In 1955, a dying man named Anselmo Bacame asked for a Franciscan named Father Solano to come sit with him. When the priest arrived, Bacame said no—not confession, not in the way the church wanted it. Something else. He asked instead for a writer who had been recording old cases along the highway for a small magazine out of Pasadena, a man known among the older families for sitting and listening without moving a pencil until you were ready.

The writer went to San Bernardino and sat by Bacame’s bed. The old man’s hands lay on the sheet, the color of iron kettles long used and carefully put away. His voice came out slow, the way water rises through a well that has settled a while. The nurse left them the room, tired of him refusing morphine.

Bacame was born in 1887 in Sonora, in a Yaqui village called Vicam, in the years when the government of Porfirio Díaz was moving Yaqui families down into the plantations of Yucatán in what everyone in those villages knew was a slow deportation. His mother made it out with him before the soldiers came. His father did not. He crossed into Arizona at eleven or twelve, grew up around Tucson working freight yards, drifted west into the border country of Nevada and California, and by 1908 had been tracking for prospectors, cavalry stragglers, and railroad companies for close to fifteen years.

He was known, not famous. His name never appeared in the papers of that time; his people had long since learned to stay out of any paper anyone in an office could reach. But if a mining outfit lost a survey crew somewhere between the Piute Range and the Mojave Lava Beds, and had already paid two white trackers who came back with nothing, someone in the saloon at Daggett would set down his glass and say, “Well, if it is really lost, you want the Yaqui. ”

That was how a man named Windel Sarmiento came to him.

Sarmiento was not Yaqui. His family was Californio, from an old ranchero line near San Diego that had lost most of its land after the American takeover and clawed a small piece back by running a supply operation to the borax works out at Death Valley. He was a broad, careful man in his early forties who wore a black wool suit no matter the weather. He came out to the little adobe Bacame was renting in a place called Sagebrush Springs—not a spring any longer, but a rail siding with three buildings and a windmill that did not turn—in the last week of August 1908, in the worst of the heat.

He sat down without being asked and said, “I have five men who did not come back. ”

Bacame asked which country. Sarmiento said out past the Black Rock, toward the Amargosa, a basin they had sent men into to map a claim. Silver leads were supposed to run in the country west of Cerro Perdido.

Cerro Perdido—the lost hill. Bacame said he stopped his hand on the table when he heard the name. Sarmiento noticed. “You know the country.

” Bacame said, “I know the name of the country. That is not the same thing. ”

They talked long about the money. Sarmiento would pay twelve dollars a day, very good money in 1908 for a tracker, and would provide a mule, water, and a rifle.

He would send one of his own men, a Spaniard named Silvestre Marquez, to travel with Bacame and keep the company’s interest represented. Bacame agreed to the money, the mule, and the water. He said no to the rifle, because a rifle would make Marquez think they were the kind of men who could shoot their way out of a country, and that was the wrong way to be thinking when you went into the west side of the Piutes. Sarmiento agreed with a little smile that was not a smile.

Before he went on, Bacame stopped and told the writer he had to understand a thing. When he was a small boy in Vicam, his grandfather told him there were places in the desert his people did not walk in. He named some of them; most of the names were in the old tongue and were lost when the grandfather died. But one name he said three times, and each time he touched the boy’s forehead with his thumb.

The name was Inyaki—in English, something close to the place the sun has forgotten. Not lost, not hidden. Forgotten. The grandfather said, “If you find yourself walking toward it, walk away.

If you find yourself already in it, sit down and wait for the day the desert brings you back out. And it may not. ”

Bacame took the job anyway, because twelve dollars is twelve dollars, and he had a brother back in Sonora he was still trying to get out. The brother was named Refugio Ochoa, different last name, different fathers.

Refugio had stayed in the plantations. Bacame had not heard from him in three years but was sending money to a priest in Mérida who was supposed to be trying to find him. The priest may or may not have been a real priest. Bacame said it did not matter in the end, because when the letters came back they said what he wanted to hear, and by then he had given up believing them anyway.

“That is what a man does. He pays for the lie because the lie is better than the silence. ”

He was not a superstitious man in the way most people think of superstition. He was a man who had lost most of what a man can lose and made his peace with the fact that the world took things and did not always give a reason for the taking.

