The Four Corners region stands as a place where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet at a single point. A flat metal marker sits on red earth, surrounded by silence. Tourists stop, take photographs, touch the metal, and drive away within minutes. They blame the heat, the dust, the strange wind.
But the Navajo families who have walked that desert for generations know the land is not empty. Something has lived there longer than any map. In 1947, I met an 81-year-old Navajo elder named Hashké Nahbah outside a small trading post south of Shiprock, New Mexico. His face was lined and sun-darkened, patient.
He had spent most of his life as a hand trembler, a traditional diagnostician, finding what was wrong with people, animals, and land. I had come to ask him about a series of disappearances near the San Juan River in the late 1930s. A geologist named Marvin Calloway, 44 years old, had walked into the desert one morning in 1936 and never returned. His truck was found three days later by a wash, keys still in the ignition, canteen full, rifle clean, boots beside the driver’s seat.
The federal report admitted no cause had been determined. A footnote said local Navajo had refused to assist in the search. I asked Hashké Nahbah why his people refused to help. He looked across the mesas as the late sun cast long shadows.
Finally he said slowly, in English, “We did not refuse to help. We refused to call it back. ”
He told me the land between the four points had never been empty. Long before the surveyors arrived with their chains and instruments, the Diné walked that ground carefully.
There were places a man went around, not through. Places where a wise person did not build a fire, canyons where a wise person did not speak above a whisper. There was one thing in particular that walked that country at certain times of the year, a thing his grandfather had warned him about. He would not name it.
He said some names, spoken aloud in the wrong place, are heard. He told me that in 1865, when the Long Walk ended and his people were forced to Bosque Redondo, something changed in the desert behind them. Whatever had walked that ground before had been kept in balance by the songs and rituals of the Diné. For four years no one sang the proper songs or walked the proper paths.
When the people returned by treaty in 1868, walking back to the land between the four sacred mountains, they came home to a desert that had grown hungry. The elders stopped and sang for a long time, the way you sing to a sick relative who has recovered. But things had taken root in those four years. Some things had learned the country was empty, liked it empty, and were not pleased to find it occupied.
In the 1870s and 1880s, disappearances occurred that never reached any newspaper. In 1878, a railroad scout from St. Louis named Curtis Velmar walked off from his camp one night and vanished. His horse was found two weeks later, calm and grazing with the saddle still on.
His rifle leaned against a juniper tree as if he had set it down before resting. The Navajo refused to enter that area for the rest of the summer. When a sheriff from Farmington asked why, an old man told him only this: “The man you’re looking for sat down at a fire that was not a fire. ” The sheriff did not understand.
The case was closed. Hashké Nahbah explained that in that desert at certain hours there could be a fire that was not a fire, a voice that was not a voice, a shape in the long red sundown that wore the form of a man or wore the form of a thing that wanted you to think it was a man. If you walked toward it, you did not walk back. He said the elders had a word for this thing, but he would not tell me.
He said it was older than the Diné, older than the Pueblo people, older than the rivers that had once run through that country. It had been there when mammoths moved across the plains. It was still there. And it was hungry.
Marvin Calloway had been hired in the spring of 1936 by a mining concern from Denver to survey the San Juan Basin for uranium deposits. He was not a fanciful man. He kept careful field notebooks and believed only in what he could measure. After his disappearance, the company sent a recovery team of three men: Howard Pemberton, an assayer; Lester Cromwell, a camp foreman; and a Navajo guide named Tó Bi Yazhi, meaning little water.
The guide led them to the wash where the truck had been found. Then he stopped and said, “I will wait here. ” Pemberton offered him more money, threatened him. Tó Bi Yazhi did not move.
He said, “There is no amount of money that would make me walk up that canyon. ”
The white men went up alone. They were gone two days. When they returned, Howard Pemberton was missing.
Lester Cromwell could not speak. He had an unexplained cut on his hand and clutched a strip of old canvas with faded dye and marks that looked like unrecognizable writing. The foreman finally spoke one sentence: “Howard sat down. ” He would not explain.
Lester Cromwell died in 1958. His widow found a sealed envelope marked “Not to be opened. ” Inside was a single sheet of paper dated 1941. It read: “There was a fire that was not a fire.
