In the spring of 1887, a Jesuit priest named Father Anselmo Reyes was traveling through Arizona Territory on a mission from the Diocese of Sonora. He was collecting accounts from native trackers, vaqueros, and old prospectors about what he called the spiritual geography of the borderlands. In May of that year, he met a man named Cuchillo Tafoya in a small adobe house on the outskirts of Sasabe.
Tafoya was a 41-year-old tracker who had spent his life walking the floor of the Sonoran Desert. He was not Apache by blood. His mother was Yaqui, and his father was a Mexican muleteer who died of fever when Tafoya was a baby. He had been raised from the age of 11 by a Chiricahua Apache scout named Sotelo, who took him in after the boy was found alone on the salt flats near the Pinacate.
For years, Tafoya worked for a livestock agent named Joaquin Westover out of Tucson. Westover had a contract with the army to recover horses and pack mules that had wandered off, been stolen, or been driven off by raids. Westover later said in a deposition that Tafoya could read the ground the way a priest reads a missal. He could walk into a valley, stand still for a minute, and tell you how many men had passed through it in the last week, what direction they were going, and whether any of them were sick.
Toward the end of 1886, Tafoya started refusing certain jobs. He would take work in the north and the east, but he would not take work in the country south and west of a place called Quitobaquito Springs. That was a stretch of desert that ran from the springs down across the border into Sonora and out to the lava fields of the Pinacate. It was roughly 4,000 square miles of the driest, hottest, emptiest land in North America. Tafoya had grown up in that country and knew it better than any living man, but after the autumn of 1886, he would not set foot in it.
When Westover pressed him on it, Tafoya said, "There is something out there that has been watching me my whole life. And I am too old now to keep pretending it is not."
Father Reyes spoke with Tafoya for three nights in a row. The third night ran almost until dawn. Reyes wrote everything down in a leather-bound notebook in a mixture of Spanish, Latin, and careful English. That notebook stayed in the diocesan archive in Hermosillo until a fire in 1948. Most of it burned, but 42 pages survived because Reyes had bound them separately in a smaller folio. Those pages are the source of Tafoya's confession.
Tafoya started with the first time he saw it. He was 11 years old, camped on the eastern edge of the lava field with Sotelo. It was the dry season, and the night was clear. Tafoya had been lying on his back looking up at the stars when he noticed that one part of the sky had no stars in it. Not a cloud, not a shadow. Just a tall, narrow shape where the stars were missing, standing about 200 yards from the camp.
He woke Sotelo. Sotelo looked once, then told the boy to lie back down, face the fire, and keep his eyes on the coals. Tafoya obeyed. He could feel the shape behind him, not see it, feel it. He said the feeling was like standing in a room when someone else has just walked in, except the someone else was already there and had been there for a long time.
The next morning, Sotelo took a small bone awl out of his pack and scratched a mark in the rock at the edge of the camp. It was a simple mark: two lines crossing with a third line under them. Sotelo said it told the next man who passed that way that the thing had been there. He told the boy, "If you ever see this mark, do not camp at that place. Go on three more miles. Sleep on hard ground. Do not sleep on sand."
Tafoya asked what the thing was. Sotelo said, in Apache, a phrase that translated roughly to "the one who is not where it stands." He said, "The place where you are looking is where it is not."
Tafoya carried that lesson for 30 years. He saw the mark in a dozen places across the Sonoran during his life. Sometimes it was scratched in stone, sometimes in the wood of a fence post. Once, he saw it cut into the dried hide of a dead steer, the wound so old that the leather had cured around the lines. He always obeyed it. He always slept on hard ground.
His second sighting came when he was 19. He was hunting mule deer alone in the foothills west of the Baboquivari range. He had tracked a single buck for most of the morning and finally cornered it in a small box canyon. Just as he was about to fire, the buck turned its head, not toward him, but toward the opposite wall of the canyon. The deer froze. Tafoya froze, too.
He lowered his rifle very slowly. He looked at the canyon wall and saw nothing. He looked back at the deer, which was still staring. And then, while he was watching, the deer simply fell over. It did not flinch. It did not stagger. It dropped the way a man drops when something cuts a string at the back of his neck.
Tafoya waited for almost an hour before he moved. When he walked over to the carcass, he found no wound, no blood, no mark on the hide. He left the deer where it lay and walked out of the canyon. Halfway down the slope, he stopped and looked back. About 30 feet from the buck, he saw a long, narrow patch of sand where the ripples in the surface ran the wrong way, as if something had been standing there and the sand had settled around the shape of its weight.
