Free Ancient Enemy by Michael McBride

be brave. He was the one who taught me that if you didn’t have confidence, you had to fake it. And if you faked something well enough, then it was only a matter of time before the illusion became reality. That advice served me well through my early years as a half-breed Navajo at a Ute school and, later, during an online distance-learning pilot program for select high school students as part of an outreach program through the University of Colorado, for which I was the only one from my reservation chosen. Maybe that concept translated to other states of being.
    I stared into his eyes for several moments, attempting to decipher his thoughts, but it was like trying to see the trout in a placid lake through your own reflection.
    “You know what’s happening out there, don’t you?” I whispered.
    His eyes locked onto mine, then—very deliberately—looked toward his shelf and back again.
    “You heard them last night. I mean, how could you not? They were right outside your window. Before they slaughtered what was left of our herd.” I cocked my head and studied his expression. “You know what they are, don’t you?”
    He glanced at his shelf, then back again.
    “I’ve seen what the rattle can do. I’ve been inside the House of Many Windows. I’ve seen the blood. How it phosphoresces. I know what happened to those people. Those children. I’ve seen the…bodies…entombed in the flowstone inside the cavern in Fewkes Canyon. I’ve seen what they did to our livestock and worry that it’s only a matter of time before they kill the rest. And mostly I’m afraid. Afraid they’ll find a way in here and…and…”
    His eyes hardened, if such a thing was physically possible. It was how they looked when we were forced to put a wounded animal out of its misery or when he had to deal with the representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs when they showed up on our land, one of a man doing what he knew needed to be done, no matter how little he wanted to do so. When his eyes guided mine toward the shelf again, I got up and walked across the room.
    I stood beneath a shelf now held together by silver duct tape and looked back at him. I could barely see his eyes across the dark room. I pointed at the water jar, now spider-webbed with cracks. His eyes darted to the right in response. I moved on to the rawhide parfleche with its juvenile painting. He stared directly at it.
    I brought it down from the shelf and returned to the side of the bed, where I sat in the chair with it flat on my lap. A line of light from the seam around the boarded window bisected the design. It looked like something a child might have painted, certainly not something you would save unless it had been your child who painted it. The mountains were uneven and the sun about as round as a football. The paint was cracked from the fall and crumbling off in large flakes, beneath which I could see the smooth, tanned leather and…
    I looked up at my grandfather, whose eyes recognized the expression on my face. Whatever hardness had been there was now gone, leaving in its place what looked like sympathy.
    The dried paint chipped off with my thumbnail and covered my bare legs. The more I chiseled away, the more the design beneath was revealed. The leather had been intricately carved using an implement with such a small, sharp tip that every fine detail remained perfectly clear, despite its obvious age. It was smudged and discolored by the oils from the many hands that had held it and run their fingers over the design. At first I wondered why someone would allow a child to paint over something that must have taken an incredibly long time to create. And then the realization struck me.
    It was a map.
    I recognized Prater Canyon and Morefield Canyon. White’s Mesa and Big Mesa and the East Rim. And I recognized Moccasin Mesa on what was now the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation, just north of the Mancos River, which flowed less than a quarter-mile from where I was sitting