Admitted Ground

The light came from the west-southwest at an angle of eleven degrees above the horizon and I noted the time as 5:47 and the distance to the nearest ridgeline as four and one-quarter miles.

I checked the heliograph in the yard behind the county office. The mirror was a four-inch silvered glass set in a brass gimbal and the sighting vane was true and the keying mechanism tilted cleanly on its pivot. I angled the glass toward the sun and sent three flashes east toward Redvale where Deputy Loftus had ridden ahead. No answer came. I attributed this to distance and to the dust that had been rising since noon the day before and I folded the instrument into its leather case and walked inside.

The county clerk, a man named Puttnam, had the commission papers on his desk. Seven men to ride out from Redvale into the Jornada del Muerto and locate the figure reported by three separate travelers on the San Augustine road. The first witness, a freighter named Eberle, described a man in faded army blues walking bareheaded across the flats. The second, a woman whose name the clerk had misspelled, described a child carrying something wrapped in sacking. The third, a shepherd who had been moving his flock east, described a barefoot woman with her hands at her sides standing at the center of the playa as though she had been placed there. None of the descriptions agreed. All three witnesses agreed the figure had not moved like a person.

I signed the papers. I had crossed the Jornada six times during the Apache campaigns with my heliograph and a leather canteen and a Spencer carbine and I knew its interior the way other men knew their own yards. This was what Puttnam told me and I did not correct him, though knowing the Jornada’s interior is not a phrase I would have chosen. I knew its distances. I knew where water could be dug for and where it could not. I knew the salt flats and the black malpais flows and the places where the sand was thin over basalt and a horse’s shoe would ring like a bell on a church floor. I had been the Army’s eyes out there, my mirror talking to Fort Cummings and Fort Cummings talking to Fort Stanton, light to light across sixty miles of nothing, and the nothing had been the medium and the message both.

Puttnam asked if I needed anything. I told him I needed a good horse and men who could ride without talking. He laughed at that. He said the county would provide seven horses and seven men and the talking was beyond his jurisdiction. He said they had selected men who had volunteered and one who had not and that the one who had not was the deputy and the deputy had been told this was his commission to lead. I said that was fine. I did not care who held the commission. I was the tracker and the tracker goes where the sign goes and the sign does not care about jurisdiction either.

We rode out the following morning. Seven men. Deputy Loftus, who had been given authority by the county and wore it poorly — his back too straight, his hat too clean, the commission paper folded in his vest pocket where he touched it three times in the first mile as though confirming it was still there. Aldrich and Gosse, cattlemen from the flats east of the river, mounted well and armed with Winchesters. They had been quarreling about a water right on the Río Salado before the commission and the quarrel rode with them like a seventh horse. Yount, a former cook for the railroad who had volunteered and brought provisions on a mule that he handled better than most men handle a wife. A man called Pace who did not give his Christian name and whose horse was too good for his clothes and whose hands had the calluses of someone who worked with rope but not cattle. A Mexican vaquero named Esparza who spoke little and rode with the balance of a man raised in the saddle and who watched the horizon the way men watch a door they expect will open. And myself. Colvin Strake, forty-one years of age, formerly of the Army Signal Corps, civilian tracker under commission.

We followed the San Augustine road south and then west where it bends toward the lava country. The morning was clear and the mountains to the east stood blue and distant and the mountains to the west stood blue and distant and between them the land was the color of the inside of a kiln. Nothing grew above knee-height. The soil was caliche and calcite and everywhere the iron stain of desert varnish on the exposed rock, the dark coatings that take a thousand years to form and that you can scratch through with a fingernail to find the pale stone beneath. The road itself was two ruts in the hardpan that had been worn by wheels and hooves since the Spanish came through and the ruts were deeper than they should have been, as though the road had been sinking into the country an inch at a time for three hundred years and the country had been letting it.