He was ready to walk into any country. That was his gift. That was why they hired him. He and Marquez left Sagebrush Springs on the third of September 1908.

Two mules, four water casks, dry rations for twelve days, and a small oilcloth packet of survey papers showing where the missing crew had last camped. The papers were dated the fourteenth of August. The crew had been unaccounted for about twenty days when Bacame went in after them. Twenty days in that country in August.

He told Sarmiento at the door, “I am going to bring you a report, not men. ” Sarmiento said, “I know. Bring me the report. ”

The first two days were nothing.

Hard walking, mules complaining, Marquez talking about a woman he had left in Bakersfield and a stationer’s shop he was going to start on Chester Avenue with a back room for repairing typewriters, a trade he had picked up in the army. Marquez was not a bad man. He prayed at nightfall out loud in Latin that was mostly correct and a little made up in the parts he had forgotten. Bacame liked him for it.

A man who prays in his own broken Latin is being honest with God about what he can and cannot remember. On the third day they crossed into the basin. It had no name on the survey maps. The Piute called it one thing and the Chemehuevi another, and the men on the Southern Pacific just called it the flat.

A plain of hardpan and creosote forty miles across, ringed by low black hills that shimmered in the afternoon and stood sharp and lavender in the hour after sunset. Cerro Perdido was on the western edge, a low flat-topped mountain that did not look tall until you had walked toward it for a day and realized it had not gotten any closer. The first thing that was wrong came on the fourth day. In the middle of the afternoon, their shadows were not the length they should have been.

Not shorter, not longer. Bent—in a way he could not describe, as if someone had drawn them on the ground with the geometry a small degree off. Marquez did not notice, or did not say. Bacame did not point it out either, because to name a thing before you are sure is to give it more than it deserves.

He watched. On the fifth day the shadows were right again, and he thought it had been the heat, his eyes, and he stopped watching for a while. On the fifth night they made a dry camp in the shadow of a ridge of blistered black rock. Marquez said the evening prayer.

Bacame built a fire from dried creosote wood, sat on his heels, and watched the mules standing with their heads down, ears loose, eating grain. At some point around three in the morning, both mules picked up their heads at once, together, and turned them west. Neither made a sound. They stood like that for a long minute, then lowered their heads and went back to the feed.

Bacame did not sleep the rest of that night. He did not tell Marquez in the morning. On the sixth day they found the first camp. A proper camp, laid out by men who knew how.

Fire ring, tent stakes still in the ground, a picket line for two mules—the mules gone. Everything abandoned in a hurry, but not in a panic. The tents were folded. The tools were stacked.

There was a coffee pot on a stone by the fire ring with an inch of dried coffee crusted in the bottom, and the fire underneath had been kicked out with a boot. Marquez said, “They left of their own accord. ” Bacame agreed, but did not say what he was thinking: why fold the tents? You do not fold tents unless you plan to come back.

If you are running, you leave them where they fall. Folded tents mean the men who folded them thought they were going home. Two hundred yards out he found the survey stakes, neat and orderly, running due west toward the mountain. He followed them for half an hour.

They stopped. The last stake was driven into the ground, and beside it, scratched in the dirt with a stick or a boot heel, a line going off at an angle—northwest, toward a break in the hills Bacame could see with his own eyes and did not want to walk toward. He told the writer that he had a moment at that last stake when he thought about turning around, riding back to Sagebrush Springs, telling Sarmiento the men were gone, taking his money, never speaking of it again. He was thirty-one years old.

He was not brave in the way men in novels are brave; he was sensible in a way that had kept him alive in a country that had killed a great many people braver than he was. But Marquez was with him, and Marquez had been given a job, and Marquez was already kneeling by the folded tents in the failing light, saying the evening prayer in his broken Latin. Bacame said, “I could not turn around with him kneeling like that. ” That was not a good enough reason.

But it was the reason. They followed the scratch in the dirt. It took three more days. On the seventh day the country changed.

The creosote thinned. The hardpan gave way to a fine white grit that clung to the mules’ hooves and did not brush off easily. A low humming Bacame attributed to wind moving through a hollow rock formation they could not see—though later, he was not sure that was what it had been. On the eighth day they crossed a dry salt pan where the sun off the ground was so white that Marquez tied his bandana over his eyes and let his mule follow Bacame’s by the sound of its hooves.

