“Can’t.”

“Can.”

“Can’t.”

“Can, too.”

“Mercy,” said Adam with exaggerated patience tinged with humor. He knew I was doing it on purpose. That was okay because he wasn’t angry anymore.

“Cannot,” said Calvin.

“Knock it off, both of you. Neither of you is five.” He glanced at Calvin. “He answered what I wanted to know anyway. That hawk was no natural animal, and this one knew it.”

No one reads body language like a werewolf, I thought. And then I realized what Adam was saying.

The blood shot from my head so fast that I had to step sideways to keep my feet—and sideways was three feet down the hillside. Adam jerked me back on the trail before I managed to fall. “Okay?” he asked.

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure it was true.

I’d never met another one of my kind. After more than thirty years, I’d sort of assumed that there were no more left, that I was the only one.

I’d also assumed they’d be coyotes like me. Hadn’t the old man last night kind of implied that? He’d known I was a coyote, and I’d only told him I was a walker.

I didn’t know much about being a walker. Only what Bran had told me, and he hadn’t known much—or he’d told me exactly as much as he intended to. I’d grown up thinking the last was true, but over the past year or so had come to believe the first.

“She is a walker,” Adam told Calvin. “Coming up with reasons it can’t be so doesn’t help, and neither does arguing. I should know: I was bitten and Changed by a bandit warlord in Vietnam. Even now, I don’t know of any werewolves living in Asia—there are things over there that don’t like us, and they can make their dislike fatal. Yet there he was. Mercy changes into a coyote. You can’t argue with fact. Just accept it and get over it. Was that your grandfather?”

If Gordon Seeker was a walker who turned into a red-tailed hawk, that would explain why he was able to disappear so effectively. There still should have been a pile of clothes where he’d changed, but being a walker would answer most of my questions.

“Grandpa Gordon changes,” said Calvin. He looked as though he had sucked on a lemon as he stared at me.

He didn’t not-lie very well, either. Maybe it was something medicine men learned when they were older. I had a feeling that his uncle Jim could not-lie as smoothly as any fae, and I’d seen that his grandfather could do the same. So why had they sent Calvin out with us? Unless they wanted us to share their secrets.

And the reason they might want us to know was tied up with Gordon Seeker, Yo-yo Girl Edythe’s prophecy, and whatever had happened to Benny and his sister that Calvin wanted to wait until later to tell us.

Someday, I’m going to meet some supernatural creature who tells me everything I should know up front and in a forthright manner—but I’m not going to hold my breath.

“That hawk wasn’t Gordon,” said Adam, who could tell a bad not-lie as well as I could. “Who was it?”

If Gordon could change, and the hawk wasn’t Gordon, then there were three of us. Three walkers. Gordon had known about me, about my existence, and the only reason we had met was chance. Engineered by Yo-yo Girl, but not by any desire on their part. Fine. They hadn’t wanted anything to do with me. I would extend them the same courtesy.

Calvin looked at me a moment and threw up his hands in surrender. “Coyote, huh? Maybe that explains a few more things about why Grandpa Gordon wanted you to see this.” He rubbed his face. “Look. Let me take you to see She Who Watches—I don’t know if she’s something you needed to see or not. Uncle Jim wasn’t exactly forthcoming, but she’s the best and best-known of the pictograms. Then I’ll take you on to the petroglyphs. I’ll tell you Benny’s story—and I’ll give you Uncle Jim’s phone number, and you can call him about anything else you need to know, all right?”

It sounded fair enough to me, and Adam nodded.

He turned around and led us back down to where the trail split, and we followed the path of the woman I’d seen earlier. There were more drawings on the rock faces we passed.

“There’s no lichen on the places where the pictograms are,” commented Adam.

Calvin nodded. He’d calmed down a lot, and his fear no longer made me ache to give chase. “Right. They had some way of clearing off a bare patch and keeping it clean a thousand years later. It might have been something as easy as scraping the rock clean. Lichen needs a certain amount of roughness to grow. There are a few bare patches of rock that were obviously cleared off.” He pointed. “But they don’t have anything on them. Maybe someone mixed the paint wrong, or maybe they didn’t get around to using them. You can see a bit of pigment on some of the bare patches when the light is just right.”

