6

There was some water running in Picture Wash, but the big ranch truck crossed without difficulty. Splash marks on the other side of the ford told Ten that he wasn't the only person who had driven toward September Canyon today. Ten glanced quickly around but saw nothing. They had passed no one the entire length of the one-lane dirt road, which meant that the other vehicle was still in front of them.

Frowning, Ten turned right and drove along the edge of the broad wash. There was no real road to follow, simply a suggestion of tire tracks where other vehicles had gone before. Tributary canyons opened up on the left of the wash, and more were visible across the thin ribbon of water, but Ten made no attempt to explore those openings. After three miles he turned left into the mouth of a side canyon.

Diana looked at him questioningly.

"September Canyon," Ten said. "The mesa it's eaten out of didn't really have a name, but we've started calling it September Mesa since we've been working on the site. Wind Mesa is behind us now, across the wash."

"What's upstream?"

"More canyons. Smaller. If you follow the wash upstream long enough, it finally narrows into a crack and disappears against a wall of stone, which is the body of the mesa itself. Almost all the canyons are blind. Only one or two have an outlet on top of the mesa. Other than that, the canyons are a maze. Even witha compass, it's hard not to get lost."

Diana turned around, trying to orient herself. "Where is the Rocking M?"

Ten gestured with his head because he needed both hands for the wheel. "North and east, on top of the big mesa."

"It is? I thought the ranch was on the edge of a broad valley."

He smiled slightly. "So do most people who come on the Rocking M from the north. You don't know the valley is really a mesa until you drive off the edge. The mountains confuse you. All of the Colorado Plateau is like that."

Diana reached into her back jeans pocket, pulled outa United States Geological Survey map and began searching for the vague line that represented the ranch road they were on. The bouncing of the truck made map reading impossible.

"Perspective is a funny thing," Ten said, glancing at the map for an instant. "Coming in from the south and east, you see the wall of the mesa, the cliffs and gorges and canyons. That's where the explorers were when they started naming things-at the bottom looking up. You can't see the Fire Mountains from that angle, and everything looks dark and jumbled at a distance, so the whole area was once called Black Plateau or Fire Mountain Plateau, depending on which old-timer you talk to."

Diana folded up the map and put it away.

"On the other hand," Ten continued, "if you're coming in from the mountain end of the territory, you see a mesa top as more of a broad valley, and you name it accordingly."

"Is that what happened on the Rocking M?"

Ten nodded. "Case MacKenzie started out with a ranch at the base of what became known as MacKenzie Ridge, which is a foothill of the Fire Mountains. From his perspective, the mesa top is a broad, winding valley. But history named the hunk of land for a hundred miles in all directions Black Plateau, even though it's more like a mesa than a plateau. Then you add a hundred years of Spanish and American cowboys translating Indian names and adding their own to the mix, and you have a mapmaker's nightmare."

"You also have a lot of lost tourists."

The left corner of Ten's mouth lifted slightly. "Just remember that September Mesa and Wind Mesa and all the nameless mesas are nothing but narrow fingers stretching out from the huge hand known as Black Plateau or MacKenzie Valley, depending on which direction your mapmaker came from."

"I'm beginning to understand why men invented satellite photos. It's the only way to see how the pieces all fit together."

Ten shot Diana an amused, approving glance, but only for an instant. The truck, moving at barely five miles an hour, bumped and thumped over the rocky, narrowing canyon bottom. To Diana's eyes there was nothing to distinguish the cliff-rimmed canyon they had entered from the many other tributary canyons that emptied into Picture Wash. The mouth of September Canyon was perhaps eighty yards across, marked by nothing but a faint suggestion of tire tracks in the sand. The cliffs were of a vaguely muddy, vaguely gold sandstone that overlay narrower beds of shale. The shale crumbled readily, forming steep, slippery talus slopes at the base of the sandstone cliffs.

Scattered on the surface of the gray-brown shale debris were huge, erratic piles of sandstone rubble that were formed when the shale crumbled and washed away faster than the more durable cliffs above, leaving the sandstone cliffs without support at their base. Then great sheets of sandstone peeled away from the overhanging cliffs and fell to the earth below, shattering into rubble and leaving behind arches and alcoves and deeper overhangs-and, sometimes, filling pre-existing alcoves.

In many cases the shale had been eroded by the seeping of groundwater between layers of sandstone and shale. When the water eventually reached the edge of a cliff or a ravine, it became a spring, a source of clean, year-round water for the people who eventually sought shelter in the arching overhangs that the springs had helped to create. Without the water there would have been no cliff-hanging alcoves for men to take shelter within, no easily defended villages set into sheer stone. Without the very special circumstances of sandstone, shale and water, the Anasazi civilization would have developed very differently, if it developed at all.

That interlocking of Anasazi and the land had always fascinated Diana. The fact that their cliff houses were found in some of the most remote, starkly beautiful landscapes in America simply added to her fascination.

"Does the Rocking M run cattle here?" Diana asked.

"Not for several years."

"Then how were the ruins discovered?"

"Carla was returning a potshard that Luke had found years ago in the mouth of September Canyon and given to her. She drove out from Boulder alone and spent several hours walking the canyon floor. There had been a storm recently and a tree had fallen. She came around a bend and there the ruins were."

"That must have been incredible," Diana said, her voice throaty with longing.

"I doubt that Carla was in a mood to appreciate it. She had come here to say goodbye to everything she had ever wanted-the land, the ranch, and most of all the man."

"Luke?" Ten nodded.

"What changed her mind?"

"Luke. He finally got it through his hard head that Carla was the one woman in a million who could live on an isolated ranch and not go sour."

Diana's mouth turned down in a sad curve. "I was ranch-raised. It's not for everyone, man or woman."

"You didn't like it?"

"I loved it. No matter how bad things at home got, the land was always waiting, always beautiful, always there. I could walk away from the buildings and the land would…" Her voice shivered into silence as she realized what she had almost revealed.

"Heal you?" Ten suggested softly. Diana's eyes closed and a tiny shudder went through her. Ten was too perceptive. He saw things with dangerous clarity.

"The land was here long before a primate climbed down out of a tree and put a kink in his back trying to see over the grass," Ten said matter-of-factly.

"The land will be here long after we're gone. That frightens some people because it makes them feel small and worthless. But some people are made whole by touching something that's bigger than they are, something enduring, something that lives on a different time scale than man."

The words slid past Diana's defenses, making her realize that Ten was one of those who had come to the land to be healed.