Spider Woman atop your rock,

  I would greet you,

  but I am going the other way.

  Only a fool would pursue a Navajo

  into the Canyon of Death.

  Only a fool would go there at all

  when the waters are running.

  I am going to an old place.

  He who follows must go there, too.

  Windmark, raintouch, songrise, light,

  with me, on me, in me, about me.

  It is good to be a fool when the time is right.

  I am a son of the Sun

  and Changing Woman.

  I go to an old place.

  Na-ya!

  * * *

  When Cat emerged from the trip-box at Chinle he wore a dark cloak, glasses and floppy-hat disguise. The station was empty now, though he could see a couple of minutes into the past in a limited fashion with his infrared vision and knew from the heat signatures that two people had recently been standing inside the doorway for a while. He moved forward and looked outside. Yes. A man and a woman were walking away. Presumably one had met the other here and they had stood talking for a time before going on their way. As he watched, they crossed the street and entered a cafe to his left. Their thoughts served to remind him that for many hours he had been growing hungry. Without moving, his eye also took in countless images of the nearby wall map. He was getting the idea of such things better now, and he would remember all of the markings on this one. When he saw something which corresponded to a feature, he would have his directions, though he felt he already knew them. In the meantime, he would follow his feelings and his hunger while gaining impressions.

  He departed the station. Half of the sky was overcast and the clouds seemed to be moving to cover more. He felt the dampness and negative ionization in the air.

  He passed along the street. Three men rounded the corner and stared at him for an unusually long while. Stranger. Odd. Very odd, he read. Something funny about that one, the way he moves …Images then. Childhood fears. Old stories. Similar in ways to Billy’s stream of consciousness.

  More people approaching from the rear. No design to their movement in his direction. But the same curiosity flowing.

  He selected. He broadcast fears and old forebodings: Flee! Man-wolf shapeshifter! Gnawer of corpses! I will shoot corruption into your bodies, blow the dust of corpses into your lungs. Wolf, wearer of the skin. I will track you and rend you!

  The men at his back hastily turned into an open shop. Those before him halted, then quickly crossed the street. Almost amused, he continued to broadcast the feelings for a time after they had departed. It cleared the way before him. People would begin to emerge from buildings and halt, then return within, as if suddenly recalling something undone inside, experiencing the resurgence of childhood fears. Better to give in and rationalize later than to brave them out for no reason.

  But they are real, he reflected. I am the shapeshifter who could strike you down without effort. I could have stepped from your nightmare legends…

  He picked the direction of the Chinle Wash from a retreating mind, turned at the next corner and again at the following one.

  Silly. No one in sight now. There will be no trouble, he decided.

  Stretching and contracting, he bent forward. Soon he was loping along the street. Not far, not too far. This way was indeed north. The town thinned out, fell away. He departed the roadway, ran beside it, cut across country. Better, better. Soon now. Yes. Downhill. Trees and desiccated grasses. A faint flash of light. Much later, a soft growl from the eastern sky.

  Down, down into a barrenness of sand and moist earth, detached tree limbs and half-sunken stones. Firm enough, firm enough to run and—

  He halted. Ahead, a primitive sentience, wandering. Automatically he fell into a stalking mode of progress. Hunger remembered in this almost delicious spot, save for the moisture. Slow now, beyond the next bend…

  He halted again as soon as he saw the canine, a lean, black dog, sniffing about the heaps of rubble. Parts of it might do, if he diluted them…

  He sprang forward. The dog did not even raise its head until his third bounding movement, and by then it was too late. It let out one short whimpering noise before the projected feelings hit it, and then Cat’s left paw shattered its spine.

  Cat raised his muzzle from tearing at the carcass and swiveled his head so as to cover every direction, including straight up, with his many-faceted gaze. Nothing. Nothing moving but the wind and its consequences. Yet…He had felt as if something were watching him. But no.

