Kitt Peak Read Free Page B

by the beginnings of Texas desert. This was a place he knew. A mere two hundred miles west lay Abilene, and another hundred miles to the south and west of that lay Fort Davis, which had been his home in the Army for so long.
    He found himself sitting straighter, clearing the smudged window so he could look out. Already, west of Fort Worth, the trees were changing to desert oak, cottonwood, and mesquite brush. Winter had been left behind. Remembrance, and longing, flooded through him, and it occurred to him just how much he had missed this landscape. This land was like his soul, sparse and clean, and all the clutter of the East had only contributed to the crowding of his mind and the softening of his spirit. It was as if a spigot had been opened, letting out all the tarnish that had built up in him over the past five years, leaving only cold steel behind. He felt, if not young, then at least himself again.
    He was home.
    With a satisfied sigh, he turned away from the window and pulled out another copy of the Strand magazine from his bag. It was a story he had read many times before, the first installment of "The Hound of the Baskervilles," but he didn't care.
    In the next hours, as light turned brighter with noon and then dimmer with evening, obliging him to hold the pages of the magazine to the window as he read, he was lost in a world that he loved and knew, and the words steel yourself did not enter his mind, because there was no need.

Chapter Four
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    In the high mountain, the one known as Oto A-Pe, the sacred mountain, the eagle waited.
    The eagle was patient. Its eyes were sharp, and its mind clear. The eagle saw all from its perch, and all that it saw, it ruled.
    The eagle was a god.
    And the people worshipped it. And feared it, for the eagle was a vengeful god, one to take measures against those who invited its wrath.
    And the people below, the Tohono O'otam, whom the white man called the Papagos, had angered the eagle.
    The Tohono O'otam were a peaceful people, but this did not concern the eagle. It did not care that they were at peace with themselves. The white man preyed on them, as did the Spanish before them. The eagle cared little for the gifts they left for it, the coiled baskets of devil's claw and yucca sewn over bear grass, the horsehair miniatures they left as tokens at the foot of its perch. The food they left, from their meager cultivation of the flood plains below, it ate but did not taste. For the eagle had little but derision for the Tohono O'otam, whom it considered weak, and it had only anger for them in its heart.
    They had tried to talk with the eagle, to assuage it, but this was to no avail. It was when the eagle had clawed their headman, the Keeper of the Smoke, who had come to speak with it, and whose body it had hurled to the rocks below for the council of old men to see, that the Tohono O'otam knew that its wrath was great, and that its anger for them was vast. It was then that it had swooped down on them, and bloodied one of their squaws in the night as she slept, and gave them the sign that it would only be assuaged if this sacrifice was brought to it at each sign of the moon. In their dreams, the eagle knew that they saw what it wanted to curb its wrath. And though there was much sad singing in the reservation below, and many tears, this is what they gave the eagle.
    Tonight, on the night when the moon disappeared from the sky, they would give it to him again.
    The eagle saw them, with its sharp eyes, by the light of many sharp stars, climbing the rocks below to leave what it demanded at the foot of its perch. Even now they moaned and sang. The new Keeper of the Smoke led them, declaiming the visions he had, and behind him the old women circled the young squaw they would leave for the eagle. She was filled with dreams and smoke, the eagle saw. It wondered if they had given her white man's whiskey, for she stumbled in their midst, and spoke loudly, and even laughed. She did not act as she