Howard walked toward it. I called him back. He did not turn his head. He sat down at the fire, and he was not Howard anymore.
I ran. May God forgive me. I ran. ” His widow burned the paper and told no one until she was dying in 1973.
When I described this to Hashké Nahbah, he nodded slowly. “Yes. That is how it happens. ” He said the thing did not always take a person by force.
Sometimes it called. It made itself look like something they wanted to walk toward, a fire on a cold night, a familiar voice, a figure that looked like someone they knew. The person would walk toward it. Once they sat down, they did not get up.
Or rather, something got up, but it was not them. I asked carefully whether this was what other peoples called a skinwalker. He looked at me sharply. “We do not say that word.
” The skinwalker was a man who had chosen to become something. The thing in the desert had never been a man at all. In the autumn of 1937, Hashké Nahbah’s own grandson, a young man of 23 named Bidzil, went out at sundown to bring in sheep that had wandered west of the Lukachukai range, toward an old wash the family always avoided. He did not come home.
At dawn, his grandfather and three other men followed his tracks. They found his horse tied to a juniper, the sheep all alive, and a hundred yards beyond, the prints where Bidzil had stopped walking. Just stopped. The prints faced west.
Beyond them, nothing. No more tracks of any kind. Hashké Nahbah took out a small leather pouch passed down five generations. Inside was a substance made by medicine people, meant to be scattered where something had taken a person, to mark the place and make the ground inhospitable.
He scattered it where the footprints stopped. They gathered the sheep, led the horse home in silence. Bidzil was never found, not a body, not a bone. The family held a ceremony after a year.
They did not speak his name again. I asked the old man what the thing actually was. He said that long before people existed, there were other beings, beings of fire, water, and wind, in worlds that came before this one. There were four worlds, and in each the beings did terrible things, and each world had to be destroyed and remade.
Some of the beings did not pass cleanly from one world to the next. They got caught in between. They found the cracks where one world had not closed properly behind another, and they came through. The Four Corners was one of those places.
The desert there was thin. The thing that walked there was something that had not been able to come all the way through. It was here, but still partly somewhere else. That was why it could appear and disappear, why it could look like a man one moment and nothing the next, why it could call you with a voice that sounded like someone you loved.
It collected, he said. It had been collecting for a long time. That was why he would not name it. Because if you name a collector in its own country, it remembers you, and it adds you to the list of things it intends eventually to come for.
As the sun set, he said quietly, “You should leave before it is full dark. ” I drove that night back to Gallup without stopping. Twice on a flat stretch of road I thought I saw a thin, tall shape standing on a low rise. I told myself it was a saguaro, though saguaros do not grow that far north.
The second time, I did not look. I went back to see him the following spring. The trading post was closed. A woman at a nearby home told me he had gone to be with his ancestors, in the winter months.
He had gone out to walk one evening toward the west and did not come back. The men of his family followed his footprints to a place where the land sloped into a small wash. There his footprints stopped, just stopped. She said he had told them the year before that he had a debt.
When his grandson was taken, he had thrown the substance from his pouch to keep the thing away. But the thing remembered. He said one day it would come for him. She paused.
“He went to meet it so that it would not come to the house. ”
I never went back to that country again. In the years that followed, I spoke with other Navajo elders. Most would not speak of it at all.
One old woman in Tuba City told me the thing did not come for everyone. It was looking for a particular kind of person, and sometimes it only watched and let you go, and you would never know how close you had come. I asked what kind of person that was. She said, “The kind that hears.
” Most people walked through the world half asleep. They did not hear what was talking to them. The thing did not bother with them. But there were some people who had always heard things, felt things, known when a room was wrong, when a road was wrong.
Those were the ones it watched. Those were the ones it called. Because those were the ones that, when they sat down at the fire, would give it the most. Sometimes late at night, when the wind moves through the trees in a way that seems to come from no single direction, I think about the old man walking out into the dusk to meet what he had owed for fifty years.
I think about Howard Pemberton sitting down at a fire that was not a fire. I think about Marvin Calloway leaving his boots beside the driver’s seat and walking up a wash in the late afternoon. I think about the footprints stopping in open sand.
And I listen in the silence, and I wonder whether something somewhere is listening back.