The glint of something through the needles and limbs of the three Pinyon Pines below flashed again.

“Can you see it?”

Sam lowered the small binoculars from his eyes, but continued to squint down through the labyrinth of boulders.

“Doug, if I could see it, I’d say so.”

Doug lowered his own binoculars. Just like that, it was gone.

“Right in there, below the trees.”

“Well, what’s it look like?”

“Like a sheet of stainless steel.”

“I thought you said it looked like water.”

Doug shifted his focus to his fellow desert rat, whose white beard split with a teasing smile, his grey eyes dancing mischievously. Normally the barrel-chested loan officer would comb his thinning hair over his bald spot, but out camping, usually with a hat on, he’d let it shoot out in all directions. Without his hat, he reminded Doug of either a mad scientist or Ernest Hemingway.

“I’m telling you, I see water down there. I’ve seen it before, too. Y’have t’be in th’right place at the right time, and the right time of year, and you can see it.” Doug continued to stare down into the rocky desert bowl. “Standing water.”

Sam chortled and shook his head.

“It’s mid-July, it hasn’t gotten below a hundred degrees t’day. Any guzzler that might be in these rocks dried up a month ago, let alone a standing pool.”

“Which means its gotta be a year-round spring,” Doug concluded.

“Why? Because Injuns use’ta live in these caves?” Sam motioned back at the tumbled boulders they'd come through to get to the overlook.

Doug didn’t take his eyes off the rocky barrier before him.

It was no more than a thousand feet wide, towering over their heads on both sides, with Pinyons growing between boulders, plunging three hundred feet down. Maybe two thousand feet long, it was an impenetrable bowl of house-sized granite boulders, Laurel Sumac and Desert Mahogany somehow burst through and around the boulders, almost all the way down. From this overlook, Doug could see the Yuha desert beyond the bowl, crystal clear. What was at the bottom of the bowl was unrecognizable, except for the three Pinyon Pines rising above the lowest boulders.

Sam tugged at Doug’s T-shirt.

“Come on, kid. Time t’get back t’camp.”

“They had water here, Sam,” Doug continued to argue as they wove their way through the natural tunnels. Both pictographs and petroglyphs were etched on stones they worked their way around, moving back through the caves. At several points the granite boulders were stained black with centuries of camp fires

“And what do I keep telling you?” The two men pushed past the last of the boulders, where someone, who knows how many epochs ago, had carefully stacked stones along the edge of the natural caves, closing them in, blocking out the wind, going so far as to stack rock along the edge, as if to mark out a path. “This place is getting drier.” The old man, his knobby knees exposed by his shorts with cargo pockets, pointed west. “The Lagunas are rising An inch a year, they say. That’s a foot every twelve years. Blocking out the clouds and rain from the ocean. More rain on the west side of the mountains, drier every year on this side. When was the last time these caves were inhabited, a hundred, hundred fifty years ago now?”

The two descended to the sand of the In-Ko-Pah mountains. Around them, rising out of the sand like ragged teeth, monoliths of solid stone, or massive piles of boulders rising up two, three hundred feet.

“Haven’t even touched on earthquake activity. One day there’s a spring, a little shake of the land, next day it’s gone, just like that spring that’s on the topo map, just up the road from camp.”

“You don’t know how long ago this area was inhabited,” Doug countered. “There was that one lady who wrote that book, darn, what was her name? She reported wild Indians living on her property as late as the thirty’s.”

“In Alpine, as I recall,” Sam answered. “Two things, Alpine is on THAT side of the Lagunas,” They had made it to the sandy road that wound back toward their camp, passing Century Plants and large dead Junipers as they went. “And second of all, who all saw those Indians she spoke about?” The old man looked at Doug. “Just her private little band of savages.”

The road veered due south, and at that point the duo slipped down into a wash that wound roughly north-west.

“Break?” Sam gasped.

“Only a quarter mile t’camp,” Doug protested.

Sam turned and sat on a rock.

“Break.”

Sweat streamed down the old man’s face, twisted in agony. He whipped his backpack off, sat it on his lap and pulled something out. With a flick, the umbrella popped up and Sam hefted it over his head.

“There,” the old man sighed. “Instant shade.”

“A parasol,” Doug said.

“Shade,” Sam countered. “You know how long it took me t’find an umbrella that wasn’t either black or covered with flowers or some kind’a weird design?”

“Months and months,” Doug answered.

“Months and months,” Sam stressed. He leaned back and gasped some more, now with relief. “Nice thick material, almost canvas, nice tan color. Reflects the sun.”

Sam adjusted the position of the umbrella until some of the shade fell on Doug. Doug moved closer, and Sam glanced down on the boulder they perched on.

“Look at that! Damn, they’re everywhere!”

Doug looked where Sam pointed and sure enough, there was a Yoni, carefully shaped from a crack in the boulder.

“Crazed Injuns were obsessed!” Sam bellowed. He looked up and around at the rugged country they move through. “Besides,” he started, “Even if there’s water down there, how would they get to it?”

“There’d be a path,” Doug answered.

“How?” Sam asked incredulously. “You can’t hop from boulder t’boulder, they’re all too big! Rock climbing gear might help, but then you’d have t’slide down a boulder t’climb up the next boulder t’slide down to the next! I’m telling you, it’s just not practical.”

“Bet’cha from down there, the trail is obvious,” Doug argued.

They made it to camp, and Sam pulled the Dutch Oven from the pit they’d made before they left. He knocked the ash off the top, then carefully lifted the lid. Gingerly he poked one of the potatoes in the bubbling brew.

“This is ready. How’s the rolls?”

Another Dutch Oven sat under a blanket in the shade of a two-story boulder that marked the south side of their camp. Doug looked inside the cast iron pot.

“They’ve risen.”

“Let me get some more of these out of the pit,” Sam grunted, scooping red-white coals out with his tri-shovel. Without another word, Doug brought the second Oven with the sourdough rolls over to the pit, waited for Sam to finish, then settled the pot with the distinctive flare-sided lid onto the remaining coals. Sam shoveled the coals he’d pulled out on top of the Oven.

“Check your time.”

Doug looked at his watch.

“Five thirty.”

“Six we’ll see if they’re ready.”

“Y’know, Sam,” Doug said, staring down at the coal-covered pot, “other people go camping, they bring a couple cans of chili, maybe some eggs for breakfast, and they do just fine.”

“Yes, poor deluded devils.” Sam’s voice trebled with anguish, looking north to a four story monolith of stone with a Pinyon Pine sticking out from it’s side a third of the way up, “Probably drink light beer, too. Speaking of which.” The old man stretched an arm out toward the coolers covered with wool blankets. “We’re not hiking anywhere else today, are we?”

“No, we’re in for the night I think.”

“We’re getting a late start as it is.”

Doug laughed and hauled out two twenty-four ounce bottles of some weird Czech beer Sam had picked up at Trader Joe’s.

Sam grunted to his feet and walked over to their two fold-out chairs up against the south rock, where there was shade.

“Won’t get dark ‘til eight tonight,” Doug said.

“We’ll have a nice healthy buzz on by then.”

Doug shook his head as he eased down into his chair and handed the older man a chilly bottle.

“Can’t drink like that anymore, Sam.”

“Oh, please,” Sam countered, popped the cap and took a long pull on the molasses colored beverage. He smacked his lips. “Why the hell do you come to the desert in the middle of July?”

Doug contemplated the question as he took a pull on his drink.

“Nobody’s out here, even on the weekends.”

“You come to the desert to become intoxicated,” Sam countered. “The shimmering heat sweats out your pores, purifies you, prepares you to receive the desert smells and tastes that fill you with its drug, and you wallow in the solitude, as much an inebriant as a good stiff hit off a joint. Stay long enough and you graduate to the equivalent of hash, maybe coke, maybe even acid.” Sam took a long swallow, looked over at the younger man, shook his bottle. “The beer’s here to help you stay sober.”

“I’ll buy the solitude part,” Doug said, “But I think you’re just waxing poetic on the rest.”

Doug studied the old man’s face, his labored breath.

“You don’t look too good, Sam.”