  He fell to tearing the bones free, breaking them, grinding them, swallowing them along with large gulps of sand. Not as good as crunching the tube-crawlers back home, but better than the synthetic fare they had given him at the Institute. Much better. In his mind, he roamed again the dry plains, fearing nothing but—

  What? Again. He shook himself and ran his gaze entirely around the horizon. There was nothing, yet he felt as if something were stalking him.

  He dropped into a lower position, spitting out pieces of dog, baring his fangs, listening, watching. What could there be to fear? There was nothing on this planet that he would not face. Yet he felt menaced by something he did not understand. Even when he had met with krel, long ago, he had known where he stood. Now, though…

  He sent forth a paralyzing wave of feelings and waited. Nothing. No indication that anything had felt it. Could this be like dreaming?

  Time ticked nets about him. The sky flared briefly beyond his right shoulder.

  Gradually the tension went out of him. Gone now. Strange. Very strange. Could it be something about this place?

  He finished his meal, thinking again of the days of the hunt on the plains of his own world, where only one thing could cause such uneasiness in him…

  It struck.

  Whatever it was, it fell upon him like a boulder out of nowhere. He bunched his legs beneath him and sprang straight up into the air when it hit, head thrown back, a sharp hissing noise passing his throat. For an instant, his vision swam and the world grew dim. But already his mind was spinning. This he could understand, after a fashion.

  Among his kind the mating battles were always preceded by a psychic assault from the challenger. This was somehow similar, and he possessed the equipment to join it.

  He could not tell exactly what it was doing inside his head, but he struck at it with all of his hate, with the desire to rend. And then it was gone.

  He fell across the carcass of the dog, teeth still bared, slipping back into an earlier mode of existence. Where was the other? When would he strike? He ranged with all of his senses about the area, waiting. But there was nothing there.

  After a long while, the tension flowed away. Nothing was coming. Whatever it had been, it was not one of his own kind, and it had not been a battle challenge that he had felt. It troubled him that there was something in the area which he did not understand. He turned toward the north and began walking.

  * * *

  Mercy Spender and Charles Fisher, who sat at either side of him, reached to catch hold of Walter Sands’s shoulders as he slumped forward.

  “Get him up onto the table—quick!” Elizabeth said.

  “He just fainted.” Fisher said. “I think we ought to lower his head.”

  “Listen to his chest! I was still with him. I felt his heart stop.”

  “Oh, my! Somebody give us a hand!”

  They moved him onto the table and listened for a heartbeat, but there was none. Mercy began hammering on his chest.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Ironbear asked her. “Yes. I started nursing training once,” she grunted. “I remember this part. Somebody send for help.”

  Elizabeth crossed to the intercom.

  “I didn’t know he had a bad heart,” Fisher said.

  “I don’t think he did either,” Mancin replied, “or we’d probably have learned that when we gave each other a look. The shock when the thing struck back must have gotten to him. We shouldn’t have let Ironbear talk us into going in.”

  “Not his fault,” Mercy said, still working.

  “And we all agreed,” Fisher said. “The time seemed perfect, while it was remembering. And we did learn something…”

  Elizabeth reached Tedders. They grew silent as they listened to her relay the information.

  “Just a moment ago. Just a moment ago,” Fisher said, “and he was with us.”

  “It seems as if he still is,” Mancin said.

  “We’re going to have to try to reach Singer,” Elizabeth said, crossing the room and taking her seat again.

  “That’s going to be hard—and what do we really have to tell him?” Fisher asked.

  “Everything we know,” Ironbear said.

  “And who knows what form it would take, that strange state of mind he’s in?” Mercy asked. “We might be better off simply calling for that force Mancin suggested.”

  “Maybe we should do both,” Elizabeth said. “But if we don’t try helping him ourselves, then Walter’s attack was for nothing.”

  “I’ll be with you,” Mercy said, “when we do. Somebody’s going to have to take over here pretty soon, though, till the medics trip through. I’m getting tired.”

