After his adventures reported in EAGLES WATCH, professor Jack Rogers had a quiet time until he received a message from Fawn StarRising:

Jack Two Leggings -

Can you meet friends next Saturday afternoon, June second, I think it would be, at Paradise, New Mexico? (They tell me that is a real place!) They need your help. Tell NO ONE. Fawn StarRising.

Jack goes and meets a man, who calls himself Willy Sutton and says he belongs to the Free Apache. Willy tells Jack he is being followed and invites him to visit the tribe in Mexico. At home, Jack finds a radio beacon attached beneath his truck! Confused and worried—Why me?—he takes a bus to Durango, where a peanut vendor in the plaza tells him where to go and find the Free Apache.

Jack meets the Free Apache strong man Hal Say, who asks Jack’s help in finding the gold stolen by the renegades a hundred years earlier, and also invites him to visit the camp of those living the traditional way. The trip to the camp has many perils:

Hands, hard, clawed hands, grabbed my upper arms. My stomach turned with a nauseating fear and sense of evil. I reached up and grabbed his, or its, upper arms and felt iron biceps. I gave a hard, upward kick with my knee into its groin that brought a grunt and an explosion of wet, hot breath. Instantly, the arms turned to cold snakes sliding over my sweaty back. Coils twisted around my legs. I toppled and shouted in a voice that would peel the bark off a mesquite tree. “Usen, help me!”

In the mountains, Jack meets a young Apache woman and ancient shaman, who take him to a place for a medicine journey. That, too, has dangers:

I knew, again, that sickening fear that comes as something terrible starts. I slid downward for what seemed a long time, tearing my shirt and back and ripping my palms without really feeling it. I managed to finally lift my head and look below. The edge of the real cliff was just ahead, and I dug my heels in hard. Instead of stopping, I flipped again and dove head first into nothingness.

On the medicine journey Jack meets pumas who talk to him, and he takes a new name, Pumas Brother. The adventure continues, and Jack finds Apache gold in a lava flow in New Mexico. He has a climactic battle in the lava flow with his old opponent, Dead Sage:

He rolled his huge bulk and I was underneath. He pulled his knees forward and sat on my belly. I felt blood dripping onto my chest. Dead Sage smiled and slowly raised the long blade.

In that last instant I did not feel fear. I was consumed with rage. I snarled. I slapped him with my claws extended, ripping part of his face away, even as I saw my hand was a furred paw. A spray of blood hit me, and he fell back, screaming and holding his face.


About the Author:
Bill Reid doesn’t always admit he was a rocket scientist, but he was. He grew up in a family of aircraft builders and studies engineering in college. During that time, his neighbors invited him to serve in the Army after he left school to climb mountains in Colorado. He returned after building runways in Europe, graduated and again left for the West. While working on projects like Apollo, he was lured by nature, high country and wilderness adventures. He returned to school for a Ph.D. in ecology. The then became a professor, taught in Texas and Israel, and worked at the National Laboratory where we once made Plutonium. He then coordinated research in seven national parks in Texas and New Mexico for three years. Now, he lives at the edge of southern Utah’s wild lands and writes.