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would putting the bones back together do? And so the older brothers, bellies full, went to sleep.
    The youngest brother left them and walked up a hill to lay out the bones. Leg bone connected to the shoulder bone and so on. He finished and watched as the moonlight fell upon the skeleton. Before his eyes the bones knitted together, flesh grew, hair sprouted. The buffalo rose and walked away.
    When the hunter went down the hill, he discovered his three brothers had transformed into enormous rattlesnakes: this was their punishment for ignoring the buffalo. They slithered into a hole to live beneath the hill. The youngest brother put his head in the hole and told them, Even though you’re now serpents, and jackasses as well, you’re still my family . So from that time onward the Sioux would bring offerings to the entrance of their hill, whereupon the snakes would give the tribe powerful medicine to use in battle against their enemies.
    This story came suddenly to the head of Tobias Clayton Lyddy as he picked himself up from the scree he had just rolled down like a wheel of cheese. Having walked three steps off the trail to piss, his fingers undoing his fly as he trod, he became aware of a cunning illusion in the landscape: a crevasse in the ground that, through perspective and an arrangement of brush, was indistinguishable from solid earth until Lyddy’s boot heel met nothing but wind and curses. He tumbled into darkness. Lay there some moments at the bottom, wondering if he was broken completely or if just parts were.
    Staring upwards, wiggling fingers and toes to confirm their assemblage, Lyddy saw a cavernous dome far overhead, the underside of the mesa he had been circumnavigating. Sunlight sliced down through pierced rents. Lyddy had tripped into one of these. But rather than plummeting straight to the rocky floor, his fall had been interrupted by a landslide of bruising stone.
    After he realized his legs would hold him, Lyddy stood. Faced the clusters of buildings cut into the walls of the enormous cavern, many of their facades etched with winding serpents. That’s when the story of the four brothers jumped into his brain.
    He had heard the story years ago around a campfire, one of those impromptu nights when the paths intersect of a half-dozen Conestogas and a couple of prospectors and maybe a few rowdies on the run from a warrant, a night where bottles of whiskey are passed around. Stories told about Indians and ghosts and the Devil swapping fiddles for souls. The teller had said the tale of the four brothers was from Sioux lands—up north, in the Dakota Territory. But seeing the snakes under the mountain made Lyddy think he had found where the three siblings had sidewinded off to.
    Lyddy was fresh to New Mexico. Had held over a dozen claims, each of them squeaking out just enough to keep him in shovels and cornmeal before he would shake his fists at Jesus sitting at the Right Hand and light out to buy another patch someplace else. Nebraska, Colorado, now the Territory. He had heard descriptions of pueblo cities, square stone houses and courtyards built into the sides of canyons, and he imagined these were them: wedges of sandstone fitted together to make walls, black gaps for windows and doorways. Empty places, their architects disappeared. Some Indians, like the Hopi, knew about the cliff villages. Shunned them. Refused to even discuss them. Or so Lyddy had been told.
    These buildings weren’t square. They were cylindrical, without corners, with painted snakes wrapped around them. Lyddy was ringed by shelves upon shelves of giant hat boxes, rising up toward the fractured ceiling of the mesa.
    He crossed the cavern floor, climbed a ladder to the lowest tier. He was surprised the wood and fiber twine held his weight.
    “Hello there, hello?” he called.
    No answer except his echo. He approached the buildings, the wet armpits and back of his shirt turned icy, once away from the smolder of the desert. Up close he saw