Excerpts from the upcoming fiction book tentatively entitled, Painted Desert:

Morgan stared into the remnants of the Kiva, searching for a sense of the people who had lived there. She wondered if they faced the same questions she faced every day, in their own ways. Did they worry about tomorrow? Think about the future? Stress about the past? They must have. Morgan imagined that ancient pueblo living must have included a large dose of music and ceremony, but it made sense that the people probably spent a great deal of their time concentrating on the very act of survival in such a harsh and unmerciful environment. "Geez," she thought, "I just described my own life."

Raising her kids alone seemed pretty harsh and unmerciful at times, too. Morgan decided that the inhabitants of this place probably lived much like she did, and that time did not separate them nearly as much as one would think. She envisioned a mother chasing an errant child down a hill that held dangers only a mother could see. Or a father teaching his son to hunt, much like a father today would pass down the traditions of baseball. "Life is life," Morgan thought. Still, she couldn’t help but feel curious about what every day living would have been like for a woman standing eons ago on the very same rocky slope Morgan stood on today. Morgan felt an odd connection to that other woman, and for a moment, she did not feel so alone.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Linayha wanted to go with Tao on the hunt, but there was too much to do here at home. Many women and girls joined in when the hunts were only for food. The short excursions away from the village offered a welcome break from the monotonous duties of everyday life, where there was always more to be done. The hunts provided both food and entertainment, and quite often they became a way for young men and women to court one another. It was traditional for a young girl to be given her first rabbit by an interested young man. And if she also was interested, the girl would return the courtesy by attempting to cook the animal, quite often with amusing results, and take it back to her young suitor as a gift. Of course if he wanted to continue the courtship and win her favor, the young man had to eat it, no matter how undeveloped the girl's cooking talents might be. Every member of The People knew that many a good marriage had begun with an inedible but well-intentioned rabbit stew.

The village also held numerous ceremonial hunts, but to these, women were not invited. The heavy magic of women could taint the magic of the ceremony, or even of the Shaman himself. Men and women both understood that this was not an exclusion. Instead, the power of women was respected, and its possible affect on the outcome of a ceremony could not be ignored. Women and men of The People had equal value and equal status, but they did have different responsibilities. It was understood and accepted that each of their places beneath Father Sky and upon Mother Earth were different, even though their paths and obligations often crossed. Creator had blessed men and women with different strengths, different weaknesses, and very different interests most of the time. Women were the creators of life, but a man was needed to begin the process. One could not do without the other. One could not walk without the other, any more than day without night, or light without dark. Everything was dependent upon Balance, and in balance lay Beauty. To "walk in beauty" was the highest compliment. Everything worked together, no one in the village walked alone.

Linayha and Tao were two halves of a whole being, and the young wife missed her other half tonight as he was away on the hunt. Something was coming. Something was wrong. Something was going to change. The air around her felt charged with energy, and the sounds of distant thunder made her flinch. Linayha could hear the howling wind even through the thick protective walls of her cabin, which had been built entirely of the ancient, heavy tree stones that sprinkled the land. Even the stones could not keep out the cold chill that crept up through the floor. Linayha hugged Little Hawk Wings a bit closer to her.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

The dark room seemed mysterious. Morgan stretched into the window to get a better look at the inside of the ancient Pueblo. The small ceiling hole didn’t let in very much light, so much of the room was hidden behind deep shadows that hung like a thick fog from the heavy rock walls. Layers of pebbles and dark brown dust blurred the bottom edges of the stone walls where they met the dirt floor. The air in the room felt stiller, cooler, like it wasn’t able to move around as much. There was a sense of something sinister, too, but Morgan figured that was just an extension of what she had felt on the pathway. Or maybe it was just her fear of the dark, something she had for as long as she could remember. Still, empty as it was, the room didn’t feel empty. Something was different, something didn’t belong. "Maybe it’s a rat, or a snake," Morgan thought. Visions of scorpions and spiders made her want to pull back out of the window. But Morgan was nearly half-way through, her butt high up behind her waist, her toes barely touching the ground. "I’ll bet this looks just great from the outside," Morgan thought.

Morgan stared into the dark, trying to get her eyes adjusted enough to search the barely visible corners of the cave-like room. After just a few moments she saw something. There was a tiny spot of reflected sunlight far back into the corner just below her. That must have been what had made her uneasy, Morgan thought, even though she hadn’t really "seen" it at all. Laying on the dirt floor, "as out of place as a whore in a church service," as Michael liked to say, lay a tiny, crumpled glob of neon green and bright silver wrapping discarded from some careless visitor’s stick of Double Mint Gum.

Morgan knew she had to pick it up, even though she was struggling just to reach into the small window. She could have used the door, but that would have meant walking into the darkened room. That would have been against the rules, or at least Morgan assumed it must be, although she had not seen a sign. Morgan had to admit that she really did not want to go all the way inside. No, she’d reach in through the window and hope that her arm would be long enough. Morgan stretched a little farther up on her toes, until her feet were off the ground completely. She reached down as far as she could toward the floor. The wrapper was just beyond her longest finger, so she stretched from her waist a millimeter or two more. Morgan was almost there when suddenly, her breath caught in her lungs. Tucked deep into the corner behind the wrapper was the face of the little black pottery owl, its tiny mouth forming a soundless "O." An eerie, distant screech, like the hunting call of some far off Great Horned Owl, pierced the dank, foggy silence of the room at the exact moment Morgan’s finger closed the brief distance and touched the edge of the wrapper. The screech got louder and louder until it was an intense, piercing wave of white noise. Morgan tried to close her eyes against the heat of it, when suddenly a blinding streak of silver light, burning far too brightly to be coming from the small hole in the roof, exploded into the room, filling the darkness and filling her eyes. It drove into her head like an asteroid, an avalanche, a snowstorm, a sharp, searing migraine of pain unlike anything Morgan had ever felt before. Unable to think, unable to move, to retreat, to do anything but burn, Morgan felt herself falling, falling, through the window and into the room, down a much greater distance than the floor must have been. In her last instant of cognizant thought, Morgan wondered how she still could be falling. In less than a flash she was gone.