On the first day we found sign. Bootprints in a wash of fine sand that had settled after the last rain. I dismounted and studied them. The prints were of a military boot, square-toed, the heel worn on the outside, the stride length twenty-eight inches. The depth was wrong. The prints sank three-quarters of an inch into sand that should have taken half that under a man’s weight, as though the figure had been pressing down with a force that exceeded its mass or as though the sand had reached up to meet the boot. I recorded this in my journal. The depth. The stride. The bearing: two hundred and forty-seven degrees, southwest into the heart of the Jornada. I did not find this strange. A heavier man sinks deeper. The soil varies. The soil is never the same twice in the same mile.

At midday the figure’s trail crossed a pan of exposed limestone and I lost the prints and found them again on the far side, the same boot, the same stride, the same bearing, as though the figure had walked across the bare rock without altering pace or direction, without slowing to find footing, without the hesitation that every man shows on uncertain ground. The line was straight. No man walks a straight line across open country. The body drifts, the eye follows the easiest path, the feet negotiate with the terrain. This figure had negotiated nothing. The figure had walked the way a compass needle points — not because it chooses the direction but because the direction is what it is made of.

I wrote this in my journal as consistent with a person of military training maintaining a fixed bearing. I calculated the ground speed at three and one-half miles per hour based on stride length and the depth of heel strike. I wrote these figures clearly, in the hand I had been trained to use for signal transcriptions, which is a hand without personality, a hand designed to be read by anyone at any distance.

We camped the first night in the lee of a basalt outcrop that rose from the plain like the fin of something buried. Yount cooked beans and fatback and coffee and the men ate in silence. Loftus sat apart and cleaned his pistol though it had not been fired. Aldrich and Gosse renewed their argument about the water right, the sound of their voices flattened by the open air until the words lost meaning and only the rhythm remained, the rhythm of two men performing a disagreement because disagreement was a shape they knew and the shapelessness of the Jornada was something they did not. The silence of the Jornada is not the absence of sound. It is the presence of a frequency too low to hear, a vibration in the ground itself, and the body registers it before the ears do. You feel it in the soles of your boots. You feel it in the fillings of your teeth if you have them. It is the sound the earth makes when it is thinking. I include this because I include everything.

Esparza said something to me in Spanish as I unrolled my bedding. I asked him to repeat it. He said the ground here was admitted ground. I took this to mean surveyed or claimed. He said no. He said admitted meant the ground had accepted them. Had let them in. He rolled over and pulled his blanket to his chin and said nothing else for the remainder of the night. I lay awake for some time and watched the stars and the stars were where they should have been and this was a comfort.

On the second day we rode into terrain I remembered from the campaigns. A long bajada sloping west from the foothills, gravel and creosote and the white crust of alkali where seasonal water had evaporated and left behind a surface that cracked underfoot like the glaze on old china. I navigated by the peaks to the south — Salinas Peak and an unnamed formation I had used as a triangulation point twenty years before. The distances were as I remembered them. The peaks were where I had left them. The land was the same land. I confirmed this to myself and wrote it in my journal and the writing of it felt necessary in a way it had not the day before, as though the confirmation required a record and the record required a hand and the hand was the instrument that made the confirmation real.

The trail continued southwest. The figure had not camped. There were no ashes, no depression in the sand where a body had lain, no evidence of food or water or waste. The bootprints continued in their straight line across the bajada and down through a dry arroyo and up the far bank without any sign that the figure had descended or climbed or broken stride. I noted this. A man walking twenty or thirty miles does not maintain the same stride through a drainage. He shortens his step descending, lengthens it climbing out. The muscles insist. The grade insists. This figure’s stride did not vary.

Pace rode up beside me in the afternoon and said he had been watching the horizon and the horizon had not moved. I told him the horizon does not move, that this is the nature of a horizon. He said that was not what he meant. He said he had been watching a particular feature on the horizon — a notch in the ridgeline to the west — and riding toward it for three hours and it had not grown closer or larger or changed its shape. He said it was as if the feature was riding at the same speed they were, keeping its distance, the way a man might who did not want to be overtaken but did not want to lose them either.

