Cry Dance

"You the BIA guy from Phoenix?" The Bureau of Indian Affairs, United States Department of the Interior. In the last century, the same inflection would have been reserved for the cavalry. Emmett Parker had just locked up his government sedan and was studying the crudely painted sign at the trailhead on Hualapai Hilltop: ENTERING THE SOVEREIGN NATION OF THE HAVASUPAI "You Investigator Parker?" Still silent, Emmett glanced skyward. The snow was coming down harder than it had in Prescott, where he'd grabbed a late breakfast while having his tires chained up. A soft, wet snow was falling all over northern Arizona. Lowering his gaze, he studied the vehicle tracks, not his own, that showed a U-turn in the slush. Boot prints were evident too, two sets. One was small enough to belong to a juvenile. On the way in along Indian Route 18, he'd noted the passing of only three other vehicles. A power company repair van. Then a Forest Service truck. The female employee driving it looked slight enough to have left the smaller prints. And finally, about ten miles back, a 1981 Ford station wagon with two figures seated up front. Their ages and sex had been obscured by the snowmelt the wagon's tires had thrown against Emmett's windshield. Turning, he finally examined the Havasupai tribal cop. In his early twenties, the man had a scraggly beard. His straight black hair had been painstakingly coaxed into dreadlocks, and pinned to his khaki uniform shirt was a cameo of Haile Selassie. Pai youth turning to Rastafarianism. Emmett decided not to ask the young cop about it for the moment. He was back on Indian time again: Everything revealed in its own season. "Yeah, I'm Parker." "Billy Topocoba. Ready for this?" "Sure," Emmett said, flipping his parka hood up over his own raven-colored hair. He still had it cut boarding-school style--scalp showing through the stubbled sides of his head. "Any luggage?" "Just my evidence kit." Emmett slid the battered aluminum case from the car trunk. Topocoba had tethered a string of two horses and a mule to a pinon pine beside the tumbling cliff that marked the end of the Coconino Plateau and the beginning of the lower Grand Canyon. The abyss was lost in swirling white. He walked a tired-looking gelding over to Emmett, averting his eyes as he offered him the reins. "You some kind of Apache?" "No, Comanche," Emmett said. He brushed off the saddle before climbing into it. "Don't recall meetin' a Comanche before." "Never was many of us. Like you Havasupai, I suppose." Emmett paused, then asked, "You just bring somebody up the trail with you?" "Nope." "What about those footprints?" "Forest Service made a pass-through while I was waitin' for you." Emmett asked, "He or she?" "She." That much was the truth. "She get out of her truck to chat?" "Yeah." Topocoba shoved Parker's evidence kit into a wicker pannier on the mule. He went on avoiding eye contact, which made Emmett want to check and see if his own horse's girth strap was tightly fastened. It was too early to get paranoid, even though Topocoba was possibly lying: The smaller of the boot-sole sets appeared to begin where the mule and Topocoba's horse were waiting. But, in all fairness, the prints had already melted out enough to confuse the heel and toe impressions; it was difficult to tell which direction the walker had headed. "Anybody come off the reservation in the last day?" "Nope." Mounting, the young cop started down the trail, leading the mule on a handwoven rope. Not a store-bought one. A poor people--the Havasupai, the Eastern Pai. Too far from any beaten track to profit from the Indian gambling bMitchell, Kirk is the author of 'Cry Dance' with ISBN 9780375432651 and ISBN 0375432655.