In 1947, a journalist drove south from Shiprock, New Mexico, to meet a Navajo tribal elder named Hash-ke-nah-bah. The old man was 81 years old and sat outside a small trading post on a chair he had built himself from cottonwood. He had been a hand trembler, a traditional diagnostician whose job was to find what was wrong with a person, an animal, or a piece of land.
The journalist had come with questions about a series of disappearances near the San Juan River in the late 1930s. There were sheep ranchers, two government surveyors, and a geologist from Denver named Marvin Calloway. Calloway was 44 years old when he walked off into the desert one morning in 1936 and never came back. His truck was found three days later, parked neatly by a wash. The keys were still in the ignition, his canteen was full, his rifle was clean, and his boots were beside the driver's seat. He was gone.
A federal report admitted that no cause of disappearance had been determined. There was also a note that the local Navajo population had refused to assist in the search. When asked why, Hash-ke-nah-bah did not answer right away. He looked out across the rust-red mesas and 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 the journalist that the land between the four points was not empty and had never been empty. Long before the surveyors came with their chains and theodolites, the Diné had walked that ground carefully. There were places a man went around, not through. There were 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 give it a name. He said that some names, when spoken aloud in the wrong place, are heard.
He told a story that went back to 1865, when the Long Walk ended and his people were forced from their land down to a place called Bosque Redondo. For four years, no one sang the proper songs. For four years, no one walked the proper paths. When the Diné came home in 1868, they came back to a desert that had grown hungry while they were away. His grandfather had been a young boy on the walk back and remembered that the first thing the elders did when they came in sight of the sacred mountains was stop. Hundreds of people stood and sang for a long time. 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 and soldiers and surveyors who came after did not understand any of this. They thought the silence was just silence. They thought a tall, thin shape on a far ridge at sundown was just a tree or a trick of the dying light. But the Diné knew. They kept their distance from certain places and did not speak certain names aloud. The white men did not always survive.
In the 1870s and 1880s, there were disappearances that never made it into any newspaper. Cattlemen, drifters, and 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 grazing peacefully with the saddle still on. His rifle was found leaning against a juniper tree, not dropped, not flung, but leaning the way a man might lean it before sitting down to rest. The Navajo who lived near where Velmar had been camping refused to enter that area for the rest of the summer. When a sheriff from Farmington came to ask why, an old man told him only this: "The man you're looking for sat down at a fire that was not a fire."
Hash-ke-nah-bah explained that in that desert at certain hours there could be a fire that was not a fire. There could be a voice that was not a voice. There could be 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 it. He said it was older than the Diné. It had been there when the desert was still green, when rivers ran where there are now only dry beds, when mammoths moved across the plain. It was still there. And it was hungry.
The story of Marvin Calloway began in the spring of 1936. He was hired by a mining concern out of Denver to survey the southwestern quadrant of the San Juan Basin for uranium deposits. He was 44 years old, had worked in mineral geology for 22 years, and had surveyed in the Yukon, northern Mexico, and the high canyons of Peru. He kept careful field notebooks in a small, precise hand and did not believe in anything he could not measure with a rule.
When he disappeared, the company sent a recovery team. It consisted 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 Yazhi, which means "little water," hired in the town of Aneth. Tó Bi Yazhi led them as far as the wash where the truck had been found. Then he stopped. He pointed up the wash into the canyon and said in English, "I will wait here." Pemberton tried to argue, offered more money, tried to threaten him. Tó Bi Yazhi did not move. He said, "There is no amount of money that would make me walk up that canyon."
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 that he could not explain and a piece of fabric clutched in his fist. It was a strip of old canvas, the kind you might cut from a tent. The dye had faded. There were marks on it that Cromwell would later say looked like writing in a language he did not recognize.
Cromwell was helped down out of the canyon by Tó Bi Yazhi. He did not speak for three days. When he finally did, he said only one thing: "Howard sat down." He would not explain. For the rest of his life, he refused to talk about what had happened in that canyon. He died in 1958 of natural causes in Pueblo, Colorado. His widow, going through his papers, found a sealed envelope marked simply, "Not to be opened." She opened it anyway. Inside was a single sheet of paper dated 1941. It said: "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 the journalist described this to Hash-ke-nah-bah, the old man did not seem surprised. He nodded slowly. "Yes," he said. "That is how it happens." He said the thing did not always take a person by force. Sometimes it called them. It made itself look like a thing they wanted to walk toward: a fire on a cold night, a voice that sounded familiar, a figure on a far ridge that for a moment looked like a man they knew. The person, especially the person from outside who did not know to look away, would walk toward it. Once they sat down, they did not get up. Or rather, something got up, but it was not them.
The journalist asked carefully whether this was what some other native peoples called a skinwalker. Hash-ke-nah-bah looked at him 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."
In the autumn of 1937, a year after Marvin Calloway disappeared, Hash-ke-nah-bah's own grandson, a young man of 23 named Bidzil, went out to bring in sheep that had wandered too far from the family hogan. It was late in the day. The sun was already low. Bidzil had been told all his life not to be out alone in the desert at sundown, especially not in the quarter of country west of the Lukachukai range. But the sheep had wandered, and he was young, and he was not afraid. He did not come home that night.
When morning came, Hash-ke-nah-bah and three other men of the family rode out to find him. They followed his tracks. They found his horse, calm and well, tied to a juniper tree. They found the sheep, all 11 of them, gathered in a small huddle near a rock formation, alive and unharmed. About 100 yards beyond the sheep, they found the prints where Bidzil had stopped walking. Just stopped in the middle of the desert, with nothing in front of him. The prints faced west toward the setting sun. Beyond them, in the soft red sand, there were no more tracks of any kind.