The old man nodded, staring off, rested the beer against his chest and looked over to Doug.

“You could walk another dozen miles, couldn’t you?”

Doug laughed with a crooked smile, then knitted his brow, said nothing.

“Douglas, I’m too old to be out in the desert in July,” Sam said, still looking at the young man. “I’m stove in.”

“It didn’t get above a hundred today.”

Sam snorted and grunted.

“Regular cold snap.”

Doug took a long pull on the bottle of weird Czech beer that for some reason seemed to be numbing his lips.

“Know how long I’ve been comin’ out here, Doug? Fifty some-odd years. Think about that. Came out with my family in the fifties, my buddies in the sixties, did ‘Nam, and came back out here in the seventies with new buddies.” Sam looked back at Doug. “I’ve seen active mining operations and faced old men with shotguns running us off, people struggling to make ends meet out here on their homesteads, come back and find ‘em abandoned, pots and plates left in the cupboards, linen still on the kitchen table. Watched ‘em fall into ruin, mines collapse, watched ‘em disappear so thoroughly I couldn’t tell you where they were today.” Sam turned his eyes back to the monolith with the pine tree. “I can break my life down into segments, how I perceived the desert, bright and clean, full of injuns and cowboys, looking for arrow heads and pottery shards with my dad, then full of wonder and curiosity and competition with my friends, testing our strength, challenging each other, learning about life,” Sam ran a hand across his chin as he kept staring off, “Then, rebelling against convention, corrupt values of a sick society, hiding in the desert to practice God-freed rituals, Pagan nights, potent pot and sweaty naked bodies dancing ‘round the campfire, lit by desert moonlight, slick flesh, jiggling breasts and swaying hips running through the rocks, cornering your giggling prey right where she wanted you, lustfully embracing amoral animal urges.” Sam furtively glanced over at Doug, “Married one a’those girls, so we gotta be careful.”

“Gloria?” Doug gasped with a smile.

“Not another word,” Sam warned sternly, straightened up. “All that before I ever met you.”

“Stuck in a wash,” Doug said.

“In a Ford Escort buried up to its hub caps, four miles from the nearest paved road.”

“It had front wheel drive,” Doug protested.

Sam rolled his eyes and stared once more into shimmering heat, moving his foot back into the shifting shade, the sun moving west.

“Twenty-three years ago, Doug.”

Doug swallowed more beer, wondered about the alcoholic content of Czech beer.

“Twenty-three years?”

Sam nodded.

“Started out quite full of myself, caring for the green newbie, fascinated by the desert.”

“I liked getting the wife out here,” Doug sighed. Without looking at him, Sam held up an open palm

“I don’t wanna hear about your sex life.”

“You told me about yours.”

“Can’t possibly be as good as mine, so stuff it.”

Doug paused, then turned to Sam.

“I can show you right where Mike was conceived. Right up the road here a piece.”

“Then I found you a challenge,” Sam continued, “Proving my old-man strength by keeping up with you.”

“We were just trying to stay warm,” Doug continued. “I bet it dropped below freezing. You and George were camped in that wash beyond, down below the wind. Remember George?”

“But now,” Sam continued, ignoring the younger man, “I have to face the simple, painful reality. I can’t keep up any more. I’m getting old, and one by one, I can see the things I love to do are going to drop by the wayside. I’m starting another epoch. I can remember everything I’ve seen here in the desert, they come back to me in pleasant moments of solitude, but someday soon, I’ll die, and all my memories, all that is me will be nothing but dust. The desert has not changed, not really, only a mite drier, the Lagunas five feet taller than when I started.”

“We made love all night,” Doug whispered. “Over and over again.”

“I will cease to exist as thoroughly as anything I know,” Sam said. “All I can do now is pray to God that He really exists.” The old man looked over to Doug. “And, ya’ know, hope he’s still into that forgiving thing.”

“What do you want us t’do with your ashes?” Doug asked bluntly.

Sam shifted his weight and looked back out.

“Um, did you hear about this guy who had his ashes blown out of a cannon? Big gun nut, always blowing holes in his house, which apparently was all right, ‘cause he was a liberal journalist kind’a guy.”

“Yeah?”

“That works for me, only blow me out,” Sam swept his free hand over the landscape they had before them, “from like, from the Desert View Tower.”

“You mean over Interstate 8?”

“Well, sure.”

Doug thought about that.

“I don’t have a cannon. What if I loaded you up into some twelve gauge shotgun husks.”

“Do what you can, but the immediate death to be dealt with now is,” Sam looked back over to Doug, “I can’t do this desert in July shit anymore.”

Sam tried to keep a poker face, but his eyebrows knitted as he frowned.

“How so?”

“I’m stove in, Doug. Lousy six mile hike and I’m dying.”

Doug studied the old man’s ashen face, and knew it was true. He said nothing, but swallowed long and hard from the Czech beer bottle, discovering most of his face was numb now.

“I’m pulling out tomorrow morning before it gets too hot,” Sam continued. “Got a ton of honeydews t’do. What are you gonna do?”

“I’m cleared to stay here another six days,” Doug answered instantly. “Might move camp down to Carrizo Wash, but I want to go to the overlook and paint it before I leave here.”

“All alone?”

“Yes.”

Sam nodded for a while.

“Paint the bowl with the water at the bottom?”

“Nono.” Doug looked over at Sam. “The Yuha overlook. With Pinto Wash and Davies Valley down below. Two thousand foot drop.”

“Oh, yeah.” Sam lifted the bottle and studied the small writing on the label. “Think you can get all your painting gear down there?”

“No problem, just takes a little effort.” Doug watched Sam study the beer bottle. “What are you doing?”

“Checking out the ingredients.” Sam pulled back and critically examined the mouth of the beer bottle. “Just wondering if there’s something like Novocaine in this shit’r somethin’.”

Doug could still hear Sam’s Landcruiser grinding up the road as he sorted out his painting gear, brushes, palette, paints and one 16x20 canvas.

“Why don’t you take up photography?” he could hear Sam asking. “Or take a picture, take it home, paint from that.”

The often repeated comment brought a smile to Doug’s face. He pulled his tripod out of his backpack, extended one leg, but re-tightened the strap he had on the wooden tool. Just like that, and with a leather wrap around the extended leg for just this purpose, he had a walking stick. He re-checked his canteen, his food for the day, adjusted the load a bit, checked his boot straps. The summer sun was rising like a menace, a threat. It was definitely going to be hotter than yesterday.

“That’s another thing wrong with summer desert camping,” Sam had said last night, “It never cools off! fall’r spring, it might be hot in the day, but it gets good’n cold when the sun sets. Feel the heat’s just radiating off these rocks? If ever there was a time t’learn t’levitate a couple dozen feet off the ground, this is it.”

A world of extremes, Doug contemplated, looking around him at the massive boulders, sun-bleached sand, sparse plants, desperately stark Pinyon Pine, this little piece of high desert exquisite in its merciless purity. The desert rat gloated with the thought.

The small camouflaged fold-up seat went under the canvas, and then Doug fit an old white cotton sheet, cut down to cover the canvas, all on the outside of the old military backpack with a frame. He had once walked up Whale Peak with all his gear, only to find a big blob of bird shit smack in the middle of the canvas he was carrying. He never even saw the bird that did the deed, but it had been big. Putting the canvas inside inevitably crushed the wood frame.

Doug stopped, looked around. Something had changed. The desert of gray rock monoliths and occasional Pinyon Pine was silent. He stood alone in his camp. To the north he could see the Coyote Mountains, twenty-odd miles away. It was hard to believe there was a freeway between him and them. It was hard to believe there was any human activity between him and them.

That’s when he realized what was different. He couldn’t hear old Sam’s Land Rover any more. It had crossed over the top of the mountain, starting down the other side.

Doug dwelled on the curious sense of abandonment he felt as he loaded his burden on his back. He had camped alone in the desert many times before, much to his forsaken wife’s consternation. What was different now?

