Written by : u/Zchaupt

Year written : 2023

Growing up in Arizona, myths and legends are a part of life. Native traditions, mystic places, vortexes, ufo abductions, and dozens of other stories of the unknown that I always found fascinating. I grew up spending a lot of time wandering around the desert and the mountains, hunting, camping etc so I felt very at home in the wilderness.

One late spring day on one of my many hiking adventures, I wandered off trail and after several hours came upon a small group of old mud adobe houses. A few people heard me coming and came out of the houses to investigate, and after apparently making the collective decision that I was not a threat, one of the elders dressed in old style traditional native clothing and a headdress came over to greet me. The man spoke slowly and told me that I had wandered onto a Navajo reservation and asked me if I was lost, or if I needed help. When I told him no I was lost but intentionally, he chuckled and invited me in to eat with his family.

The next several hours were one of the great experiences of my life, the whole thing was like being thrown back in time. While we ate and talked, others from the surrounding houses began coming over to join us and I got the feeling they didn't get many outside visitors. We shared stories for hours about life, family, thier history in the area and time spent in the wild, and the longer we talked, the more they opened up and the more interesting the elders stories got. Throughout the time, there was one man who never spoke, he just sat out of the circle listening and watching me.

At one point, I told them I did what I called my walkabouts every year around September, where I would go out by myself into the wilderness for 2-4 weeks at a time, and this got the attention of the one silent old man. When I finished, he came over to the circle around the fire, sat directly on the ground in front of me and asked me to join him on the ground. He told me that years ago he used to do the same thing, and went on to tell me about the canyon he went to. He described it as a dangerous but magic place, and that I would see the world differently if I came back. If? Must be for dramatif effect.

When he finished, he invited me over to his home. The house was small, and through an open door in the back room, I could see it was filled with various animal pelts, coyotes and wolves mostly. He walked over and closed that door, then picked up and handed me an old map and some written directions that seemed like he had been holding on to them for a long time, and just walked away into that back room and closed the door behind him. It was late, and one of the families had invited me to stay the night, which I gladly did. The next morning as I prepared to leave, one of the old women came over to me with something in her hands, handed me a talisman and simply said "dip your bullets in the white ash at the hottest part of the fire." then just walked away.

September came, and as I packed for my walkabout, I saw the talisman in a drawer and something felt right about taking it with me. After a beautiful drive, I was very happy to find the forrest service road marked on the old map. The entrance to the area was remote and overgrown, and tough to get to even in my Jeep and took me much longer to get to than expected, so I decided to make camp and start the hike in the morning.

After a few hours on a trail that looked like it had been forgotton, I came to a stream, and the entrance to the secret valley. It was a narrow crack in the tall cliffs with about 4 feet of water running gently through, but too narrow for a kayak or canoe. I hoisted my gear over my head and began the wade sideways through the chest deep water. The crack in the cliffs seemed to go on forever, but after almost two hours I came to the place where it opened up into a small lake in an incredible valley surrounded by tall rock faces. This may have been the most remote place I have ever been, in the sense that there was no sign that people had ever been there. No trash, no bullet casings, not even the evidence of campfires.

My first night there was the quietest night I have ever spent in the wild, no birds, no frogs, not even crickets, but I didn't feel like I was alone there. In the morning, after breakfast, I headed out on my first exploratory hike to explore my new home for the next couple weeks. After being stalked by a mountain lion on a hike about 10 years ago, I make a point of now bringing a pistol with me when I'm out wilderness hiking. After some looking around, I found a narrow path that appeared to be a game trail that lead up the side of one of the cliffs and towards what looked like caves from the canyon floor. I made my way up to them and came upon an entrance that was much larger than it appeared from below. I made some noise to alert any possible animals I was there, and made my way inside.

The cave was an expansive single chamber that went back a couple hundred feet. As I walked, I inspected as much as I could see with my light, but there was no tracks of any kind in the dirt besides mine, so I decided I was alone in there and pushed on towards the rear of the cave. As I came around the last bend in the cave and approached the end, my headlamp panned across a large pile of bones, some animal, some human, and a very old looking, small candle sitting on a natural stone shelf. This is the first thing that has scared me in as long as I can remember, but focusing my wits I remembered that there was no other tracks in the cave and figured it was all from a long time ago.

I was still a little uneasy as I exited the cave, and was ready to get back to camp. As I came out into the light, about 75 feet away, there was the largest wolf I have ever seen that looked like it was coming down from standing on it's hind legs. It dropped down to all fours on a rock just began staring at me, not growling or bearing its teeth, just staring. I pulled my .45 and fired two shots of to the side of it to scare it away, but it didn't even flinch. Not only have I never seen a wolf in this part of northern Arizona, but I have never seen a wild animal that did not at least flinch at the sound of a gunshot. We both stood there staring at each other for a moment, I turned and set my backpack down to grab my binoculars and get a little closer look, but when I turned back, the wolf was gone.

I made my way cautiously down the path back towards camp. I have encountered wolves before, and usually it's not the one wolf you can see that should worry you, it's the ones you can't see, so I was extra cautious for the return trip. Back at camp, I made sure my gun was fully loaded, and got my recurve bow strung just in case the wolves came back. I have seen plenty of predatory animals on my adventures, it's a part of being in the wilderness, so I wasn't too worried, just prepared myself the best I could and went over to the lake to go fishing.

