Novel "Tinaja", Ch. 1
Tinaja
Chapter 1
A single swallow of water swirled in my bottle, and I was eight miles from my car.
To those who don’t know the desert, eight miles may not seem all that far. A healthy man can walk it in two hours, three at the most. But when the sun is directly overhead, and it’s over a hundred degrees, and the humidity is about five percent, and you’re out of water, it’s very bad news.
So far, I seemed to be alert enough. But the dusty dryness in the eyes had begun, along with the headache and the weakness in my legs. I hadn’t urinated today. In a little while, I guessed, I’d develop cotton mouth as the saliva glands packed it in. Later, the cramps and delirium would begin, and my judgment would fail. I would hallucinate, I would see water, and familiar people and places. So the survival courses and books had taught me.
The eight miles might as well have been eight hundred. I knew this, and panic hovered just at the edge of my consciousness, waiting for an opportunity to rush in and take charge.
Every year, hundreds of people die in the desert. Most are Mexican border crossers, unfamiliar with the desert’s subtle traps. Some were those weekend hikers who stubbornly refused to learn. But I’d worked out here for fifteen years, and I knew better. With my artist’s tools, GPS, and eight quart bottles of water, I’d walked into the hills on a semicircular route calculated to bring me back to the road after two days.
At the end of the first day, while searching for a spot to camp, a stone had come loose and thrown me headfirst down a rocky slope. My backpack had taken the brunt of it, and I struggled to my feet, congratulating myself on making the best of a bad fall. But water began to pour from a rent in the bottom of my pack. It ran down my pants and soaked into my shoes and the gravel at my feet. I tore open the pack, only to see that four of my five remaining quarts of water had burst. The empty bottles, ironically, were unharmed.
Then I made my second mistake. Once I discovered that the water was missing, I should have walked back through the night, avoiding the day’s heat. But exhaustion urged me to rest awhile instead, and I slept through the night. The desert does not easily forgive a mistake, even a trivial one. It never forgives two.
Just before dawn, I headed back, trying to put as many miles on as possible before the day’s heat set in. Now it was ten o”clock and hot, and I’d used most of my remaining water. While I still had a clear head, I sat on a rock and assessed my situation. Behind me was the range of mountains I’d planned to visit, with a central canyon rich in plant and animal life, but no water that I knew of. Pack rats made their own water when they digested their food, but the mule deer, coyotes, and rabbits had to get it somewhere. I could gamble on tracking the animals to their water source, or on finding a low spot and digging. But that was foolish; a few hours from now, I wouldn’t have the strength or will to do those things.
I could find shelter from the sun and hunker down until dark. But that was ten hours from now. And I’d still have the eight miles to walk, with no moon to help.
There was nothing to do but push on and hope for the best. Perhaps I might encounter another hiker, a rancher on horseback, a low-flying aircraft, or even a search party looking for another lost person. These were unlikely, but at the worst I could improve the chances of my body being found. I took the GPS receiver from my pocket and consulted the compass embedded in the panel. Once I’d fixed on a pair of mountain peaks on the horizon, I began walking due west toward them.
Walking was easier now that I was out of the mountains. The thick scrub was behind me, and only sparse sagebrush struggled to survive on the sun-hardened caliche. The only sound was the wind. Animals and birds had more sense than to be out here, except for a lone hawk that circled, keeping up with me. I guessed that she was waiting for me to flush a packrat, or a lizard, or with luck, a rabbit. Soon, I knew, this hawk would be joined by vultures, who would patiently wait until I stopped moving.
I limped on tired feet until I realized that I’d been staring at the ground for some time. I looked up and saw that I’d wandered off course, heading almost straight north. I turned west again, too abruptly, and fell heavily on my side. I rested on my hands and knees for a moment, recovered my breath, and struggled painfully to my feet. I trudged on, though the cramps were beginning. Lifting my feet became an effort. Putting them down again was agony. For that matter, breathing through my tormented throat was a painful, if necessary, chore. I had to take care not to move my head too quickly, or I’d get dizzy and fall again.
I checked the bottle. The half-inch of water still swirled. As long as there was water left, hope remained. Now that hope was, in fact, gone, I took the cap off and swallowed the last of the water in two gulps. It was soaked up by the parched tissues of mouth and lips, hardly reaching my throat at all.
The sun itched and burned on my forehead. When I tried to adjust my hat to cover it, the back of my neck sizzled instead. While engaged in this task, I fell over a knee-high bush.