The doors on his Wrangler were locked, for what good it would do. The coolers were tucked in between stones, out of the direct sun no matter what the time of day, covered with old wool blankets. It was a trick he’d discovered quite by accident, and which didn’t seem to impress anyone, but wrapping a wool blanket all around a cooler could make the ice inside last as much as three times longer. He’d once thought about taking a wool blanket, cutting it up and making like a sock for the cooler. But coolers come and go, disposable society in action, and wool blankets were much more versatile as blankets, not socks for some particular cooler.

It hadn’t dropped below 80 all night, and now the sun was gaining altitude. Doug started his march into the burning globe, hot on his face at seven in the morning.

It had started out as a well-established social event, Doug decided, certain rules of etiquette practiced. When it was old Sam and him, bringing out a book and reading passages was accepted and appreciated, the only caveat being it had to be desert related. Poetry by Edward Abby, passages from Smeaton Chase, it all was good. With the wife, the kids, other desert rats, this was either a waste of time or considered something of snobbery.

But Sam had left, the mental preparation Doug had put himself through, the copy of ‘Land of Little Rain’ he’d found at a Goodwill store, the ear-marked passage where, in Doug’s opinion, Mary Austin implies she’s a Lesbian, now worthless. Suddenly it was a solo event, something he had not primed himself for. Curious how disconcerting it seemed. A bad omen.

He felt the ‘water’ hangover and knew today was a day to practice caution.

“Drink too much of anything and it’ll give you a hangover,” Sam would say. “Out here in this kind’a heat, a hundred fifteen in the shade, you should drink at least a gallon of water a day, right? And you sweat it out, that and more.” He’d point at Doug’s stomach. “All those internal organs processing all that water, getting a work-out they don’t get except when we’re out here in the Summer. You got Gatorade or something like that so you don’t wash out all your electrolytes, but even so, the next day, you got a water hangover.”

“I would think it would be a purification,” Doug inevitably answered back. “All the crap washing out of you. You ache inside because your organs aren’t used to it, like an unused muscle. I’m figuring the more we exercise those internal organs get, the stronger they’ll become.”

“Well, my internals are sprained.”

Now the sun was a shimmering demon beating down on his boonie hat, and it still sat low on the horizon. Man, was it going to be hot. He thought about wetting his hat, but he had only brought a little more than a gallon of water. He hadn’t walked a quarter mile and already he was sweating.

His boots kicked up dust like silt from the road. All the annuals had dried up and blown away, or turned into the dust. The cholla held out, and the sumac was still a dusty green.

There was no sound, no wind, no birds. Nothing was so stupid as to be out in that sun. Except him.

Doug stopped, looked back and knew camp was just out of sight, that he had another half hour of hiking, maybe closer to an hour, and he could feel the blood growing thicker in his veins, pumping sluggishly through his neck He grimaced, reached into a cargo pocket on his cut-off BDUs, and in a moment, Sam’s tan parasol popped out. The dark shade fell all around him.

“It’s light,” Sam had said, jamming it into Doug’s pocket as the younger man had helped him load, “and if you actually use it, I’ll never know!”

Doug looked up at the umbrella, could just make out the shape of the sun through the threads of the fabric. He let his boonie hat fall back off his head, the sweat now streamed down his face, into his eyelashes, into his eyes.

Due east, south of the caves and skirting the mystery bowl of boulders, a rock mountain between him and it. He had to stop often, gasping for breath, once going to one knee to rest on the hot ground. He would have moved into the shade of the wall of grey and rust-stained stone to the north, but the rock itself was still hot from the day before. There was a wash, several pine trees and brush on its top edges, and the moment he slipped down into its walls it was cooler. Though bone dry now, there was a spring here that ran most of the year. Doug wondered what the local animals had for water at these times. The spring water could be evaporating before reaching the surface, Doug imagined, wicking away the heat, venting it off.

He took a fifteen minute break here, dropped his pack, leaned against the cool southern side of the wash wall. His walking stick was propped up against the stone whose shade he hid in, the umbrella on its head, its handle poking up for an easy grab.

Bees buzzed around him. They landed ever so gently on his flesh, and he could feel them sucking up the moisture pouring from him. Egyptian bees, brought here in the twenties by enterprising farmers that crossed them with European bees, looking to find a honey producer that could stand the heat of the desert. Hardy they were, but so laid back they didn’t make any more honey then they absolutely had to. The farmers released them into the wild in disgust. The feral bees were so indulgent you could step on their hives that they made in the sand washes in summer, and they wouldn’t sting you. True Southern Californians. Six decades later, when the Africanized ‘Killer’ bees had swarmed up from the east, across the Imperial Valley, they had run into the docile cousins from the same continent, had identified the peaceful bees as kin, and had left them unmolested, not seizing their hives, killing their queens and turning them into the intolerant Bees of Brazil. You could argue the Egyptian bees had saved the deserts and the Laguna Mountains from the Killer Bee Menace, at least for a time.

So the story went. The desert, so empty of everything else, was full of stories. Doug raised his canteen to his lips and drank. So full of ghosts.

Doug noted his heart had slowed nearly to normal. It was the weight of the pack that was killing him. It wasn’t that hot yet. It was all wash from here on out. All he had to do was trudge to the overlook. He looked down at his feet, and practically under his heel was a two-inch long piece of pottery shard.

“Every time it rains, the shards show up,” Sam would say. “Local Indians would burn their dead, put the ash in pots, then put the pots up in these rocks, in the crevices, in these little caves, just stick ‘em in as far as they could.” Sam would nod looking around the stacks of stone around them. “Ten thousand years of dead, if you believe Shippeck. That’s a lot of pottery.”

All he had were the dead for company, Doug thought. And it had to be Hell, at this temperature.

He drank some more water, wondered if he should haul the Gatorade water out of his pack. Usually he saved that for later in the day, but this was going to be much more intense than usual, alone. Instead he pulled out his favorite little tool for just these times. He hung it on an acacia, in the shade. A breeze stirred it slightly. Perhaps it was some passing spirits, out for a soul-warming stroll.

The thermometer read ninety degrees Fahrenheit, humidity twenty-five percent. And it was probably moist down here in the wash, Doug thought. He pulled his CalMex from his pocket and smeared the balm on his lips. Finally, he dragged himself back to his feet, hefted his backpack back on, scooped up the umbrella and then the walking stick.

He monitored himself carefully as he returned to the hike. His biggest fear was cramps. He’d done that only once in the past. Never again. Laid up for half the day, his buddies having to stand around caring for him, the camping trip completely ruined, and it was his fault. That had been some fifteen years ago, but still, what if his buddies hadn’t been there?

Past a few more Junipers, another set of Pinyons, and there it was.

The overlook was a V-shaped break in the mountain, where the wash drained down. The world dropped off a thousand feet, a wall to look down. Boulders of every shape, every size, stacked up to him, forming the V that rose up another hundred feet around him, with Junipers and more Pinyons holding on in the cracks, and further down, where the ground began to level off, still dropping, but not so radically, palm trees in groves. A single hawk rode the currents.

There was Myer Valley, more stone stacked about. It had been closed since the fifties, sixties, Doug had never heard why. There were claim markers and metal fence posts in there, along roads obviously built for automobiles, mortreroes and springs overgrown with Wait-A-Minute bush. Ever-changing Pinto Canyon and Wash to the south, a deep boulder-strewn chasm running west to east and just a tad south, emptying into Mexico. There were three springs down there, two that were overgrown and difficult to get to, a third that sprang up in the middle of the wash amongst stone and sand that all you needed was the coordinates, and your GPS could take you straight to it. Then you dug. Beyond, the Yuha Desert, and beyond that, the Imperial Valley. From here on a clear day you could see the Colorado River.

And smog, and the silvery strip that ran out of Devils Gorge and through the scene, Interstate 8.

“Photoshop,” Sam offered deadpan. “Got a book on it. You can do some really cool stuff with it.”

Only Sam wasn’t there. The more he thought about it, the more annoyed Doug got. Once again he lowered himself into the shade of a boulder, mindful of the canvas on his back, working off the pack when he thought about it.