Within about 20 minutes, I caught 2 of the biggest brown trout I've ever caught, so I decided to stop fishing for the day and take a swim. Back at camp, I made a fire, cleaned my trout and made dinner while the sun went down. As soon as the sun went down, all of the life in the canyon seemed to go silent again. As I put out my fire and prepared for bed, I noticed there was a small flicker of light coming from the area where the cave I had explored earlier up the cliffside, which didn't make sense. It was a moonless night, and stars don't reflect that way. It couldn't have been the candle I had seen, it was too old and would not have burned so bright. I decided to keep my gun close and try to get some sleep. I would investigate the cave again the next day.

When I woke at sunrise, there was a haze along the ground throughout the whole canyon floor, but as the sun rose it disappeared quickly, and the area came back to life. I made my breakfast, gathered my gun and bow, and headed back up towards the cave. When I reached the entrance, I saw there were still no tracks besides mine around the entrance and decided to push up the hill further. Just a little further up, I came upon the entrance to another cave, much smaller than the first one. There was a small flat landing with a large, heavily twisted juniper tree that to my absolute surprise had many small objects hanging from thin, old looking ropes tied to the branches. There were bones, but there were also old things definitely made by humans, and looked like they were old Native American artifacts. Thinking I might have found the spot where the old man I met on the reservation had stayed when he was there decades ago, I went into the cave.

This cave was much different from the first one. Just a few feet in, I noticed the walls were covered in what looked like ceremonial cave paintings. As I pushed further back, the cave got dramatically colder, much colder than it should have been, and the walls were completely covered with the paintings the entire way. When I reached the back of the cave, I was not prepared for what I saw. There was what looked like an old altar made of wood and bones. As I looked around, I saw that a little before the back of the cave, there was another shaft in the ceiling that went up, and on a ledge about 25 feet up sat the small figure of what appeared to be a woman.

She was small and pale with her face painted white, and wearing something like a crown made of woven branches with two small antlers at the front. I stopped and stared for a few minutes, and the figure did not move so I assumed that it was mummified remains from a long time ago. Not wanting to disturb a burial site, I turned to walk back out of the cave, but I began to walk, I heard what sounded like a faint voice in an unknown, ancient language. I instinctively looked back up towards the figure, but it was gone. I was immediately terrified, and ran from the cave as fast as I could get out, but my headlamp flickered and died. I made my way out, feeling along the wall to find my way, and the whole way I felt like there was something right behind me.

When I saw the first light from the cave entrance I began to sprint towards it. Just before I made it out, I looked back and there was nothing so I slowed down, but I could still hear the faint voice and the volume never changed. When I got outside, all the bones and artifacts hanging from the tree were gone. I ran down the path as fast as I could, headed back to my campsite by the lake. Just as I reached the floor of the canyon, I noticed the large wolf at the treeline to my left, but this time it stayed standing upright on it's hind legs. I stopped running, hoping to not initiate it's preditory response to chase me, and again, it just stood ther staring at me.

I reached my campsite safely and immediately began packing up. It was too late in the day to make it out before dark, and I did not want to make the hike out at night with all that was going on. I moved my tent so it would back up to the canyon wall by the crack in the cliffside so I didn't have to worry about anything sneaking up behind me. I built my fire much larger and knew I wasn't going to get any sleep that night.

Just as the sun was going down, I began to hear noises coming from the trees, and I felt like I was being hunted. Finally, in the last light of day, I saw the wolf slowly walking around by where the path lead out of the trees and it began to slowly walk towards me. This time I drew my gun and fired towards the creature intending to hit it, and while I saw a couple hit the dirt around it, several bullets hit it. Several rounds from a .45 will at least slow down anything I've ever encountered, but this giant wolf kept walking towards me like nothing had happened. I continued to fire at it until the inevitable click of an empty magazine.

I reached down and fumbled around in my backpack looking for my other magazines to reload, and as I lifted it, the talisman the old woman gave me fell out onto the ground. I picked it up and put it around my neck and immediately remembered what she had told me; "dip your bullets in the white ash". I looked around, but didn't see my backup magazines, so I grabbed my bow, pulled an arrow that was tipped with a hunting broadhead and dipped it into the white ashes, drew and fired. I hit the creature just in front of it's right hip and it let out a noise somewhere between a growl and a person screaming that made my blood curdle, I can hear that noise in my head to this day. It immediately turned and ran back to the trees, and in the flicker of the fire light I saw the small women with the antler crown standing there waiting for it.

They both retreated into the trees and for the rest of the night, I could hear the same faint voice I had heard in the cave. I spent the night outside of my tent, as awake as I have ever been, but no longer afraid and at dawn finished packing up so I could get out of that canyon.

The next spring, I went back to the small group of houses on the Navajo reservation I had found the year before. I was wearing the talisman as a necklace, and the first person to greet me was the woman who had given it to me and she ran up to give me a big hug. "You heard me." was all she said. I asked the group about the man who had given me the map as I was almost desperate to talk to him about the experience I had so I could compare it to his own. They told me that he had disappeared shortly after I had visited them the first time and had not been back. Strangely, when I tried to tell them what had happened to me, no one would let me tell the story, and the oldest man there who sat in the corner kept mumbling the words "yee naaldlooshii".

We all once again sat and shared other stories of life and a meal. Before I left the next morning, I found the old woman who had given me the talisman and offered it back to her. She smiled and told me I had a good heart, then just closed my hands around it telling me to keep it to watch over my next walkabout. I went back to that small villiage on the reservation several times over the next 10 years or so till I moved to Oregon, but they never let me tell them what happened. I never went back to the canyon and while curiosity sometimes gets the best of me, I don't think I ever will.