Pamela Clare - Naked Edge (I-Team, Book 4)

This book is humbly dedicated to the Dine people of Black Mesa for opening their hogaans to a lost Bilagaanaa journalist, feeding her roasted corn, frybread, and mutton stew, and sharing their troubles and joys and prayers with her. I came to the dinetah to help you, and in the end it was you who helped me. Ahehee'.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With love and deep gratitude to Ray James (Salt Clan) and to Kat Kozell-James for their endless support, love, and friendship. You are always in my prayers and in my heart. You reached out to me when you didn't even know me and turned my face to the East so that I could start again. Ahehee'.

Special thanks to Rick Hatfield for sharing his expertise on the duties, challenges, and gear involved in being a mountain ranger.

Additional thanks to Teresa Robertson, RN, CNM, for sharing her experiences of working as a midwife among the Dine; to Sgt. Gary Arai for his gun expertise; to my mother, Mary White, RN, for her input on the medical scenes; and to my brother Robert for his help with the technical climbing aspects of this story.

A lifetime of thanks to Robert White, my father, for instilling in me a deep love of the mountains and the life within them and for sharing his knowledge of astronomy; and to my brother David for living-- and for sending me all the beautiful photographs from his hikes.

An enormous thank-you to my editor, Cindy Hwang, for her understanding and patience as I worked for more than a year to write this book. Thanks, too, to Natasha Kern, my agent, for (yet again) helping me through my midmanuscript jitters.

Love and thanks to my beautiful sister, Michelle, for reading every word I write and re-write; to my beloved Gangstas--Sue, Kristi, Libby--for holding my hand and helping me breathe through the rather painful birth of this book; and to my dear, sweet FOPs for always being there for me.

And as always, thanks to my sons, Alec and Benjamin, for their help, love, and encouragement. You are what I cherish most about being me.

PROLOGUE

THE COYOTE CAME out of nowhere. It streaked across four lanes of traffic directly in front of Katherine James's pickup truck, ears back, head down, tail tucked between its hind legs, then disappeared in the prairie grass to her right. Kat's foot jerked off the gas pedal, but it was already too late. At fifty-five miles an hour, she'd already blown past the spot where it had left the road.

Whenever the Ma'ii crosses our path, we stop and make an offering to show our respect. If we don't, our lives might be thrown out of balance, and bad luck might come upon us.

Grandma Alice's voice sounded clear in her mind, accompanied by an image of gentle, old hands sprinkling yellow corn pollen on red earth. But the rutted, dirt roads of K'ai'bii'to on the dinetah --Navajoland--were far removed from the traffic of Colorado's infamous Highway 93. If she stopped now, bad luck would immediately come upon her in the form of a ten-car pileup.

Pray for me. I drive 93.

The slogan on a popular bumper sticker popped into Kat's mind as she glanced at the SUV in her rearview mirror and pushed on the gas. And then she did pray, muttering a few words in her mother tongue, thanking Coyote.

But a sense of uneasiness had already settled on her skin, and it stayed with her despite the bright morning sky and the deep green beauty of the forested foothills. It was still with her when she turned off the highway and headed west on CO-170 toward Eldorado Canyon State Park. Only when she'd parked her pickup and gotten her first good breath of mountain air did the feeling begin to fade.

Leaving her cell phone in the glove box, she grabbed her backpack from the passenger seat and slipped the straps over her shoulders. Packed with just enough to see her through a midmorning hike--a sweater, a pair of binoculars, her pouch of corn pollen, water, and frozen grapes--it wasn't heavy. She locked the truck, zipped her keys in the front pocket of her pack, and started up the dirt road toward the trail.

The summer sun shone warm and bright, her shadow stretching out on the road before her. Thickets of tall choke-cherry bushes lined the trail, their branches laden with clusters of wine-red fruit, food for hungry bears trying to fatten up for winter. Broad-tailed hummingbirds buzzed through the limbs of a nearby ponderosa pine, so quick and tiny they were almost impossible to spot. White butterflies gathered at the edges of mud puddles left by last night's downpour, the scent of water calling them to drink.

Grandpa Red Crow had been right. "What you need, Kimimila," he'd said, calling her by the Lakota nickname he'd given her, "is a chance to be alone with the sun and the wind and the sky."

Not that she was actually alone. The road was lined with Subarus and Jeeps and SUVs of all kinds, transportation for those who'd come to the canyon to climb the cliffs for which it was famous. People drove in by the hundreds to crawl up the rocks like four-legged spiders, ropes trailing like webs behind them.

But the climbers didn't bother her. Growing up in a two-room hogaan with seven brothers and three sisters, her aunt Louise, her mother, and her grandparents, she'd long ago learned to turn inward when she needed privacy. Besides, she hadn't come here to get away from people. She'd come to get away from the concrete and neon of the city, to breathe clean air, to feel earth beneath her feet.

It had been three years since she'd left the reservation, perhaps the best and toughest decision of her life. It wasn't that she didn't like living among other Navajo, or Dine. In fact, there'd been a time in her life when she'd vowed never to do what so many young Dine people did--grow up, go to college, and then leave for high-paying jobs far away from the parents and elders who'd raised them. She hadn't been able to keep that vow, but not for lack of trying.

She'd gotten her journalism degree at the University of New Mexico, then come back to the rez to work at the Navajo Times, hoping to use her skills to help give a voice to the voiceless among her people. At first, she felt she'd found her place in the world. In her first year as a reporter, she'd broken a story about families growing sick after being relocated from traditional homesites to government housing that had been built on the radioactive mine tailings. She'd won awards for her work, but the greatest reward had been the satisfaction she'd felt at helping Dine families.

She'd lived in a trailer in Tseghahoodzani--known to the outside world as Window Rock--during the workweek, making the long drive home to K'ai'bii'to each Friday night, her truck filled with food and water she'd bought with her pay-check. Her grandmother would wait up for her, welcoming her home with warm frybread, a hot bowl of mutton stew, and a strong cup of coffee, asking her to sit and share the news from the Earth's Center--the ceremonial name for the Navajo Nation's capital. But her mother had made it clear that she'd have been happier had Kat stayed away.

That's how it had always been--love from her grandmother, loathing from her mother. Though Kat had hoped her mother would at least come to respect her for the work she did at the newspaper, nothing had changed. No matter what Kat might become, no matter what she might accomplish, she had done her mother unforgivable harm. She'd been conceived of a man who wasn't her mother's husband--a Bilagaanaa man.

A white man.

The only thing Kat knew about her father was the color of his skin--and the fact that he'd gotten her mother pregnant, then left her to deal with the consequences alone. He hadn't even stayed on the rez long enough to put his name on Kat's birth certificate.

"Every time I look at you, I see him," her mother had told her more times than Kat cared to remember. "Your green eyes, your light hair, your white skin. Why did you have to be born?"