There is a fire, but they don’t believe me because I am the only one burning. The flames coat my throat so that I cannot speak, cannot tell them. But what would I tell them? There is a fire and they started it. There is a fire and they started it because I asked them to. They put a tube in my arm so that I would burn quickly. Nurses in blue and white hold shallow bowls beneath my chin. I vomit out the fire whenever I wake and burn the bowl red. I know my children are watching me. The pain of them knowing is worse than the pain of the fire. My daughter will drive me home when the fire is put out and we will eat soft potatoes and I will try not to vomit them up. When it becomes too much they put me to sleep and I dream of turnips and turquoise, of making an offering to the Earth Maker. I see myself at the top of the mesa. The mesa is orange and red like my insides. I am still on fire. And the ground beneath me is burning too.
“Roscoe said there were two-headed deer in the pines, but Roscoe drinks sometimes and Kaibab makes you see things. He said squirrels too, and maybe even one or two of those horses. When Roscoe says those horses he means the rez horses that aren’t rez horses anymore. Most of them died during the drought because horses are like people and they don’t know how to leave. But some of them left because the choice was to leave home or die. Which to some of us is the same thing. They belong to the pines now and make new, wild horses that graze like everything else is new too.”
She stared at him.
“I came down here because it’s almost May, almost tourist season and we don’t need tourists all frightened, or worse, too interested. And I came down here because I wanted to see. And now I’m rambling because I’m nervous and because I don’t have much time before my morning shift.”
The fresh sun rippled through the canopy like linen skirts hung to dry. Her body was a soft oat color and he watched one of her heads eat lichen off a trunk like it was meat on a rib. Her other head watched him.
Another deer stood ten yards away. His antlers were still velvety, but they’d be hard and bone-colored by hunting season.
He stared at her. The head that was eating lichen turned to look at him. The other head reached down to sniff white mushrooms.
“The forest is very loud these days,” she said. “It was quiet for a while.”
“There was a virus,” he said. “A pandemic. It killed many people and we stayed inside for a long time. Now people are anxious to get outside again.”
“That is not what I am talking about.”
“I know it’s not,” he said. He rubbed his white apron anxiously.
“What do you do?”
“Like for work?”
“Okay.”
“I work at one of the lodges in Tusayan. I’m just a server. Bring people their food, tell them the eggs are very nicely yolked this morning. Refill their water.”
“Your water is from the aquifer?” Both of her heads turned to look at him.
“Yes. I mean, all water here goes into and comes out of the Colorado River.”
Her heads stared at him. Her eyes were the soft wicks of lighted candles.
“Right now it’s early, just the old couples, the first of the season. They don’t like to be around all the children. They like it calm. They like that donkeys carry their bags into the canyon. They like that we carry their bags into the canyon. They’ll go home with pictures for their families. They say shit like ‘isn’t it amazing, we have to go home, but you get to stay here!’”
“Yes,” one of her heads said. The other chewed on white mushrooms. “We stay here.”
My daughter and I make an offering. We put on turquoise and go into the mountains and offer white shell to the Earth Maker. She helps me as we go. There is moss here but not the moss I remember. My ancestors will hear me and they will send a medicine man with herbs. But he will not have a ritual, because we do not have a word for this ailment and I do not want to teach them. I will burn for several hours today. I will dream of my father and his dreams for me tonight.
The area was red and flat and even the perimeter trees appeared taken aback, like a giant helicopter or some great alien rocket had flown in and pulverized all the green upon landing. The rig and outbuilding in the center padded this theory, as did the man in PPE and diggers walking toward the perimeter fence and away from his marked truck. He held a cooler in one hand and a thing that looked like a toolbox in the other.
He paused and put down his things so he could unlock the fence, then collected his things again and entered. He approached the rig and the adjacent pool of green gray water. There would be no need to take the elevator down. He stopped in front of the rig and knelt down in front of the small well box, using a bailer to collect groundwater. He put the water in a sterilized bottle and placed the bottle in the cooler. His phone rang.
“I don’t have any photos, I’m not at the Grand Canyon honey, I’m just near it,” he said. “No, I’m not going under, I’m just taking samples. I’ll drop them off in Utah, then fly home tonight.” He shook his head and sat in the dirt. “There ain’t nobody here now honey, the damn thing flooded. Bush league. All this money is just sitting around.” He took off his yellow hard hat and rubbed his head. “I don’t know, missiles, submarines. Top secret shit.” He looked up at the pool of water and dropped his phone.
They stared at him as he put his hat back on. He felt for his phone in the red dirt. “Honey, I have to go.”