It dawned on Doug, he didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t what he’d come for, it wasn’t what he had intended for his one week away from the wife and kids, alienating the wife, making the kids feel abandoned while Dad went off and ‘did his desert thing’. Sometimes he craved the solitude of the desert like an ache in his heart, but this was not the time, this was not the place when the desert was just as hostile as it could be to his presence. He thought of those guys who climbed sheer rock cliffs with nothing but some powder on their hands and maybe special shoes. He couldn’t help but think, even in his awe of their courage, strength and daring, that it was just plain stupid to do something like that. Wasn’t he just as stupid to be out here all alone at nine in the morning, the temp creeping past ninety, knowing perfectly well it would hit a hundred five before noon and stay there until five or six in the afternoon? And for what? Solitude that he hadn’t planned on and now didn’t want.

What’s more, he was stuck. He wasn’t walking out of there, with all his gear, until the sun had set and had been down for at least a couple of hours. He was pissed and he was angry at Sam, at the desert, but mostly at himself. He suddenly had the irrational thought that he was a poor man, owning nothing more than the clothes on his back and the meagerly belongings in his backpack.

“Still the internal conversation,” Sam would say.

“You can’t stop thinking,” Doug croaked out loud. “You’re always thinking. You stop thinking when you’re dead.”

“I didn’t say stop thinking!” Sam countered in frustration. “Look, damnit, stop thinking so hard. Clear your mind, take a breath and let all your thoughts go, y’know? And focus on the task at hand. Learn to discern the substantial from the insubstantial.”

Doug nodded at nothing. He had to think this out, anticipate the challenges, be prepared, because he was in fact in danger. Healthy men could have a heart attack in this heat, in the exertion necessary to survive, suffer a stroke. He simply could not make mistakes.
Drink more water, and think.

On the other hand, he had hiked miles in hundred fifteen degrees. He’d been a lot younger, still, this was the high end of the desert. It wasn’t going to get that hot.

He could sit there on the hot sand for the next ten hours and hike back to camp, load up and leave the next morning, or he could find a cave maybe at the base of the boulder mountain to the west and wait out the day as best he could, or he could go about the project he had prepared himself to do all along, paint the Yuha Desert Overlook.

The next thought came as a revelation. This was not where he had to be to paint the oil canvas he saw in his mind. The view to the east from here did not show the craggy expanse, or the amazing drop. He looked back the way he’d come, then measured to the north and west.

Yes, up that swell, further up to the next stone pile that looked like the bow of a battleship, up onto its deck and against the superstructure. There were several reasons for this. It would give him the panorama and height to include the V-shaped overlook itself, stark and startling with the pines coming out of the sheer walls of the V, and also, there was shade up there. Give it an hour and the tripod and canvas would have a place in the gloom of the shadow cast by the boulder mountain.

Doug looked back out across the overlook and noted the hues of blues even now in the sky along the horizon. You couldn’t capture that with a camera. Forget a thirty-five millimeter. Maybe a two-and-a-quarter, better a four-by-five, could give you the depth, the grain, the range, but never could simple film capture the hues as accurately as the human eye and a paint palette. Color film was either ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, and either way you sacrificed something, untrue blues, imperfect reds. He would have to mix quickly of course, the low humidity and heat dried the oils out at amazing speeds. Still, he could secure the nuances, and place them where they belonged. No camera could do it. Don’t even mention digital. Besides, photography was a mechanical creation, two-dimensional. Paint was the human power of observation expressed.

Doug only wished he was a better technician. Never mind. He would do what he could. He still had this emotional ebb in his heart, a poor man going about his meaningless meager chores of survival. So be it. He resigned himself to the poverty of his soul.

It was time to start on the water with the Gatorade powder in it. Half strength, it still felt oily in his mouth and throat. Doug looked back at the battleship bow. Now, how was he going to get up to its main deck?

It was getting late. Shadows receded closer to that which cast them. There was nowhere to hide from the sun in the wash. The only shade available was Sam’s parasol.

Doug calculated the different routes he could take. He knew the direct assault was out of the question, but what if he eased around the north side of the dirt rise in front of him, worked his way into the Sumac at the bottom of the stone, then ease himself up, favoring the shaded side. From his angle Doug saw no way anywhere to climb the stone hull, the cliff actually angling out, but when he got there, he’d find a way. There was always a way.

Doug took inventory, determined he was as good as he was going to get, stood up and started out across the blistering sand and gravel, favored the right, slowly ascending until he reached the crest of the rise, paused and fell to one knee. He kept the parasol above his head, but retracted the leg on his makeshift walking stick. Again he struck out for the battleship bow, which now with angle, looked more like a pile of boulders.

A curious thing. The northern sides of the stones, right up to the craggy top of the boulder mountain, were much darker, some spots appeared actually black.

Doug reached the barrier of Laurel Sumac at the base of the stone cliff. Gasping for breathe, the air hot and ragged in his throat and lungs, the poor man used this time on one knee to look through the limbs of the six-foot tall plants. It took a long while for his eyes to adjust to the darkness beyond the plants, against the granite wall.

Doug found himself squinting at something incongruous. The rock at the base of the boulder mountain was dark anyway, and covered with the debris of the plants around them, but it sure looked like a staircase to him.

Doug slipped his backpack off, mindful of the still unscathed canvas, collapsed the umbrella and put it in a side pocket of the pack. Without the weight and girth of his burden, he slipped around, over and through the large plants. Some of the limbs bent against him, the distinctive dusty perfume of the Sumac wiping against his sweat-stained T-shirt. Some snapped like balsa wood as he overcame their resistance, sometimes where he pressed against them, sometimes at the base of the plant. Others didn’t give an inch, and Doug worked a booted foot up and stepped on and over them.

He was against the rock now, pinned actually by the resilient dark green plants around him. He bent down a bit to study the stone.

Most of the steps were flat rocks stacked against the side of the boulder he was up against, or wedged into gaps in cracks and crevices. Other steps had been hewn from the boulder itself, as wide as a man, down to no wider than six inches, climbing up the north side of the boulder

Doug wondered if there was a way to tell the difference between stone tool against stone, and metal tool. He looked back down the steps. They disappeared in debris at the base of a large Sumac. If he knew how long it took for a Laurel Sumac to reach this size, Doug thought, he’d know at least how long these steps had not been used. Sumacs could grow pretty quick, though. Let’s say twenty, thirty years to get this size and have all that litter at the bottom. That would only be the seventies. Yeah, hippies out here getting back to nature, leaving their mark on the land just like the corrupt society that they despised had, scarring up the land. He looked up the steps. They appeared to stop not much further ahead of him, maybe ten feet from the floor, six, seven feet below the battleship’s flat deck. Doug climbed the steps until he figured they ended.

More steps miraculously appeared, now climbing the other way, switchback, up toward the top of the boulder. From this angle, the optical illusion of a flat deck was erased, and the reality of a rounded stone with more stone stacked against and on top of it appeared.

Doug looked west along the north side of the four stories of boulder mountain to yet another wall of rock blocking his view. A bowl of stone.

Something caught the climber’s eye at the base of the bowl to the west. Doug squinted even as he pulled his binoculars from his cargo pocket. It glistened and shimmered. A moment of effort and Doug could clearly see it through his binoculars. The top of Cottonwood trees, at least two at the far southern end of the bowl. Farther north, closer to the middle, three Pinyon Pine trees.

It was his bowl with the standing water at the base, viewed from the other side. He looked up to where the caves they had passed through yesterday, and where the overlook must be. How was it they couldn’t see the Cottonwoods from the West end, he marveled. Sam and he had been much higher up.

Should he keep going or go back for his pack? He would have to walk crab-style up to where the boulder’s top, but it was doable. He stepped back down to the bottom, crashed again through the Sumac, grinding out a trail, more aggressively pounding it down. He hefted the pack up one more time. Carefully he threaded his way back to the steps. Once again he became much too aware of the pulse in his neck. He made it to the top of the boulder.

A furnace blast of a breeze swept up over the stone from the south, making a hollow whistle as it whipped over and around the summit. It sucked the moisture out of Doug’s mouth, nose and eyes. He turned sharply to the right and gasped, staggered toward the blistering hot stone. Out of the pot, into the fire for real.

