Diamond, Chip, and I, though we did not all travel together, were drawn to the same place. A flash from high above the camps led us to the mountaintop. All of us stood in the smell of smoke, while the Nagawitchi, in their feather boas, marched around pine trees set ablaze. Whitest fire I ever saw.

  In our midst, a hard faced elder with a headdress extending down to his waste sat on a stump. He chanted a story in their dialect. Big Owl stood aback from him, holding a big bottom lipped frown and flute. When Owl saw us, he said, “Taiowa, English, too.”

  Owl played the flute off key to the old man, Taiowa’s, singing.

  Twenty years and many moons ago,

  The midwife gave us false hopes.

  A knife at birth

  Turned to a curse

  She told us how great our children would grow

  But after they were born, none had a shadow.

  A generation of lost Nagawitchi

  Their hearts could not be fulfilled.

  Their desires sent up a hill.

  Where their shadows hid.

  As the mist surrounded us and seemed to make only him and Big Chief in his backdrop visible, Taiowa began to speak plainly. He said, “The Ana beasts came out from us but are not of us. They are the shadows of the children whom the midwife cursed.”

  I wondered how the spreading fire wouldn’t consume us all, but something kept me standing firm, listening to him as he went on. “Three years ago, the shadows went from teepee to teepee leaving arrowheads in the hearts of the next generation of our people. The ones whom the midwife delivered; the shadows took back to her dead. Emboldened by their kills, the shadows of those cursed at birth took the form of the Ana beasts.”

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  Nerves pricked like a cactus in my chest. At this point, one thing made as much sense as another and all had terrible implications. I accepted that the shadows must have brutally killed Owl’s son, and one of them had become the beast, Ana Ahote. What would this mean for Martin Coffee and all the Grand Josian babies whom I sent Calamity to deliver? What would they become? I said, “Where did the wolflike part of the Ana beasts originate from?”

  Taiowa replied, “Legend says, creator wondered if he sent his creatures would the Nagawitchi of old sense their divinity or would they take them for food.

  Creator tested the Nagawitchi of old out in the parts of these very deserts where giant saguaro grows. When they played their flutes, four-legged, red furred, white breasted and bushy tailed creatures surrounded them, purring in trust.

  Instantly, the Nagawitchi of old felt warmth in their hearts and petted and fed the creatures. The creatures flew faster than the plains could handle and took our people anywhere they could imagine. Until one day, when our people thought, ‘if we eat them, will we gain their power for ourselves.’ It’s then, the creatures fled away to never return.

  The Ana beasts are a perverted combination of our people and of the creatures. The Ana’s evil brought balance, yes, but now the scales are tipped. They must be stopped.”

  Big Owl stepped up. “These are no words of man. Taiowa is light entity and say Ana beasts must be stopped. This mean I must stop them. I join your posse.”

  Chip pointed at him. “Laughing Heart says you know where the witch is. That she’s close by. As fast as those Ana beasts are, how can we be catching up to her?”

  The bright fumes from the fire blinded and suffocated us, and when they subsided, Taiowa and the Nagawitchi tribesmen were gone.

  My eyes could have leaped out of their sockets at the tribe’s disappearance, then I caught the shocked expression of Chip and the elated smile of Diamond. At the mountain’s peak, Big Owl gazed up at Orion’s Belt. The three of us crawled up on him, nearly clinging to one another.

  When we got in hearing distance, he went on talking as if none of the mysterious departures of his people occurred. “Every year at Garden Cemetery, witch and Ana beasts have ceremony where they desecrate graves of many Apache Indians. They will be at Garden Cemetery for one more day of celebration. We can make it there on your mule train before they leave.”

  Diamond turned flush. For her this meant less than a day before rejoining Dylan. Chip exhaled; less than a day, he’d be putting his life on the line in duty.

  All I knew was, I would be forced along, because, unfortunately, my services as a doctor would be required.