He went back to his camp that night and did not sleep. Around 3:00 in the morning, his fire began to do something he had never seen a fire do. It did not go out. The flames did not waver, but all the heat went out of it. He held his hand over the coals and felt nothing. The flame was still there, but there was simply no warmth inside it. The cold lasted about as long as a man takes to slowly count to 100. Then the warmth returned all at once.
By the time he was in his 30s, Tafoya had built a kind of map in his head. Not a map of where the thing was, but a map of where it was not. He had walked thousands of miles of that desert and had begun to notice that there were certain corridors of land where animals behaved normally, where the wind moved the way wind should move. And then there were other corridors, sometimes only 100 yards wide, where everything was slightly wrong.
The wind in those corridors did not match the wind on either side. Birds did not fly across them. Mule deer would walk for miles to go around them. Coyotes would not hunt in them even when game was plentiful. He learned to recognize these corridors by feel before he could recognize them by sight. He said it was like walking out of a room into a hallway where the air pressure was different.
He began to suspect that these corridors were not random. They formed a pattern. By the time he met Father Reyes, he had mapped mentally about 200 of these corridors across a stretch of country roughly the size of the state of West Virginia. And here is the part of his confession that the priest underlined twice in his notebook: the corridors moved. Not quickly, not in a single night, but year by year, decade by decade, the corridors shifted. The patch of ground that had felt wrong in 1865 would feel ordinary in 1875, and another patch of ground three miles east would have taken on the wrongness instead. He said it was as if the thing did not occupy fixed places. It occupied a route. And the route was slowly, patiently walking.
In the winter of 1883, when Tafoya was 37, he was hired by Westover to find a string of seven mules that had been driven off from a freight outfit operating out of Ajo. He took with him a younger tracker, a Tohono O'odham man named Etoy Macario, who was 23 years old at the time. They picked up the trail of the mules about a day south of Ajo and followed it for three days.
On the second day, they noticed that the prints of the mules were no longer being followed by the prints of any men. The raiders had vanished. The mules were still walking south in a straight line, the kind of straight line an animal walks when it is being led by a rope and a hand. Etoy wanted to turn back. Tafoya overruled him.
On the third day, they came over a low rise and saw on the flat below the seven mules. The mules were standing in a circle. Their heads were all pointed inward toward the center. They were not eating. They were not moving. They had been arranged. Tafoya and Etoy watched the mules for almost an hour from the ridge. The animals did not shift. They did not stamp. They did not flick their tails.
Tafoya took his field glass out of his saddlebag and looked through it at the center of the circle. He said he could not at first see anything in the center. He said he then made the mistake of looking very carefully, of letting his eye really settle. And when he did, he saw in the center of the circle what he could only describe as a place where the air was thicker. It was the shape of a tall, narrow figure. It had no edges. It had no features. It had only the suggestion of having a top where a head would be and a bottom where feet would be and a length in between.
He lowered the field glass. He told Etoy very quietly that they were going to back away from the ridge, leave the mules, and ride north for the rest of the daylight. They were not going to stop and they were not going to look back.
About two hours after they left the ridge, while they were riding hard across the flats, Etoy began to scream. Tafoya did not stop. He had been told what to do when a man begins to scream in that country, and what to do was keep riding. They reached water at sundown. Tafoya got off his horse and walked back to Etoy. The younger man was sitting in his saddle, eyes open, breathing, but he was not present.
They made camp that night. Etoy sat across from the fire and stared into it without expression. Around midnight, Etoy finally spoke. He said one sentence in his own language, which Tafoya understood. He said, "It followed me back as far as the ridge, and then it stopped because we crossed a place where someone had marked the rocks."
Tafoya asked, "What marked the rocks?" Etoy said, "You did, when you were a boy."
Tafoya did not remember marking any rocks anywhere as a boy. He had watched Sotelo do it many times. He had never done it himself.
They reached Ajo three days later. Etoy spoke normally by then. He claimed to have no memory of what had happened between the moment they saw the circle of mules and the moment they arrived at water. Two months later, in the early spring of 1884, Etoy Macario walked out of his own house at 3:00 in the morning in his night clothes and walked south. His wife saw him go. She called after him. He did not stop. He did not turn.
His tracks led south out of town and into the desert and continued in a straight line for almost four miles. And then the tracks ended. Not faded, not blown over, ended as if he had stepped off the edge of something. A search party combed the country for two weeks. They never found him.
Tafoya, when he heard, stayed in Tucson. He drank that week for the first time in his adult life. Then he stopped drinking and never started again. He believed he had brought something home from that ridge. Not the figure itself, but an attention. A piece of having been noticed.
