A Story of Navajo Survival

Steep to offer a place to sleep. We keep going, slashing our way across ledges and fissures, groaning under the weight of our bulging packs. Night falls and still we find no place to set our camp. We become separated, and in the moonless dark I stop, holding onto the trunk-twist of a juniper tree for balance. I listen and cannot hear my partner. We are trying to reach the flatness of the mesa top. I listen for his boots pounding through rocks. I listen for the rasp of his breath, for his pack grating against bush and stone. Nothing. I cannot rely on his route-finding now. I continue alone, but become stranded on a ledge, thinking I can inch my way across an open face of stone. How far is the drop? I cannot see in the dark. This far into the wilderness, floating in the void of the inner reservation, mistakes cannot be made. I panic, feeling my boot soles slipping. I drop to a knee, face pressed to the course grain of sandstone bedrock, and desperately shrug out of my pack. The weight of the gear slips from my back. My pack grunts as it falls, ledge-to-ledge, out of sight. I will have to chase it down and hope that nothing turns out to be too badly damaged. At least now I am free of its weight, able to steady myself on the ledge. I wait, catching my breath. Then I look up and see the shape of my partner against the stars. He's maybe 80 feet above and has heard the fall.

He calls down, tells me that he has found the way-an old domestic sheep route, he says, carved up the cliff's side. Just look for the switchback cuts and then a jury-rigged gate of boulders and juniper limbs off to my left. In less than half an hour, I retrieve my pack and meet him along the sheep route, coming through a gate held closed by a badly rusted kink of bailing wire. The moon is just rising, sending knife blades of milklight through the canyons below. We march ahead, nearing the mesa top. Coming to a flat area, we both stop. A circular shape stands on the ground ahead of us. We split and circle it from opposite sides. It is man-made, very old and mostly collapsed. "Hogan?" my partner asks. I reach out and touch the wood. It is juniper, left to the weather for perhaps a century. The beams had been chosen for their straight lines and girth, and had been corbeled into each other, once composing walls and a ceiling. The shape is traditional,

The construction techniques familiar. This is a Navajo dwelling. "Hogan," I affirm. The wind and sun have peeled back, layer by layer, the wood's surface. The entrance, framed by fallen posts, lies open to the east. We do not even consider entering it. After circling the structure, grazing the wood with our hands, we turn and continue along this old route to find a place to sleep. As we leave, I glance back once, burning this image into my memory: the skeleton of a hogan incrementally illuminated by the rising moon. And then I remember. Less than a year earlier, I sat in the firelight glow inside a hogan. The floor was red dirt, the woodstove in the center made of an oil barrel sawed in half and planted into the ground. Across from me an old Navajo singer sat in a chair, and standing beside him was his grandson, a man in his 30s. The singer was maybe 80 years old, and he wore a down jacket grungy from years of shepherding. He spoke no English, so his grandson translated. I sought permission to walk with a traveling companion in a nearby labyrinth of desert canyons. The singer listened to our questions, told through his grandson, and he spoke back in liquid words of Navajo. Instead of giving us permission, he told us a story. His old hands, dark and wrinkled from working with leather and livestock, opened and folded as he spoke. He explained through his grandson how, when he was a child, most kids were taken from their parents and carried off to Indian boarding schools, and not returned for 10 years. His own parents sent him into hiding, and so as a child, the singer wandered alone into a realm of vast chasms, a place where he could never be found. Each time the people came from the Indian school, he vanished into this lost country.

Then I look up and see the shape of my partner against the stars. He's maybe 80 feet above and has heard the fall.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 6 AND 7] As the Navajo Indian Reservation crosses into New Mexico, Split Mesa's cliffs jut nearly perpendicular to the parched and cracked earth. On the horizon across the state border, Arizona's Sonsela Buttes rise in purple shadow. ADRIEL HEISEY [LEFT] Encouraged by summer rains, fresh green growth carpets Tsegi Canyon along its wending course within Navajo National Monument. GEORGE H.H. HUEY [ABOVE] More than 200 years old, the woody framework of a forked-stick hogan, formerly covered with mud, demonstrates the sturdiness of its ancient design. BERNADETTE HEATH

Arizona, a winter trek known as the Long Walk that left many dead. There was a small group, he said, a few families from Kayenta and Black Mesa, that fled to the west. Troops chased them, but they slipped like ghosts into this realm of hollow canyons. The troops paced back and forth, sending out scouts, trying to follow tracks, but found nothing. The Navajo families were gone.This was the same country we were seeking permission to enter. The story continued. It went back to 1864, when the U.S. government rounded up Navajos and marched them out ofSeven years later, they emerged. They were emboldened by their escape, by their perseverance, enduring years of life in a barren and treacherous landscape. They carried with them a new ceremony, a religion of survival and triumph.