“Do you know which tribe the people who lived over there belonged to?” Adam asked.

Calvin shook his head. “When the Europeans came, everybody moved. Lots of bands and a few tribes died off entirely. Most tribes kept their histories orally, and many of those stories were lost. We have some good guesses, but so do other tribes, and their guesses and ours don’t always line up.”

We turned a corner, onto the same trail down which the woman had disappeared. I could scent her. The trail paralleled the fence. On the other side of the fence were the railroad tracks that ran along the river. The fence and the trail ended abruptly, leaving us in a corner between the fence and a basalt rock wall. On the rock, looking out at the Columbia, was the biggest, clearest pictogram I’d seen. She could have been drawn a decade ago rather than centuries.

She Who Watches looked like a raccoon’s face. Two little tulip ears perched on top of her head, and her mouth was open in a wide smile. A square of faded black was set in the middle of her mouth. It might have been a faded tongue or a long-ago attempt to cover up something, but whatever it was, it looked out of place in the rest of the face. Faintly, I could see where fangs had once been drawn in the mouth—and I bet she didn’t look so friendly long ago, when those were more obvious.

Most of the pictograms we’d seen were cruder, two-dimensional stick figures. This had depth and real artistry.

“There are a lot of stories about She Who Watches,” Calvin said. He opened his mouth and stopped. “But that’s not why it was important to come here.” He looked startled, as if he’d surprised himself with what he’d said.

“Why don’t you tell us the story anyway?” Adam invited. “We have time.”

Calvin looked uneasily over his shoulder but there was no one behind us. “All right.” He took a deep breath. “All right. It’s a Coyote story, so I suppose it’s appropriate, right? One of several about how she came to be here—all the ones I know are Coyote stories.

“One day, Coyote came walking up the Columbia and he found this Indian village. He walked among the people, but he couldn’t find their leader. So he went up to an old lady making a fish trap. ‘Where is your leader?’ he asked her.

“‘Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches, is our leader,’ said the old woman. ‘She is up on the hill.’

“So Coyote, he comes up to this place and found a woman standing just where we are.

“‘What are you doing up here?’ he asked her. ‘Your people are down in the village.’

“‘I am watching,’ she told him. ‘I watch to see that my people have enough to eat. I watch so they have good homes to sleep in. I watch to see that they are safe from enemies.’

“Coyote, he thought that this was a good thing. So he took her and threw her up against this rock so that she could keep a watch over her people always.”

“I bet there is more to the story,” said Adam. “Coyote wouldn’t throw her on the rock unless she made a smart-aleck comment or two.”

“Well,” I said, because he’d been looking at me, “I suppose if I were doing my job, and some stranger came up and started questioning me, I might be tempted to say something a little rude.” I’d said quite a bit to Adam over the years, and I saw in his eyes that he was remembering it, too.

“Maybe so,” said Calvin. “Let me take you back to the petroglyphs.”

He started back down the trail, and I hesitated. I turned to look at the little corner we’d been stuck in and took a deep breath, but I didn’t smell her. I’d caught her scent at the fork in the trail, and there was nowhere else she could have gone. Even if she had climbed over the fence, she’d have left her scent behind.

“Did either of you notice the woman who was out walking the trail a little ways behind us?” I asked. Maybe she’d been the hawk we’d seen.

“What woman?” asked Calvin.

Adam shook his head. “Who did you see?”

“The woman from the museum, from the Indian exhibit there,” I told Adam, expecting him to have seen her, too. Adam notices things. Part of it is being werewolf, but a bigger part of it, I think, comes from his time as a member of a Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol in the jungles of Vietnam.

“A family,” he said. “Father, mother, three kids.”

“And a middle-aged Native American woman wearing a bright blue shirt with a pair of macaws embroidered on the back,” I told him. “She smelled like mint and coffee.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t see her.”

He’d walked right past her.