He’d walked right past her.

“What does that mean?” asked Calvin.

“I’m not sure yet,” I told him. Calvin couldn’t smell a lie. You could see it in his face that he believed what I said. I bet his uncle Jim would have called me on it. Adam gave me a sharp look.

There was a lot going on. Too much of it was mysterious and made no sense at all. And there were two other walkers, at least one of whom had known all about me before we met. The disappearing woman was one mystery too much. Though I was pretty sure she was my mystery and not something engineered by Gordon Seeker or anyone else we’d met there.

“Why don’t we go to the petroglyphs, then you tell me about Benny,” I told Calvin grimly. “I’ll see if the woman fits in anywhere.”

It wasn’t his fault. I had the feeling that he was even more in the dark than Adam and I were. Someone was playing games, and I was tired of it.

7

PICTOGRAMS ARE PAINT ON SOME SURFACE, ANY surface. Gang graffiti are pictograms, but usually the term refers to paints done by ancient man. Petroglyphs are carved into the rock. A lot more effort goes into them, and they take a lot longer to create. Like the displays in the museum, the petroglyphs at Horsethief Lake were on big chunks of rock that had clearly been cut from larger rocks. Unlike the ones in the museum, these were fenced off—look but don’t touch.

The first petroglyph I saw at Horsethief Lake looked like a pineapple.

Calvin didn’t quite hide his grin when I told him so. “Before the Columbia was dammed in 1959, the river was narrow and deep here, not the wide and tamed thing she is now. There were falls. Celilo Falls. We have photos.”

The young man stared out at the river.“You know, I wasn’t born then. My mother wasn’t even born back then. Some of the old ones still mourn the old river as if she were a living being who died.”

“Change is hard,” said Adam. “And it doesn’t much matter whether it is change for good or ill.”

The young man looked at him.“All right. Some of the change was good, some of it not so good. There used to be a canyon. Some people said that there were more petroglyphs on the canyon walls than any other location in the world. I don’t know, but there were a lot of them. When it became clear that the dam was going in, an effort was made to save as many as possible. These were displayed at the dam for decades before they were brought here. There are others in the museum and a lot, I suppose, in private collections—the tribes asked people to go in and take what they could as long as they would care for them. The ones left in the canyon are underwater, and I suppose they will be there forever.”

We were walking as he talked. Like the drawings on the rock, the carving was primitive. Some of it, like the pineapple person, were like trying to guess what a kindergartner had drawn. Some of them were extraordinary despite the stylization. I could have stayed looking at the eagle for an hour or so. But it was a rock that held a row of mountain sheep that clued me into something.

“I’ll be darned,” I said. “That’s why he sent us to look at the baskets.”

The men looked at me.

“Well, maybe not,” I conceded, thinking of the woman who’d stared at us in the museum, then followed us to the pictograms. “But those animals look like the ones woven on the baskets. If the only art you ever saw was on baskets and woven blankets, when you decided to carve something, you’dmake it look like the baskets.”

“When we’re through here, you can write to the anthropological journals and tell them your theories,” said Adam.

I narrowed my eyes at him.“Stuff that. I’ll write a doctoral thesis. Then I can go do what most of the other people with doctoral degrees in anthropology do.”

“What’s that?” asked Calvin.

“You don’t need to encourage her,” said Adam seriously, but his eyes laughed at me.

“The same thing that people with degrees in history do,” I said. “Fix cars or serve french fries and bad hamburgers.”

“This one is the one my uncle told me to point out to you,” Calvin said.

The rock had been broken, but the two pieces had been fit together carefully. The creature’s face looked a little like a fox—a mutant fox with very big teeth and tentacles. Its body was snakelike. It was like a cross between a Chinese dragon and a fox with the teeth of a wolf eel.

“We don’t know as much about these as we do the pictographs,” Calvin said. “They could have been carved ten thousand years ago by the first people, or a hundred years ago. We don’t know what this one was meant to represent, but we have a name for it. We call it the river devil.”

Its eyes were eager, intelligent, and hungry.

I’d seen them before. Bright green eyes in the water that I’d seen in my dream. I blinked, and the eyes were just eyes. No matter how avid they appeared, they were just carved in the stone. But I knew what I had seen.

“Now,” Calvin said cheerfully, while Adam watched me out of feral eyes, “there’s a Coyote story about a monster who lived in the Columbia in the time of the first people, before we humans were here.”

I tried a reassuring smile at Adam, who must have sensed my sudden recognition of the monster on the rock. I mouthed,“Later.” He nodded.

It had been a dream, I reminded myself fiercely. Just a dream.

Calvin missed all the byplay, which was fine.“This monster,” he said, “ate all of the first people who lived in the river. It ate up all the first people who fished in the river. Eventually, no one was willing to go near the river at all, so they asked the Great Spirit for help. He sent Coyote to see what was to be done.

“Coyote went down to the river and saw that nothing lived near the river. While he was watching, he saw a great monster lift out of the water. ‘Ah,’ it cried, ‘I am so hungry. Why don’t you come down so I can eat you.’

“That did not sound like a good idea to Coyote. So he went up into the hills where he could think. ‘Hee, hee,’ said his sisters, who were berries in his stomach.”

“They were what?” I asked, surprised out of my panic over a pair of hungry green eyes in a stupid dream.

“This is the polite version,” Calvin told me. “You can ask around if you want to find out the rude version. It is also rude to interrupt the storyteller.”

“Sorry.” I tried to figure out how berries who were sisters in Coyote’s stomach could have a rude version.

“‘Why are you laughing?’ asked Coyote.

“‘We know what you should do,’ his sisters said. ‘But we won’t tell you because you’ll just take all the credit like you always do.’

“But they were his sisters, and Coyote was very persuasive. He promised that this time he would tell everyone who was responsible for such a clever plan. At last they told him what to do. Following their advice, he took nine flint knives, a pouch of jerky, a rock, a torch, and some sagebrush and walked down to the river.

“‘Come eat me,’ he told the monster.

“And it did. As soon as it had swallowed him, he used the flint and stone to light his torch. Inside the monster were all of the first people it had eaten. They were very hungry, having not had food since they had been eaten by the monster. They were also cold because the monster was as chill inside as the river was outside.

“Coyote lit the sagebrush and shared out his jerky among them. He told the first people that he was going to kill the monster. Then, he told them, they would have to find their way out as best they could.

“So he took his first flint knife and started carving his way through to the monster’s heart. He hadn’t worked very long on the tough flesh before his first knife broke, and he had to bring out his second. The second knife broke, the third, and the fourth. Until at last he was down to his very last knife. But that one cut into the heart of the monster.

“ ‘Run!’ he told the trapped people. ‘Get out.’ And they did, escaping the dying monster any way they could. Out its mouth, out its gills, and out its bottom.”