Bacame remembered thinking, “We are being led—not by ourselves, not by the map, by the country. ” He did not like the thought, but he could not put it down. On the ninth day they crossed the break in the hills and came into a valley that was not on any map. That is not a figure of speech.

Bacame carried the survey maps in an oilcloth pouch and had committed them to memory. According to the paper, there was no valley there—only a continuous ridge running from the north shoulder of Cerro Perdido up to a knuckle of granite marked with a triangle and the letter S. The valley they came into had opened out over perhaps two miles of easy walking, with a dry wash running down the center and cottonwoods standing along it. Cottonwoods.

If you are not a desert person, you need to understand: cottonwoods do not grow anywhere. They grow where water is close to the surface year round. In that country, at that latitude, you did not have cottonwoods for another sixty miles. You had smoke tree, mesquite, creosote, Joshua.

You did not have cottonwoods. Marquez said in Spanish, thank God, water, and started walking down toward the wash faster than Bacame would have liked. Bacame caught his arm. Look at the ground, he said.

The ground in the mouth of the valley was smooth—not swept, not raked, smooth the way water leaves sand after the current has gone by. There were no footprints. No animal tracks. No rabbit droppings, no coyote scat, no lizard trails.

Nothing had walked there in a long time, and they had not seen water in three days. Marquez said in his practical way, then whatever we are afraid of has not been through here either. Bacame said that was not a comforting thought. Because if a place has water and shade and has been avoided by every living creature that walks or crawls in that country, that is a thing worth thinking about very carefully.

But they walked in. When they got down among the cottonwoods, Bacame said, the sound changed. In the desert, there is the wind, the small dry sound of it moving over hardpan, the click of the creosote, your own breath. When the wind lays, there is a silence with weight in it—not an absence of sound, a pressure, like someone had laid a large hand flat against the sky.

In the valley, that pressure was gone. “It was as if we had walked into a room, as if there was a ceiling above us we could not see. ” The wind was still moving—he could see the leaves shifting—but he could not hear it. Only their footsteps on the sand, the breathing of the mules, their own breathing.

And under all of that, faint at the very edge of hearing, something else. He could not describe it in 1955 any better than he could in 1908. “It was like a room with a person in it who is not speaking, but is there. ”

They walked in about a quarter mile.

At the base of the third cottonwood on the west side was a small pool, no bigger than a man’s hat, of clean, still water. The mules pulled toward it. Bacame let them drink. He and Marquez did not.

He remembered thinking that if the water was bad, the mules would show it in the next hour, and if it was good, there would be plenty of chances later. Also, he said, he did not want to put anything from that valley inside his body. That was not a reasoned thought. That was a feeling.

But he let it decide. At the second bend of the wash they found the survey chain laid out neatly along the sand, one end fixed by a small brass pin, the other coiled and left beside it. Marquez said, “They were working here. ” Bacame said they were finishing here.

At the third bend of the wash, they found the missing crew. There were five men. They were laid out along the bank of the dry wash in the shade of the cottonwoods, on their backs, side by side in a row. Their hats had been folded and placed on their chests.

Their boots were placed at their feet, side by side, laces tied together the way a man does at the door of a house he means to enter and not track dust into. Their surveying equipment was stacked neat, five paces upstream. Their pistols were in the pile. Their coats were folded on top of the pistols, and their canvas water bags—still with water in them—were set in a row in front of the coats.

The men themselves were dry. Not decomposed the way bodies left twenty days in that August heat should have been. Dry. Bacame said, like a piece of leather left out in the sun a long, long time, or a mummy in a museum jar.

Their faces were composed. Their eyes were closed. There were no marks on them; he looked carefully, because that was the job. All five of them had one hand laid flat on the ground beside them, palm down, and under each palm in the sand was a small round stone—smooth, river-worn, in a country with no river.

Marquez, who had been praying under his breath all the way down the wash, stopped praying. He said in Spanish, “Holy Mother of God, who did this? ” Bacame said, “None of them. ” And also all of them.

Five men had laid themselves down, or had been laid down by five other men who had then also laid themselves down. Or, most likely, five men had one by one taken off their boots, folded their hats, laid down their guns, and gone to sleep in the shade of trees that should not have been there, in a valley that was not on the map, in a silence that had a person in it. Marquez wanted to bury them. Bacame said no.