  “I’ll try,” Fisher said. “Let me watch how you do it.”

  “I’d better learn, too,” Mancin said, moving nearer. “I do still seem to feel his presence, weakly. Maybe that’s a good sign.”

  Sounds of hammering continued downstairs, from where a shattered wall was being replaced.

  He crossed the water above a small cascade, knowing things would be relatively solid at its top. Then he moved along the southern talus slope, leaving a clear trail. He entered Black Rock Canyon and continued into it for perhaps half a mile. The rain came down steadily upon him and the wind made a singing sound high overhead. He saw a cluster of rocks come loose from the northern wall far ahead, sliding and bumping to the floor of the canyon, splashing into the stream.

  Keeping watch on driftwood heaps, he located a stick sufficient for his purpose. He walked near the water’s edge for a time, then headed up onto a long rocky shelf where his footprints soon vanished. He immediately began to backtrack, walking in his own prints until he stood beside the water again. He entered it then, probing with the stick for quicksand pockets, and made his way back to the canyon’s mouth.

  Emerging, he crossed the main stream to its north bank, turned to his right and continued on along Canyon del Muerto toward Standing Cow Ruin, concealing his trail as he went, for the next half-mile. He found that he liked the feeling of being alone again in this gigantic gorge. The stream was wider here, deeper. His mind went back to the story he had heard as a boy, of the time of the fear of the flooding of the world. Who was that old singer? Up around Kayenta, back in the 1920s…The old man had been struck by lightning and left for dead. But he had recovered several days later, bearing a purported message from the gods, a message that the world was about to be flooded. In that normal laws and taboos no longer apply to a person who has lived through a lightning-stroke, he was paid special heed. People believed him and fled with their flocks to Black Mountain. But the water did not come, and the cornfields of those who fled dried and died under the summer sun. A shaman with a vision that did not pay off.

  Billy chuckled. What was it the Yellowclouds had called him? “Azaethlin”—“medicine man.” We aren’t always that reliable, he thought, given to the same passions and misapprehensions as others. Medicine man, heal thyself.

  He started past a “wish pile” of rocks and juniper twigs, halted, went back and added a stone to it. Why not? It was there.

  In time, he came to Standing Cow Ruin, one of the largest ruins in the canyons. It stood against the north wall beneath a huge overhang. The remains of its walls covered an area more than four hundred feet long, built partly around immense boulders. It, too, went back to the Great Pueblo days, containing three kivas and many rooms. But there were also Navajo log-and-earth storage bins and Navajo paintings along with those of the Anasazi. He went nearer, to view again the white, yellow and black renderings of people with arms upraised, the humpbacked archer, circles, circles and more circles, the animals…And there, high up above a ledge to his left, was one of purely Navajo creation, and most interesting to him. Mounted, cloaked, wearing flat-brimmed hats, carrying rifles, was a procession of Spaniards, two of them firing at an Indian. It was believed to represent the soldiers of Lieutenant Anthony Narbona who fought the Navajos at Massacre Cave in 1805. And below that, at the base of the cliff, were other horsemen and a mounted U.S. cavalryman of the 1860s. As he watched, they seemed to move.

  He rubbed his eyes. They really were moving. And it seemed as if he had just heard gunshots. The figures were three-dimensional, solid now, riding across a sandy waste…

  “Always down on us, aren’t you?” he said to them and to the world at large.

  He heard curses in Spanish. When he lowered his eyes to the other figure, he heard a trumpet sounding a cavalry charge. The great rock walls seemed to melt away about him and the waters grew silent. He was staring now at a totally different landscape—bleak, barren and terribly bright. He raised his eyes to a sun which blazed almost whitely from overhead. A part of him stood aside, wondering how this thing could be. But the rest of him was engaged in the vision.