In the shadow flicker of firelight, the singer explained to us the importance of such rituals like vanishing into the wilderness in search of a ceremony. He told us that they are protection. They are the way to live.

NOW, NEARLY A YEAR after meeting the singer in his hogan, I move across this mesa top in the first light of morning, carrying my belongings on my back. I remember the singer's story as I walk. I remember also the weeks that followed my conversation with him, weeks of difficult travel as I crawled and climbed through the same maze of dim canyons that he had walked as a child, the same place his ancestors had gone to escape the U.S. troops, a country that now, on this return trip, lies maybe 40 miles ahead of us.

In the warmth of sunrise, my partner andI stop to survey the land ahead, deciding which approach to take to surmount an extensive row of cliffs. I realize this must have been where the troops had stalled. By the directions the singer had given me, I am able to re-create the scene from 1864. The refugee families must have come through here on their way to the canyon maze. They knew that if they could find a way through the cliffs ahead, the troops would be stymied behind them. Relying on our own knowledge from years of travel through difficult terrain, we scrutinize every cliff band and each shadowed break. There is only one real choice, a steep canyon leading to a butte leaning against the highest cliffs. For the rest of the day, my partner and I struggle up this canyon. Every quarter-mile or so we find some remnant of a sheep gate or a cleared trailthe purple glass of an antique bottle, a strand of rusted barbed wire. As we reach a high pass toward the cliff top, we come to the remains of another hogan. Its juniper beams rest one across the next in a huddle where a dwelling once stood. To one side lies the outline of a sheep corral turning to dust. I kneel to the ground in front of the hogan and lift a lost shirt button. Turned between my fingers, it gives off rainbow colors. It is made of shell. The pass leads to a ramp handcut into stone, which puts us on top of the cliff. Looking down hundreds of feet, I see this is the only passage for miles. A person would have to know this land well to find this route. The troops in 1864, I imagine, were strangers to this place. The Navajo escapees, on the other hand, understood this country. They knew that not far beyond these cliffs were shadowed passageways of canyons, a place so deep and byzantine that it seems like the exposed plumbing of the Earth. No one was able to find the Navajo refugees after they descended into this sandstone underworld. Continuing along our route from the second collapsed hogan, we follow a narrow, high platform of sandstone and piñon trees pinched between the heads of two great canyons. Eventually, the pinch becomes so narrow that cliffs peel away to either side. We walk this narrow passage until finally it crumbles into a harrowing gap spanned by a bridge of stone and wood. At first, neither of us crosses the bridge. We study it, peering down the surrounding plunges of cliff. It seems solid to the eye. It also seems old. It offers the only way through. The entire landscape behind us thins into this single passage, a tight walk to the other side. Again, I think of the Navajo families fleeing into the canyons beyond here. I imagine them in this very place, perhaps the first people to build this bridge. For them, this was the breakaway point, the parting of the Red Sea that would close on the troops behind them. My partner goes first, leaving bootprints in the fine dust. Wind blows them clean before he reaches the other side. I follow, and stop in the middle. Cliffs hang below my hands. I think that if the troops had not known about this single causeway, they had no hope of tracking the families they were after. This is how the families got away, slipping the trap right here. When I began this particular journey, I had not even thought of the singer's story or the canyon refuge I had traveled through the year before. I am just traveling with a friend across northern Arizona. Coming into Navajo territory is happenstance of the trek. I only walk where the land tells me to go, following mesas and canyons. This route has led me to here. It is the land, I realize, that tells the stories we live by. By merely placing one foot in front of the other, I have been propelled along a story older than I, older even than the Navajo people, a story of landscape, of patterns set by geology, by erosion, by time. I continue across the bridge onto the wider blocks of bedrock on the other side, and from there, I vanish within the canyons, following this story into the shadows.

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