I told him it was a common illusion in flat country. I told him the atmosphere refracts light over heated ground and distances become unreliable and a feature that appears to be ten miles may be twenty and the brain cannot reconcile the difference and reads it as stasis. He listened. He looked at me the way a man looks at a doctor who has explained a symptom without curing it. He said nothing and fell back to his position.

That evening Yount served salt pork and cornbread that was gritty with sand and the men ate without complaint because complaint was a luxury that required believing the conditions were temporary. Loftus asked me how many days to the central playa. I told him three, perhaps four, depending on the terrain. He asked if the terrain was likely to change. I told him the terrain was always changing. He did not ask what I meant by that and I did not clarify.

On the third day we found the moqui marbles. They were on a flat of exposed sandstone, a bench of Entrada formation that had been scoured by wind to a surface smooth as a swept floor. Seventeen iron oxide concretions, dark brown and spherical, the largest the size of a child’s fist and the smallest the size of a musket ball. They were spaced at irregular intervals across the sandstone in an arrangement that drew the eye the way certain things draw the eye — the way a set table draws the eye, or a row of chairs facing the same direction in an empty room. They looked geological. They also looked deliberate. They looked the way a sentence looks when you cannot decide whether it was written or found.

I dismounted and walked among them. I counted them. Seventeen. I measured the distances between the nearest pairs: fourteen inches, twenty-two inches, nine inches, thirty-one. I sketched their positions in my journal with the accuracy of a survey plat, marking each marble as a dot and connecting the nearest neighbors with faint lines that formed a pattern I did not recognize but that my hand seemed to want to draw, as though the shape was one the hand already knew. Moqui marbles form underground in sandstone when iron-rich groundwater precipitates around a nucleus of calcium carbonate. The process takes thousands of years. The Hopi word moqui means the dead. The concretions are associated with the spirits of departed ancestors and are considered sacred objects not to be collected or disturbed. I knew this because I had read it in a geological report during my years at Fort Cummings and I included the information in my journal because I include everything. Because the record is the work and the work is the record and the two are the same thing and the same thing is what I was trained to produce.

Loftus came over and looked at them. Indian markers, he said. Strake, we should ride around.

They are geological formations, I said. Concretions. Iron oxide around a calcium nucleus. They form in the sandstone over thousands of years. There is nothing cultural about them.

Loftus looked at me and then at the marbles and then at the landscape stretching away in every direction without distinction, without feature, without mercy. He mounted up and we rode on.

That night I woke. The camp was quiet. Yount was snoring and the fire had burned to coals and the horses stood with their heads down in the picket line, sleeping or not sleeping, their eyes half-closed and their ears turning slowly in the dark the way an instrument turns when it is scanning for a signal it has not been told to expect. I rose and walked to the sandstone flat where we had seen the marbles. I do not know why I walked there. I walked there because I was awake and because the flat was close and because I had been thinking about the arrangement before I slept. The moon was nearly full and the sandstone was pale as bone in its light.

Twelve marbles. Not seventeen. Twelve, in a different arrangement, spaced now at distances that were more regular than before, and the pattern they described was not the pattern I had sketched. No tracks crossed the sandstone. No scuff, no drag mark, no sign that a hand or boot had disturbed the surface between the stones. The marbles sat in their new positions as though they had always been there and the positions I had sketched in my journal had been the error and the error had been mine and I had been wrong to count seventeen because twelve was the number and twelve had always been the number.

I stood among them for some time. Then I returned to camp and lay down and slept until morning and in the morning I did not open my journal to the page with the sketch and I did not return to the flat and I did not mention the number twelve to any man in the posse because there was nothing to mention. The marbles were geological. The count was geological. The change was geological and geology does not require reporting.

On the fourth day the terrain changed. We entered a canyon system that I did not remember from the campaigns though my maps indicated it should be there — a thin line of crosshatching that I had apparently noted twenty years before and then forgotten, which is possible, which happens to every man who rides a country as large as this one. The walls rose gradually at first — ten feet, then thirty, then sixty — and the floor narrowed from a quarter mile to a hundred yards to what felt like the width of a street. I say felt because I did not measure it. The measurement did not seem necessary.