There was a cave of sorts, a ragged crack, one stone split in two, then leaned against itself. The passage was maybe six feet tall, five feet at the bottom, a foot wide five feet off the floor. If nothing else, there was shade.

Doug walked in as far as he could, sank to his knees at one point, eased his backpack off. Turning around to guarantee the canvas stayed on top, Doug looked out the cave to the sizzling stone before him.

There was something curious about the stones dumped out on the curved skillet in front of him. They weren’t all the granite stone he hid in, not the gray rust-stained rock the boulder mountain was made up of. Some had quartz veins running through them, others were red or black. Most were no bigger than a foot across, while others were much larger, all seeming to have a certain symmetrical quality in relation to each other.

The bizarre logic of youthful druggies thirty years ago, or some esoteric symbolism of the Indians that had come before all of them?

Or coincidence, something simple like a stone above, full of different minerals, crashed down a hundred years go, scattering these stones out in a way that looked peculiarly recognizable to his imagination.

That didn’t explain the steps, though.

Doug left the pack where it lay, moved further into the rock cave, sat and struggled to calm his breath. After a moment, he felt the most curious thing. A chill.

Quickly he grabbed his water and began to drink. He couldn’t quite remember if chills were something you might experience if you were going into shock or heat stroke, but he knew water was the only thing he had for it.

It came again, a chill across the length of his body on the left side, especially across his bare flesh, furthest from the entrance.

It was a breeze. Not from the entrance, but blowing out of the cave.

Or being sucked out of the cave?

Doug didn’t realize he was smiling as he pulled out his thermometer/hydrometer tool. He hung it away from his body, and watched the red mercury drop to ninety degrees, humidity hovering around twenty per cent.

“And me without my heavy coat!” Doug said out loud.

There was a black arrow at the back of the cave, pointing right and down. Doug had to crawl back on all fours as he came to about a foot from the arrow.

It was actually four dots, made from what had the texture and color of tar, but it looked like an arrow, and Doug followed the arrow down.

The hollow there, that adhered to the curvature of the boulder, disappeared into darkness, a pinprick of light far off, but the breeze blowing up from it was cold. He pulled his hat off and found his stiff wet hair being pleasantly teased by something above. He looked up and saw there was another tunnel rising higher into the rocky mountain. Air was being pulled through that as well.

The Shoshone Ice Caves, in Idaho. Doug nodded as he tried to remember the principles. The caves were natural, formed by a massive volcano that covered thousands of miles of North-West America millions of years ago with melted stone. As the lava rolled across the land, it cooled, forming tubular tunnels forty feet tall and a quarter mile long, just below the surface. The desert wind would whip across the top of the caves, sucking the air out of the tunnel from an opening at one end. The drop in atmospheric pressure caused the temperature to plummet by something like forty degrees. With everything properly positioned, the vacuum formed in the cave would suck air in from another entrance. During the winter, it would drop well below freezing in the caves, something like nineteen degrees. The moisture in the vacuumed-in air would condense, increasing the refrigeration affect, and filling the cave with a sheet of ice on the walls and on the floor. The sheets grew thicker through the winter and spring, any melting periods shifting water to the floor, freezing again, until the ice was yards thick. Come summer, with the temperature outside a hundred and better, the Ice Cave wouldn’t get above thirty-five, the tons of ice inside slowly melting, lasting well through the hot months back to winter.

A moment’s thought. Doug scooted back to his backpack. In one of the side-pockets he found his Mini-Mag light. He tested it. Sure enough, the batteries were still good.

Scooting back down the tunnel, Doug pointed the light down into the darkness.

He leapt back with a gasp.

The roof of the top rock curved quite a bit higher than Doug had expected. Of the dozen or so bats hanging from this rock, half raised their wings to cover their eyes from the blinding light, the other half twisted around to look the other way. They all squeaked a protest. One bared its teeth.

Doug’s heart raced as he shuffled back to his backpack. It was decidedly warmer there, and he knew a furnace blast existed beyond.

They’re only bats, he thought to himself. They’re fun to watch when they’re flying overhead at night.

It had crossed his mind earlier, that his body and backpack might act like a partial plug in this bottle with a vacuum, reducing the effectiveness of this carefully balanced vacuum. Now being a cork with a dozen pissed bats behind him was truly unappealing.

Doug scooted further out of the cold cave, and looked out across the boulder deck, east to the Yuha Desert.

It was too late to paint what he knew he’d seen before. The light was all wrong, bland and neutral, the sky, too. There was no contrast, no shadows. No, he’d be wasting the canvas to try to paint now. He also had to be further out on the rock, maybe just inside the cave, but a whole lot closer to that furnace blast.

He would have to wait then, either this evening, or even tomorrow morning, maybe a couple hours after sunrise.

He didn’t want to stay the night, though. Not here anyway, in this cave. Besides, his curiosity was piqued. This Cold Cave was a find. It wasn’t some kind of fluke. The pictograph of what he took for an arrow meant the Indians knew of this cave. The chances the stairs he’d come up on were carved by the Indians also gained some credence. He had to go back out there and hunt around for the source for the pinprick of light at the end of the crevice the bats were in.

After a moment, Doug found the courage to scoot back to the dark place of the bats. He placed his thermometer at the entrance. Laying on the rock, it dropped to eighty degrees.

A twenty-plus drop in temperature. In winter, there’d be times when there would be ice forming in this little cave.

Doug pointed his light source back down the hole, this time keeping the beam low. The bats still protested, but not nearly as badly.

On the floor of the crevice, something glistened oily black. Despite the strong breeze coming up, delicate aerial insects danced about.

There would be a solid rust stain, if not actual moisture, coming from the inlet hole, Doug thought, drawing back from the bat’s domain. And the light below flickered, as if something was moving on the other side, some kind of plant life, not actually blocking the hole, just waving in the path of the light source. It would be reflected light, he imagined, the hole pointing down and northward.

What could he leave behind? He had to lighten his load, or he simply could not operate outside for any length of time. His painting gear would stay for his return. He’d leave it here overnight, in fact, go back to camp, and come back with another canvas, he had an eight by ten, and he could then paint both the morning and the evening.

Doug bought some time in the cold cave, doing minor chores, covering his paint gear with the cotton cloth as best he could. Bat guano was surely as bad as bird shit. He pulled out his GPS and took a reading, leaning far out of the cave, then sat down with an eight by ten section of map he’d printed off from his topography program. He pulled out his clear plastic UTM tool and with the coordinates figured out where he was on the map. How simple it looked on the paper. Then he used the side of the UTM too to draw a line from where he was to where Sam and he had been yesterday in the caves, something he’d marked on the map by the light of his propane lantern last night. That told him practically nothing. He then hit GO TO and punched in yesterday’s caves, INCOV, Indian Caves Overlook. He walked outside the cave, wondered if mustard gas felt this bad to breath. The GPS screen’s arrow pointed and announced it was just a tad more than a quarter mile to INCOV.

As the bird flies, Doug reminded himself. From this vantage point, the gray blanket of boulders looked like a sea of house-size eggs blistering in the sun. At sunset they would glow orange, and in morning light, the streaks of rust and many colors of grey and tan would make you think you weren’t looking at the same stone.

He returned to the cold cave and drank a great deal of Gatorade water, feeling dehydrated in the cold, even drier than outside, cold being where he sat roughly ninety degrees, sucking the moisture from his flesh, cooling him more, but also dehydrating him. He contemplated filling his two quart canteen and leaving the rest of the water behind, but blanched at the thought. Besides, the bats might smell the water, and who knows what they could do to a water bladder. He could pull off the frame on the old military backpack, but it didn’t weigh all that much, and it kept the load of the pack off his shoulders.

He’d stalled long enough, he told himself. The backpack weighed half of what it had earlier. He’d drunk a great deal of water, and worried a bit that he hadn’t needed to urinate since that morning.

Back out into the blast furnace, quickly through the carefully laid-out rocks to the steps, down, and crashing through the Sumac.