For the next two years, he kept working, but he stayed north. And during those two years, he started to see the small mark of the two crossed lines and the line underneath in places he had been many times before and had never seen it. Old fence posts, the door frames of abandoned mining shacks, the rim of a stone well outside a roadhouse where he had stopped a hundred times. He swore in his confession that the marks had not been there before.
Then in the autumn of 1886, he came home one evening to the small adobe room he rented from a widow in Tucson and found scratched into the inside of his own door, very faintly, the same mark. Two lines crossing. A third line beneath. He had locked the door behind him that morning and unlocked it that evening. No one had been inside.
He sat on the floor of his room and looked at the mark for a long time. Then he understood something, or he believed he understood something. The mark was not a warning that the thing had been there. The mark was a warning that the thing was watching that place. Someone all those years had been leaving the warnings behind for the people who would come later. Someone who knew where the thing's attention was. Someone who was tracking the tracker.
Tafoya told Father Reyes that he believed Sotelo had been one of these people. He believed there were others. He had never met them. He did not know what they called themselves. He only knew that the marks kept appearing in country he had walked, in rooms he had locked, and that whoever was leaving them was leaving them for his sake.
He spent the last winter of his life in Tucson, drinking only water, going to early mass at the small mission on the edge of town, and walking every afternoon out to a particular ridge east of the city. He told Father Reyes that he believed the thing was, in its slow patient way, walking toward the city. Not at him, not at any man, just walking, the way weather walks, the way a river finds its bed. He said its corridors had been moving north and east for as long as he had been mapping them. At the rate they were moving, in another 40 or 50 years, they would reach the foothills. In another 100, they would reach the city.
Father Reyes asked him on the third night what he believed the thing was. Tafoya said it was not a ghost, because ghosts were the leftover shapes of people, and this had never been a person. It was not a demon, because demons had purposes and this had no purpose he could see. It was not an animal, because animals could be tracked and understood and this could not.
He said the closest word he had for it in any of the three languages he spoke was the word the Apache had used: the one who is not where it stands. He said it was a thing that occupied the place where you were not looking. It lived in the corner of the eye. When you turned to look, it had already moved one step further into your blind spot.
He said he believed that everyone at some point in their life had probably seen it for half a second and looked away and convinced themselves it had been nothing. He said the difference between him and other men was only that he had been raised by Sotelo, who had taught him to write down in the back of his mind every half second of strangeness he ever experienced and never to dismiss any of it. He said, "If you wrote them all down in your own life, you would find a pattern, too." He said the pattern would scare you. He said, "This is why most people did not write them down."
Father Reyes asked finally what he should do with the confession. Tafoya told him to keep it. He said the warnings were already in the world. The marks were on the doors and the stones and the fence posts. The people who needed to see the warnings would see them. He said he was telling the priest because he had carried it alone for 40 years and he was tired. He wanted one other person to know before he died that he had not imagined any of it.
Father Reyes wrote in the margin of that page a single line in Latin. Translated, it reads, "I believed him."
Cuchillo Tafoya died the following winter in February of 1888 of pneumonia. He was 42 years old. He was buried in the small Catholic cemetery on the south side of Tucson. His grave was unmarked at his own request. He told the priest he did not want to leave a place with his name on it. He did not want to be findable. He had spent 40 years learning how to be a man the thing in the desert could not follow home.
In 1951, three years after the fire in Hermosillo, a survey crew was running a new telephone line through a stretch of desert about 90 miles south of Tucson. A worker named Augustine Vaqueros was digging a hole when his shovel struck stone. He cleared the dirt away and found a small flat slab about the size of a dinner plate buried two feet down. The slab had been buried deliberately, face up, and on its face someone had carved a mark: two lines crossing, a third line beneath them.
They photographed it for the survey report and then left it in place, digging their pole hole three feet to the side. The photograph went into a county file in Pima County. In 1973, a graduate student from the University of Arizona going through old county records came across the photograph and recognized the mark from a footnote in a Jesuit history book. The footnote was a reference to the partially surviving Reyes confession. The student wrote a short article about the photograph and the mark and the confession. It was published in a small academic journal that almost no one read.
The mark is still there. The pole is still there. If you stand in the right spot on a back road south of Three Points and walk about a quarter mile west, you can find the pole. And if you scrape away enough dirt at the base of it, you can find the slab.
People who have been there say the air on that quarter mile of ground feels a degree off. They say their watches do not keep the same time on that walk as they do on the rest of the road. They say a person who is paying attention and who knows what to listen for can hear very faintly the sound of something walking slowly parallel to them on the other side of a small ridge that should be empty. They say the sound never comes from the same direction twice. They say, if you turn your head to look, the sound stops, and then after a little while it starts again somewhere just outside your line of sight.