I lay on my back, staring up into the sun. It was brighter than in my native Illinois, brightening as it sucked the spirit from me. By the time it was satiated, I’d be a dried husk and scattered bones.
Overhead, the hawk crossed the sun’s disk and startled me. Frightened by my predicament, I came alert, flipping myself on my stomach. The sun was still before me, a glowing ball burned onto my retina. It would take a minute for my vision to return. Until then, I could justify resting on the hot ground.
As the sun’s image faded, a dark figure appeared within it. It was a woman, standing on a rocky shelf a half-mile away, looking in my direction. I waved and tried to shout, but no sound came out.
It didn’t matter. She’d seen me and was coming my way. I let myself sag back to the ground and waited. I hoped that she wasn’t a hallucination, but this was exactly the sort of vision that others rescued from the desert had described.
But she wasn’t. She used a twist of white cloth to wring precious water onto my face and into my mouth. She wore a tunic and skirt of rough weave decorated with colored designs, and her eyes were black pits in the midday sun. Her long black hair touched my face as she shifted to shield my eyes from the sun.
I clutched at the wet cloth, but she pulled it away. “Not too much at one time, stupid man,” she said in a soft accent. “Let’s get you to shelter.”
I was able to stagger, steered by the woman and sometimes supported by her, until we reached a pile of huge boulders that stood alone in the desert, piled carelessly together as if dumped there during some ancient make-work project. She led me through a gap into a dark little space, where I slumped against the stone walls.
Blessed shade! The sun no longer chewed at my skin. The hard stone was cool against my arm, and I twisted to hold my cheek against it. A hand tried to pry my face from the stone, and I resisted.
“Hold still, stupid man,” said a soft female voice. Water, cool water, holy water, drizzled onto my face and into my mouth. She took the bowl away and sat against the opposite wall of the little chamber, watching me.
“More water?” Speaking was an effort. My throat was still dirty and dry.
“In a few minutes, if you can hold down what you just drank.”
The Indian woman sat with her back against the stone, watching me with dark eyes. The clay bowl sat on the ground by her hips, with a clean white cloth draped over the side. After a few minutes, I gestured at the bowl. She passed it over, and I drank until I’d drained it all.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “I might have died out there.”
She continued to watch me over the next two or three hours as the water made its way into my tissues and the strength returned to my limbs. The faintest of smiles played in her eyes, and I found myself watching her mouth, the fleshy delicacy of her lips, and the smooth skin of her face. Her hair fell over her shoulders and below her breasts. Around her neck and wrists she wore jewelry of turquoise, silver, and obsidian, in a style I recognized.
“That jewelry was made by Michael Big Hawk, wasn’t it?” My voice seemed to be working again, albeit hoarsely.
She continued to watch me.
“That would make you Lagalero, right?”
She stood up, possibly offended by my boldness, and crouched through a passage on the other side of the little chamber, taking the bowl with her. She came back a moment later, having filled it, and left again. I scooped water to my mouth. It was turbid with mud, and tiny white things swam in it, but it tasted better than a frosty beer in an Illinois summer day. I tried once to stand up, and decided I should stay on the ground longer.
The woman came back with an armload of wood and began stacking it in a gap in the rocks. By way of conversation, I said, “Why do we need a fire? Are you cold?”
She said, “You will be, when it’s dark.”
“Can I have more water?”
She took the bowl and descended into the rocks, following a natural passage that spiraled down, out of sight. When she came back, I’d braced my back against the rock and fished some power bars from my pack.
She left the water within reach and I offered her a power bar. She took it and resumed her seat, nibbling at the bar, watching me. Her lips moved sensuously as she ate. I watched with an artist’s interest the fall of the hair, the high cheekbones, the clear bronze skin, and a hundred other details. She sat against the rock, one knee drawn up, and a wrist draped over it.
“Do you mind if I sketch you?” When she made no answer, I drew my sketchbook from my pack and slid it from its protective case, along with a couple of pencils. She was the perfect model, gazing directly into my eyes, scarcely moving while I worked. She scratched an ankle at one point, but both her hand and leg returned to her original pose.
The light began to fail. I thought about getting to my car. The prospect of sleeping in my own bed almost led me to make another wrong decision. But my head still ached and my legs were definitely not ready to carry me to the road. I would be spending the night here. I slid the sketchbook back into its case and thanked her.
“Do you live around here? Don’t you have to get home?”
“You should fill your water bottles,” she said.