He paused and breathed. The temperature was still surely rising. He turned west, to his left, and found himself facing an impenetrable wall of boulders, with thick plants growing up where the boulders meshed. Creosote mixed with the Laurel Sumac here, Desert Mahogany, sage, rabbit brush. Doug’s first inclination was to favor the south wall, where there was at least an occasional bit of shade, and the stone was black instead of this eye-baking grey that radiated heat back at you. Doug pulled out Sam’s parasol, but wondered if light was coming from around him as much from the sun. It was the kind of hot that reminded Doug of standing too close to an electric heater. He sucked in some more mustard gas and approached the stone.

It jumped out at him. There were four-tar black dots that to his eyes formed an arrow pointing north. He was in sand and an occasional flat boulder buried in the sand, and he went north until he found another pictograph. This one looked like the letter ‘D’ and the numeral ‘6’.

It crossed Doug’s mind that maybe these were some kind of survey markers from a USGS team or a grad project.

Just to the north of it, the two boulders actually sat on top of the ground, perhaps resting on yet other boulders buried beneath the sand. The crevice between the two was choked with grey sage and yet more Sumac. He folded up the umbrella as he peered through the limbs and could see a sandy clearing beyond.

Doug grabbed limbs of the plant and shoved them aside as he eased himself into the brush, finally stepping up on the stone that had a lip to it. He pushed himself up on the lip, slipping past.

It was like falling into an oven. The boulders that now surrounded him both reflected and retained the sun’s rays. Doug gasped and staggered south. He walked up a boulder, could feel the heat through his boots. Ahead was a hint of shade and surprisingly green brush. There was even a struggling Pinyon Pine tucked into the crevices of some rocks.

Doug’s heart pounded in his chest. He looked like an ant running from a kid with a magnifying glass. Up a flat boulder and then down, into a spot that offered a small amount of shade against the mountain. He popped the umbrella and blocked the blistering reflection from the north.

He drank a great deal of the tepid water. Somehow it felt dry on his tongue, fuzzy. Too close, he thought. Too damn close.

There was a pile of rocks next to him, up against a boulder that towered over him. Before he had completely recovered, he realized the pile was not natural. A gray sage plant growing on top of the pile rustled where there couldn’t be a breeze. He moved the plant with his hand, and realized air was being sucked through the pile of stones. Where the sage grew was a large enough hole that he could look in.

There was a cave in there, boulders with a great deal of smaller stones packed around them. Small flies circled in motes of refracted light that made shadows and form on the dusty dirt floor within.

Doug didn’t move for a solid fifteen minutes, until his condition had improved as far as it was going to. Then, he moved along the top of the sizzling boulder, worked his way around, looking for an entrance.

Four black dots on a boulder, in Doug’s mind clearly an arrow, pointing to a hole in tumbled stone. It didn’t appear to be man-made, but Doug stuck his hand down in it. There was no sucking air. Still, it had to be ten degrees cooler in there than where he was.

“Forty, fifty years ago, when I was a kid, they talked about the local Indians, and they were mud people,” Sam had said as he worked on a bottle of Sam Adams. A blizzard of stars swirled above the campfire between them. “Professors would point to the Navajo and Hopi, and say, ‘there were civilizations, and what we got here is cave men, pre-cultural’. They’d point to the rock art, the Yonis, the whole thing, and say, ‘see? Cave Man Art. One step above apes.’ The Indians open some casinos, next thing you know, their ancestors had observatories, their shamans were men of science and culture and their rock scrapings are works of art. Truth is,” and Sam had leaned across the fire. “We don’t know a damn thing about the tribes that were here, or rather, we don’t know the whole truth.We’ve so lionized these Indian cultures, in the process, we’ve dehumanized them as well. God Help them if they should ever fall off that pedestal.”

It had been a terribly cold night. The kids and wife had gone to bed, huddled under blankets on air mattresses in a nearby tent while the hard-cores stayed up to talk, for Old Sam to hold court.

“You don’t believe Doctor Shippeck?” a Confrontationalists had asked, someone that hadn’t hung with their group for long, as Doug recalled.

“I’m not a religious man, I don’t take anything as an article of faith,” Sam had countered. “Take that book written by, damn, what’s her name, about Lucas up there on Laguna Mountain, last of his tribe. He’s talking along about all the rules and regs they all lived under, how you went about cremating and sending a soul onto a better world, how they lived in peace with the Earth, but then he says they’re careful not to let anyone get a sample of their hair or fingernails. Evil medicine men or shamans or whatever, can use that against ‘em. Well, you got people worrying about bad people, that means there’s bad people t’worry about, another opinion out there not buying what you’re tribe’s preachin’. Lucas’s tribe didn’t hesitate t’kill people they thought needed dying, broke their rules, so that means they’re sweating other tribes, other villages that must be operating on other rules.” Sam itched at his white beard. “Suddenly Lucas’s world isn’t so black and white, so peaceful.”

Doug dropped down onto a dusty floor. He crouched a bit as he swept his flashlight around until his eyes adjusted.

It was a natural cave, a boulder up against and partially sitting on another boulder. Beyond this cave, dark and muggy, light filtered through. Doug scanned the ground, the roof, the walls, looking for desert creatures that surely would seek out such a place. No snakes, no lizards, tarantulas, scorpions out in the open. He didn’t smell that distinct odor of dog he whiffed the few times he’d stumbled on coyote dens. He walked carefully toward the end of the cave, toward the light. Around the curvature of the stone, Doug realized the boulder above had been heavily chiseled, making the passage to the next chamber possible.

Here the stone walls were covered with petroglyphs. Doug gasped and smiled as he walked along the panel, almost flat, with another huge boulder sitting on top, giving the cave a cathedral ceiling. Light filtered through a thousand pinpricks of holes from above. Doug squinted, and saw that stone had been stacked where there had been openings between the boulders that made up the chamber’s roof, perhaps once cemented solid with mud. Doug looked around, once again searching for desert residents.

There were pottery shards and dart heads on the ground, in the corners. The neck of an olla sat on a rock shelf further down. Some chinks and quiet corners had some cobwebs, Black Widows spiders, but nothing else. The southern wall here was nothing but stacked stones.

Major human effort. This was not something done on a whim or in a couple days. This was in competition with the Pueblos, those Indians influenced by the Aztecs and Mayans.

It crossed Doug’s mind that he might be the first to have discovered this place. Maybe it was an undisturbed Indian site, something abandoned a hundred years or more ago. Maybe much older. Into the next chamber, Doug crept.

It was a tunnel running perpendicular to the other chambers. He could see the southern end running to a boulder. A gap in the boulder made a sucking sound, and a rust stain ran from the hole all the way to the ground.

Doug rushed to the boulder wall. The lip of the hole was moist, black with bat guano, the water evaporating not two inches from the gap. He could feel the air rushing around him, being sucked into the fissure and cave beyond.

It had to be the hole at the bottom of the Cold Cave. Stepping back, Doug nearly tripped over a large rock, incongruously on the dusty sand floor where nothing else was. The room he stood in, though enclosed on all sides save the north, actually was well lit. Chinks in the rocks and boulders that formed the walls let refracted light in. Not direct sunlight, but radiance reflected back and forth amongst the rocks above before entering here. The only exception to this, Doug noted, was a large mote of sunlight coming from the eastern wall. The wall was a single boulder to chest high, but up to the boulder above that made the roof, the eastern wall was stacked stone, and the stone on the ground matched the only real hole in that wall and the source of the sunlight, with a piece of gray sage flickering back and forth.

Without thinking, Doug dropped his pack, figured out the best way to do what he suddenly was doing, scooped up the two-foot long stone and lifted it. He had to shift his weight, his grasp, and then boosted the stone to the hole and shoved it in.

It felt to Doug like the breeze doubled. Hot air no longer whistled down through the hole Doug had just plugged. The pitch of the howl through the fissure in the stone to the Cold Cave changed, and the air moving from north to south noticeably cooled. Out came his little tool that he placed on the floor. Eighty-five degrees and moist compared to the outside.

