Wolf had got to know Camellia better on the long drive down. She was a natural optimist, but he thought the phone call from her ex had let some of the air out of her balloon.
The further he’d driven, the more her buoyancy had returned, though. She walked briskly, with a bounce in her step. He liked her. It felt good being around her.
The landscape held more boulders than trees. Rock formations that protruded from shrub-scattered patches of all but barren ground seemed to rise higher the farther they hiked. They’d passed a fork in the trail, where the other way had veered downhill. Their route went up. There was a water spigot right at the fork, the last one before their site, according to the colorful map.
The air was hot and dry, and it smelled different than the air back home. Something inside Wolf drank it in, and he wondered if his lungs remembered it from when he’d been a baby. It feltthat way. There was a sense of relief, like a weight rising from him. What was that?
Maybe it was because his ancestors had come from here.
“Whoa,” Camellia said. She’d stopped in the trail. He walked up beside her and stopped as well.
They were at the top of a cliff, with a sheer drop to the river far below. Across from them stood an equally high cliff. The river had split the stone, and its face was an earth-tone rainbow, with stripes of red and brown and black and tan, and bits that sparkled when viewed from certain angles.
Camellia moved closer to him and clasped his upper arm in her hand. “This is just…wow. How far down is the river, do you think?”
“A thousand feet?”
“Look how small those people are!” She pointed.
Far below, at a spot where a strand split off from the river, a group of people had gathered. One of them held something that wafted smoke.
“It’s some kind of ceremony,” Camellia whispered. “She looks Native.” And just as she said it, the woman far below paused and looked up, right at Wolf.
He raised his hand, and she raised hers back.
And then she bent near the water’s edge and the smoke stopped. When she rose, everyone in the group hugged her and each other. Then they got into some waiting canoes and floated around the bend into the faster moving waters.
He watched them until the last canoe was out of sight.
Camellia squeezed his arm. “Wolf, this was a really good sign.”
“Maybe it was,” he said. Then he turned her way “But I don’t want to camp up here. What do you say we look for a site down below, near the river?”
She pulled out her phone, tapped it several times, and shook her head. “No signal. I can’t book a different site, or even see which ones are taken.”
“If somebody shows up, we’ll just say we read our map wrong, apologize, and move on,” he said. “No harm done. I really want to go down there—near where those folks were. Let’s head back to the split and take the righthand fork this time.”
“You got it.” She reached for the bigger bag. “My turn to carry this for a while. Especially since we’re headingdownhill.” She slung it over her shoulder and trudged off ahead of him.
Willow, Big Bend National Park
Willow had braided sage and sweet grass into a thick bunch that produced ribbons of fragrant smoke when it burned. She’d held it up in honor of her ancestors, as she whispered a plea for their help in finding out what had happened to her brother. As the smoke rose and twisted, she turned to each of the four winds, repeating her gestures and words.
The air had been still, but a brisk gust swept down the cliff faces and rode the river, buffeting them all. She was facing west, lifting her gaze and her smudge bundle as one.
At the top of a cliff stood a man. He had long black hair, blown by the wind, very much like her own. He raised a hand. She started to raise hers, then a burst of wind threw red dust into her eyes, and she had to squeeze them tight and cover her face. She knelt to extinguish the burning smudge and splashed some river water into her eyes to rinse the grit away.
When she looked again, the light had shifted, and man was no longer in her sight.
“I think my brothermustbe dead,” she whispered so softly only Drew could hear.
“Why?” Drew whispered back, her blue eyes wide and round.
Drew had been sticking super close to Willow since she’d learned about her lost sibling. Willow knew her littlest cousin was trying to play big sister, and it touched her. “I think I just saw his spirit.”
Drew frowned. “You mean that guy who was standing up on the cliff?”
“You saw him, too?” Willow asked.
