The trickster came out of The Cinders that winter, wearing the form of a cougar that had wandered into her territory. She had not ventured this far from her mountain in a very long time, having spent the last several centuries as a colony of fairy shrimp living in the sand at the bottom of a tinaja. It had been an interesting experience, lying dormant for months and sometimes years, coiling into hard kernels indistinguishable from sand, organs crystallized within, for all intents and purposes, dead, at least until the next rain arrived to shake them gently from their sleep. But she had learned from that what she could, and was ready to see what had become of her domain. She took her time making her way down the game trails, pausing often to sniff at different plants and the dead things in the bushes, savoring the cold wind as it glided across her coat.
In a small clearing in the scrub oak she found a firepit, which surprised her as she thought the last humans had abandoned this place long ago. Searching the clearing, she found the tracks and droppings of a large herd of sheep—not the big horned rams that frequented the rocky passes further up, but a smaller, clumsier breed. She followed their tracks down to the springs. She could smell them well before she saw them, musty in a way that wild things are not.
When she entered The Meadows she barely recognized the place. The wildflowers and native grasses had all gone, replaced by a coat of coarse dry sod. At the far end of the meadow the herd of sheep stood. She pressed herself flush against the grass. A gauzy moon hung in an ink-washed sky, its faint blue glow twinkling on the frost. The sheep must have smelled her coming for their eyes all trained in her direction, glinting in the moonlight like a candlelight vigil. The cougar waited. She could attack now, but forever after her prey would associate her scent with death. Better to wait. Let her scent become like the air they breathed, as familiar as the junipers and frostbitten grass. Only then would she pounce, silent and scentless, her prey unaware until her fangs punctured its neck. Perhaps not even then. Perhaps the sheep would know nothing but the passage of night into a deeper night, as if the dark had simply opened and swallowed it whole.
From a perch on the cliffs above, the cougar watched as the shepherd rode into The Meadows. He appeared to be of a different people than those that had inhabited this valley before. He was paler, his beard thicker. He rode an ancient, slope-backed mule that clambered uncertainly over the rocky path. When the shepherd came to the springs, he halted. His flock had scattered into the trees and grazed here and there in small defensive clusters. It did not take the shepherd long to find the kill site. Clumps of wool drifted loosely in the matted grass. The shepherd dismounted.
He knelt, studying the frantic crosshatching in the earth where the lamb’s hooves had thrashed it ragged. Curious to know more about him, the trickster slid inside the shepherd, skimming over the scrub oak and straight into his thoughts and memories. The shepherd did not notice. The event registered to him only as a rush of wind accompanied by the faint reek of carrion, gone as quickly as it had arisen.
The shepherd’s name, the trickster learned, was Abberan. He had lived in the valley for almost thirty years. His family were shepherds as far back as anyone could remember. Within his mind, the trickster could see where Abberan had been born: a mountain range on the other side of the world. And she could hear his father tell him stories of hunting brown bears through those mountains, which he called the Pyrenees. He said that they had hunted the bears so relentlessly that by the time Abberan was born, there were none left within a hundred miles of their village, perhaps none left anywhere in the mountains. His voice filled with pride when he said this.
When Abberan first moved to this valley he could hear wolves calling as he lay in bed. He even remembered seeing buffalo in the valleys, many years ago. Since then, cattlemen had laid barbed wire and poisoned the wolves. The buffalo were all gone and no one had seen a wolf in the state in decades.
He lived in a small shack with his son Hector. He’d had a wife, but she had passed away in childbirth. Zurina was her name.
Having learned what she needed, the trickster left Abberan. Another gust of wind and she was gone.
A clamor of rockfall on the cliffs caught Abberan’s attention. He stood and looked, searching for whatever had disturbed the rocks. Seeing nothing, he turned, mounted his mule and rode into the hills to regather his flock.
The next time Abberan rode into The Meadows and found another of his sheep murdered, he drew his rifle and began tracking the cat. It had rained the day before and the track was easy to follow. It led him through the manzanita thickets and up through the scrub oak to the shelf above The Meadows. When he came to the place called The Cinders, he stopped. The cougar’s tracks were still perfectly visible in the dirt, yet he hesitated to follow.