A man-made air conditioner, Doug thought. A pre-historic man-made machine. Had the phenomena occurred naturally in nature, the observant Indians merely enhancing it? Even then, that meant they understood the principle of how the vacuum cooled, something he wasn’t even sure he really understood. He looked north, in the other direction of the tunnel he stood in. Boulder against boulder with a boulder stacked on top. It looked like it might go a good twenty feet before ending. He approached the north wall, and noted that the stone ceiling here looked like a boulder from above had been shaved and plugged into the space between the wall boulders. As he closed on the wall, another tunnel appeared that swerved to the left, through chiseled passageways.

Chiseled. Doug stopped and imagined the work necessary to have done this. More petroglyphs. Doug stopped and studied the stick figure that seemed to have a curious frame, stick legs making an inverted ‘V’, a torso that half-way up bent to the left, then straightened again, the stick arms and ‘O’ for a head otherwise normal. There were little somethings at the figure’s neck, head, armpits, crotch.

“You go to Table Mountain, Indian Hill, The Shaman’s Cave,” old Sam had said, taking a cigarette break in front of the stone with the ‘Bug Man’ of Pinto Wash carved on it. “They’ve got a polish, refined quality. You just sense the artist was straining to make sense of the world and express it. Get on this side of the freeway, up in these hills, and this artist,” the old man pointed a finger casually at the rock art in front of him, “you know he was – unhinged, crude, did way too much Datura. This guy, he’s wrestling with his demons.”

These drawings were of the ‘unhinged’ quality, disturbing in their imagery. Doug studied the stick figure. There were other scratchings, geometric drawings, a lizard on its hind legs, but nothing seemed so telling as the bent stick figure.

Doug turned back to the tunnel, which descended down a good five feet.

It was a labyrinth of stone, the underside of the field of boulders, turning in fits and starts until it finally went west. Refracted light filtered down through brush, growing at former entrances or air and light holes. Doug had to keep his head down, most of the tunnel no more than five feet tall, although occasionally he could stand up where boulders’ sides rose. The boulders above absorbed the heat, but it didn’t seem to be able to get down here. Here the air felt moist and yes, cool.

Shelves of stone had the litter of small animals’ nests. Occasionally a lizard would scurry away, Black Widow Spider webbing appeared in some spots, but where were the larger animals? Doug warily looked for sign of coyotes, mountain lions, foxes. There was nothing, no droppings, no prints in the occasional areas of sand, no smell of bigger animals in the circulating air.

Several times he assumed he had left the tunnel, skirting through areas of boulder so naturally linked and huge, that there was no sign of Man’s hand, but then there’d be a pile of stone shoring up a spot, and those ubiquitous tar-black four dots pointing to an unimpressive crevice, where, sure enough, the tunnel would reappear, chiseled rock, stacked stone. In one of these spots, Doug looked to the incredibly bright sky. He could feel the heat outside forcing itself down.

From above, if someone was boulder hopping, this all would be invisible, unthinkable.

He came around a boulder, where he could rise up, the next set of boulders forming a crude cathedral entrance.

The stone walls had been etched, from floor to where the two boulders made an inverted ‘V’ entrance and ceiling, scored into a pattern that looked like a weaved basket.

This is getting creepy, Doug thought.

But what a find. Who would he tell? Who could he tell? Would he tell anyone? Who could he trust?

The moment the Authorities knew of this place, it would be put off-limits, and only the looters would get to it, he reasoned. He had to think this out.

There was a cave past the vaulted entrance, dug out, at least somewhat, to stone below. This room was dark, and far above there might have been bats and the like, but down in the recesses of this cave, there was no one but Doug the Desert Rat as he inched his way into the small grotto, his heart pounding in his chest. Some light fell from the holes and crevices overhead. Still, without his flashlight he could see nothing.

The stone walls had been hacked and chiseled out of one of the boulders to make a chamber twenty yards long, ten yards wide. His flashlight played along the wall. There was a low platform covered with a thick layer of dust, with several small ollas neatly arranged at the back. There were brushes made from some kind of plant fiber, metal etching tools, rock tools mixed with steel knives with the finest layer of rust over them. Glass Mason jars, whose contents had long ago dried away, sat lined up at one end.

It was all intact, as if nothing had been touched since its occupants left, who knows how many years ago. Doug rambled his light around the dark cave, looking for more. The beam fell on a kerosene lantern.

Not so ancient, not some thousand year old place. Doug gingerly picked up the lantern’s handle. Next to where the lantern sat, a metal can with a cap. The lantern’s red paint job was barely scratched. The wick inside looked complete.

How old? He’d remembered his dad having kerosene lanterns for camping, some time in the seventies. But they were old even then. Still, this could be a camp or project from the seventies, someone trying to live like the Indians, assuming some of their tools, while holding on to other modern necessities. The amount of labor, however, suggested a major undertaking. He wondered what resource out there might know about this place, the library, the historical societies. How would he Google this?

“Indians weren’t stupid,” Sam had said many times. “The moment one tribe showed up with bows and arrows, the next tribe got rid of their darts. Spaniards come along with flint and metal, the local red man wasn’t hacking on trees with stone hatchets any more. You could argue that the White Man was quite generous with his technology.”

Doug set the lantern on the platform. Not a table, it was a bit low, and Doug had to sit on his haunches, putting the small flashlight in his mouth, pointing the beam with his teeth and tongue. He fetched the closed can, shook it. There was quite a bit of fluid in it. Gas went bad after a couple of months, how about kerosene?

A sweet oily odor wafted up from the open container. He sniffed it. Alcohol. Doug looked at the container. It looked like the old kerosene cans he’d been told about. With a shrug he poured the liquid into the tank of the lantern, worked the wick up and down a few times, then dug through his pockets until he found the lighter he always carried.

The rusty parts all seemed to function. Doug raised the glass globe and lit the wick.

He wished he’d cleaned the glass beforehand. He found himself pulling a tissue out of one of his pockets and wiping at it, then adjusting the wick down, trying to get rid of the black sooty smoke escaping the lamp’s chimney. Finally satisfied, he now switched his attention back to the room.

The rock walls were covered with murals.

Doug found himself slowly making a circle, holding the lamp up and staring where the yellowish light was the brightest, trying to take everything in. The colors looked so wet, Doug reached out and touched one red figure. Dry, of course. There were familiar creatures, black and red stick figures, some things that looked like the Bug Man of Pinto Wash, but there did seem to be periods, different styles, artists, or perhaps different times. There were crude figures that looked stone-age, then characters and creatures that reminded Doug of the Aztecs and Toltecs, other marks that looked to his untrained eyes like Chinese calligraphy. The eras seemed to progress from right to left across the walls, the styles blending until you came over the platform.

Above the platform, five stick figures, life-size, each one a different color. The first one on the right was black, with black rays coming off the body, its arms raised out to its sides. Its torso was made up of two lines, bulging out as it rose from the legs to the arms, giving it some girth. The second one was dark rust color, a hue that Doug had never seen on a pictograph figure before. A sun hung above it, and once again, the curious little marks at the neck, arm pits, crotch appeared. It too had the two-line torso. The third figure, a tan red, still had the small marks, the rays coming off it again, and the sun shining down, but now it had was a single line for the torso. The fourth figure, burgundy red, was still covered with the small tick marks, a single line torso, sun overhead, but its head was made from dashes instead of a solid lines, the blanks filled in with a white paint. The combination made it appear as if the head was dissolving.

Doug stared at this fourth figure and though not comprehending it any better than the others, it sent a chill through him.

The fifth figure was a dark color. At first Doug thought it was black, but he looked closer, and it was a purplish blue. The sun was gone, the body was surrounded by white flecks Around it, waves radiated off its form.

This kept getting bigger and bigger. The place had been occupied recently, within, lets say, the last fifty years. The mural, though, with its many styles of art, suggested something stretching out over eons. Could it be that the cave and tunnels he stood in had been actively lived in by Indians over the last thousand years? Cities in Mexico, cliff dwellings in Arizona and New Mexico hadn’t been lived in for such long stretches. Doug stared for a long time at the images, wondering what the paints were made of, why these characters here were so large, why some had two lines for the torso but the last ones had only one. Absently he wiped at something tickling the hairs of his neck.

The tickle had legs and a simple swipe did not dislodge it. He pinched at it and pulled it from his throat.

