Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

Seeker, Yo-yo Girl Edythe’s prophecy, and whatever had happened to Benny and his sister that Calvin wanted to wait until later to tell us.
    Someday, I’m going to meet some supernatural creature who tells me everything I should know up front and in a forthright manner—but I’m not going to hold my breath.
    “That hawk wasn’t Gordon,” said Adam, who could tell a bad not-lie as well as I could. “Who was it?”
    If Gordon could change, and the hawk wasn’t Gordon, then there were three of us. Three walkers. Gordon had known about me, about my existence, and the only reason we had met was chance. Engineered by Yo-yo Girl, but not by any desire on their part. Fine. They hadn’t wanted anything to do with me. I would extend them the same courtesy.
    Calvin looked at me a moment and threw up his hands in surrender. “Coyote, huh? Maybe that explains a few more things about why Grandpa Gordon wanted you to see this.” He rubbed his face. “Look. Let me take you to see She Who Watches—I don’t know if she’s something you needed to see or not. Uncle Jim wasn’t exactly forthcoming, but she’s the best and best-known of the pictograms. Then I’ll take you on to the petroglyphs. I’ll tell you Benny’s story—and I’ll give you Uncle Jim’s phone number, and you can call him about anything else you need to know, all right?”
    It sounded fair enough to me, and Adam nodded.
    He turned around and led us back down to where the trail split, and we followed the path of the woman I’d seen earlier. There were more drawings on the rock faces we passed.
    “There’s no lichen on the places where the pictograms are,” commented Adam.
    Calvin nodded. He’d calmed down a lot, and his fear no longer made me ache to give chase. “Right. They had some way of clearing off a bare patch and keeping it clean a thousand years later. It might have been something as easy as scraping the rock clean. Lichen needs a certain amount of roughness to grow. There are a few bare patches of rock that were obviously cleared off.” He pointed. “But they don’t have anything on them. Maybe someone mixed the paint wrong, or maybe they didn’t get around to using them. You can see a bit of pigment on some of the bare patches when the light is just right.”
    “Do you know which tribe the people who lived over there belonged to?” Adam asked.
    Calvin shook his head. “When the Europeans came, everybody moved. Lots of bands and a few tribes died off entirely. Most tribes kept their histories orally, and many of those stories were lost. We have some good guesses, but so do other tribes, and their guesses and ours don’t always line up.”
    We turned a corner, onto the same trail down which the woman had disappeared. I could scent her. The trail paralleled the fence. On the other side of the fence were the railroad tracks that ran along the river. The fence and the trail ended abruptly, leaving us in a corner between the fence and a basalt rock wall. On the rock, looking out at the Columbia, was the biggest, clearest pictogram I’d seen. She could have been drawn a decade ago rather than centuries.
    She Who Watches looked like a raccoon’s face. Two little tulip ears perched on top of her head, and her mouth was open in a wide smile. A square of faded black was set in the middle of her mouth. It might have been a faded tongue or a long-ago attempt to cover up something, but whatever it was, it looked out of place in the rest of the face. Faintly, I could see where fangs had once been drawn in the mouth—and I bet she didn’t look so friendly long ago, when those were more obvious.
    Most of the pictograms we’d seen were cruder, two-dimensional stick figures. This had depth and real artistry.
    “There are a lot of stories about She Who Watches,” Calvin said. He opened his mouth and stopped. “But that’s not why it was important to come here.” He looked startled, as if he’d surprised himself with what he’d said.
    “Why don’t you tell us the story anyway?” Adam invited. “We have time.”
    Calvin looked uneasily over his shoulder but there was no one behind us. “All right.” He took a deep breath. “All right. It’s a Coyote story, so I suppose it’s appropriate, right? One of several about how she came to be here—all the ones I know are Coyote stories.
    “One day, Coyote came walking up the Columbia and he found this Indian village. He walked among the people, but he couldn’t find their