Staggering and giddy, I got to my feet and picked up my pack. She led me down the passage. I could feel the moisture in the air before I saw the water. At the bottom of the rocky maze was a pool of water six feet across, rainfall trapped in a sheltered cavity. The desert people called it a tinaja. I dipped each of the five unbroken bottles below the surface and put them in the pack and in the outside pockets.
When I hoisted the heavy pack to my shoulder, the woman had gone. I peered down another couple of passages, and out across the darkening desert in all directions, but she was not in sight. For a moment I felt a twinge of fear. Perhaps this had all been a hallucination and I would wake to find myself parched on the daytime desert where I’d last fallen. Perhaps I might not wake at all.
I waited in the little space for her to return. The desert, which had been quiet but for the soughing of the wind, started to sound with the songs of coyotes and the rushing and chirp of insects. Before the sky turned pitch black, I started a fire and got out my sleeping bag.
I woke as the sky reached a mid-violet color, and took a long drink of water. I would drink a couple of quarts before beginning my walk, to get my kidneys working again and rehydrate myself before the last stretch to my car.
While gathering my things, I pulled the sketchbook from my pack and leafed through to the page I’d drawn on last.
It was blank. The shock left a pit in my belly, and a little spin of disorientation. How odd! Had the woman really existed? Had she been only a figment of my delirium, and I would awake in the baking afternoon desert after all? Was she some spirit that rescued lost travelers? I’d heard enough Indian tales and legend, plus some first-hand accounts, that I wasn’t ready to dismiss all of the lore. But the water in my bottles was real enough. So were the indentations made by her buttocks and heels where she had sat in the sand. The crumpled power bar wrapper lay on the ground where she’d dropped it.
I held up the notebook so the light struck the first blank page at an angle, and there were indentations from some of my heavier pencil strokes. Examining more carefully, I saw that the last page had been torn out.
Whatever her reason for tearing out the page, it wasn’t going to work. I’d been an artist all my life, and I’d sprung from my mother’s womb fully equipped with an eidetic memory. What my mind couldn’t remember, my fingers would recall. I sat down against the rock, facing the spot where she’d sat the night before, and set to work. In two hours, I’d recreated the sketch from memory. I knew it would be as accurate as if she were still there, resting against the rock wall.
Then I went a step further and sketched the jewelry she’d been wearing. Someday, I might find this woman who’d saved my life. I didn’t know her name. For that matter, she didn’t know mine.
[The End]
Chapter 1
A single swallow of water swirled in my bottle, and I was eight miles from my car.
To those who don’t know the desert, eight miles may not seem all that far. A healthy man can walk it in two hours, three at the most. But when the sun is directly overhead, and it’s over a hundred degrees, and the humidity is about five percent, and you’re out of water, it’s very bad news.
So far, I seemed to be alert enough. But the dusty dryness in the eyes had begun, along with the headache and the weakness in my legs. I hadn’t urinated today. In a little while, I guessed, I’d develop cotton mouth as the saliva glands packed it in. Later, the cramps and delirium would begin, and my judgment would fail. I would hallucinate, I would see water, and familiar people and places. So the survival courses and books had taught me.
The eight miles might as well have been eight hundred. I knew this, and panic hovered just at the edge of my consciousness, waiting for an opportunity to rush in and take charge.
Every year, hundreds of people die in the desert. Most are Mexican border crossers, unfamiliar with the desert’s subtle traps. Some were those weekend hikers who stubbornly refused to learn. But I’d worked out here for fifteen years, and I knew better. With my artist’s tools, GPS, and eight quart bottles of water, I’d walked into the hills on a semicircular route calculated to bring me back to the road after two days.
At the end of the first day, while searching for a spot to camp, a stone had come loose and thrown me headfirst down a rocky slope. My backpack had taken the brunt of it, and I struggled to my feet, congratulating myself on making the best of a bad fall. But water began to pour from a rent in the bottom of my pack. It ran down my pants and soaked into my shoes and the gravel at my feet. I tore open the pack, only to see that four of my five remaining quarts of water had burst. The empty bottles, ironically, were unharmed.
Then I made my second mistake. Once I discovered that the water was missing, I should have walked back through the night, avoiding the day’s heat. But exhaustion urged me to rest awhile instead, and I slept through the night. The desert does not easily forgive a mistake, even a trivial one. It never forgives two.
Just before dawn, I headed back, trying to put as many miles on as possible before the day’s heat set in. Now it was ten o”clock and hot, and I’d used most of my remaining water. While I still had a clear head, I sat on a rock and assessed my situation. Behind me was the range of mountains I’d planned to visit, with a central canyon rich in plant and animal life, but no water that I knew of. Pack rats made their own water when they digested their food, but the mule deer, coyotes, and rabbits had to get it somewhere. I could gamble on tracking the animals to their water source, or on finding a low spot and digging. But that was foolish; a few hours from now, I wouldn’t have the strength or will to do those things.