The canyon floor was smooth, a kind of waterworn limestone polished to a surface that held the light and gave it back altered — warmer than it arrived, with a tint like aged paper. The horses’ hooves echoed off the walls in a way that was directional, that seemed to come from ahead of us rather than behind, as though the sound was being conducted forward through the stone the way sound conducts through the hallway of a house, bouncing from hard surface to hard surface, funneling toward a destination. The men felt it. I watched them shift in their saddles, turning their heads toward the sound ahead, the sound their own horses were making arriving before they had made it.

The walls were of different temperatures. I noticed this when I dismounted to check the footing and placed my hand against the south wall: warm, as it should be in afternoon sun. I crossed the canyon — twelve paces, though I would have estimated twenty from looking — and placed my hand against the north wall. Cold. Not cool. Cold, the way stone is cold that has never been touched by sun, the way the interior wall of a root cellar is cold, or the wall of a room that has been shut up for years and that you open and the cold comes out to meet you like a thing that has been waiting behind the door.

I did not find this strange. Canyons are geological formations with their own microclimates. Differential heating is a function of exposure and rock composition and the angle of incident light. I had studied this. I had read the reports. I had read every report.

The canyon widened into a chamber. I use the word deliberately, because that is what it resembled. A room. An oval space perhaps two hundred feet across with walls that curved inward as they rose, not vertical but concave, so that the sky above was a smaller circle than the floor below. The effect was architectural. The effect was of a room with a domed ceiling that had been sliced open at the top, and the light that came through was the wrong color for the time of day, a warm amber that belonged to late afternoon though it was barely noon, and the air in the space was still, perfectly still, in a way that open air is never still because there is always wind in a canyon, always convection, always movement. The men rode into this space and stopped without being told to stop and the horses stood with their ears forward and their nostrils wide and I watched Esparza cross himself though I do not think he knew he was doing it.

Loftus said: This aint right.

I told him it was a playa chamber, a formation caused by differential erosion in the limestone where softer rock had been carved away by seasonal flooding. I told him the concave walls were the result of undercutting at the base, the same process that creates sea caves. I told him what I knew.

He looked at me the way Pace had looked at me. He said: I know what a cave is, Strake. This aint that.

We rode through. The canyon continued for another mile, narrowing and widening, narrowing and widening, the floor rising and falling by small degrees, and I could not stop thinking of the word hallway, of the word room, of the word hallway again, and of the way a house is a series of spaces that control your movement, that decide where you may go and how quickly, that funnel you from one threshold to the next.

On the morning of the fifth day Yount made coffee that was good. He used the last of the clean water and the grounds he had been saving and the coffee tasted the way coffee is supposed to taste and the men drank it standing and nobody spoke about the canyon or the chamber or the sound that came from ahead and the morning was just a morning and the coffee was just coffee and I drank mine and rinsed the cup and packed it.

Then Gosse’s horse went lame and he had to ride double with Aldrich and the two of them stopped speaking. They had been arguing since Redvale but now they rode in a silence that was not peace. It was the silence of men who had each seen something they could not reconcile with the world they had agreed to inhabit and who blamed each other for the seeing. Their faces had changed. Not dramatically — a flattening, a loss of specificity, as though the features were being worn down by something finer than sand.

Yount had not slept since the canyon. His eyes were red and the skin beneath them was the color of tallow and when he cooked he burned things he would not normally burn and did not apologize for burning them and nobody asked him to. I asked him if he was well. He said he was well. He said he was well and then he said: Do you hear it? And I said: Hear what? And he said: The ground. And I said: I hear nothing. And that was true. I heard nothing. But the nothing I heard had a quality I did not know how to describe — a thickness, a pressure, the way silence in a closed room has a different weight than silence outdoors, the way the silence in a house knows you are listening to it. I noted this in my journal as atmospheric conditions consistent with low barometric pressure and wrote the elevation as best I could calculate it and moved on.

On the sixth day we came out of the canyon system and onto the playa.