Though its bulbous gray butt was flat and shriveled, the tick was as big as a dime.

“Wherever man settles, you’ll find the filthy bloodsuckers,” Sam had said inside the ruins of an old line shack made of stone and cement, stacked against another boulder. Doug had leapt back when he moved a tattered mattress from a corner, only to have a tick scramble up out of its fluff. “Ticks, flees, mites, bed bugs, appropriate company for Western Man.”

With a spastic twist Doug crushed the creature, wiped at himself, his air, his clothes. The lantern jerked around until he finally set it roughly down on the platform, and he danced some more until he was satisfied. His breathe shivered as he once again reached for the lantern. Just as his fingers touched the handle the room reverberated with an otherworldly ‘beep’.

Doug jerked his hand away from the handle, hesitated, then swung around to look behind him. His monstrous shadow shimmered oily orange against the back mural. It hid more than the lantern showed. Doug reached back and grabbed the lamp.

What had it been? The mechanical sound had echoed off the walls of the cave with a emotionless whirr. It was only now that he listened so intently that Doug realized how deathly silent it was in this cave, a mound of stones buried in the earth of a desert breathless with heat, the dry air unstirred by a breeze.

Doug jerked his light source around, to look deeper into the cave.

There were five bed sites neatly lined up against the back wall, five sets of gray wool blankets laid out, as if to mark someone’s sleeping territory, rolled-up sleeping bags at the center of the blankets, pillows of different colors and shapes against the stone wall.

Just as Doug started leaning toward the beds, it came again, the unnatural short drone of a beep. Doug snapped up and spun around. It had come from behind him, he was sure of that. For a moment the light shining from the entrance blinded him.

Unearthly in its mechanical drone, the buzz came from somewhere nearby. The desert rat’s heart raced until he begrudgingly started to breathe hard.

Was it coming from outside? Sunlight fell through a break in the boulders to the west of the tunnel that had brought him to the vestibule of the cave. Something from above? Something in all that heat? Even as his breath became more ragged, Doug tried to be silent as he tiptoed to the entrance. He put the lantern down, calculated how he’d do it, then stuck his head out and pulled it in just as quickly.

He’d seen nothing. He listened some more. Still nothing. He eased out of the cave, looking west, looking into and up at the sunlight.

The sun did not fall directly into the tunnel, but refracted off several tumbled boulders to where he stood. Doug could see where he could get up to the top of the boulders from here. Despite his tattered breathe, he felt more calm, only a slight shiver in his hands as he pulled out his GPS. He clicked it on, marveled at how he got a signal between the boulders.

“YOU HAVE ARRIVED”

Doug frowned at the message. Arrived where? He punched at the buttons until he saw the four-letter name he’d given the marker. BBSP: Boulder Bowl Spring. It had been the coordinates he’d approximated for where he thought the water was. He looked up anew through the stones toward the sunlight and the top of the boulders.

The beep was so close it was upon him. Doug swung hard around, crouched. It had been directly behind him, eternally behind him. Now he shivered with the adrenalin, fight or flight, only there was no where to run and nothing to fight. ‘War of the Worlds’, the ‘X Files’, ‘Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders’ all shot through his mind. He stared at every corner, his hands balling up and relaxing. What was it? Why would it not just attack and be done with it?

Even with gasps of fear and quaking limbs, a calmer thought crossed his mind. He hesitated, then pulled his backpack off. There was a small pouch in the top flap held tight with Velcro. It took him longer than usual to get it open. Finally it ripped apart. Out fell his cell phone in its zipped shut plastic bag. As he picked it up, it let out the now familiar beep.

“Son-of-a-bitch.” Doug’s voice came out threadbare. He popped it open. The screen read: “No Service Available’.

“No Shit Sherlock.”

He wondered what he’d bounced against to turn it on. It had happened before, nothing new under the sun. Now he sighed out, hesitated, then fiddled with the Simon-Says options, until he raised the phone and hit the ‘Take Photo’ button.

“What the hell are you going to do with a camera phone?” Sam had asked. “The quality is crap and most the time you’re nowhere near a cell out here.”

“Wife bought it for me,” Doug had answered as he’d taken a picture of the sunrise.

Sam had nodded sagely as he watched Doug fiddle with the device some more before speaking again.

“You’re wife doesn’t understand you, does she?”

“Not a wit,” Doug replied.

But now he looked anew at the little gadget, and marched purposely back into the cave.

He aimed it at the back mural, pushed the ‘take photo’ button, then grimaced at the results and deleted it. The lantern got cranked up to its maximum. Having sat and heated up, the fuel burned clean and bright now. He tried holding the lamp in one hand, the camera in the other, then found himself striking odd poses to get the light right on the uneven rock surface. He took a shot of each of the walls, the five large figures getting their own frame, the bed spreads, which he now noticed there were cigar boxes at the head of them.

Something tickled the leg hairs just above his boots. He looked down and in the light of the lantern he could see another damn tick. He spastically scraped the other boot across his leg, crushing the offensive creature off, only to see another one on the boot doing the killing.

“That’s it, we’re out’a here,” Doug proclaimed out loud as he ran to the entrance of the cave and his backpack. He smacked at his clothes and hair, paroxysmal in his motions, even as he twisted the knob of the lantern and squelched the flame within. The lantern now sat at the entrance of the cave.

How did the Indians deal with bugs in their dwellings? Did they just live with them. Even as Doug kept spanking himself, he recalled reading something about them burning fires with herbs and smoky wood to chase chiggers and the like out of their living spaces when they would return to them after migrating from the desert or the mountains.

That’s what he would do, Doug decided, when he returned with Sam. He’d make a point to find out how the Indians did it. He contemplated just bringing a flea bomb like you could use for infected carpeting, but decided against it. It would take a day to clear out, or they’d have to wear gas masks. Whatever he did, it mustn’t damage this place.

Doug thought about that some more. This just kept getting bigger and bigger. Boulders had been leveraged, rocks hewed. He’d seen the cliff dwellings in Arizona, in New Mexico, and this was just as much effort.

They were different though. How were they different? Doug tried to contrast the two, and decided, where the pueblos he’d seen had been geared for general use, for large numbers of family, this place was hidden away, for a specific purpose, for a very few. This was an intimate operation.

Outside the cave, in the diffused light, Doug caught his breathe and drank a great deal of water. He looked back the way he’d come through the tunnel. If he went back, would he still paint the picture he wanted to do? That was still hours off, though. What else was there to do?

He remembered his GPS. ARRIVED.

The water he sought was somewhere nearby. A new smile came to his face as he glanced up through the boulders toward the sun.

He went over himself, took one more look into the cave as he pulled on his backpack, then started to climb up through the boulders.

The fit was tight. At one point he pulled off his backpack and shoved it ahead of himself. There were smaller boulders wedged into the crevice that he crawled over and under and switch-backed up until he broke out into direct sunlight.

The oppressive heat returned. He sucked at the mustard-gas air, once again paced himself until he made it to the top of a boulder.

It too had boulders sitting on top of it, but there was a crevice pass to the south. He figured at this point he was walking on top of the boulder that made up one side of the cave he’d found, He adjusted the pack on his back.

The boulders opened up, and he knew he was at the base of the boulder bowl. To the west was where he and Sam had looked down from the day before. Three Pinyon pines cropped up out of stone somewhere down and below him. Leaves shimmered in a barely there breeze on Cottonwoods directly across from him, almost hidden in the boulders they nestled between.

He took several steps further out onto the boulder he was on. Below him, lush green, there was a trickle of water descending out-of-sight below him. He pushed out closer to the edge until he saw what he thought might be the edge of a standing pool of water.

He was running out of boulder. He looked down at the stone and did a double-take. Squarely in front of him was four tar-black dots, pointing straight out past the rock.

“You gotta be kidding,” Doug said out loud, but did stretch out somewhat, setting a hand out before him to steady himself.

Miscalculation, optical illusion, the palm of his hand never touched anything. The backpack shifted forward, and Doug went off the side of the boulder.

The ancient machine ground into motion. It did not live, it had no sense of its own existence. Like any machine fashioned by man, it only did what it was designed to do.