He had heard things about this place. The terrain was enough to deter most travelers: miles of jagged stone, black as cast iron, on which many pack animals had broken a leg and had to be shot or left to die. Shepherds in the area refused to enter it. They said it was a place where the underworld boiled into this one, as if hell were an untended stew. If a sheep got lost in its borders, they said it belonged to the devil now. Supposedly, the local Indians refused to enter it as well, believing that long ago, their ancestors had trapped a demon in a cave at the top of the mountain which rose from its center.
On the stones leading into the path, people had left warnings: pictures of demonic creatures, half human, half animal. On the flat side of a large boulder, they had carved the figure of a woman, her nakedness clearly, if crudely, articulated. Where her head should have been was a fanged skull, like that of a large cat.
Abberan stood looking at the monstrous figure for a moment, trying to imagine what could have conjured such a terrible vision. The sun burned weakly through the clouds. The lamb’s blood dribbled over the black stone. He did not consider himself superstitious but there were some taboos it seemed needless to test, the way some otherwise rational men might avoid walking under ladders. But there is one sure way to test a man’s superstitions and that is to put them at odds with his livelihood.
So Abberan hitched his mule to a dead tree, slung his rusty lever action Winchester over his shoulder, and continued on foot.
He had always assumed that The Cinders were devoid of life, but when he bent to drink from one of the tinajas he saw that it teemed with small transparent animals, like shrimp or swimming insects. The rain had pushed other creatures out from their hiding places. The gullies and slot canyons seethed with scorpions, tarantulas and snakes.
In the afternoon sun the black stone shimmered like crow feathers. The trail took him up the mountain, which rose like a blister from the blackened plain and then down into the vast caldera it wore in lieu of a peak. The white lamb still looked fresh when Abberan reached it, guts steaming in the crisp air. It lay at the entrance of a cave like a cat leaves a dead mouse on its master’s porch as a gift or offering.
The cougar’s tracks circled the carcass several times then departed toward the cave. Other tracks came and went but none as fresh as these. A terrible stench wafted out of the cave, the carrion scent of a predator’s den. Abberan lowered into a hunter’s crouch, rifle resting on one knee, and waited.
He had not been waiting long when something stirred in the darkness. He fit the rifle trigger gently into the crook of his index finger, lined up the front and rear sites, targeting the pale shape. Something changed. A feeling like the rushing of wind into his chest, the stench of carrion swelling in the air. It was not a strong wind, just enough to put off his aim. When he regained his balance, the shape in the cave had resolved into something less vague. Abberan lowered his gun. It was not a cougar—-not a beast at all, but a human, a woman, strolling barefoot over the gravel, draped in white robes which cascaded down her skin like gossamer.
When he recognized who it was, the rifle slid from his hands, and he fell to his knees, shaking.
The woman walked up to Abberan and placed a hand on his cheek.
“Zurina,” he said, his voice trembling, “is it really you?”
“Don’t I look like me?” she said. “Don’t I sound like me?”
She looked exactly as he remembered her, completely unaged.
They spoke for a long while. Abberan told her of the last fourteen years. Of how he was no longer a mere shepherd but a proper sheepman, owner of his own flock. Every year the flock grew and he sold more wool. In a few seasons, he told her, he would be able to hire men to help him.
“But what about you?” he asked when he had finished. “Where have you been all this time?”
She said it was hard to describe. A dark place. Vast and inscrutable. A place through which she drifted on a warm current as upon an ocean on a starless night or an underground lake.
“It sounds horrible,” Abberan said.
Zurina shrugged. “It’s not so bad. In the dark you begin to lose track of what is you and what is not. You begin to forget that you were ever anything else but this. And there is comfort in that, a sort of warmth, to sink into the same dark as everyone who has gone before, the same dark into which everyone will one day sink. But let’s talk of something else. How is our son? He must be nearly a man now.”
“Hector is well. You would be proud of him. He is hardworking. He is old enough now that he can tend the sheep on his own.”
“And do you pray with him each morning?”
