Chapter 1

     When rains come to the reservation in the late spring and early summer, they are usually female rains, mists, and drizzle that soak slowly into the grateful desert and make cactus swell. Sometimes in a wet year, the grassy north-facing slopes are tinged with a faint shade of spring green that briefly glazes the red, brown, and orange soil and makes the Navajo’s sheep and goats plump and happy. However, a rare atmospheric disturbance, thousands of miles away over an ocean the Navajos knew little of, set in motion an unusual and powerful weather pattern that would forever change the local desert landscape and the life of Chooli Tosie.

     The year 1903 had seen an extremely dry winter and spring. The Tosies, Albert and Kai, Chooli’s parents, didn’t care about the year. Season followed upon season. They had little contact with the world that used calendars. What they did know was that their sheep were struggling to find water. The freshwater springs Albert usually herded them to once a day had all gone dry. In the past weeks, Albert had herded he sheep into a makeshift pen of interwoven branches of cedar, juniper, cottonwood, and brush that he had built in the bottom of the arroyo where a spring still seeped. This spring was where the Tosies got their water. Until the drought broke, they would share their trickle of water with the sheep.

     The traditional Navajo hogan of the Tosies, built twenty strides from the edge of the arroyo on a slight rise of red dirt and ringed by rust-colored sandstone outcroppings, had been of Kai’s mother’s clan. One hundred yards to the north, the burned-out remains of an earlier hogan lay scattered in a rubble of charred wood. Kai’s grandmother had died there years before. Following Navajo tradition and fear of the dead, the old woman and the hogan had been reduced to ashes together.

    The land upon which the Tosies grazed sheep and grew corn, squash, and melons was located on the isolated far northwest corner of the sprawling Navajo Reservation, itself isolated in an America that cared little for the blank desert rectangle in the southwest.

    As the sun rose, Albert had greeted the streaks of dawn in the traditional Navajo way, by facing east and assuring himself of the harmony of all natural things. As he turned to enter the hogan, he had seen the dark clouds, thunderheads, partially hidden to the west behind the mass of chocolate colored rock that is Navajo Mountain. The lone peak towered over the orange-hued desert and maze of deep canyons that surround it. Sacred to the Navajo, the peak anchored the northwest corner of the Navajo Reservation.

    As he studied the clouds, sniffed at the air, and noted the wind direction, Albert thought it was an unusual mass of clouds for late spring, more like a cloud from which the male rains of late summer came with their fury of wind, thunder, lightning, and heavy downpours. He thought, though, that he would appreciate any rain, as the land was miserably dry. Still, the dark gray cloud, the underside black and ominous, struck a faint warning chime in the back of his skull. He’d help his wife with breakfast, wake the children, snuggle and play with them, then check the sheep and think more about the dark cloud.

    As the family squatted in the dimly lit and smokey hogan for their breakfast of corn cakes and mutton, the faint thunder which had been growing progressively louder suddenly shook the earth. Albert stood, pulled aside the blanket that covered the entrance to the hogan, and peered skyward. As he did so, the first slaps of large raindrops smacked the powdery earth with a popping sound that rapidly increased from sporadic to full staccato. Albert ducked into the hogan and wiped his face in the crook of his arm. He smiled happily at his wife and children and spoke in his Navajo tongue.

    “I don’t think out sheep will be thirsty much longer. We’d better get some pots out to catch the rain coming through the smoke hole.”

    The thunder grew louder, and the blanket in the opening of the hogan lit up with the more frequent lightning strikes. The hogan filled with the scent of wet desert, always a welcome smell on the arid reservation. Ahiga, Albert and Kai’s seven-year-old son, cowered in the sheepskins that were his bed, covering his head with every thunderclap and flash of lightning. Their daughter, Chooli, two years younger but seemingly unconcerned with the flashing lightning and rolling thunder, arranged a dented cook pot beneath the dripping smoke hole in the center of the hogan’s roof.

    “I’m going out with the sheep to keep them calm,” shouted Albert over the thunder, as he slipped on an old oilskin duster he had found many years before at an abandoned white man’s mining operation along the banks of the Colorado River. He treated it yearly with sheep fat to keep it somewhat waterproof. The duster’s musky odor was a comfort. It meant rain or snow to Albert, and he smiled to himself as he slid it over his thin but muscular frame.