“We do not touch them. We do not move them. We do not fold anything. We do not unfold anything.

We leave everything exactly the way it is. ” Marquez argued that they were Christian men who needed Christian ground. Bacame said, “If we bury them, we stay another day. And if we stay another day, we do not leave.

” He said this because he was watching the mules. The mules had walked down into the valley willingly. They had drunk from the small pool at the base of the third cottonwood, a pool Bacame did not remember them passing on the way in, though it must have been there. Now the mules were standing very still, ears not moving, with that look mules and horses get when they see something a person cannot see.

Not spooked. Waiting. Bacame said, “We go now. ”

They went.

They took nothing. Bacame said afterward that this was the hardest decision of his working life, harder than any before or since, and that if Marquez had been a man of a different temper they might have come to blows. But Marquez was not that kind of man. He looked at the row of dry, folded, patient men, and at Bacame, and at the mules.

He took his rosary from his shirt, kissed the cross once, put it back, and said in Spanish, “All right, let us go. ”

They left the survey papers on the pile with the coats, because Bacame said that was where those papers belonged. They walked out of the valley the way they had come. It took longer than it should have.

The valley on the way in had been about two miles across; on the way out, it was longer. Marquez, the practical man, noticed and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. When they came out through the break in the hills, the wind hit them like a slap, and they could hear again their own breath, the mules, the small dry click of the creosote in the last of the sun. Both stopped and stood there.

Marquez, who had prayed the whole way, was quiet. Bacame, who had never much prayed in his life, said the word for thank you in Yaqui out loud three times, the way his grandfather had said the other name. They rode back toward Sagebrush Springs in five days. They did not speak of what they had seen.

On the third night out, Bacame woke and found Marquez sitting up on his bedroll, facing the way they had come. Marquez said in Spanish, “Do you hear it? ” Bacame said, “I hear it. ” It was not loud.

It was the wind, or something in the wind, coming from the west, from the direction of the hills, at a low pitch—a sound like a person humming to themselves in another room of a house you are visiting. It went on for perhaps ten minutes. Then it stopped. Neither man slept the rest of that night, and neither spoke of the sound in the morning.

They came into Sagebrush Springs on the twelfth of September. Sarmiento was waiting at the adobe, with a chair pulled up on the porch that had not been there when they left, and a stack of newspapers on the boards beside it. Bacame went in alone, sat at the table, and told Sarmiento the men were dead. They had died of exposure west of Cerro Perdido.

Their bodies were in a country he could not describe on a map, and he would not be able to take a burial party back to them. If the company sent another party in, it should not be under his name. Sarmiento did not ask for details. He did not ask how they had died, if they had suffered, or if they had left effects a widow might want.

He paid the full contract—twelve days at twelve dollars—plus a small bonus of thirty, and said, “Thank you, Señor Bacame. ” Then: “One thing. You will not speak of this to any person. Not to the widows, not to the priest, not to your friends when you have drunk.

Do you understand me? ” Bacame said he understood. He thought at the time that Sarmiento had known. That Sarmiento had sent five men into that country not because he thought there was silver, but because he knew there was something there and wanted to know if his men would come back.

When they did not come back, he sent two more, and he chose Bacame because Bacame was a man who would come back, come back alone, and come back quiet. Bacame said, “I never knew for certain if that was true. I only felt it, and I took the money anyway. And for the rest of my life, I wondered if the money had been paid in advance to the valley in a way by Sarmiento, and I was collecting his change.

”

Marquez went back to Bakersfield. He did not start his stationer’s shop. He drank himself sick in less than two years and was buried in a Catholic cemetery near Delano in the summer of 1910. Bacame went to the funeral.

He was the only person there besides the priest and a woman who might have been the sister Marquez had never mentioned. The woman did not speak to him. He did not speak to her. Bacame went on tracking for another twenty-two years.

He never took a job west of the Piute Range. He turned down four contracts to guide parties into that country, never saying why, only, “That is not my country. ” Some of the men who took the jobs came back. Some did not.

Sarmiento died in 1914. His obituary in the Los Angeles Herald said he had been a respected man in the borax trade and left no immediate family. There was no mention of the survey crew. There was no mention of Cerro Perdido.

Bacame cut the obituary out and kept it in a tin box with a few other pieces of paper, and showed it to the writer from the bed in San Bernardino. The paper was so brittle after forty-one years that it broke along the folds when opened. Bacame said, “You can throw that away when I’m gone. ” The writer did not throw it away.

