High Moon

1: The Ant Bear

From the ridge opposite, the cliff palace of Mesa Verde seemed nothing more than an exposed termite mound.  Abandoned. Quiet. A civilization crumbling into mud and bone dust.

Diego had last seen a termite mound in Africa. He'd walked between such animalistic cathedrals while trailing a juvenile grootslang: a tremendous serpent that had devoured eight villagers in two months. Earthen spires rose from the hot Serengeti soil in such a way that giraffes stood small in comparison. Those mounds never seemed alive. In fact, when he'd first sighted one through his partner's brass telescope Diego had assumed they were the headstones of wealthy villagers. Locals claimed the termite colonies had lived in those same structures for a thousand years. They weren't dead.

They were thriving.

One night, as Diego waited in the thorny scrubland for the snake, with a low moon on the horizon and dry wind blowing in from the east, he heard the distinct rustle of parting grass. He held his rifle steady, barrel pointed toward the silver stalks.

What emerged not more than twenty feet away was a strange, humpbacked animal with sharp claws and a boarish snout. One thin, long ear twisted in his direction. The odd mammal, no larger than a dog, stayed frozen maybe a half-minute, then crossed into the shadows of a nearby termite mound.

Using those thick claws, it dug into the base of the structure, destroying months, perhaps even years' worth of hard work, all in a nightly quest to devour. The English explorers he'd traveled with told him the next morning that African ant bears could eat fifty thousand termites before dawn.

Fifty thousand. The demon of Anasazi had killed fewer in centuries than an ant bear in one night.

And as far as he knew, the serpent he'd hunted in the heart of Africa had killed less than ten. A rather insignificant number, if he compared it to the nocturnal mammal's death toll, but on that bleak night in the moonlit wilds of Africa, the ant bear walked into the pale dawn alive.

Diego rubbed two months worth of a dark beard and looked again at the pale palace before him. From this windswept vantage point it seemed as if a giant ant bear had torn out the cliff face to reveal the manmade structure housed below the surface. Those walls of straw and clay, three stories high in spots, had not been built by termites. They were the walls of ancestral Puebloans, the people whose blood his mother claimed coursed through her veins.

And not just hers. Through his blood and the blood of his brother back in Texas who'd lost a leg fighting a war Diego had run from.

It used to run through the veins of his sister, Maite. She was ten years dead this spring, but he felt her presence here in the mesa, strong and rotten as the north wind.

Behind Diego, his horse—a great black mare he'd ridden to the ancient site—straightened the handsome curve of her neck and turned one dour eye upon the short forest that stretched across the canyon's mouth, separating steed and mount from the palace.

The sun had only just peaked in a dying autumn sky, but already it seemed too late to be outside. By the time Diego sat astride his mount, the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. His hand itched for the revolver in his belt, but he gripped thick leather reins instead.

"I know this ain't how we do, Gracie," he said to his mare,  who turned obediently at her rider's nudge. "But I ain't dying without a drink."