Kevin McNally was thirteen the first time he saw Armando Luna. Armando’s black hair, almost purple under certain light, was bound in a ponytail and quit just past his shoulder blades. He wore a vest and knee-high moccasins, both adorned with quarter-sized silver conchos and a Bisbee Blue rock the size of a quail’s egg on his chubby pinky finger. While the young man’s bulk and wide shoulders made him appear quite tall, a fair measurement would have put him about an inch shy of six feet. Kevin, along with his father, was selling raffle tickets for a guided elk hunt at the Cochise County Fair’s Round Mountain Outdoorsman booth when Luna stepped up to their counter. Young Armando Luna had come to the Sulfer Springs Valley a few weeks before from Sil Nakaya on the O’odham reservation. Earlier, at the archery booth, he had purchased a half-dozen fletched cedar arrows, which he tapped against his palm as he talked with Kevin’s father. The arrows, along with the outfit, completed what Kevin recognized to be a very well-studied look.
“That bull was a five-point, but he’d go three-fifty,” Armando was telling Tom McNally, who even at thirty-eight already looked hard and worn out.
“Not possible,” Tom said flatly. “Bull elk would have to be a six-point to score that.”
The Indian lifted his right hand and placed his finger against the side of his chest. “Caught him right here with a 200-grain Nossler bullet from a Winchester 300—between the fourth and fifth ribs. Bull went about three feet—from his belly to the ground.”
McNally just shook his head.
“I got a picture,” Luna said. “I’ll bring it and show you sometime.”
“I’d like to see it.”
“I’ll bring it,” Armando assured.
“And I’ll look at it,” McNally came back.
Armando registered membership and paid yearly club dues that afternoon, which pleased Tom McNally but put away none of his doubts about the verity of the several tall stories he’d heard that day. A few weeks later, at the monthly club meeting in the McNallys’ large, comfortable home, Armando paused only a moment to thank Teresa when she let him in, before stepping up to Tom in his easy chair and handing him a dog-eared, coffee-stained Polaroid photograph. Kevin could not see the photo but noted the look on his father’s face. Tom squinted at the photo, looked up at Luna, and nodded an approval any hunter would recognize.
“Good bull,” he said. “Hell of a bull, in fact.”
Tom handed the snapshot to O.D. Hallot, who was working on his fourth Coors. Hallot shook his head and curled his lower lip.
“He’s a five-point alright, and he won’t go no 350, but he’s a good measure over 300 all day.”
McNally nodded. Same squint. “That’s about what I figured.”
Teresa stepped in from the kitchen and handed a beer to Luna, who tipped the yellow can, glanced at the label, popped the top, and tilted back a quick swallow. “Coors,” he said. “My flavor.” Armando scanned the walls, pausing on the better mounts—the heavy-antlered Kaibab mule deer, the Boone and Crockett antelope, the desert bighorn ram. “Nice place,” he said. “You got some good mounts. I think I’ll like coming to meetings here.”
It was perhaps his graceless charm, the way his outrageous stories were so often cut with measures of truth that endeared Armando Luna to the McNallys and their circle. That November, Luna hunted whitetail with Kevin, Thomas, and O.D. Hallot. The afternoon before opening day, they drove to the west edge of the Peloncillos and made camp south of Starvation Canyon in a cedar flat rich in grama grass and adult oak. Tom and O.D. pitched a rumpled, slouching canvas tent bereft of half its ribs and made a wide fire of deadfall cedar. Hallot threw a stick of butter in a Dutch oven and fried a wedge-thick, three-pound sirloin along with some onion and new potato. After dinner, Kevin chose the truck cab to sleep, and Mondy rolled his sleeping bag out on raw ground some thirty yards from camp.
In the yellow shroud of a Coleman lantern, Luna carefully made his bed, kicking down clumps of grass, removing sticks and pebbles, until he had cleared out a suitable space.
“Hell, Indian,” Hallot remarked, forking a chunk of steak into his mouth. “This ain’t the Regency. You should’ve brought your feather bed.”
“Good sleep, good hunt,” Mondy came back, which brought only derisive laughter from the two men.
Satisfied the bed was ready, Mondy removed from his daypack an apple-sized, hollowed-out gourd stopped with a small cork. He held the gourd to his ear and shook it as though its content told secrets, then unstopped it. He began to sing: low tones at first, rising to a pitched falsetto, bringing more laughter from the men and Kevin, who sat with them at the dying fire.
“What the hell is that son of a bitch singing?” Hallot asked, grinding a piece of steak in his jaw and chasing it back with a swallow of Coors.
Kevin listened carefully to the song. “I don’t know,” the boy said, finally. “It’s not Spanish.”
“Your mother sounds like that sometimes—when she’s talking to her sisters,” Thomas remarked.
Kevin shook his head. “No, that’s Basque Spanish, Daddy.” He gestured at Luna. “Those words are altogether different. Probably Papago.”
Hallot belched. “That silly bastard don’t know real Papago.”
The conversation was cut by another high-pitched keen. Struggling to control himself, Tom McNally shook his head. “Son of a bitch is probably faking it,” he said, just before he and O.D. were taken by another fit of chuckling.
Even if Mondy was aware of the jeering, he was unmoved by it. He squared himself against the yellow light and raised the gourd, cupping it in his palms above his head as in an offering to the gods. Hay-yay-yay-yay…he-ya-ya-ya-ya-heeee…
O.D. and Thomas were beside themselves now. But as they laughed, Kevin heard a shape and consistency in the words and knew they could only be real. On the playground all his school life he’d heard children fake Spanish. Tones and syllables gave an impression of the language, but their spurious words lacked continuity, no two utterances exactly alike.
His song finished, Luna knelt and sprinkled a powder-like substance from the gourd, as one would pepper a steak, onto the ground beside his bedroll.
“God,” Tom said. “Whose idea was it to bring that dipshit with us?”
“Yours,” O.D. pointed out.
“Well I guess I was eat up with the dumbass at the time,” Tom said. “A moment of temporary insanity.”
“Well,” Hallot mused. “The insanity part may be temporary, but I figure the dumbass part to be permanent.”
“Have I told you to kiss my ass yet today?”
Hallot drew down his brow in mock contemplation. “I don’t believe so,” he allowed.
“Well, kiss my ass.”
Kevin left the fire, fingers pushed into his jean pockets, and walked up to Luna, who had just finished a circle of the powder around his sleeping bag.
“What is that stuff?” Kevin asked.
“For a good hunt.” Mondy didn’t look up at him. Since their first encounter, they had spoken no more than twenty words together. The breech in their ages was wide at the time, Kevin’s thirteen to Mondy’s nineteen. A few years later, doing research in college, Kevin determined that Mondy’s performance was an odd derivation of the Yaqui Deer Dance, the rite observed not so much for the sake of good hunting but as an appeal to the “Flower World,” a version of Heaven. Traditionally, the dance was done by men wearing crowns made from deer antler. Armando Luna had modified the ritual dance and some of the words in the song to meet