River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(33)
Author: Patricia Briggs

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.

"What does that mean?" asked Calvin.

"I’m not sure yet," I told him. Calvin couldn’t smell a lie. You could see it in his face that he believed what I said. I bet his uncle Jim would have called me on it. Adam gave me a sharp look.

There was a lot going on. Too much of it was mysterious and made no sense at all. And there were two other walkers, at least one of whom had known all about me before we met. The disappearing woman was one mystery too much. Though I was pretty sure she was my mystery and not something engineered by Gordon Seeker or anyone else we’d met there.

"Why don’t we go to the petroglyphs, then you tell me about Benny," I told Calvin grimly. "I’ll see if the woman fits in anywhere."

It wasn’t his fault. I had the feeling that he was even more in the dark than Adam and I were. Someone was playing games, and I was tired of it.

Chapter 7

PICTOGRAMS ARE PAINT ON SOME SURFACE, ANY surface. Gang graffiti are pictograms, but usually the term refers to paints done by ancient man. Petroglyphs are carved into the rock. A lot more effort goes into them, and they take a lot longer to create. Like the displays in the museum, the petroglyphs at Horsethief Lake were on big chunks of rock that had clearly been cut from larger rocks. Unlike the ones in the museum, these were fenced off–look but don’t touch.

The first petroglyph I saw at Horsethief Lake looked like a pineapple.

Calvin didn’t quite hide his grin when I told him so. "Before the Columbia was dammed in 1959, the river was narrow and deep here, not the wide and tamed thing she is now. There were falls. Celilo Falls. We have photos."

The young man stared out at the river. "You know, I wasn’t born then. My mother wasn’t even born back then. Some of the old ones still mourn the old river as if she were a living being who died."

"Change is hard," said Adam. "And it doesn’t much matter whether it is change for good or ill."

The young man looked at him. "All right. Some of the change was good, some of it not so good. There used to be a canyon. Some people said that there were more petroglyphs on the canyon walls than any other location in the world. I don’t know, but there were a lot of them. When it became clear that the dam was going in, an effort was made to save as many as possible. These were displayed at the dam for decades before they were brought here. There are others in the museum and a lot, I suppose, in private collections–the tribes asked people to go in and take what they could as long as they would care for them. The ones left in the canyon are underwater, and I suppose they will be there forever."

We were walking as he talked. Like the drawings on the rock, the carving was primitive. Some of it, like the pineapple person, were like trying to guess what a kindergartner had drawn. Some of them were extraordinary despite the stylization. I could have stayed looking at the eagle for an hour or so. But it was a rock that held a row of mountain sheep that clued me into something.