I knew this place. I had built a heliograph station here in the summer of 1866. Three weeks I had lived on this playa, alone, sending light to Fort Cummings forty-three miles to the south and receiving light from a station on Salinas Peak twenty-seven miles to the east. The playa had been flat and featureless then, a lake bed of cracked white alkali that in certain light resembled milk. I had built a cairn for the heliograph tripod and a low wall of caliche blocks to shelter my bedroll from the wind and I had spent three weeks in conversation with the sun, tilting my mirror, reading the answering flashes, writing down the words that the light spelled. It had been, I remembered, the quietest three weeks of my life, and also the loudest, because the playa’s silence had a sound and the sound had been constant and the constancy had been a kind of company.

The playa was not featureless now.

At its center, perhaps a quarter mile from where we emerged from the canyon, stood a structure. Low walls of caliche, roofless, the blocks fitted without mortar in the way I had fitted them twenty years before. The structure was not large. Perhaps ten feet by eight. The walls stood three feet high. There was an opening on the south side where a doorway might have been. The proportions were exact. The orientation was exact. The opening faced the same direction mine had faced, south, toward Fort Cummings, toward the station that had once answered my flashes with flashes of its own.

I knew the floor plan. I knew it the way you know the rooms of a house you grew up in, the way your feet know the distance from the bed to the door in darkness. The structure matched, in its dimensions and its orientation and the placement of its single opening, the shelter I had built during the campaigns. The shelter I had dismantled when my assignment ended. The shelter whose stones I had scattered across the playa because the Army’s protocol required leaving no permanent structure on surveyed land.

The stones I had scattered had been gathered. The walls I had broken had been rebuilt. The shelter I had taken apart had put itself back together.

I did not find this strange.

Pace drew his horse up short and would not ride closer. Esparza dismounted and stood with his hand on his horse’s neck and watched the structure without expression. Loftus rode forward and circled it at a distance of fifty yards, riding slowly, his hand on his pistol, and came back and said nothing. The alkali crunched under his horse’s hooves and the sound was the only sound on the playa and the playa was the only thing on the earth and the earth was old and the structure was old and I was old enough to recognize what I was looking at even if I could not say what I was looking at.

We rode to the structure and dismounted and walked through the opening in the south wall.

The floor was alkali, white and smooth. On it, arranged in a pattern I recognized with a sensation I will describe only as recognition, lay seventeen moqui marbles. They were spaced with precision. Their arrangement was not the arrangement I had sketched on the sandstone flat and not the arrangement I had found at midnight. It was the pattern of the stars I had used to calibrate the heliograph twenty years ago — Polaris, Kochab, Pherkad, and the lesser stars of Ursa Minor, laid out on the white floor like a chart, like a map of a language I had once spoken fluently and had believed I had forgotten.

Yount said it first. He said: It’s been expecting us.

Nobody answered him. Aldrich drew his pistol and fired once at the north wall. The sound was enormous in the enclosed space and the muzzle flash lit the white floor like a heliograph’s pulse. The bullet struck the caliche and did not ricochet. There was no spray of dust, no chip, no mark. The wall absorbed the round the way packed earth absorbs rain — completely, silently, without evidence. The sound died instantly. It did not echo. In a space that size, with walls of stone, sound echoes. This sound did not.

Aldrich looked at his pistol. He holstered it. He walked out of the structure and stood in the sun with his back to us and did not come back in.

I took the heliograph from its case. I assembled it on the floor of the structure, fitting the tripod legs into the alkali, adjusting the gimbal, aligning the sighting vane. The sun was at its apex and the light was absolute and I angled the mirror southwest, toward the interior of the Jornada, toward the country no man I knew had reason to enter, and I sent three flashes. The keying mechanism was smooth. The mirror caught the sun and broke it and sent it out through the opening in the south wall in three pulses that I counted — one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand — the way I had been trained.

Something flashed back.

