mystery

THE WITCHES' WATER POCKET A STRANGE OCCURRENCE AT

ENOUGH STARS HANG IN THE SKY TO MAKE EVERY DREAM ON EARTH COME TRUE. I'VE NEVER SEEN anything like it. I suck in a breath and lean back in my tent, holding the pure air in my lungs as long as I can, staring up at the glory of the beyond.

So begins a night of torment.

But let me go back to the beginning. This particular encounter with the dark side started with a call from my editor.

"You're going back to the Witches' Water Pocket," he said, referring to the first story I'd done on this place.

"But I already spent a day traipsing around in there. I didn't find any witches."

"I want you to spend the night. Don't these witches come out at night?"

"You want me to put my life at the mercy of the innupin?"

"You catch on fast." Click.

I hung up thinking the world holds two sources of evil: ringing telephones and editors honking in your ear when you pick up.

Don't misunderstand. I loved the Pocket my first time there. The place is mysterious, full of history. But it's extremely difficult to reach. And to go such a distance on a hunt for witches that Chuar'ruumpeak, a Kaibab-Paiute Indian chief, swore he saw 129 years ago, seemed ludicrous. Oh, well. I'd done weirder. I called photographer Edward McCain and told him we were back on the trail of my one-armed hero, Maj. John Wesley Powell, the frontier explorer of the Grand Canyon.

"So when you flip out at 2 A.M., I'm supposed to capture it on film?" McCain inquired.

"Remember, I puff out like a blowfish when I get spooked." "I'll bring my wide-angle lens."

I CAME ACROSS SOMETHING I'D FORGOTTEN EARLIER. INNUPIN ARE SAID TO APPEAR IN DIFFERENT FORMS. ONE IS WHIRLWINDS, DUST DEVILS. THEY SWEEP YOU UP AND CARRY YOU AWAY.

We hung everything that went wrong in the trip's early stages on those pesky witches. Took a wrong turn? It's the innupin. Traffic jam? Innupin.

We spent the first night in a cabin on the Kaibab Plateau. A storm blew in, and we awoke to a sunrise in a snowy forest, and the music of water dripping from the trees and the cabin roof, a humbling sound.

Just like the discovery I soon made. I forgot to pack underwear. Ouch. Food, water - they're optional, mere trifles next to this.

We departed the plateau and headed west. I urged McCain to step on it.

"I'm already busting the speed limit," he said.

"It's chilly here, if you get my drift. Or should I say draft?"

"You mean . . ."

"That's right, I'm riding without a saddle." McCain floored it.

The first settlement we hit on the Arizona Strip was Fredonia. Not a clothing store in sight. We drove over the Arizona line into Utah, a violation of the rental agreement we signed to secure our four-wheel-drive Blazer. We joked about being lawbreakers, desperate men on a cross-state underwear run.

The only clothing store in Kanab, Utah, eight miles up, was Duke's. The clerk smiled in greeting. But I had no time for niceties.

"Look here, sweetheart, I want a three-pack of Hanes custom-fit drawers and no-body gets hurt."

Problem solved and back in Arizona, we kept the jokes going as we rolled down State Route 389, then onto the dirt road that runs south toward Mount Trumbull and Toroweap.

Witches were far, far from our minds. The day ebbed as we neared the Pocket. Instead of hiking in and setting up in darkness, we made camp short of the spring. We'd spend the night in this dirt clearing, and stay tomorrow at Powell's campsite.

Stars continue to flood the sky. They're huge and bright and dressed up to put on a show. As we make hot chocolate and watch, a problem hangs in my mind: What am I going to write about?

This place is as peaceful as any I can imagine. If witches inhabit it, or the site of the actual spring a quarter-mile down the rocky wash, they're probably as mesmerized by the beauty as I am, uninterest-ed in working any mischief.

Sleep comes easily. My last conscious thought: my kingdom for a blasted witch.

Then comes the deepest part of the night, and something happens. I awaken to a sound, a screaming so distant it requires concentration to hear. It's not coyotes, and it can't be the wind. There is no wind.

I sit up and wonder why a sound so far off stirs me in the first place. I usually sleep soundly. It goes on, this unnerving racket. I check my watch and chuckle.

Two A.M., the exact time McCain said I'd throw my fit.

Morning. The sky is clear enough to see onto heaven's front porch. Only a golden eagle breaks the gorgeous monopoly of blue. He hovers over camp as we begin climbing the high ridge that forms the Pocket's northern boundary.

We nickname the eagle Shuts, after Powell's Kaibab-Paiute guide.

The hike turns arduous, taking us through cactus patches that tear at our clothing and boulders that may or may not give way when we trust our weight to them.

Even with his camera equipment, McCain pushed far ahead. He could lug a thousand pounds up a sheer incline while eating a sandwich. Sometimes I think he wasn't born, he was assembled. I'm laboring under the weight of a Bic pen and a box of SnackWell's, which I'm sure will give me a stress fracture.