I could find shelter from the sun and hunker down until dark. But that was ten hours from now. And I’d still have the eight miles to walk, with no moon to help.
There was nothing to do but push on and hope for the best. Perhaps I might encounter another hiker, a rancher on horseback, a low-flying aircraft, or even a search party looking for another lost person. These were unlikely, but at the worst I could improve the chances of my body being found. I took the GPS receiver from my pocket and consulted the compass embedded in the panel. Once I’d fixed on a pair of mountain peaks on the horizon, I began walking due west toward them.
Walking was easier now that I was out of the mountains. The thick scrub was behind me, and only sparse sagebrush struggled to survive on the sun-hardened caliche. The only sound was the wind. Animals and birds had more sense than to be out here, except for a lone hawk that circled, keeping up with me. I guessed that she was waiting for me to flush a packrat, or a lizard, or with luck, a rabbit. Soon, I knew, this hawk would be joined by vultures, who would patiently wait until I stopped moving.
I limped on tired feet until I realized that I’d been staring at the ground for some time. I looked up and saw that I’d wandered off course, heading almost straight north. I turned west again, too abruptly, and fell heavily on my side. I rested on my hands and knees for a moment, recovered my breath, and struggled painfully to my feet. I trudged on, though the cramps were beginning. Lifting my feet became an effort. Putting them down again was agony. For that matter, breathing through my tormented throat was a painful, if necessary, chore. I had to take care not to move my head too quickly, or I’d get dizzy and fall again.
I checked the bottle. The half-inch of water still swirled. As long as there was water left, hope remained. Now that hope was, in fact, gone, I took the cap off and swallowed the last of the water in two gulps. It was soaked up by the parched tissues of mouth and lips, hardly reaching my throat at all.
The sun itched and burned on my forehead. When I tried to adjust my hat to cover it, the back of my neck sizzled instead. While engaged in this task, I fell over a knee-high bush.
I lay on my back, staring up into the sun. It was brighter than in my native Illinois, brightening as it sucked the spirit from me. By the time it was satiated, I’d be a dried husk and scattered bones.
Overhead, the hawk crossed the sun’s disk and startled me. Frightened by my predicament, I came alert, flipping myself on my stomach. The sun was still before me, a glowing ball burned onto my retina. It would take a minute for my vision to return. Until then, I could justify resting on the hot ground.
As the sun’s image faded, a dark figure appeared within it. It was a woman, standing on a rocky shelf a half-mile away, looking in my direction. I waved and tried to shout, but no sound came out.
It didn’t matter. She’d seen me and was coming my way. I let myself sag back to the ground and waited. I hoped that she wasn’t a hallucination, but this was exactly the sort of vision that others rescued from the desert had described.
But she wasn’t. She used a twist of white cloth to wring precious water onto my face and into my mouth. She wore a tunic and skirt of rough weave decorated with colored designs, and her eyes were black pits in the midday sun. Her long black hair touched my face as she shifted to shield my eyes from the sun.
I clutched at the wet cloth, but she pulled it away. “Not too much at one time, stupid man,” she said in a soft accent. “Let’s get you to shelter.”
I was able to stagger, steered by the woman and sometimes supported by her, until we reached a pile of huge boulders that stood alone in the desert, piled carelessly together as if dumped there during some ancient make-work project. She led me through a gap into a dark little space, where I slumped against the stone walls.
Blessed shade! The sun no longer chewed at my skin. The hard stone was cool against my arm, and I twisted to hold my cheek against it. A hand tried to pry my face from the stone, and I resisted.
“Hold still, stupid man,” said a soft female voice. Water, cool water, holy water, drizzled onto my face and into my mouth. She took the bowl away and sat against the opposite wall of the little chamber, watching me.
“More water?” Speaking was an effort. My throat was still dirty and dry.
“In a few minutes, if you can hold down what you just drank.”
The Indian woman sat with her back against the stone, watching me with dark eyes. The clay bowl sat on the ground by her hips, with a clean white cloth draped over the side. After a few minutes, I gestured at the bowl. She passed it over, and I drank until I’d drained it all.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “I might have died out there.”
