When the days became longer and formations of geese and ducks flew overhead, Zebulon cinched his pelts on the back of his one remaining mule and rode off for the rendezvous in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains: a tall raw-boned man drifting in greasy buckskins, his matted yellow hair falling over his shoulders, his gnarled trunk scarred top to bottom from knife and arrowhead wounds, as well as wounds secret and unimaginable.

That year, the rendezvous was held along the Purgatory River at the end of a narrow valley dotted with clumps of cottonwood and stunted alder. As Zebulon walked his horse towards the sprawling camp of half-starved Indians and drunken mountain men, he was confronted by an ancient Arapahoe squaw wearing a top hat and a dirty brown blanket thrown over a long red skirt. In one hand she held a large war club made of an elk’s horn, in the other, a rattle. As he guided his horse around her, a luminous veil of smoky light shivered down her body. As he looked closer, her shape dissolved into a mulatto woman with high cheek bones and finally into the frozen death mask of a white-haired Mexican crone.

The Arapahoe laughed at his fear. Shaking her rattle, she circled him three times until he finally lost consciousness and fell headfirst off his horse. When he struggled to his feet, his body covered with mud, the Arapahoe was gone as if she had never been there in the first place.

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