Noctuidae Read Free

traversed, Sue-Min damping her emotions down just short of panic. Ron and Pete? If they were worried, she couldn’t tell. They all three tramped along, the guys offering random inanities —At least the weather’s good. —I think we’re getting close . . . But mostly in silence.
    They’d just come onto a stretch of bare rock strewn with stones when Sue-Min concluded to call for a retreat, but before she could speak up Pete called out —Look at this! It’s some kind of pattern!
    His words still in her ears, she saw it too, gray stones around softball size set in wandering arcs and arabesques on the granite ground. Several closed cells remained intact though the arms of their neighbors disintegrated at inconsistent lengths. Ron shook his head. —Somebody built this—but who?
    Pete’s reply struck Sue-Min as ridiculous, asinine —Maybe it was the rancher’s kids.
    Ron swept three stones over soccer style with the side of his foot, bent to inspect them. —No lichen on their undersides, only above. They’ve been here a long, long time.
    Pete’s next reply seemed even more out of whack than his first —Maybe it was a Pueblo.
    Sue-Min wanted so bad to get up in his face and yell These aren’t walls! Where’s the rest of the stone then? If this is a dissipated site where is the rest of the stone? Yes, Ancestral Puebloans, Mimbres, or some backwoods branch of the Mogollon had inhabited this canyon, though not right here, not like this. Walter Hough had marked and mapped sites up and down the Blue back before World War I, and Steve Swanson had revisited the area almost a hundred years later. She knew as much, had met Swanson more than once, could share that information, but she had no desire to engage the creeper, let alone antagonize him. Nor to drag things out. She had his number and was maintaining the wall of chill. Measured, measured. Weighed. She spoke as little as she could, kept interaction at the barest min.
    He must’ve read something in her gaze though, fixed his own eyes on her expectantly and tilted his head an inch to the left, and after long enough she’d said nothing, gave the least of shrugs, staring at her still. For once Ron came to her aid.
    —Hey, look, there’s a gap ahead. He pointed beyond their present patch of patterned mystery stones, between the scrub oaks and scraggly pines. Sue-Min and Pete aligned their eyes to his extended finger’s course, saw through the dregs of forest to what seemed an empty span. At least a place with no visible trees, little scrub, no upthrust rocks. . . A shadowed background. Either a seriously major meadow ahead, or Blossom Creek Canyon. Some damn canyon anyway. . .
    If it was Blossom Creek Canyon then by dropping into it and following its route they should come around and out again onto the Blue—south of the ranch and the ends of all roads, bypass the former altogether.
    They funneled together through the gap, Ron taking the lead and never turning back. Once past the pines and onto a stretch of scattered scrub and grass they saw the gash in the earth from some way off. The canyon. A canyon at least. Pete shot forward toward that abyss and almost at once fell hard on his forearms with a rough pained grunt, his foot hooked on some snag invisible in the high grass. He swore without imagination as Ron shuffled up, paying extra attention to his own footing beneath the desiccated thin blades. Pete pushed awkwardly to hands and knees and waved Ron off, palms out —I’m okay, I’m okay. . .
    Sue-Min saw smears of blood on both his palms.
    Ron offered a similar gesture in response, though with palms angled down and presumably unbloodied. —Okay, okay, just checkin’ bro.
    Pete turned and staggered into the treeless span. Ron followed after a backward look and a shrug toward Sue-Min. She hitched her pack back up and followed.
    A few minutes later they clumped together to a halt at the edge of a canyon. Blossom Creek Canyon they hoped. If the ranchers spoke