There is a stretch of land where four states touch at a single point: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. A flat metal marker sits on red earth, surrounded by silence. Most visitors stop, take a photograph, touch the cold metal, and drive away within ten minutes. They blame the heat, the dust, the strange wind that seems to come from no direction at all.
The people whose families have walked that desert for a thousand years know better. There is something out there, something older than the names on the maps. In 1947, I sat with an 81-year-old Navajo elder named Hashké Nezbah outside a small trading post south of Shiprock, New Mexico. He was a hand trembler, a traditional diagnostician whose job had been to find what was wrong with a person, an animal, or a piece of land, and to know whether it could be healed.
I had come with questions about a series of disappearances near the San Juan River in the late 1930s. The most famous case was that of Marvin Calloway, a 44-year-old geologist from Denver who had walked into the desert one morning in 1936 and never returned. His truck was found three days later parked neatly by a wash, keys in the ignition, canteen full, rifle clean, boots beside the driver’s seat. There was no sign of him.
The federal report admitted no cause of disappearance had been determined. The Navajo population had refused to assist in the search. I asked the old man why his people had refused to help. He looked out across the desert at the rust-red mesas, the long shadows of the late sun.
Then he spoke slowly, in English. “We did not refuse to help,” he said. “We refused to call it back. ”
He told me that the land between the four points had never been empty.
Long before the surveyors arrived with their chains and theodolites, the Diné had walked that ground carefully. There were places a man went around, not through. Places where a wise person did not make a fire. Canyons where a wise person did not speak above a whisper.
And there was one thing in particular that walked that country at certain times of the year. He would not name it. He said some names, spoken aloud in the wrong place, are heard. The story he told went back to the Long Walk of 1865, when his people were forced from their land to Bosque Redondo.
For four years, no one sang the proper songs. No one walked the proper paths. The desert was left unattended. When the Diné returned in 1868 by treaty, walking back across the long red country, the elders stopped at the sight of the sacred mountains.
Hundreds of people stood and sang for a long time, the way you sing to a relative who has been sick while you were gone. But it was not right. Some things had taken root in those four years. They had learned that the country was empty, and they had liked it empty.
The Anglo settlers, soldiers, and surveyors who came after understood none of this. They thought the desert was just desert, that the silence was just silence. The Diné knew better. They kept their distance from certain places, did certain things at certain hours, and did not speak certain names aloud.
They survived. The white men did not always survive. In the 1870s and 1880s, there were disappearances that never made it into any newspaper. A railroad scout from St.
Louis named Curtis Velmar walked off from his camp one night in 1878 and was never seen again. His horse was found two weeks later, calm and well, grazing with the saddle still on. His rifle was found leaning against a juniper tree, the way a man might lean it before sitting down to rest. No sign of struggle.
No sign of him. When the sheriff from Farmington asked why the Navajo refused to enter that area, an old man told him only this: “The man you’re looking for sat down at a fire that was not a fire. ”
The old man explained. 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. And if you walked toward it, you did not walk back. He said the thing was older than the Diné.
It had been there when the desert was still green, when rivers ran where now there are only dry beds, when mammoths moved across the plain and men hunted them with obsidian-tipped spears. 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 southwestern quadrant of the San Juan Basin for uranium deposits, years before uranium became the prize it would become during the war.
He was not a fanciful man. He kept precise field notebooks and did not believe in anything he could not measure with a rule. When he disappeared, the company sent a recovery team of three men: Howard Pemberton, a 48-year-old assayer; Lester Cromwell, a 36-year-old camp foreman; and a Diné guide named Tó Bi Yazhí, hired from the town of Aneth. The guide led them as far as the wash where the truck had been found.
Then he stopped. “I will wait here,” he said. No amount of money or threat would move him. The three white men went up the canyon alone.
They were gone for two days. When they came back, Howard Pemberton was missing. Lester Cromwell could not speak. He had a cut on his hand he could not explain and a piece of old canvas clutched in his fist, marked with writing in a language he did not recognize.
It took him three days to speak. When he did, he said only one thing: “Howard sat down. ”
He would not explain. He died in 1958 of natural causes.
His widow, going through his papers, found a sealed envelope. Inside was a 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. ”
When I described this to the old man, he nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said.
“That is how it happens. ” He explained that the thing did not always take a person by force. Sometimes it called them. It made itself look like something they wanted to walk toward: a fire on a cold night, a familiar voice, a figure on a far ridge that for a moment looked like someone they knew.
