Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

So I follow it again, hiking through what's left of the afternoon until I don't feel l can go any further. The mountains in front of me don't seem any closer, the ones behind aren't any further away. I'm thirsty and tired. Every piece of vegetation has a cutting edge or a thorn. My calves ache, my back aches, my throat holds as much moisture as the dusty ground underfoot. I don't want to be here, but I can't seem to wake up.

It's the music, I realize. The music is keeping me here.

I've figured out what kind of flute is being played now: one of those medicine flutes indigenous to the Southwest. I remember Geordie had one a couple of years ago. It was almost the size of his Irish flute, with the same six holes on top, but it had an extra thumb hole around back and it didn't have nearly the same range of notes. It also had an odd addition: up by the air hole, tied to the body of the flute with leather thongs, was a saddle holding a reed. The saddle directed the air jet up or down against the lower reed, and it was adjustable. The sound was very pretty, but the instrument had next to no volume. Geordie eventually traded it in for some whistle or other, but I picked up a tape of its music to play when I'm working— medicine flute, rattles, rainstick and synthesizers. I can't remember the last time I listened to it.

After carefully checking the area around me for snakes or scorpions or God-knows-what else might be lurking about, I sit down on some rocks and try to think things through. I'd like to believe there's a reason for my being here, but I know the dreamlands don't usually work that way. They have their own internal logic; it's only our presence in them that's arbitrary. We move through them with the same randomness as the weather in our world: basically unpredictable, for all that we'd like to think otherwise.

No, I'm here as the result of my own interference. I followed the sound of the flute out the door into the desert of my own accord. I've no one to blame but myself. There'll be no escape except for that which I can make for myself.

I'm not alone, here, though. I keep sensing presences just beyond my sight, spirits hovering in the corners of my eyes. They're like the snake and the owl I saw earlier, but much more shy. I catch the hint of a face in one of the cacti, here one moment, gone the next; a ghostly shape in the bristly branches of a smoke tree; a scurry of movement and a fleeting glimpse of something with half-human skin, half-fur or -scale, darting into a burrow: little madonna faces, winged rodents and lizards, birds with human eyes and noses.

I don't know why they're so scared of me. Maybe they're naturally cautious. Maybe there's something out here in the desert that they've got good reason to hide from.

This thought doesn't lend me any comfort at all. If there's something they're scared of, I don't doubt that I should be scared of it; too. And I would be, except I'm just too exhausted to care at the moment.

I rest my arms on my knees, my head on my arms. I feel a little giddy from the sun and definitely dehydrated. I came to the desert wearing only sneakers, a pair of jeans and a white blouse. The blouse is on my head and shoulders now, to keep off the sun, but it's left my arms, my lower back and my stomach exposed. They haven't so much browned as turned the pink that's going to be a burn in another couple of hours.

Something moves in the corner of my eye and I turn my head, but not quickly enough. It was something small, a flash of pale skin and light brown fur. Winged.

"Don't be scared!" I call after it. "I won't hurt you."

But the desert lies silent around me, except for the sound of the flute, I thought I caught a glimpse of the player an hour or so ago. I was cresting a hill and saw far ahead of me a small hunched shape disappear down into the arroyo. It looked like one of those pictographs you sometimes see in Hopi or Navajo art— a little hunchbacked man with hair like dreadlocks, playing a flute. I called after him at the time, but he never reappeared.

I hate this feeling of helplessness I have at the moment of having to react rather than do, of having to wait for answers to come to me rather than seek them out on my own. I've walked for hours, but I can't help thinking how, realistically, all that effort was only killing time. I haven t gotten anywhere, I haven't learned anything new. I'm no further ahead than I was when I first stepped through that door and found myself here. I'm thirstier, I've got the beginning of a sunburn, and that about sums it up.

The air starts to cool as the sun goes down. I take my blouse off my head and put it back on, but it doesn't help much against the growing chill. I hear something rustle in the brush on the other side of the rocks where I'm sitting, and I almost can't be bothered turning my head to see what made the noise. But I look around all the same, and then I sit very still, hoping that the Indian woman I find regarding me won't be startled off like every other creature I've met since the owl gave me her cryptic advice.

The woman is taller than I am, but that's not saying much; at just over five feet tall, I'm smaller than almost everyone I meet. Her features have a pinched, almost foxlike cast about them, and she wears her hair in two long braids into which have been woven feathers and beads and cowrie shells. She's barefoot, which strikes me as odd, since this isn't exactly the most friendly terrain I've ever had to traverse. Her buckskin dress is almost a creamy white, decorated with intricate, beadwork and stitching, and she's wearing a blanket over her shoulders like a shawl, the colors of which reflect the surrounding landscape— the browns and the tans, deep shadows and burnt siennas— only they're much more vibrant.

"Don't run off on me," I say, pitching my voice low and trying to seem as unthreatening as possible.

The woman smiles. She has a smile that transforms her face; it starts on her lips and in her dark eyes, but then the whole of her solemn copper-colored features fall easily into well-worn creases of good humor. I realize that hers is the first face I've seen in this place that didn't look as though it had been rendered by a Florentine painter at the height of the Italian Renaissance. She seems indisputably of this place, as though she was birthed from the cacti and the dry hills.

"Why do you think I would do that?" she asks. Her voice is melodious and sweet.

"So far, everybody else has"

"Perhaps you confuse them."

I have to laugh. " I confuse them? Oh please."

The woman shrugs. "This is a place of spirits, a land where totem may be found, spirits consulted, lessons learned, futures explored. Those who walk its hills for these reasons have had no easy task in coming here."

"I could show them this door I found," I start to joke, but I let my voice trail off. The crease lines of her humor are still there on her face, but they're in repose. She looks too serious for jokes right now.

"You have come looking for nothing," she goes on, "so your presence is a source of agitation."

"It's not something l planned," I assure her. "If you'll show me the way out, I'll be more than happy to go. Really."

The woman shook her head. "There is no way out— except by acquiring that which you came seeking."

"But I didn't come looking for anything."

"That presents a problem."

I don't like the way this conversation is going.

"For the only way you can leave in such a case," the woman goes on, "is if you accompany another seeker when their own journeying is done."

"That... that doesn't seem fair?"

The woman nods, "There is much unfairness— even in the spirit realms. But obstacles are set before us in order that they may be overcome." She gives me a considering look. "Perhaps you are simply unaware of what you came seeking."