She continued to watch me over the next two or three hours as the water made its way into my tissues and the strength returned to my limbs. The faintest of smiles played in her eyes, and I found myself watching her mouth, the fleshy delicacy of her lips, and the smooth skin of her face. Her hair fell over her shoulders and below her breasts. Around her neck and wrists she wore jewelry of turquoise, silver, and obsidian, in a style I recognized.
“That jewelry was made by Michael Big Hawk, wasn’t it?” My voice seemed to be working again, albeit hoarsely.
She continued to watch me.
“That would make you Lagalero, right?”
She stood up, possibly offended by my boldness, and crouched through a passage on the other side of the little chamber, taking the bowl with her. She came back a moment later, having filled it, and left again. I scooped water to my mouth. It was turbid with mud, and tiny white things swam in it, but it tasted better than a frosty beer in an Illinois summer day. I tried once to stand up, and decided I should stay on the ground longer.
The woman came back with an armload of wood and began stacking it in a gap in the rocks. By way of conversation, I said, “Why do we need a fire? Are you cold?”
She said, “You will be, when it’s dark.”
“Can I have more water?”
She took the bowl and descended into the rocks, following a natural passage that spiraled down, out of sight. When she came back, I’d braced my back against the rock and fished some power bars from my pack.
She left the water within reach and I offered her a power bar. She took it and resumed her seat, nibbling at the bar, watching me. Her lips moved sensuously as she ate. I watched with an artist’s interest the fall of the hair, the high cheekbones, the clear bronze skin, and a hundred other details. She sat against the rock, one knee drawn up, and a wrist draped over it.
“Do you mind if I sketch you?” When she made no answer, I drew my sketchbook from my pack and slid it from its protective case, along with a couple of pencils. She was the perfect model, gazing directly into my eyes, scarcely moving while I worked. She scratched an ankle at one point, but both her hand and leg returned to her original pose.
The light began to fail. I thought about getting to my car. The prospect of sleeping in my own bed almost led me to make another wrong decision. But my head still ached and my legs were definitely not ready to carry me to the road. I would be spending the night here. I slid the sketchbook back into its case and thanked her.
“Do you live around here? Don’t you have to get home?”
“You should fill your water bottles,” she said.
Staggering and giddy, I got to my feet and picked up my pack. She led me down the passage. I could feel the moisture in the air before I saw the water. At the bottom of the rocky maze was a pool of water six feet across, rainfall trapped in a sheltered cavity. The desert people called it a tinaja. I dipped each of the five unbroken bottles below the surface and put them in the pack and in the outside pockets.
When I hoisted the heavy pack to my shoulder, the woman had gone. I peered down another couple of passages, and out across the darkening desert in all directions, but she was not in sight. For a moment I felt a twinge of fear. Perhaps this had all been a hallucination and I would wake to find myself parched on the daytime desert where I’d last fallen. Perhaps I might not wake at all.
I waited in the little space for her to return. The desert, which had been quiet but for the soughing of the wind, started to sound with the songs of coyotes and the rushing and chirp of insects. Before the sky turned pitch black, I started a fire and got out my sleeping bag.
I woke as the sky reached a mid-violet color, and took a long drink of water. I would drink a couple of quarts before beginning my walk, to get my kidneys working again and rehydrate myself before the last stretch to my car.
While gathering my things, I pulled the sketchbook from my pack and leafed through to the page I’d drawn on last.
It was blank. The shock left a pit in my belly, and a little spin of disorientation. How odd! Had the woman really existed? Had she been only a figment of my delirium, and I would awake in the baking afternoon desert after all? Was she some spirit that rescued lost travelers? I’d heard enough Indian tales and legend, plus some first-hand accounts, that I wasn’t ready to dismiss all of the lore. But the water in my bottles was real enough. So were the indentations made by her buttocks and heels where she had sat in the sand. The crumpled power bar wrapper lay on the ground where she’d dropped it.
I held up the notebook so the light struck the first blank page at an angle, and there were indentations from some of my heavier pencil strokes. Examining more carefully, I saw that the last page had been torn out.
Whatever her reason for tearing out the page, it wasn’t going to work. I’d been an artist all my life, and I’d sprung from my mother’s womb fully equipped with an eidetic memory. What my mind couldn’t remember, my fingers would recall. I sat down against the rock, facing the spot where she’d sat the night before, and set to work. In two hours, I’d recreated the sketch from memory. I knew it would be as accurate as if she were still there, resting against the rock wall.
Then I went a step further and sketched the jewelry she’d been wearing. Someday, I might find this woman who’d saved my life. I didn’t know her name. For that matter, she didn’t know mine.
[The End]