Prologue

... from the darkness emerged a thin disc, one side yellow and the other side white, appearing suspended in midair. Within the disc sat a small bearded man, Creator, the One Who Lives Above...

~Excerpt from Apache Creation Story~

The old one stooped his bent and grizzled frame, entering the sweat lodge he’d built on this spot, so many years ago. He poured water onto the hot rocks from a hollow gourd he’d filled from the small seep just outside. Sitting down as close to the fire as he could, he began to sweat as the steam enveloped him. Waiting for the steam to build, periodically pouring more water on the hot rocks, his thoughts drifted, and his face broke into a rare smile at the pleasant memories.

He and his first wife had found this place by accident shortly after they were married. He was a newly minted warrior still in training as a shaman. She was a beautiful young Lipan Apache. It was mid-fall, well past the season of raids, and they had decided to look for a suitable place to move once they started a family of their own.

They’d left their camp a week earlier, traveling south and east, when they came to this rolling land of deep arroyos and high hills. Eating an early lunch one day, they noticed a mockingbird dip down into an arroyo a few feet away. They watched intently waiting for the bird to reappear. After several minutes, they heard the mockingbird begin singing its repertoire of songs, but still there was no visible sign of the bird. Curious, they crawled the few feet to the side of the arroyo and peeked over the edge.

They were looking straight down into a large sweeping curved section of the arroyo. The arroyo wall was a completely vertical cliff, dropping down almost twenty feet to a long and wide stone shelf that dropped another ten feet to the bottom of the arroyo. They still couldn’t see the bird, but they could hear it singing.

The sound seemed to be coming from under a large rock sticking out from the side of the cliff wall, three feet above the stone shelf below them. As they watched the singing abruptly stopped. The mockingbird appeared from under the rock rapidly flapping its wings, which flung small droplets of water all around itself.

The two quickly looked at each other with smiles on their faces. A seep large enough for a bird to bathe, would provide enough water to fill their gourds, which meant saving themselves a long detour to the Robledo Mountains and the only other spring in this area they knew of.

They followed the arroyo back west for half a mile, until finding a way down to the bottom. Before descending, they built a ladder and carried it between them back east along the bottom of the arroyo. At the stone shelf, they positioned the ladder and climbed up the sheer stone. Standing on the shelf, they absently noted that it was completely smooth and level without a trace of sand, vegetation, or animal activity. More importantly, they felt a strong sense of peace, of strength, and the indefinable something that said this was home.

His wife looked at him with a serene expression. “My love, this is what the Spaniards mean when they say querencia. Do you feel it too?”

“Yes, my love, I do,” he said with a sharp nod.