Dance of the Bones by J. A. Jance Page B

ornaments.
    She came to be called Ho ’ ok O ’ oks, which means Evil Giantess. She came to be feared by all the Tohono O ’ odham, and that, nawoj, my friend, is still true, even to this day.
    A WAVE OF DESPAIR WASHED over Lani as the stubborn boy turned his back and walked away. She knew then that she had failed. Gabe was beyond her reach—­too angry and arrogant to listen. Hot tears stung her cheeks. For a moment she was tempted to call and beg him to come back, but she didn’t. She simply let him go, reaching instead for the comfort of her medicine basket.
    She slipped the crystals back into their pouch and dropped that into the basket. Then, in the flickering firelight, she examined the basket’s other contents. First out were two separate shards of ­pottery—­a reddish one with an almost invisible tortoise drawn on it and the other one coal black. The red one had once belonged to Nana Dahd ’s grandmother, S’Amichuda O’oks—­Understanding Woman—­while the black one had come from Betraying Woman’s cave, deep in this very mountain.
    Tradition dictated that a woman’s pots must always be broken upon her death in order to release the pot maker’s spirit. Lani was sure that Understanding Woman’s pots had been broken by her grieving relatives in just that way upon the old woman’s death. Betraying Woman, however, had died alone in the cavern, abandoned and unmourned. Her spirit had remained trapped in her long-unbroken pots until Lani herself had smashed them. And these two pieces of pottery, one red and one black, were the only reminders of either of those two long-­ago elders.
    Next came a tiny bone—­as small as a baby’s finger. That was the tiny piece of bat wing skeleton that Lani had brought with her out of the cavern. The bone served as a reminder that Nanakumal—­Bat—­had helped see Lani through one terrible fight, and maybe he would do so again in this battle for Baby Fat Crack’s soul.
    The next items in the basket were Nana Dahd ’s basket-makng awl and the leather tobacco pouch Fat Crack the elder had given her. She had gone out in the fall and collected the green wild tobacco leaves—­ wiw . She had dried the leaves and broken them into small pieces just the way the legend of Little Lion and Little Bear said it must be done. She had brought the tobacco along with her today in hope that, before the night was over, she and Gabe would share the Peace Smoke.
    Gabe was gone, but perhaps, Lani reasoned, the sacred smoke was still in order. She pulled some of the dried wild tobacco leaves from the pouch and rolled them into a loose cigarette. It took a moment for her fumbling fingers to locate the final item in her basket—­Looks at Nothing’s ancient lighter. She had taken the old blind medicine man’s Zippo to a guy in Tucson, a man with a reputation for rehabbing aging lighters. The brass finish was worn through in spots, but refilled and with a new striking mechanism, the lighter sprang to life at the very first try.
    After lighting the cigarette, Lani sat there with the sweet smoke drifting around her as she considered her connection to those two wise old men, one of whom she had never met. It was through them that she knew that the Tohono O’odham never use a pipe—­that age-­old custom that was part of other tribes’ traditions. Originally, the Desert ­People had used leaves to wrap their ceremonial smokers. Now they bought their cigarette wrappers the same place everybody else did—­at either the trading post or else at Bashas’ grocery store in Sells.
    Lani closed her eyes and allowed herself to be carried along in the smoke-­filled air. When she opened her eyes sometime later, it was as though a ghost had arisen out of the ground. That’s when she saw a vision of the evil white-­haired Milgahn woman once again.
    As the hair