She had jotted down the list of supplies people needed. She'd collected the outgoing mail to be dropped off at the Blanco Trading Post. She was driving into Farmington, she'd said. She had made the rounds of the permanent housing and checked with everyone on the digging team. There was absolutely no possibility of privacy. In that tiny, isolated Park Service society of a dozen adults and two children, everyone knew everything about everybody. And the children would chat about it to their parents. The children were up in the gray dawn to catch their school bus. Of course, they had seen her driving away from Chaco. Friedman-Bernal rested now, sitting on a convenient rock, removing her backpack, rubbing her shoulders, letting the cold, high desert air evaporate the sweat that had soaked her shirt, reconsidering a long day. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal blocking out the light of an October moon.ĭr. If an Anasazi had risen from his thousand-year grave in the trash heap under the cliff ruins here, he would have seen the Humpbacked Flute Player, the rowdy god of fertility of his lost people. Seen from above, the shadow would have made a Navajo believe that the great yei northern clans called Watersprinkler had taken visible form. The backpack formed the spirit's grotesque hump, the walking stick Kokopelli's crooked flute. Sometimes, when the goat trail bent and put the walker's profile against the moon, the shadow became Kokopelli himself. An animated pictograph, its arms moving rhythmically as the moon shadow drifted across the sand. Sometimes it suggested a heron, sometimes one of those stick-figure forms of an Anasazi pictograph. Out on the packed sand of the wash bottom the shadow of the walker made a strange elongated shape.

T HE MOON HAD RISEN just above the cliff behind her.

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