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and faced him. He’d stopped a few feet behind her, staring across the lot, squinting against the sun that gave his face a reddish cast, his own briefcase hanging next to the leg of his khaki trousers. This had nothing to do with her arriving late for the meeting, nothing to do with Amos Walking Bear’s unexpected visit. “What’s going on, Adam?” she said.
    When he turned toward her, Vicky saw the absent look in his black eyes, as if they hadn’t just suggested a possible recourse to the BLM’s decision, as if they weren’t in the parking lot in front of the stone building that housed the tribal offices, the life-size metal sculpture of Chief Washakie guarding the front door. He had gone somewhere else.
    Adam said, “We’ll have dinner tonight, Vicky. We can talk about it then.”

6
    THE PICKUP’S ENGINE gave off an intermittent belching noise that punctuated the music of “Perchè tarda la luna” as Father John drove north across the reservation. The vastness of the area was monumental—the reservation itself melting into the plains, a flat, empty landscape with plateaus that rose out of nowhere, arroyos that cut unexpectedly through the earth, and thin roads that snaked into the brush. In the west was the gray smudge of the foothills of the Wind River Range. The sky was cloudless, the color of cobalt, pressing down everywhere. He’d gotten used to the emptiness of the plains, the sense of timelessness. It was familiar and comfortable. He passed the small sign at the edge of the road— Leaving the Wind River Reservation —and drove on.
    It had been past noon before he’d gotten away from his desk and walked down the corridor of the administration building to tell Ian that he’d be gone a few hours. Parishioners had been dropping by all morning; the phone had rung nonstop. Not good, Father, another petroglyph gone. Spirits gonna be upset. We gotta get the Drowning Man back. He’d tried to reassure the callers, but all the time, he’d sensed that he was only trying to reassure himself. And each time he’d reached for the receiver, he’d wondered if this was the call, if this was the dealer. But the man hadn’t called. Not last night, not this morning.
    Outside his window, the foothills began moving closer, patches of scrub brush and stunted pines crawling over the slopes. On the other side of the road ahead, the line of high bluffs came into view, jagged red slopes shining in the afternoon sun. Now and then a pickup or sedan had shimmered in the oncoming lane a moment before sweeping past. He let up on the accelerator. It was easy to miss the turnoff into Red Cliff Canyon, nothing more than a dirt road on the left that meandered into the foothills before beginning the climb into the mountains. There was a ranch directly across from the turnoff, he remembered—the Taylor Ranch. He could see the house and barn and outbuildings rising out of the earth now, an uneven collection of log walls and metal roofs stacked against the red slopes of the bluffs.
    He slowed for the turnoff ahead, the interruption of dirt at the side of the road. The pickup bounced past the sagebrush that lapped at the doors and the tape skipped across the opening notes of “Signore, ascolta!” The pickup started winding upward, spitting out clouds of dust that sprinkled the windshield with a fine, gray film. Then he was in the canyon, climbing along the mountainside. Past the edge of the road on the left, the slope dropped into a creek that looked like a silver ribbon flung over the rocks. He kept one eye on the slope rising on the other side for the flat-faced boulders with the carved images. They were hard to spot, he knew. There were people who drove through the canyon and had no idea the petroglyphs were there.
    He kept the pickup at about fifteen miles an hour, he guessed—the odometer had stopped working a few years ago—switching