DEAR EDITOR

Along the Trackway of Extinction, Still We Walk in Beauty

“DINOSAUR TRACKS” DECLARES the hand-lettered sign on a dirt-road turnoff from U.S. Route 160 on the outskirts of the Navajo Indian Reservation. Brimming with love of all things saurian, I follow the road to a cluster of plywood jewelry booths on a great expanse of red sandstone with a relentless wind snapping a row of American flags.

An old woman with a face of seamed leather sits silently in one of the booths with an air of resignation as profound as the horizon. A young man in a baseball cap, T-shirt and worn jeans steps forward to greet me.

“No charge to see the tracks that are over here,” he says. “Just pay whatever you want after you see them.” He falls into step beside me, carrying a plastic water jug. “I’m Morris Chee, Junior,” says Morris Chee Jr. He pauses and splashes some water into a three-lobed depression in the stone. “They say these are duckbill,” he says.

I kneel to study the fossilized tracks, made from 145 to 213 million years ago in a lush world crowded with giant ferns but bereft of flowers.

“Here is the little one,” says Chee, gesturing to another set of tracks that echo the first set. The ground bears 20 different imprints within 200 yards of the trinket booths. Chee leads me to the largest.

“Tyrannosaurus,” he says.

I slip my hand into the place where the tyrant king had walked. Perhaps he stalked the duckbills and just beyond the reach of stone snatched the baby as it trotted alongside its mother, a premature extinction.

We chat as the sun subsides. Chee was born just up the road in Moenave, and speaks the Navajo language more easily than English. He calls Navajos who speak only English “lost Indians.” Raised in California foster homes among white kids who called him “Cheeseburger,” he lived awhile in Phoenix before returning home to the dirt-floor hogan that had nurtured five generations of his family. In summer, he shows the tracks, herds sheep and tends cornfields. In winter, he plucks turkeys in a Utah factory.

Chee takes me up to the edge of the mesa to appreciate the view: south to Humphreys Peak where the Hopi Katsinam spirits live just beyond the ski resort; west to the Grand Canyon’s North Rim where a last fragment of oldgrowth forest sways in the wind; and east to the white flanks of the mesas where the Hopi people hold ceremonies to perpetuate life in this, the Fourth World.

“I would not leave again,” says Chee. “It is much better to live here. In Phoenix you have to pay, pay, pay. If you lose your job, where do you live? What do you do? That is why we feel sorry for you,” he concludes, turning back to watch the sunset. Down on the distant highway, the cars hurtle past like demented beetles.

But all that was years ago. Since then I have learned that the tracks of the carnivore in the sandstone were probably made by a prowling dilophosaurus-a 20foot-long meat eater with a flashy crest that inspired the frilled, poison-spitting critter in the movie Jurassic Park. Last time I passed by that windswept stretch of highway, I turned aside once again. The tracks persist, and the wind, but Chee was not there with his jug of water.

Still, I thought of him as I looked through the photos of Dinétah by Navajo photographer LeRoy DeJolie in this issue, along with mystery writer Tony Hillerman’s insightful description of the Navajos. In the book, Hillerman recalls standing with a Navajo friend overlooking a place labeled “Desolation Flats” on maps made by white people. His friend laughed and said the Navajos call that same place “Beautiful Valley.” My life has hurried on since that windswept day with Chee. I have a 401K, sign other people's timesheets and aspire to a digital camera.

But still I think of Chee's pity for me and the swagger of an extinct predator.

The dinosaurs could not imagine extinction, but Chee lives in its shadow, as do we all.

So I will not linger long, in this office shut away from the sun. I will go happily into the late light, repeating the words of the Navajo Night Chant: With beauty before me, I walk With beauty behind me, I walk. With beauty all around me, I walk It is finished in beauty.