  He seemed to hear the sound of a drum as he watched them ride across that alien desert. It was increasing steadily in tempo. Then, when it had reached an almost frantic throbbing, the sands erupted before the leading horseman and a large, translucent, triangular shape reared suddenly before him, leaning forward to enfold both horse and rider with slick membranous wings. More of them exploded into view along the column, shrugging sands which yellowed the air, falling upon the other riders and their mounts, enveloping them, dragging them downward to settle as quivering, gleaming, rocklike lumps on the barren landscape. Even the cavalryman, now brandishing his saber, met a similar fate, to the notes of the trumpet and the drum.

  Of course.

  What other fate might be expected when one encountered a krel, let alone a whole crowd of them? He had given up quickly on any notion of bringing one back to the Institute. Two close calls, and he had decided that they were too damned dangerous. That world of Cat’s had bred some very vicious creatures…

  Cat. Speak of the Devil…There was Cat crossing the plain, lithe power personified…

  Again, amid a shower of sand, the krel rose. Cat drew back, rearing, forelimbs lengthening, slashing. They came together and Cat struggled to draw away…

  With the sound of a single drumbeat, the scene faded. He was staring at anthropomorphic figures, horses and the large Standing Cow. He heard the sounds of the water at his back.

  Peculiar, but he had known stranger things over the years, and he had always felt that a kind of power dwelled in the old places. Something about this manifestation of it seemed heartening, and so he took it as a good omen. He chanted a brief song of thanks for the vision and turned to continue along his way. The shadows had darkened perceptibly and the rock walls were even higher now, and for a time he seemed to regard them through a mist of rainbows.

  Going back. A part of him still stood apart, but it seemed even smaller and farther away now. Parts of his life between childhood and now had become dreamlike, shimmering, and he had not noticed it happening. He began recalling seldom used names for things around him which he had thought long forgotten. The rain increased in intensity off to his right, though his way was still sheltered by the canyon wall. A trick of lightning seemed to show momentarily a reddish path stretching on before him.

  “A krel, a krel,” he chanted as he walked, not knowing why. Free a cat to kill a Stragean, find a krel to kill a cat…What then? He chuckled. No answer to the odd vision. His mind played games with the rock shapes around him. The Plains Indians had made more of a cult out of the Rock people than his people had. But now it seemed he could almost catch glimpses of the presence within the forms. Who was that bellicano philosopher he had liked? Spinoza. Yes.

  Everything alive, all of it connected, inside and out, all over. Very Indian.

  “Hah la tse kis!” he called out, and the echo came back to him.

  The zigzag lightning danced above the high cliff’s edge and when its afterglow had faded he realized that night was coming on. He increased his pace. He felt it would be good to be past Many Cherry Canyon by the time full darkness fell.

  The ground dropped away abruptly, and he made his way across a bog, probing before him with his stick. He cleaned his boots then before continuing. He ran a hand across the surface of a rock, feeling its moist smoothnesses and roughnesses. Then he licked his thumb and stared again into the shadowy places.

  Moments came and went like dark tides among the stones as he strode along, half-glimpsed images giving rise to free association, racial and personal.

  It seemed to sail toward him out of the encroaching darkness, its prow cutting a V across his line of sight. It was Shiprock in miniature, that outcrop ahead. As he swung along it grew larger and it filled his mind…

  Irresistibly, he was thrown back. Again the sky was blue glass above him. The wind was sharp and cold, the rocks rough, the going progressively steeper. Soon it would be time to rope up. They were approaching the near-vertical heights…

  He looked back at her, climbing steadily, her face flushed. She was a good climber, had done it in many places. But this was something special, a forbidden test…

  He gnashed his teeth and muttered, “Fool!”

  They were climbing tse hi dahi, the rock with wings. The white men called it Shiprock. It stood 7,178 feet in height and had only been climbed once, some two hundred years earlier, and many had died attempting the ascent. It was a sacred place, and it was now forbidden to climb upon it.