Leslie Silko - The Turquoise Ledge - A Memoir

The ancient petroglyph the ancestors incised into the boulder in the big arroyo was done only for the most important spiritual purposes.

I carried a small day pack with the paint, a jar of clean water, a rag and a paintbrush. I was on a mission for the Star Beings so I didn’t take along my camera.

The sun was very warm for early November. I hoped not to be interrupted while I painted because a number of hikers and horseback riders use the public right-of-way corridor the arroyo provides.

I worked for more than an hour to paint the small white crosses on the boulders and the rocks the man had already started to excavate. Then I went to work on the others nearby. There were a lot of boulders and rocks to paint star symbols on. In the bright sun and the heat, I wore myself out. When I got finished the place looked as if there had been a great meteorite shower of small white crosses on the boulders and rocks in the damaged area.

If others mistook them for Christian crosses, it would be fitting, because Jesus Christ was also known as the Morning Star or Venus among indigenous worshippers in the Americas.

I was hot and tired when I finally packed up the paintbrush and the leftover white poster paint. But before I headed home I surveyed and savored the white crosses on the rocks and boulders; the scattered white stars transformed the gouged earth and shattered rocks just as the Star Beings intended. Now instead of dread filling my heart when I walked up the arroyo past the gravel pit, I’ll see the constellation of white crosses, the sign, the warning from the Star Beings, and my heart will be filled with happiness and hope.

I realized the notice I painted to him from the Star Beings might set off the man’s mania. But he intended to destroy those rocks before the small white crosses appeared, so it was worth a try.

Later it came to me (from the Star Beings again) each cross represents a fracture, a broken bone in the body of the man who dares to harm the boulders and rocks. It doesn’t have to happen here in the big arroyo with a boulder that crushes him and his machine — the broken bones — as many fractures as there are painted stars — could easily come to him in a car crash in Tucson traffic.

On my way home from my mission for the Star Beings I found a chrysocolla nugget the size of a bean, and a piece of turquoise rock the size and shape of an apple wedge.

Mid-November now. I went to photograph the rocks I painted yesterday. I took a different path over the new open space land the old neighbors gave to the county. I never realized a smaller arroyo parallels the big arroyo for a short distance. I crossed it to get back to the big arroyo and in the brushy deep shady bottom I found the skull, spine, ribs and feet of a large javelina with long curved incisors. Dried meat bits remained on the bones, enough that I knew some large predator would be back to chew the bones clean.

The large size of the javelina and its tusks made me realize only a pack of coyotes or a powerful large predator would have dared attack such a big javelina. Mountain lion, I’d guess, because the coyotes are pack animals and in a matter of hours, they would have eaten or carried away all trace of the javelina. Mountain lions are solitary beings, except in mating season. The rest of the year they live and hunt alone and stash their kills so they can return and feed on them.

It occurred to me the ancestors might not have passed up those bones, especially not in lean times when the marrow in the bones would have sustained the people another day, enough time to find something else to eat. Boil those bones a long time with some chilitipines, some palo verde beans and cactus buds and you’d have a tasty stew.

Sometimes, at odd moments — such as tonight as I shut the refrigerator door — I hear what sounds like Dolly barking in her yard. All the other dogs were indoors bedded down for the night, and they remained quiet. The one year anniversary of her death is this week.

My noble Thelma dog has another infection in her foot — the same foot that we treated with high-powered antibiotics a few months ago. We took her to the vet office to x-ray her sore paw. She got up on the waiting room bench and stared out the window at the parking lot. She knew which vehicle brought her to the vet office and she looked at the old white car longingly; she knows if she can just get back to it, she will be able to return home.

Thelma weighs two hundred twenty pounds, too heavy for Dr. Christo, his assistant and me to lift onto the x-ray table. But I recalled that back in the waiting room Thelma had the bad manners to get up on the shaky bench intended for people. I told the vet Thelma would get up on the bench, so he dragged the wooden bench into the x-ray room. Thelma seemed to understand we were trying to do something important so when I asked her, she climbed up onto the bench which we pushed up against the x-ray table. She graciously allowed us to lift her huge left front paw onto the x-ray table. Not once did Thelma try to move her paw or get off the bench, although she is strong enough to do anything she wants.

The vet and I agreed we’d postpone antibiotics, and instead give Thelma medicine for the pain while we tried to boost her immune system with supplements and herbs. I soaked her foot in a strong tea made from dried greasewood leaves.

Greasewood, or chaparral, is a mighty plant, a powerful medicine that repels harmful organisms. It protects against insects including the dreaded assassin beetles that suck blood and trigger allergic reactions. But it also heals insect bites and skin inflammations, wounds, and pre-cancerous skin lesions, and even dries up warts and moles. A caution too: I once managed to use greasewood salve too frequently on myself and got mild itching and redness in the area, which went away as soon as I stopped using it.

Thelma got sick all over the place during the night. This morning she refused to eat. The vet prescribed soft salty food with pumpkin for bulk but she refuses to touch it.

Thelma is a silver fawn “classic” old English mastiff with a short wide head, and broad chest and rib cage; she is robust but not fat. She is full of only good energy and good will toward all humans, and toward other dogs and other living beings. When she is happy her whole body wags along with her tail. She is eight years old which is the beginning of old age for a mastiff.

One day later. Thelma refused to spend the night in the house last night. It was a warm night in the high fifties, but I worried she was getting ready to die. During the night I heard her bark and I wondered if the ghost dogs had come to prepare her to go with them to Paradise.

I got up at dawn to go out to check on her. I expected to find her dead, but raindrops were falling and she was up and wagging her tail, ready to come indoors out of the rain. Later she ate all her food and I knew she wasn’t going to die. What a relief!

One of the cockatoo sisters, Mrs. Rambo, died this morning, November 25. I felt so badly. I felt I might have noticed something was wrong if I’d been doing the feeding and watering of the cockatoos instead of working every available moment on this manuscript. So I took back the feeding and watering of the parrots. I enjoy the time I spend caring for them a great deal.

The fall has been warm so I’ve put the fine mist sprayer on the hose to give the military macaws in the octagon aviary a treat. The misting gets them excited about bathing and they go to the stainless steel soup caldron after I fill it with clean water and they begin to dip their beaks and heads into the water while perched on the rim of the pan. Then they dip their wings to skim the water and flick their wings back on themselves so the water showers their head and back. Gracefully at first then exuberant and joyous as they sprinkle more water on themselves, macaws at their bath are one of my glimpses of Paradise.