Aberran hung his head.
“When you became pregnant,” he said, “do you remember everyone told us what a miracle it was? After so many years of trying. I believed that then. But when you died, I began to wonder what kind of miracle would require your life, and what kind of god would grant such a miracle.”
Zurina looked thoughtfully at her husband.
“But if God is a god of life, doesn’t that also make Him a god of death?”
“If every life must be repaid by a death,” Abberan replied, “then God is nothing more than a tabulator of debts. What point is there in praying to a bookkeeper?”
Zurina’s expression turned sad. But she did not press the matter. She looked at the lamb’s carcass lying next to her, its blood beginning to cool.
She said, “Why don’t we just enjoy our time together? Come, lie down next to me.”
They lay beside one another. The light dimmed and the air cooled. In the caldera, the evening sky seemed to press upon them. At first a grayish blue with edges fading to a color like the flesh of a peach, as time passed, the edges flushed scarlet and vermillion, and the dull blue deepened to purple and finally indigo.
“Do you remember,” said Zurina, “how we used to lay just like this, in The Meadows as the sun set?”
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of it,” said Abberan.
In the night-blue dusk, the stars began to emerge and soon the sky was so loaded with them that it seemed almost to sag with their weight, as if, were Abberan to reach out, he could simply pluck one from its constellation like a grape from a sprig.
It was still dark when he awoke. Zurina was gone. The lamb lay nearby, guts shaggy with frost.
Unlike other animals, which the trickster could inhabit and discard like clothing, controlling them more or less directly, humans required a more subtle, though no less effective, approach. They must be led by suggestion, so that when inevitably they arrived at the course the trickster desired, they believed they had done so of their own volition. When Abberan returned to his home a few hours after daybreak and saw Zurina’s bible perched on the shelf near the window, he believed it was his idea to take it down and bring it to the table. And though he had not opened this or any Bible since Zurina’s death, he thought nothing of it when the memory sprang into his mind of his father teaching him that in times of confusion he should open the book at random, close his eyes, and place his finger on the first verse it came to. Which on this occasion, happened to be a verse from Exodus.
An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen: in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee.
At first the verse only confused him. What would a place where God recorded His name look like? In what language did He write and with what implement? But soon the verse began to ring with a certain kind of truth. For what were The Cinders if not a place marked by God, and what was the mountain within it but an altar of earth?
The next day, he returned to The Cinders. He left his rifle strapped to the mule and carried instead a bundle of firewood on his back and a sheep with its legs draped over his shoulders.
At the mouth of the cave, he set the sheep down and bound its legs with twine. With a single blow of his ax, he split open its skull and watched the blood and pulverized brains gush onto the black earth. From a leather sheath he drew a long gutting knife and used it to make an incision down the sheep’s belly. The sheep’s entrails slid through his fingers like a nest of newborn gopher snakes as he pulled them out and laid them across the ground. Steam billowed into the sky. He set a fire with the bundle of wood and let it build to a roar before he pulled the lamb onto the flames.
He sat and watched the cave through the rising smoke. Before long, a whitish form gathered itself out of the dark.
In the months that followed, Abberan returned to the cave many times. At first, he tried to be sparing, visiting only every few weeks. But a dull gray light began to suffuse the days between visits. He could think of nothing but seeing Zurina again. He would be sitting on a rock in The Meadows, watching his flock as they foraged in the cheatgrass and suddenly remember when he and Zurina would come here together. She had picked wildflowers for a vase in the kitchen, and they had lain in the grass and watched little white moths dance in the sun. He remembered how The Meadows used to look then, before his flock had grazed on all the wildflowers and native grasses. How dead The Meadows looked now, full of cheatgrass and thistle, the springs blazing with wasps. Abruptly he would stand, pluck a sheep from among the flock and carry it with him into The Cinders.
Soon he was visiting once per week and then, every day.
It would be too reductive to think of the Zurina that emerged from the cave as only an illusion. For the darkness which the trickster inhabited contained all things which were once in this world but were no longer. She had merely to reach into that darkness to pull forth whatever she needed. Besides, what is illusion but a thing seen from a perspective available to no one else, which is to say everything?
