Moonlight Water by Win Blevins Page B

every sound water makes, fighting its way between boulders.
    She pulled for the left bank, where the current was strong. “Echo Rapids is just around that bend. Serpent House is right there beyond those tammies, in the cliff face,” she said, “but you can’t see it from here.” She worked hard for several strokes.
    â€œThey’ve gone on,” she said, a little breathless. “If they were at the ruin, the boat would be tied somewhere right along there.” It looked like just another stretch of bushes to Red. “Let’s get into the eddy.”
    She muscled them there, and the eddy actually eased them back upstream. Zahnie jumped out, painter in hand. “Help me!”
    He plunged in and helped pull the boat most of the way out of the water. Grabbing the painter, he threw a clove hitch around a stub on a downed cottonwood, grinned, and said nothing about being a sailor.
    They climbed a sandy hillock and she glassed the rapids with her binocs. A hundred fifty to two hundred feet long, he guessed. She took her time, sliding the binocs slowly downriver. “They’re not here. Not at the ruin.” Her voice was tight, low. “They made it downriver.”
    â€œEasy from here?”
    â€œEasy enough.” Her voice relaxed a little. “C’mon, let’s scrub our way through these tammies, see Serpent House. Just a couple of hundred yards.”
    â€œTammies?”
    â€œTamarisks, those big bushes that line the bank.”
    In a couple of minutes they were bushwhacking across a flat.
    â€œUp there is Neville Canyon,” she said, pointing off to the right to a break in the rock wall.
    They hand-fought their way through tammies. Suddenly they were in a clearing and the ancient Serpent House ruin gazed down upon them.

 
    12
    SERPENT HOUSE MAGIC
    Don’t cross a snake’s path unless you slide or shuffle your feet.
    â€”Navajo saying
    Â 
    In one breath he lost his heart.
    He gasped, drawing his life back in.
    It was higher up the wall than the other ruin, and bigger, maybe three stories high. It had a couple of round towers that blew harmonicas through his skin. From the high buildings in the center small structures rambled sideways along the cliff, like flowering vines. It had the magic of paintings in fairy-tale books.
    Then he saw. A huge snake was painted bloodred on the wall above the ruin.
    He wandered forward, toward Serpent House, enchanted, and came to the base of the rock. Odd steps led upward, cut into the stone, now smoothed by wind, water, and time.
    â€œForget it,” she said. “Higher up they’re worn too smooth. You have to be a daredevil or use a rope.” She handed him the binoculars. “These aren’t the same as being there, but they’re better than nothing.”
    Red glassed from building to building like a sleepwalker. He knew he could make it up there, touch the rock, smell the musty air.
    â€œCheck out that snake,” she said softly.
    He trained the glasses on it. Spectacular, as thick as a man’s thigh and undulating about twenty-five feet across the wall above the buildings. The color was a red that probably was once bold, but now faded with age. In form it was a wave, perfectly regular in the way of no earth-born snake. Mysteriously, it had neither head nor tail.
    He noticed Zahnie eyeing him peculiarly, but he had no time for that, only for the strange new feelings lifting his chest and spinning his head.
    Red felt her touch his shoulder. “Let’s have another swig,” she said. “You’re probably dehydrated.”
    They sat on a rock in the shade of a giant sagebrush. Red pulled deep on the water bottle.
    â€œThe big snake,” she said to him, “how do we know it’s not a painting of the river?”
    â€œDon’t know. How do we?”
    â€œWe ask the descendants of the Anasazi, the modern pueblo people, the Hopi, the Laguna, all those