Three pulses. From the southwest. From a point I could not fix because the distance was wrong — the flash was too bright for the distance I estimated and too dim for the distance the terrain suggested and the interval between the pulses was not the interval I had sent but a different interval, shorter, and I recognized in the rhythm a pattern I knew, a pattern from the old signal codes, though I could not recall what the pattern meant.

I recorded the exchange in my journal. I noted the time, the bearing, the estimated distance, the interval of the return signal. I wrote these figures in the same hand in which I had written everything else: the bootprints, the moqui marbles, the canyon temperatures, the distances. The hand was steady. The figures were clear. The figures were always clear.

Loftus was standing beside me. He said: Who are you signaling, Strake?

I told him I was testing the instrument.

He said: Nobody tests an instrument by pointing it at nothing and waiting for an answer.

I told him the flash was a reflection off the alkali flats. Atmospheric refraction. A common phenomenon. I had explained a dozen things to this man in six days and every explanation had been accurate and every explanation had satisfied him less than the one before.

He looked at me for a long time. Then he said: You’ve been here before.

I said I had. During the campaigns.

He said: That aint what I mean.

We left the structure at dawn. The men mounted without speaking and we rode east toward the canyon and the canyon admitted us and we passed through its narrowings and widenings without comment, without pause, without the horses balking. The walls were both cold now, both sides, and the hoofbeats echoed from ahead and behind simultaneously and I rode with my journal open across the pommel and I wrote while I rode, recording the distance, the bearing, the time, the angle of the light.

Aldrich and Gosse rode side by side and did not speak. They had stopped quarreling. They had stopped all speech. Their faces were the same face — not similar but the same, flat and unmarked, as though something had been subtracted and they did not yet know what. Yount rode with his eyes closed, his hands loose on the reins, his mule following the horse ahead of it by scent or memory or some communication between animals that does not require sight. Pace had fallen to the rear and I could hear his horse’s hooves on the stone but when I turned he was further back than the sound suggested, a figure small against the canyon wall, riding at a pace that should have been ours but was not.

Loftus rode beside me. He had torn a page from his own journal and was holding it in his fist, crumpled, and as we rode he opened his hand and let the paper fall and the paper fell to the canyon floor and lay there white against the stone like a thing that had been placed.

Esparza crossed himself twice and spoke a prayer I could not hear over the sound of the horses, which had become a sound I could not quite identify, not hooves on stone but something else, something more regular, more purposeful, like a mechanism turning, like gears in a clock that had been wound and set and left to run.

We reached Redvale by noon the following day. The town was as I had left it. The buildings stood in their places. The dirt street held the ruts of recent wagons. A dog slept in the shade of the livery. Everything was where it should have been and I noted this in my journal because I note everything. I dismounted at the county office. Puttnam was at his desk.

I gave him my report. I told him the posse had ridden the length of the San Augustine road and into the Jornada del Muerto as far as the central playa. I told him we had found bootprints consistent with a single figure traveling southwest. I told him we had found no evidence of criminal activity and that the figure was most probably a drifter or deserter gone south into Mexico by a route that would not support pursuit.

Puttnam asked if there was anything else. I told him there was not.

I went to my quarters above the feed store and I set the heliograph on the table by the window. The sun was going down, the light coming in low and orange from the west, and I angled the mirror and sent three flashes through the window toward the Jornada. The glass caught the failing light and broke it and sent it out over the rooftops and the corrals and the dirt street and into the country beyond, where the land flattened and the color drained and the Jornada began.

Three flashes came back.

I noted the time. I noted the angle. I noted the duration of each flash — one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand — though the rhythm was different from mine, quicker, and in the shortening interval I recognized again the old signal pattern, and this time I knew what it meant, or I believed I knew, or the knowledge arrived in me the way the flash arrived in the mirror, from outside, and complete.

I wrote the figures in my journal. The same journal. The same hand. The same careful notation I had used since the first morning when I checked the heliograph in the yard behind the county office and sent three flashes east and received no answer.

The light came from the west-southwest at an angle of eleven degrees above the horizon and I noted the time as 5:47 and the distance to the nearest ridgeline as four and one-quarter miles.