Alex Archer - Tribal Ways

Apparently there was some sentiment, in the Southwest at least, that any kind of archaeological excavation of potential Indian sites was profane.

Although this massacre was just a few weeks old Annja didn’t learn anything new there, either. As in the other two cases a cautious approach could easily have gotten the killer in range for a final rush without being seen. Especially since nobody would really have been looking.

She got back to Albuquerque about two o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon as she waited for her next appointment going through local and national news accounts of the murders online at a coffee shop on a fairly rustic-looking section of Rio Grande Boulevard a few miles north of her hotel.

The common threads among the murders, aside from the obvious gross similarities, were that they took place on dig sites that were protested by obscure groups. These had no apparent connection between themselves, other than professed radical pro-Native American sympathies. It wasn’t even clear how many of the protestors were actually Indians themselves.

She sat on the outdoor patio beneath a cottonwood beginning to leaf, drinking tea and pondering a few questions. Was the fact that all three attack sites had been protested significant or purely coincidental? If significant, what was the connection? Even the FBI, notoriously eager to discover terrorist conspiracies even where they weren’t, had either actively cleared the protestors of involvement or at least failed to list them as persons of interest.

Plus, frankly, people who’d go out and picket an archaeological dig struck Annja, who’d encountered a few in her time, as precisely the sort who would not be inclined to carry out impossibly violent blitz attacks ending in multiple murders. Nor, for the most, capable.

The light took on a late-afternoon yellowness. The sun had gotten tangled in the branches of the massive old cottonwoods across the boulevard. Time to go, she told herself, and folded her computer shut.

The western sky blazed in orange like burning forests when the silver Prius pulled up to the curb by the park and stopped. A tall woman got out of the driver’s side. A skinny young girl in jeans, T-shirt and a yellow Windbreaker, with her black hair in pigtails, got out of the passenger’s side. A big floppy yellow Lab pup, an adolescent probably, spilled out after her.

“You must be Dr. Watson,” Annja said, rising from the picnic table a short way down a grassy slope from the street as the woman walked toward her. She was handsome if a bit heavy in face and hip, and the hair hanging unbound around the shoulders of her mauve cable-knit sweater was black with silver threads. She wore a long dark-blue denim skirt over dark purple suede boots with silver medallions on them.

“Yes,” the woman said. “And you’re Annja Creed?”

Annja agreed she was. “And I’m Sallie,” the girl announced. “It’s short for Salamander!”

“No, it isn’t, Alessandra,” her mother said. “Don’t be untruthful.”

Annja laughed. Something about the girl’s appearance tweaked her subconscious. She couldn’t pin down exactly what.

The dog sniffed Annja’s legs. She hunkered down to stroke its head. “What’s his name?” she asked Sallie.

“It’s a she,” Sallie said. “Her name’s Eowyn. She’s kind of silly.”

“Young Labrador retrievers act that way,” her mother said. “Why don’t you and she go play?”

The girl was looking intently at Annja. “You’re on TV, aren’t you?” she said.

Her mother looked stern. Annja said, “Yes.”

“Oh. I like your show.”

“Thanks,” Annja said.

Sallie reached in a pocket of her jacket and produced a pale-green tennis ball, which she launched down the hill. The dog bounded in pursuit. Sallie ran after her, romping through the shadows of big elm trees lengthening across the hills of Roosevelt Park, which was located roughly halfway between the University of New Mexico campus, where Watson worked, and downtown.

“Thanks for taking the time to meet with me, Dr. Watson,” Annja said.

“Susan, please. I’m certainly willing to do anything I can to get to the bottom of these terrible crimes. And I thank you for being willing to meet with me under such unusual circumstances. I don’t really have any time free at school this week, and I don’t want to leave Sallie at day care longer than necessary.”

She leaned forward and fixed Annja with a disconcertingly probing look. Even without the low boot heels she had to stand six feet clear. Annja did not envy any student of Dr. Watson’s who failed to measure up to her expectations.

“So, is your interest in skinwalkers personal or professional?” Watson asked.

If she wanted to keep things up front Annja could match that. “Both,” she said. “I lost a close personal friend in the last attack.” She felt a nasty twinge as she said it.

“Also the authorities in Oklahoma have asked me unofficially to consult on certain anthropological aspects of the case.”

“You’re an archaeologist by training, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Of course, my training included extensive education in social and physical anthropology, as well as subjects like geology.”

“Oh, yes.” Watson herself was a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of New Mexico, specializing in the study of Southwestern native cultures. “So what can I do for you?”

“My specialty’s the European Renaissance. It’s a little far afield from the South Plains and the Rio Grande Valley. And to be perfectly honest, while we studied Native American history and cultures, my memory isn’t as sharp as it could be.”

“I understand,” Watson said with a grin. “I forgot all my geology pretty much the instant I turned in my last exam.”

“So if you could fill me in a bit on the cultural background of the Southwest and Plains cultures, and any hint you can provide me as to why something out of Navajo folk belief would be operating in the Comanche country of western Oklahoma would definitely be appreciated.”

“Well, to start with, the Indian cultures of North America didn’t live in vacuums, much less isolation from one another,” Watson said.

Annja was only mildly surprised at a tenured professor using such a politically incorrect term as Indian; very few Native Americans she’d ever met showed anything but the most strident contempt for the phrase Native American. Tom Ten Bears hadn’t had much use for it, either.

“Even before the Europeans’ arrival, my own people, the Kiowas, were especially famed for their roles as raiders and traders. Rather as the Vikings were in Europe and even the Mediterranean. So were the Comanches, especially after the two nations allied in the late eighteenth century. Comanche relics have turned up in the Cahokia Mounds. Kiowa tradition recalls trading voyages to the country of the Maya—who were themselves noted for the long journeys of their own traders, who also served as proselytizers for their religion.”

“Really?”

Watson nodded. “So the South Plains people were common visitors to New Mexico. What’s now northeastern New Mexico was part of their customary range. In fact, the Kiowa-Comanche alliance got its start in the 1790s on what’s now the site of Las Vegas, New Mexico—you did know there was one, didn’t you?”

“Oh, yes. In the mountains east of Santa Fe,” Annja said.

“That’s it. You’d be surprised how many people have only heard of the one in Nevada. Or maybe you wouldn’t. At any rate, the relationship between the Pueblos and the South Plains people was especially problematic. Sometimes the Plains folk came to the Pueblos to trade, sometimes to pillage and kill. It was the usual antagonism between settled groups and nomads.”