Bacame told one more thing before the nurse came back and said his time was up for the day. In 1931, in the summer, he had a dream. He was back in the valley of the cottonwoods, standing among the five men. The men were still lying on their backs, hats folded on their chests, boots at their feet.

But there was a sixth space in the row now, on the downstream side, where the sand had been smoothed flat. And in the sand of that space, someone had placed a small, round, river-worn stone. The stone was waiting for a hand. He woke in a rooming house in Barstow in the middle of the night, got up, dressed, walked outside into the desert street, and stood for a long time looking west.

He did not go then or ever. But every year since 1931, on a night sometime in the summer, he had the dream again. Each year the row was longer—the sixth space filled, then a seventh, then an eighth. More men in the row now than there were, and he did not know their faces or their names, or whether they went into that valley in this world or in another one running alongside it.

He knew only that he had watched the row fill up, and that at the end of the row, there was always a space, and a small, round stone. He looked at the writer. His eyes in that bed in San Bernardino were the color of well water in the shade. He said he was telling this because he was about to close his eyes for the last time and did not want to see the row when he did.

He wanted to give it to the writer—not to carry, but to write down. “Because a thing written down is a thing that lives outside a man and can be looked at by other eyes than his. And maybe if enough eyes look at it, the row will not need to fill any further. That is what I hope.

I do not know if it is true. ”

He died three days later, on the sixteenth of October 1955. Father Solano gave him the last rites in the end, because Anselmo asked for them at the very last. Father Solano said afterward that in his last hour, Bacame spoke a few sentences in Yaqui the priest did not understand, with one word repeated three times—a long word with a soft ending, like a breath running out.

Each time he said it, he raised his hand as if to touch something above the bed. Then he lowered his hand, and he was gone. The writer wrote the story down as Bacame asked. He did not go looking for the valley and did not intend to.

In 1958 he drove out to Sagebrush Springs, by then no more than a chimney and the ruined footings of the windmill, and stood looking west toward the country between the Piute Range and the Amargosa. He saw nothing you would not expect to see: black hills low, standing sharp and lavender in the hour after sunset. Cerro Perdido was somewhere out there; he could not tell which one it was from where he stood. There is no marker on any map he has looked at, no listing in the county records for a mining company that lost five men in September 1908.

He has looked—in Barstow, in San Bernardino, in the state archives in Sacramento. There is a Wendel Sarmiento in the borax records for those years. There is a Silvestre Marquez in the death register for Kern County in 1910. There is no record at all of the survey crew.

Their names he does not have. Bacame did not know them. Sarmiento did not offer them. He got back in his car that day in 1958 and drove east.

He did not stop until he was in Barstow, and he did not sleep well that night, and he does not sleep well on any night now in the summer. In 1962, four years after that drive, he received at the boarding house a small parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. There was no return address. The postmark was smudged; he could not read the town.

Inside was a single object: a small, round, river-worn stone, the size of a dollar coin. There was no note, no letter, nothing to say who had sent it or why. He kept the stone in the tin box with Sarmiento’s obituary for a long time. In the spring of 1964, he took it out, drove into the desert one afternoon alone, walked a little way off the highway toward nothing in particular, set the stone down on the ground, turned around, walked back to his car, and drove away.

He did not look back. He has not been back to that stretch of highway. He does not know whether the stone is still where he left it. He would not go and check even if he remembered exactly where it was, which he says he does not—or at least, he tells himself he does not.

Some places keep what walks into them. That is not a lesson, and not a moral. It is the shape of the country in some parts of the world, and the shape of a story in others. Anselmo Bacame walked into one and came out again, and spent forty-seven years wondering if the coming back was real, or only the courtesy of the thing that had already put its hand on his shoulder.

The writer does not know the answer. He suspects Bacame did not either. He suspects Bacame suspected. And he suspects that when Bacame closed his eyes for the last time in that room in San Bernardino, with Father Solano murmuring the old words over him, he did not see the row after all.

The writer hopes not. He has tried since then to see it as little as possible himself, and has mostly succeeded. On the summer nights when he does not sleep, he reads, or sits up on the porch of the boarding house and watches the highway go quiet, and tells himself that a story told is a story that is no longer only his.