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What were originally mistaken for windows were actually the small doorways of eleven adjacent dwellings built onto a ten-foot-deep stone ledge in an otherwise sheer limestone escarpment that could only be reached via a treacherous toe trail from the mesa top fifty feet above it. Below lie only a series of steppes, whose cliffs were lined with dangerous accumulations of talus from which gnarled pines and cedars miraculously grew, leading down to the canyon floor where the dense trees collected the sparse remaining water of what was once a vast prehistoric ocean.
    From where I stood now, shielding my eyes from the blinding glare of the sun, I couldn’t even see it.
    I left Yanaba to nose through the pinecones and needles for piñon nuts as I worked my way to the edge of the cliff and the start of what hardly qualified as a path by any definition of the word. I caught a glint of sunlight from the National Forest Service sign far across the canyon, in the scenic overlook off of Mesa Top Loop Road, where, during the summer, the tourists snapped pictures of these dwellings with telephoto lenses. I intended to get a far closer look.
    A toe trail was literally just that: a series of faint indentations in the sandstone barely deep enough to accommodate your fingers and toes as you crawled down the steep rock like a gecko. I couldn’t imagine having to do this every day to reach my home, especially in the dead of winter when the frigid winds whipped through the valley and every surface was rimed with ice. You’d have to be pretty terrified of something to even consider it.
    It took forever to negotiate the trail. At least that’s how it felt. By the time I reached level ground, my muscles ached in places I didn’t even know I had muscles, places that were going to make my ride home a lot more uncomfortable. I kicked a rock over the edge and watched it flutter and flare like a bird before diving to the slickrock and skipping over the steppe below. It vanished from sight long before I heard it clatter down the talus.
    The walls of the pueblo were built so close to the ledge there was hardly room to walk. They were composed of flat chunks of sandstone and granite fitted together like bricks. The dwellings toward the center remained largely intact, while the wind and the elements had conspired to topple those at the periphery. I ducked through the first patent entrance and into a blessedly cool darkness that spared me the brunt of the wind and the prospect of falling to my death. The walls between dwellings had fared about as well as those along the front. They’d fallen in sections through which I could crawl from one tiny home to the next if I wasn’t worried about tearing my jacket or the knees of my pants. It was hard to imagine people living here in any kind of numbers. The individual dwellings were smaller than prison cells and even I had to duck to keep from knocking myself unconscious on the low roof near the back. It almost felt as though this entire pueblo had been built for children rather than adults, like some last bastion of safety for the next generation should the battle their parents waged be lost.
    I shivered at the thought. There was something about the idea of a vanished society constructing a tiny sanctuary, which was nearly as hard to see from any vantage point as it was to reach, with the sole intention of hiding their children from an enemy it feared it could not defeat that rang true to me. I imagined frightened mothers whispering for their children to be brave as they sent them crawling over the pitfall, while all around them the war cries of their fathers echoed through the valley. Those children sitting in the cool darkness where I now stood, wondering what the resultant silence meant and how much longer they would have to stay hidden before someone eventually came to retrieve them.
    I pried the rattle out from beneath my waistband and shook it. The pale blue glow diffused through the small room.