True, this Zurina differed somewhat from the one Abberan remembered. For instance, her eyes, green in life, now gleamed a strange shade of yellow. And she smelled not of the wildflowers she once picked or the meals she used to cook but strangely rancid, like decaying meat.
Even so, Abberan grew to love these differences, for what is love other than the ability to embrace the way a loved one changes over time? After a while, even her rancid odor smelled to Abberan like a sweet perfume.
The months wore on. Spring turned to summer. In The Meadows, the sun baked the mud into hardpan and the cheatgrass grew pale and brittle. Abberan’s flock dwindled to a fraction of its previous size. A few dozen head, foraging in the dust.
A strange thing happened toward the end of the season. As the flock shrank, new plants began to sprout from cracks in the clay. Wildflowers bloomed—not many but a few, the first Abberan had seen there in over a decade, with blossoms that dangled from their stems like little white church bells. He remembered them as a variety Zurina used to collect. Desert thornapple, she had called them.
“Let me go with you,” Hector said one morning as Abberan finished saddling the mule. “I can help you hunt.”
“No,” said Abberan. “Your job is to stay with the flock. We have to protect what we have left.”
“But,” said Hector, “if we lose any more then we won’t have enough wool to sell by the time market comes around.”
At this, a thought struck Abberan. Not about the market, for his obsession had already moved him beyond such concerns. For the first time he wondered how he would see Zurina when he had no more sheep. The thought troubled him all through his journey to The Cinders so that, even as he watched Zurina running her hands through her glimmering brown hair, studying the strands as if seeing them for the first time, the thought kept playing over and over.
“Darling,” he said finally, “soon I will have no more sheep to give to you. How will I see you then?”
Zurina looked at him, her expression unconcerned.
“Don’t you have anything else of value?”
“You know I don’t,” he replied. “Everything I have earned I have put into my flock.”
“Not true,” she said and explained that there was something he had that was more valuable than anything else. In exchange for this, he would be able to be with her not just for a few fleeting moments, but forever. “Isn’t that what you want?” she asked.
“More than anything,” said Abberan. He asked her what the thing was, but Zurina replied that it was not for her to say. In any event, she suspected he already knew what price heaven had placed on her life.
“Wake up,” said Abberan.
Hector blinked up at his father.
“What is it?”
“Get dressed.”
Hector blinked again, looking at a window that held nothing but reflections.
“It’s dark out,” said Hector.
It was the last day of the season. The sheep would have to be sheared in order for the wool to be ready for market on Monday, a job which would take all day. Even so, the boy was right. It was early. Just a few hours after midnight.
“She came back,” said Abberan.
“She?”
“The cougar. She took another lamb in the night. I tracked her as far as the foothills.”
Hector sat up and began pulling his trousers on. Then stopped and looked at his father.
“Shouldn’t someone stay and watch the sheep?”
“Get dressed,” said Abberan. “I’ll be outside.”
The sun was not yet up as Abberan and Hector rode out. They found their way by a light that was little more than a rumor, dull and silver at the sky’s gnawed edges. By dawn they had reached the edge of The Cinders. Abberan could tell by the boy’s expression that he knew the place, but if he was hesitant to go on he said nothing. Abberan hitched the mule to the same tree as always, and Hector unslung the rifle from his shoulder, holding it out for his father to take.
“No,” said Abberan, pulling the ax from a saddle bag. “You take it.”
Hector’s eyes lit up.
“Once we catch sight of her, it’ll be you that takes the shot. You think you can handle that?”
“Yes sir,” Hector said, forcing as much confidence into the words as he could.
Abberan smiled.
“That’s my boy,” he said.
At the rim of the crater, they paused to catch their breath. Abberan looked out over the valley. The Cinders stretched like charred skin across the blonde prairie. Distant rain clouds made their way north, their undersides strung with golden virgas.
It occurred to Abberan that he did not have to go through with this. He could turn back now, tell Hector that he’d lost the trail and walk down the mountain. He thought about the last fourteen years with just the two of them. It had not been bad. Lonely at times, but not bad.