    He ducked beneath the wet blanket, pushing it aside with his arm as he stepped outside. His hair was soaked before he made ten strides. He leaned into the wind with one arm protecting his eyes from the pelting rain as he walked to the edge of the arroyo. He peered through the rain at the sheep pen, and what he saw instantly filled him with dread. The sheep, close to panic, milled about in a foot of foaming, brown water that flowed and swirled through their makeshift pen. This year’s lambs, their small heads straining above the water, bawled in terror.

    Albert struggled to control the fear and panic that rose in his chest. He turned and ran back to the hogan and yanked the soggy blanket aside.

    “Kai, come help me with the sheep. The arroyo is flooding!”

    As he turned and ran toward the pens, a noise, very low, more of a vibration, registered in his brain, something deeper than the thunder and the pounding rain, teased at his consciousness. The earth seemed to be vibrating.

    Albert ran to the edge of the arroyo and leaped, bounding down its steep side, until he slipped in the mud and slid feet first into the bottom of the arroyo. He stopped sliding when he hit the water, which was now close to two feet deep. He scrambled to his feet and waded upstream until he reached the pen. He wrestled his way to the side of the pen and struggled to free the panel of woven branches and brush that blocked the opening. Albert yanked with all his strength, trying to move the material aside, but the pressure of the water prevented him from moving it even slightly.

    Without thinking, Albert flung himself over his makeshift fencing into the pen. The water, churning and swirling brownish red, was filled with silt and was deeper behind the inside wall, which acted as a dam. The bodies of the sheep were pressed tightly against the downstream side. Albert began wading into the mass of terrified sheep. The water caught his duster and drove him forward. He began flailing blindly beneath the water between the bodies of the larger sheep, yanking the lambs from the wooly, muddy chaos and throwing them up and out of the pen and onto the muddy side of the arroyo. He gave no thought to injuring the lambs; the alternative was their drowning. The lambs, their wool weighted with the mud and silt, slipped and fell as they tried to climb up the side of the arroyo.

    Kai ran from the hogan headlong through the rain and also slipped down the side of the arroyo into the rising water. Regaining her footing, she grabbed at the struggling lambs, pushing and throwing them higher up the side of the arroyo, away from the rising water.

    The force of the rushing water and the weight of the sheep began to shift the entire pen. The sides of the enclosure began to break apart. Albert, the water to his armpits, tore at the branches and wire still holding the pen together. A panicked sheep frantically climbed up his back and shoulders, its hooves ripping his ears and the sides of his face. The weight of the animal forced Albert’s head beneath the brown water. He fought and strained to get his head above the water. Surfacing, he shook his head and tried to clear his eyes. It was then he became fully aware of the deep rumbling vibration he had faintly registered earlier. Treading water among panicked and drowning sheep, he desperately looked for Kai. Their wild and terrified eyes met.

    Barely audible over the roar of the muddy water and growling thunder, a high-pitched shriek from the edge of the arroyo jerked both their eyes upward. Chooli, wearing only a purple blouse with no skirt or leggings and barefooted, held a lamb by the back of its neck and tried to pull it over the edge of the arroyo. As she did so, the edge crumbled, and she tumbled headfirst toward the rising water.

     “No, Chooli, no. Go back. Run!” screamed Kai as she made a wild, pointing gesture toward the top of the arroyo.

    Chooli did not hear her. None of the three could hear anything as the deafening roar drowned out all other sounds. Barreling around the bend of the arroyo above where the sheep pen had been was a ten-foot wall of brown water filled with logs, branches, rocks, and sagebrush. It raced toward them like a liquid freight train. The wall of water slammed into Albert, the sheep, and what was left of the pen. He never had a chance against the force of the flash flood. A soaked purple blouse and his little daughter gamely clawing her way through mud and water was his last vision.

    Kai turned and ran in a splashing, all-out sprint toward Chooli. She had a split second to grab Chooli between her legs and by her black hair and flip her with all her strength further up the steep side of the arroyo. Then the water slammed Kai’s body, and she was sucked into the torrent. Chooli scampered on all fours up the slope until the rising water overcame what strength the five-year-old had, and she floated down the arroyo, swimming and grabbing desperately at roots and rocks that might save her.