Gabe turned on her accusingly. “Now you’re talking about my friends, the Josés. You probably know about them from talking to my parents and not from looking in that stupid crystal. But you know what else?” he demanded, standing up suddenly and wrapping one of Fat Crack’s blankets tightly around his shoulders. “My parents don’t get to dictate who my friends are, and neither do you.”

With that, he stalked away from the fire and back toward the path.

“Wait a minute,” Lani called after him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Home,” he said.

“It’s dark, and home is a long way from here,” she argued.

“Home may be, but the road isn’t. It’s Friday night. Someone coming back from town will give me a ride.”

“What if you trip and fall?”

“The moon’s up now,” he told her over his shoulder. “My eyes have adjusted to the dark, and I can see better than I would have thought possible. And just for safety’s sake, on my way down maybe I’ll ask for some help from that precious I’itoi guy of yours in hopes he’ll look out for me.”

CHAPTER 7

IN THE EVENING WHEN BRAIDING Woman awakened, she found a tiny baby, a girl, crawling on a mat—­the same mat she had been weaving when the dust ball appeared, the dust ball that belonged to Tash.

The baby girl who had once been a dust ball grew very fast. Every four days she was bigger and bigger, until finally she was as large as any of the other children in the village. She had very long, sharp fingernails. When she played with the other children, she scratched them. She would make them bleed by tearing their skin. This happened many times. At last the mothers in the village grew angry. They took their sticks and beat the girl until she lay senseless.

That night, when Braiding Woman went to look for the girl, she could not find her, although she had been told exactly where the child lay.

The next day, this strange girl-­child had grown to be a giantess. She went away from the village and into the mountains. There she moved some great rocks and made herself a house. She lived in the house all alone. She killed deer and lions and rabbits and other animals for food. She used their skins to make clothes. The bones and claws of the animals she killed she used for ornaments.

She came to be called Ho’ok O’oks, which means Evil Giantess. She came to be feared by all the Tohono O’odham, and that, nawoj, my friend, is still true, even to this day.

A WAVE OF DESPAIR WASHED over Lani as the stubborn boy turned his back and walked away. She knew then that she had failed. Gabe was beyond her reach—­too angry and arrogant to listen. Hot tears stung her cheeks. For a moment she was tempted to call and beg him to come back, but she didn’t. She simply let him go, reaching instead for the comfort of her medicine basket.

She slipped the crystals back into their pouch and dropped that into the basket. Then, in the flickering firelight, she examined the basket’s other contents. First out were two separate shards of ­pottery—­a reddish one with an almost invisible tortoise drawn on it and the other one coal black. The red one had once belonged to Nana Dahd’s grandmother, S’Amichuda O’oks—­Understanding Woman—­while the black one had come from Betraying Woman’s cave, deep in this very mountain.

Tradition dictated that a woman’s pots must always be broken upon her death in order to release the pot maker’s spirit. Lani was sure that Understanding Woman’s pots had been broken by her grieving relatives in just that way upon the old woman’s death. Betraying Woman, however, had died alone in the cavern, abandoned and unmourned. Her spirit had remained trapped in her long-unbroken pots until Lani herself had smashed them. And these two pieces of pottery, one red and one black, were the only reminders of either of those two long-­ago elders.

Next came a tiny bone—­as small as a baby’s finger. That was the tiny piece of bat wing skeleton that Lani had brought with her out of the cavern. The bone served as a reminder that Nanakumal—­Bat—­had helped see Lani through one terrible fight, and maybe he would do so again in this battle for Baby Fat Crack’s soul.

The next items in the basket were Nana Dahd’s basket-makng awl and the leather tobacco pouch Fat Crack the elder had given her. She had gone out in the fall and collected the green wild tobacco leaves—­wiw. She had dried the leaves and broken them into small pieces just the way the legend of Little Lion and Little Bear said it must be done. She had brought the tobacco along with her today in hope that, before the night was over, she and Gabe would share the Peace Smoke.

Gabe was gone, but perhaps, Lani reasoned, the sacred smoke was still in order. She pulled some of the dried wild tobacco leaves from the pouch and rolled them into a loose cigarette. It took a moment for her fumbling fingers to locate the final item in her basket—­Looks at Nothing’s ancient lighter. She had taken the old blind medicine man’s Zippo to a guy in Tucson, a man with a reputation for rehabbing aging lighters. The brass finish was worn through in spots, but refilled and with a new striking mechanism, the lighter sprang to life at the very first try.

After lighting the cigarette, Lani sat there with the sweet smoke drifting around her as she considered her connection to those two wise old men, one of whom she had never met. It was through them that she knew that the Tohono O’odham never use a pipe—­that age-­old custom that was part of other tribes’ traditions. Originally, the Desert ­People had used leaves to wrap their ceremonial smokers. Now they bought their cigarette wrappers the same place everybody else did—­at either the trading post or else at Bashas’ grocery store in Sells.

Lani closed her eyes and allowed herself to be carried along in the smoke-­filled air. When she opened her eyes sometime later, it was as though a ghost had arisen out of the ground. That’s when she saw a vision of the evil white-­haired Milgahn woman once again.

As the hair rose on the back of Lani’s neck, she knew two things at once. Evil White-­Haired Woman was not the school principal at Sells, and Baby Fat Crack Ortiz was in mortal danger.

GABE STORMED OFF DOWN THE mountain, furious with Lani, his parents, and everyone else. It wasn’t easy being the son of the tribal chairman. If it hadn’t been for the José brothers, who had befriended him early on, his life would have been hell. He and Timmy, the youngest of the brothers, had been fast friends since kindergarten. When one of the older kids, Luis Joaquin, had started picking on Gabe, Tim’s brother Paul had intervened on Gabe’s behalf.

It would be years before Gabe understood that Luis Joaquin’s father had been his mother’s opponent for chairman in a recent tribal election. The man was also a bad loser who, long after his failed bid for office, continued to bad-­mouth Delia Cachora Ortiz and all her relations to anyone who would listen, including his son.

As a consequence, that first schoolyard skirmish between Gabe and Luis Joaquin and his pals was not the last. Even now, everyone at school—­well, maybe not the mostly Anglo teachers—­understood that Gabe Ortiz and Luis Joaquin continued to be sworn enemies. As a consequence, Timmy’s older brothers still came to Gabe’s rescue whenever rescuing was needed.

Gabe’s parents worked long, unpredictable hours. Mr. and Mrs. José worked, too, but Mrs. José’s mother, Mrs. Francisco, had lived with the family and looked after the kids after school. Early on, Gabe Ortiz had been added to the José after-­school mix. On most days, once classes were finished, he would tag along with the others to the Josés’ house, where Mrs. Francisco maintained order until the parents came home and also cooked the evening meal.