“You alright Papa?”
Abberan stirred. He must have fallen into a trance, lost track of time.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” said Hector. “We’ll get her this time.” He glanced at the sky. “It’s early enough, we might even be able to get the shearing done. I’ll stay up all night if I’ve got to.”
Abberan smiled, hoping his son could not see the sadness in it.
“Let’s get moving.” Abberan swung the ax up to rest on his shoulder and started down into the caldera.
Stillness closed around them. They did not speak as they made their way down the slope. Its shape acted as an amplifier, turning every sound, every cough, every pebble rolling down into a lover’s whisper in their ears.
They cut around to the base of the ridge to stay downwind of the cave. As they neared the entrance, the ground was littered with bones, charred and scattered among the yet more ancient ashes. The cave sighed its rank breath in their faces. Abberan closed his eyes and savored the scent. He tightened his grip on the ax, picturing what would happen next.
He would not kill Hector. That much he knew. It would be like the Bible story, the one where the man is commanded by God to kill his son, but an angel stops him just before he rakes the knife across the boy’s throat.
At the last moment Zurina would emerge from the cave and tear the ax from Abberan’s hand. Only the gesture mattered, thought Abberan, his willingness to sacrifice everything, even his own son. And yet this thought comforted him only a little, because for that gesture to have any meaning, he would have to act as if she would not appear, and when the time came to swing the ax, he would have to believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would hit its mark.
At the entrance to the cave Hector lowered into a crouch and raised the rifle to his shoulder. Abberan closed his eyes. In the vastness and gloom that opened before him, he saw Zurina, dressed in her gossamer robes, beckoning him into the dark. He exhaled and a feeling of peace unlike anything he’d felt before washed over him, a peace that was deep, dark, and endless. For the first time in fourteen years, Abberan whispered a prayer to himself.
“Papa?” said Hector.
“Yes son.”
“I think I see her.”
Abberan opened his eyes.
“Yes son,” he said, raising the ax above his head. “I see her too.”
In the springtime, the shepherd emerged from The Cinders, ragged and gaunt, and began making his way down to The Meadows. It had been raining off and on for the last two weeks, and the tinajas were deep with runoff. The shepherd paused to look in one. Along the bottom, the eggs of desert toads lay strung like dark pearls. The shepherd pressed his face to the water and drank, the way a cat might.
In The Meadows, the mud had not yet dried into hardpan, and the ground was a mess of dark brown slop. The sheep were all gone. What few he had not killed had turned wild and wandered off. The shepherd followed the network of old sheeptrails through the thistle. New plants sprouted where the old grass had been tramped down, not only thornapple but Indian paintbrush, yellow bells and owl-clover. The mud sucked at his bare feet as he made his way to the spring. The first growths of bullrush and cattail jutted from the banks and the air teemed with small white moths. He removed his tattered shirt, his dirt-caked trousers and waded in.
From a distance, the shepherd looked much the same as he had before he’d disappeared into The Cinders four months ago. Only upon closer examination would anyone have noticed his jaundiced eyes, or the rancid odor which wafted off him.
He waved his arms through the water, savoring the way it felt against his skin. The spring was still murky, but running clearer every day. Another year, maybe two, and it would be as clear as it had been when the shepherd had first laid eyes on it. Sometimes, when he thought about his old life, the shepherd would be struck with a faint tinge of nostalgia, but it always passed. For the world now was much richer than his old self could have ever imagined. His old life was but one memory amongst millions vying for space within him.
Others would come, he knew that. The Meadows were too lush to be forgotten for long, and this new race of men seemed unable to leave any such place alone. But they would be dealt with when the time came, just like all the others who had tried to warp this place to their own ends. For now, he sat in the warm spring water and watched the moths dance in the steam, dainty and weightless, like ashes through smoke.
Joshua West is an artist and writer based in Utah. He has a bachelor’s degree in art with a minor in philosophy from Utah Valley University. He enjoys rock climbing and exploring the deserts and mountains of the American West. His writing has appeared in Coffin Bell, Touchstones and Just Peace.
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