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Petroglyphs appeared on the sandstone where moments before I had seen nothing. They were old and faded and indistinct, little more than the powdery residue that remained of whatever phosphorescent medium they’d used to paint it. I recognized men and animals. Coyotes and deer and turkeys and pronghorns and bears. Animals like bison and mountain goats I had a hard time imagining had ever roamed this area in any kind of numbers, and yet here they were, immortalized on the stone by hands I would have been surprised to learn were even as old as mine.
    And there was something else I recognized, not from the history books or from legends, but from a chunk of rock I suspected originated somewhere nearby and somehow found its way into my grandfather’s possession. There was the animal with the hunched back and the oblong head with the horns of a ram. It must have been utterly terrifying to have been captured in such painstaking detail by what I now believed to be children.
    Children who might or might not have understood that their parents would never be coming back for them.
    I watched that process of comprehension play out before me on the walls as I crawled from one room to the next, shaking the rattle as I went. I saw great warriors with spears and arrows, etched larger than life by those who revered them, and I saw an enemy against which there was no doubt they would fall, even in the minds of those who drew them. And I watched that number of warriors diminish and their eyes turn to Xs, watched the same thing happen to the animals, and wondered exactly what kind of view this pueblo afforded.
    Eventually, I encountered a section where the rear wall had cracked and portions of the storyline had crumbled away and fallen to the ground. This was where my grandfather’s slab had originated. Right here in this very room where once a child had knelt in the darkness, painting his or her final testament onto the sandstone while waiting for the eventual return of his or her parents, or for the enemy against which they fought to scurry over the edge of the mesa and find where they’d been hidden.
    And in the next to the last room I found the depiction of another location I recognized. A steep cliff on top of which was the unmistakable design of the Sun Temple. The original construction consisted of fifteen-foot double walls filled with rubble, fortified in a manner well beyond any of the other dwellings. A construction, archaeologists believed, that was abandoned before its completion. And below it, halfway up the steep cliff, was a doorway into which more of the hunched creatures with the horns appeared to be crawling, bringing with them stick men and animals with Xs for eyes. And one creature, right in the middle of the doorway, that I couldn’t help but feel as though was staring right at me through the centuries.
    There was no continuation of the storyline in the last room. Nothing but bare rock.
    I crawled back out and sat on the ledge with my feet dangling over the precipice for a while. The still darkness, which had initially felt so wonderful after riding so far in the frigid wind, had suddenly become smothering. I reveled in the sensation of the movement of fresh air against my bare skin. There was something about this place that made me increasingly uncomfortable, as though rather than an ancient dwelling, it had served as a tomb.
    I climbed back up the toe trail and shared a half-frozen bottle of water with Yanaba before hauling myself up onto her back. We were both going to need it for the long ride ahead.

 
     
     
    TEN
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    The Sun Temple was named for a single design found on a rock in the southwest corner. Experts believed construction on the temple commenced in 1275, well after the Anasazi moved from their original dwellings on the mesa tops into the defensible cliff dwellings, and then was abandoned with the remainder of the Canyons of the Ancients a year later. The truth was no one actually