He looked back at the open gate and swore.
Five of them drank from the open pool. The stag stood directly opposite him, and as the stag moved, his large antlers rocked atop his head like a boat on water. As the stag bent down to drink, he kept his eyes focused on the man.
The man slowly removed a probe from his tool box and dropped it into the pool and read the calculations. The deer stopped drinking. The man stared at them. “You shouldn’t drink this water,” he said. He smiled to himself and shook his head. They were just deer after all. He removed the probe and took out a second sterilized bottle and collected water.
The stag lifted his head, then turned to the north and craned his neck to the side so that his left antler dipped into the water. Behind the left antler, another head craned its neck down to drink from the pool. “I think it is a bit late for that,” the first head said.
The man dropped the bottle and it shattered. The milky water leached into the red dirt like a melon cut open. The other deer formed a single file line and stepped around the pool toward the man, but the stag remained on the opposite side of the pool. They faced each other, far enough away that the man thought he might have imagined it.
But the second head bent to drink again.
“You’re not real,” the man said. “I am sleep deprived. I’m on Toronto time. I am going to deliver the sample and I am going to go home.”
“Perhaps you’re high on your own supply,” the stag said. His second head stopped drinking and disappeared behind his antler. The stag walked toward the front of the line of deer until he was only a few feet from the man. His antlers rocked back and forth on a current, his heads taking turns staring at the man.
“There’s a sign. Right there,” the man shook his finger at the fence. He struggled to crawl backwards and onto his feet. “It says keep out.”
“I’m a deer, I can’t read,” the stag said. “Besides, you said you’re here to make sure the water is safe. Perhaps it is not safe. Perhaps you are lying.”
“I’m not lying,” the man said. The wet dirt clung to his pants like dried blood.
“We all lie sometimes,” the stag said. “The missiles you make will pound the earth into water and you will call it drowning, but we know a drought when we see one.” His first head looked toward the open gate and the second looked at the man. “We raised the horses.”
There are others now. We burn together. They ask me: can I say a prayer for you? And I say yes. They bring their lucky rabbit’s foot, their four leaf clover, their cross, coin, and horseshoe. Pack it all in, we say to each other. Pack it all in. My hair is gone and I have no stomach left. I have given it to my daughter, whose belly grows each day. You will be a great grandfather, she says. I am a great wood burning stove. Turn my arms into pinyon and let them be kindling.
She walked the perimeter fence, using the moon as a spotlight, carrying a duffel bag. She had parked further back on a dirt service road so as not to cast more light. The fence glowed in the dark, a hollow silver that reflected onto the trees. She kept the trees on her left shoulder as she paced. They shook softly in the wind and sounded like rain on window panes. She paced the entire perimeter in the dark and then began the circle again until her companion soundlessly joined her.
She looked down and saw six glowing eyes. “I was waiting for one of you,” she said.
“The rest are in the tree line,” the deer said. The eyes dotted the forest, so that the sky extended and constellations tethered to the earth.
“I don’t suppose you have a cigarette,” she said.
“No,” said the deer. “I ate a cigarette butt once. It was terrible.”
“That does sound terrible,” she said.
“Why didn’t you come during the day?” the deer said. “Like the others?”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” she said. She heaved her duffel bag down and opened it to retrieve bolt cutters.
“Apparently neither are we.”
She laughed as she cut through the padlock and opened the fence. “I’m from Blue Gap,” she said. “But I live in Utah now, for school. I’m studying to be a hydrologist.”
“Our horses are from Blue Gap.”
“My family has lived in Blue Gap for as long as my aunties can remember.” The two of them walked to the translucent pool. Its milk white color in the dark created a sheet of soft light and they could see each other. The fawn still had her spots, and her body was the color of creamed coffee.
“Why have you come here?” the fawn tilted one of her heads at the woman. The other lapped water from the pool. A third head rested against its back and slept.
She removed a probe and a bottle of water from her bag. “My grandfather was a miner in the 40s, in a mine just like this one. He did it so that he could send my mother to school. He was not one for modernization, he couldn’t speak English, but he wanted my mother to have the choice. She made a choice and I made another one.”
The second head stopped drinking and looked at her.
“They built rigs like this all over the rez. Hundreds of them. They let my grandfather take home scrap metal and wood to build fences for our sheep. He thought they were being fair, even generous maybe. Then our sheep started dying,” she paused, “or coming out like you.”
“You wanted to see if we were like your sheep?”
“No, I wanted to see if they’d learned anything since killing him.” She scooped water into the bottle.