The men stood there a long time. Then Hash-ke-nah-bah took out a small leather pouch that had been passed down through five generations. Inside was a substance made by a particular family of medicine people in the Lukachukai Mountains. It was meant to be scattered in a place where something had taken a person, to keep the thing from coming back to the same spot. He scattered it on the ground where Bidzil's footprints stopped. Then he and the other men gathered up the sheep, led the horse, and rode home in silence.
Bidzil was never found. Not a body, not a bone, not a scrap of clothing. The family held a ceremony for him after a year and did not speak his name aloud after that. Hash-ke-nah-bah told the journalist that was the worst day of his life. He said that all that day, walking through that piece of country, he could feel that the thing that had taken Bidzil was still there, still watching. He said the air was wrong. He said even the sun, low on the horizon, looked like it was hesitating, like it did not want to set in that place because of what would walk in the dark afterward.
The journalist asked what the thing actually was. Hash-ke-nah-bah thought for a long time. He said the Diné have a story that long before there were people in this world, there were other beings: beings of fire, beings of water, beings of wind. They lived in the worlds that came before this one. There were four worlds before our world, and in each of those worlds the beings 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 of them got caught in between. And some of them found the cracks, the places where one world had not closed properly behind another. They came through.
He said 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 it was also still partly somewhere else. That was why it could appear and disappear. That was why it could look like a man one moment and like nothing at all the next. That was why it could call you with a voice that sounded like your father, or your wife, or your child, or a friend you had not seen in 20 years. 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, on its own ground, sometimes it remembers you, and it adds you to the list of things it intends eventually to come for.
The sun finished its setting. The sky turned the color of dried blood, then the color of bruises, then dark. After a long time, Hash-ke-nah-bah said very quietly in English, "You should leave before it is full dark." He was not joking.
The journalist left and drove all the way back to Gallup without stopping. Twice on that drive, on a long flat stretch of road where there was nothing for miles, he thought he saw a thin, tall shape standing on a low rise off to the side of the highway. The first time, he told himself it was a saguaro, even though saguaros do not really grow that far north. The second time, he did not let himself look at all. When he pulled into a gas station in Gallup, his hands were shaking on the wheel. The man who came out to fill his tank looked at him, looked at the direction he had come from, and said, "You've been out toward Shiprock?" The journalist said yes. The man said, "Late to be coming back from there." He did not ask who the journalist had been visiting. He just looked at the dark road behind him for a long moment and said, "Some folks shouldn't drive that road after sundown."
The journalist went back the following spring in 1948. He had learned of three more disappearances in that country: a rancher named Curtis Holloway, a pair of hunters from Wyoming, and a botanist from the University of Arizona named Dr. Viola Vance, who had gone out to study desert flora and had not come back. But when he drove out to the trading post south of Shiprock, it was closed. The young man who had translated was not there.
At a nearby home, a woman answered the door. She said in English, "He has gone to be with his ancestors." The journalist asked when. She said, "In the winter, in the cold months." He asked how. She said that Hash-ke-nah-bah had gone out to walk one evening toward the west. He had told his family he wanted to walk a little before supper. He was 82 years old and had walked that path many times, but that evening he did not come back. The men of his family had gone out at first light. They had followed his footprints to a place a half mile from the house, where the land sloped down into a small wash. There, his footprints had stopped. Just stopped in the open desert with nothing in front of him.
The journalist asked her if she knew what had happened. She said something he thought about every day for the rest of his life. She said, "He had been waiting. He had been waiting for a long time. He had told us the year before that he had a debt. When his grandson was taken, he threw a substance on the ground to keep the thing away. But the thing remembered. He said that throwing the substance was not the end of it. He said that one day the thing would come for him." She paused. "He went to meet it so that it would not come to the house." She closed the door.
In the years that followed, the journalist tried to learn more. He spoke with other Diné elders in other parts of the reservation. Most would not speak with him at all about the subject. Two spoke obliquely. They said the thing in the Four Corners was real. They said it had been there a very long time. They said the modern world of paved roads and electric lights and radio waves had not driven it away. It had only made it more careful, more patient. It had learned to hide better. It had learned to wait.
One old woman in the town of Tuba City in the autumn of 1953 told him that the thing did not come for everyone. Most people who walked through that country, especially the tourists and the photographers and the families pulling off the highway to buy a postcard at the marker, were of no interest to it at all. It was looking for a particular kind of person. Sometimes it only watched and let you go, and you would never know how close you had come. The journalist asked what kind of person it was looking for. She said, "The kind that hears."
He asked what that meant. She said, "Most people walk through the world half asleep. They do not hear what is talking to them. The thing in the desert does not bother with them. It is a hunter. It does not waste its time. But there are some people, the ones who have always heard things, who have always felt things, who have always known when a room was wrong, when a road was wrong, when a person across a table 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."
She would not say more. The journalist wondered sometimes whether he was one of those people, whether he had felt that prickling at the back of his neck on the road outside Gallup because it had noticed him, because it had in some way marked him. He did not know. He never went back.
There is a stretch of land where four states touch in a single point. Most folks who pass through it stop, take a photograph, and drive away within 10 minutes. They tell themselves they are leaving because of the heat, or the dust, or the long emptiness of the road ahead. But maybe they leave for a reason their bodies know and their minds will not say. Maybe that prickling at the back of the neck, that sudden urge to be back inside the car, that strange, shapeless dread when the wind comes up, maybe those things are old. Older than language. Older than the names we put on the land. Maybe their bodies know something is out there. And maybe their bodies are right.