But the view is worth the work: the grassy flatland split by the road, whirlwinds of dust racing along its khaki surface, the towering cliffs lining the eastern horizon, the grumpy green hump of Trumbull to the southwest.

The scene sparks my imagination. I'm seeing artist Frederick Dellenbaugh, one of Powell's party, crossing the plain below.

"I was riding a bronco broken only a few weeks before," Dellenbaugh wrote in his memoirs, describing an experience he had before reaching the Pocket, "and at an unexpected moment I was sudden-ly deemed persona non grata, but I kept my seat and vanquished the beast after a vigorous circus."

When Powell's men camped here, he saw them dipping a pail into the water trying to get a clear drink. The major grabbed a cup, dragged it through the water, and gulped it down without a pause. "I haven't seen any wigglers," he remarked nonchalantly.

We toast the major with Rimrock bottled water gulped under the grinning half moon.

"Still no innupin," McCain says.

"Maybe we saw them and didn't realize it."

"What're you talking about?"

I'd been doing some reading and came across something I'd forgotten earlier. Innupin are said to appear in different forms. One is whirlwinds, dust devils. They sweep you up and carry you away.

"You mean today . . . out on the road?" McCain asks.

A few hours earlier, out at our first campsite, he would've let out a skeptic's howl, but not now with 12 hours until the next sun.

Clarence Dutton, a 19th-century geologist, was right. This truly is a weird place.

HE EYED ME KEENLY. "WHAT'S WRONG?" "DON'T YOU HEAR THAT?" "HEAR WHAT?" WE GO BACK AND FORTH ABOUT THE SCREAMING.

I picture a teenage Dellenbaugh hanging on for life. He painted another picture in his book A Canyon Voyage: "We saw a band of 20 wild horses spinning across the plain one behind another like a train of railway cars, a huge stallion playing locomotive."

And a bit later, Dellenbaugh reported: "A flock of antelope blew by, but they were too far off to be hunted."

The wild horses and antelope are long gone from this land. Maybe the witches Dellenbaugh wrote about have gotten out of Dodge, too.

We sit on the big limb of a fallen juniper, its blue berries shaking in the wind that's kicked up. Shuts is still with us, gliding the sky. I ask McCain, for the fifth time, if he heard the screaming in the night.

"Only things I heard were the birds this morning. It was probably just the birds."

"That was like no birds I ever heard."

The next night we set camp in the abode of the witches, and it begins.

Supper is tuna fish and cheese served beside the murky pool at the rear of the Pocket. The water jumps with tadpoles. In early accounts they were called "wigglers."

It's as though, in coming here, we departed one realm and entered another, one in which everything familiar is gone. Darkness demands that we observe everything anew.

The black rock walls on three sides seem higher and closer now, and with that comes the realization of what would happen if one of them breaks loose. The exit path along the creekbed is blocked by an oak tree sent hurtling off the ridge by rushing water. I passed it several times in daylight without a thought.

But in the blackness of evening, and in the bounce and flicker of our fire, the branches move and take new shapes, becoming whatever the mind allows. No one should camp in this spot. A hard rain could create a wall of water to ferry us into the next area code.

Why am I entertaining such thoughts when there isn't a cloud for miles? I think I'll enjoy the stars.

Soon I'm jerked from sleep by the popping fire. Then I hear it again, the screaming, much louder this time and in longer stretches. Several times I wait, thinking it's finally over, and back it comes, this tortured cry.

THE WITCHES' WATER POCKET

I take a moment to assess logically what I'm hearing. A troubled aircraft. Coyotes. A wounded animal. I reject all of these. It's unlike anything I've heard before. And it won't stop.

The next thing I know, my heart practically bounces out of my chest. I hear the sound of movement on the rocks behind the tent. Someone, or something, is making its way down the north wall of the gorge. Louder and louder the sound grows.

I grip the sleeping bag beside me and shake it to awaken McCain. But it's empty. At the same instant, I turn back toward the tent opening and see McCain, standing in silhouette between me and the fire. I had no idea he was even gone.

"It's . . . you," I say, struggling for a breath.

"Yeah, I couldn't sleep." He eyed me keenly. "What's wrong?"

"Don't you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

We go back and forth again on the screaming. He sticks with the preposterous notion that it's birds. That's the trouble with photographers. If it doesn't show up in a camera lens, it isn't real.

The night clicks down, one long, ghastly hour after another. McCain's snoring sounds like small-arms fire. Sleep is out of the question. The howling won't let me read. All 1 can do is listen to what only I can hear.

Morning breaks with agonizing deliberateness. The first thing I see in the brightness above is Shuts, still soaring, still watching. I'm grateful. We depart the gorge with not a word about my wide-awake nightmare. What is there to say?

In the coming days, I tell friends what happened in the Witches' Water Pocket, emphasizing that I saw no witches. I'm not a believer in innupin. I did not see what Chief Chuar'ruumpeak saw. But I receive neither sympathy nor understanding. My good friends joke that my imagination is a thoroughbred, sure, but my brain is a nag. Fine. Okay. But please, will someone, anyone, explain that sound to me? I await your reply.