The first head began to drink. “Learning is not the same thing as caring.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.” She placed the water into a small cooler in her duffel. “My grandfather said water is the giver of life. By that logic, it can take life away too. The tailings, the mill waste, it lives for thousands of years and it all has to go somewhere. The wind carries it into our streams, our rivers. We drink the water and our children are born with radioactive uranium inside them. My family is dying trying to stay alive. Because what else are they supposed to do?”
“We do not see water and know not to drink it.”
The two walked side by side until she found the well box. She removed the bailer from her bag. Through the glass of the bailer and the perimeter fence, the eyes still watched her.
“You and your herd, you could go somewhere else, where the water isn’t contaminated yet.”
“Yet,” the fawn said. “We live here. We know these trees. That takes a long time. Sometimes they want us here, sometimes they don’t.”
“I know the feeling.”
“It is very loud here,” the fawn said, twitching her pairs of ears.
“And it is very quiet in Blue Gap.”
“Sometimes the quiet is worse.”
“Yes, sometimes it is.”
The two walked back toward the open gate together. She removed the broken padlock and replaced it with a new one from her duffel bag. “I hope this causes them some frustration.”
They walked to the treeline and she sat against a pinyon trunk.
“Why did you want a cigarette?” the fawn asked, curling up beside her.
“I guess I just needed to take the edge off,” she said.
“Those things will kill you, you know.”
She leaned her head back and smiled and felt the gentle breath of the deer of Kaibab behind her. “Yes, I know.”
My daughter says they will clean the mines, they will take it all away. But where is away? Show me where away is. If you say it’s all on this paper, it’s all cleaned up, we will trust you, that’s the way we dealt. A handshake is as good as a contract. Wood is wood, a shovel is a shovel, a rake is a rake. They let us build our homes and schools with poisoned tools. There are no more streams. There are no more frogs. They don’t want to give us money now but they’ve given us a use for it. When my clan members died and they told our people this land is contaminated, that we have to move away, I understood. But how could I abandon mother earth and father sky and go to a place that is foreign to me and my spirit? Where I won’t be able to make my offering? Where I can’t hear the laugh of my grandmother or the whisper of my childhood? They won’t know me there. Our roots are deep down into this ground. We still live in our matriarchal homelands, the ones that I was born on, that my parents and great grandparents lived in. We walk the same hills, mountains, and mesas. We still gather the same wood from juniper, from pinyon. These places where we work, where we play, where we pray have stayed the same. The only difference is we are sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I think: what are we doing with our todays in which they gave their yesterdays for? That brings me joy. I picture those that are in bondage jubilantly going home. Knowing tomorrow I’m going to be close to home. A different home. We believe in a change of worlds. We will see all those that have gone before us again. And they will ask me: how is our home? How are our sacred sites? Do they still know our voice? And I can honestly say we still speak Navajo. We have spoken Navajo ever since the rocks were soft. And we still believe we can go into the mountains to make offerings to call forth the rain. I have made a truce with cancer. We will get along together. I am good with my soul. And I understand that I have made a truce with life. I love life. I want to live. I’m not going to ask for one more day.
This piece was informed and inspired by Earl Tulley. Mr. Earl Tulley (Diné) is a member of the Navajo Nation and originally hails from the central reservation community of Blue Gap (Arizona) where he is currently refurbishing traditional hogans for sustainable housing. As Principal of Tulley Attakai and Associates, Earl brings his lifelong work as an environmental justice activist to bear on concerns related to Indigenous food, energy, and water sovereignty. Earl is one of the founders of the Indigenous Environmental Network and Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment, and serves on the board of the Peace Development Fund; in these capacities, he has represented the Indigenous environmental concerns locally and internationally. Earl has engaged in numerous collaborations with environmental researchers, filmmakers, activists, funders, and regional NGOs. In addition to many decades of activism, Earl has worked with the Navajo Nation Housing Authority for more than thirty-five years, advancing community planning and construction in stick frame, earth ram, flex-crete, straw bale, traditional log, and earth dwelling projects on the reservation. Earl ran for Vice President of the Nation in 2010, served on the Board of Regents for Crownpoint Institute of Technology and Navajo Technical College, and frequently serves as an interpreter (Diné:English) in a range of public and private matters. He is currently Vice Chair of Navajo Nation Water Rights Commission and the National Latino Ranchers and Farmers Board. Earl has three daughters, each of whom is engaged in careers in science and Indigenous water issues, in particular. He resides on the Navajo Nation, Blue Gap, Arizona, where he tends his fruit trees and garden with traditional dry and drip-farming techniques, and helps raise his six young grandchildren.
