In 1947, a researcher met an 81-year-old Navajo elder named Hashkay Naba near Shiprock, New Mexico, to ask why local Navajo families had refused to help search for a missing geologist. The man, Marvin Calloway, had walked into the desert near the San Juan River in 1936 and never returned, leaving his truck parked by a wash with the keys still in the ignition and his boots beside the driver’s seat. Federal reports had closed the case without explanation. The elder’s answer was not what the researcher expected.
He said his people had not refused to help search, they had refused to help call the man back. According to him, the Four Corners region, where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet, had never been empty. The Diné had walked that land carefully for generations, avoiding certain places, speaking quietly in certain canyons, and never naming certain things aloud. Hashkay Naba spoke of the Long Walk in the 1860s, when the Navajo were forced from their land to Bosque Redondo.
During the four years the Diné were away, he said, something in the desert changed. When the people returned in 1868, the elders stopped at the sight of the sacred mountains and sang for a long time, but the old balance had been disturbed. He said some things had grown accustomed to the emptiness and were not pleased to find the land occupied again. The elder described a long history of unexplained disappearances in the region, including a railroad scout named Curtis Velmar who vanished in 1878.
His horse was found grazing calmly with the saddle still on, and his rifle was found leaning against a juniper tree. A local Navajo man told the sheriff that the missing man had sat down at a fire that was not a fire. The sheriff did not understand, and the case was closed. Hashkay Naba said the thing that walked that land was older than his people, older than the Pueblo people, and had been in the desert when rivers still flowed and mammoths were hunted with obsidian-tipped spears.
He said it did not always take people by force, sometimes it called them, appearing as a fire on a cold night, a familiar voice, or a figure on a distant ridge. According to him, once a person walked toward it and sat down, that person did not get up again. Asked whether this was what some call a skinwalker, the elder rejected the comparison. He said the skinwalker is a man who chose to become something, but the thing in the desert was never a man at all.
He said it was older and that it had come through cracks between worlds, a being that was here but also partly somewhere else. He refused to name it, saying that some names, spoken aloud in the wrong place, are heard. The elder told of his own grandson, a 23-year-old named Bidzil, who went out at sundown in the autumn of 1937 to bring in sheep that had wandered too far. He never came home.
The family found his horse calm and tied to a juniper tree, the sheep gathered unharmed, and the young man’s footprints stopping abruptly in open sand, with no tracks beyond them in any direction. Hashkay Naba scattered a substance from an old leather pouch at the spot, a mixture made by medicine people for the purpose of marking a place where something had taken a person. His grandson was never found. The recovery of Marvin Calloway followed a similar pattern.
A company team consisting of an assayer named Howard Pemberton, a camp foreman named Lester Cromwell, and a Diné guide named Tó Bi Yazhi was sent to find him. The guide refused to go up the canyon where the geologist had walked, saying no amount of money could make him do so. The three white men went alone and returned two days later without Pemberton. Cromwell was unable to speak for days and was clutching a faded strip of canvas marked with unrecognizable writing.
When he finally spoke, he said only that Howard had sat down. Decades later, after Cromwell’s death in 1958, his widow found a sealed envelope marked “Not to be opened. ” Inside was a letter dated 1941 in which he described a fire that was not a fire, and a man who walked toward it and sat down and was not Howard anymore. The widow burned the paper but told her sister before dying in 1973, and the account eventually reached the researcher.
The researcher returned to see Hashkay Naba the following spring, but the trading post was closed. A woman at a nearby home told him the elder had gone to be with his ancestors the previous winter. He had reportedly gone out for a walk one evening and never returned. His footprints had been found stopping abruptly in a small wash half a mile from the house.
She said he had told his family he had a debt, that when his grandson was taken he had scattered a substance to keep the thing away, but that the thing remembered, and that one day it would come for him. She said he went out to meet it so that it would not come to the house. The researcher later spoke with other Diné elders, most of whom refused to discuss the subject. One old woman in Tuba City said the thing did not come for everyone, saying most people walking through that country were of no interest to it.
She said it was looking for a particular kind of person, the kind that hears, those who have always felt when something was wrong. She said it did not always take those it watched, sometimes it only waited and let them go, and they would never know how close they had come.