And once they sat down, they did not get up. Or rather, something got up, but it was not them. I asked whether this was what other native peoples called a skinwalker. He looked at me sharply.
“We do not say that word,” he said. “The thing in the desert is not that. The skinwalker is a man who has chosen to become something. The thing in the desert was never a man at all.
”
He told me of the autumn of 1937, a year after Calloway disappeared, when his own grandson, a young man of 23, went out at sundown to bring in sheep that had wandered west of the Lukachukai range, toward an old wash the family always avoided. The sheep had wandered. He was young. He was not afraid.
He did not come home. In the morning, the old man and three others followed his tracks. They found the horse, calm and well, tied to a juniper tree. They found the sheep, all eleven, unharmed.
About a hundred yards beyond, the prints where the young man had stopped walking. Just stopped in the middle of the desert. Beyond the prints, in the soft red sand, there were no more tracks of any kind. The old man did something he had never done before.
He took out a small leather pouch given to him by his grandfather, going back five generations. Inside was a substance made by a particular family of medicine people, meant for one purpose: to be scattered in a place where something had taken a person, to keep that thing from coming back to the same spot. He scattered it where the footprints stopped. They rode home in silence.
The grandson was never found. Not a body. Not a bone. The family did not speak his name aloud after that.
The old man said the Diné have a story that long before there were people in this world, there were other beings, beings of fire, water, and wind. They lived in the worlds that came before this one, and in each world they did terrible things to each other, and the world had to be destroyed and remade. Some of the beings did not pass cleanly from one world to the next. Some got caught in between.
Some found the cracks, the places where one world had not closed properly behind another, and 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 also still partly somewhere else. That was why it could appear and disappear. That was why it could call you with a voice that sounded like your father, your wife, your child, a friend you had not seen in twenty years. Because it was using something it had taken from someone else.
It collected. 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, sometimes it remembers you.
I left that night. I drove all the way back to Gallup without stopping. Twice on a long, flat stretch of road, I thought I saw a thin, tall shape standing on a low rise off the highway. The first time, I told myself it was a saguaro, though saguaros do not grow that far north.
The second time, I did not look at all. When I pulled into a gas station in Gallup, my hands were shaking. The man who filled my tank looked at me, looked at the direction I had come from, and said, “You’ve been out toward Shiprock? Late to be coming back from there.
” He looked at the dark road behind me for a long moment. “Some folks shouldn’t drive that road after sundown. ”
I went back the following spring. The trading post was closed.
A woman at a nearby home told me the old man had died in the winter. He had gone out to walk before supper, toward the west. He was 82 years old. He had walked that path many times, but that evening he did not come back.
The men of his family followed his footprints at first light. At a place half a mile from the house, where the land sloped down into a small wash, his footprints had stopped. Just stopped. I asked if she knew what had happened.
She said he had been waiting. He had told his family the year before that he had a debt. When his grandson was taken, he had scattered the substance from his pouch to keep the thing away. But the thing remembered.
He said one day it would come for him. “He went to meet it,” she said, “so that it would not come to the house. ” She closed the door. In the years that followed, I spoke with other Diné elders.
Most would not speak of the subject at all. Two spoke obliquely, saying the thing was real, that it had been there a very long time, and that the modern world of paved roads and electric lights had not driven it away. It had only made it more careful, more patient. One old woman in Tuba City told me it did not come for everyone.
The tourists, the photographers, the families pulling off at the marker, were of no interest to it. It was looking for a particular kind of person. I asked what kind. She said, “The kind that hears.
” Most people walk through the world half asleep, she explained. They do not hear what is talking to them. The thing in the desert does not bother with them. But the ones who have always heard things, who have always felt when a room was wrong, when a road was wrong, when a person was not what they seemed, those are the ones it watches.
Those are the ones it calls. Because those are the ones that, when they sit down at the fire, will give it the most. I have not gone back. I will not go back.
But sometimes late at night, when the house is still and the wind moves through the trees outside in a way that seems to come from no one direction, I think about the old man walking out into the dusk to meet the thing 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 of a truck, walking up a wash in the late afternoon, never coming back. I think about the woman in Tuba City and her words: the kind that hears.
And I listen in the silence of my house at night, and I wonder whether something somewhere is listening back.