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enough, « he said. » You ready to go? «
    » Yeah, let’s do this. «
    Coyote called shotgun and was visibly surprised when I moved to the rear door. » She’s driving? «
    » Yeah. It’s my car, « Granuaile said, then arched an eyebrow. » Is there a problem? «
    » Hell, no. «
    » Good. « She beamed at him briefly, then ducked into the driver’s seat.
    › You almost died again, Coyote. Close call, ‹ Oberon said.
    At Coyote’s direction, we drove on 160 northeast toward Kayenta, but before we got there we turned off on a dirt road just on the far side of a massive sandstone wonder called Tyende Mesa. It was rough, dry country, covered in red rocks and infrequent attempts by plant life to make a go of it. The trees were scrub cedars and junipers; there wasn’t the cactus you’d find to the south in the Sonoran Desert. People tend to picture the state of Arizona as all saguaros and rattlesnakes because that’s the sort of postcards they keep seeing, but saguaros don’t grow on the Colorado Plateau. Parts of the plateau are pretty lush with pine, like the southern tip of it known as the Mogollon Rim, but on the reservation the topsoil is shallow and sandy and mostly unable to support large trees, except in the bottoms of old washes.
    The road was extremely rough in places. Discarded tires bore mute testimony to the fact that the thin layer of sand covered sharp rocks. We crossed a one-lane metal bridge that spanned a narrow defile—a flash-flood canyon that eroded anew every time it rained and the water trailed off the bare rock of the mesa—and, shortly after that, Coyote directed us to pull over onto a cleared patch on the left side of the road. There, the mesa rose up steeply in a sort of terraced fashion until it flattened out again, then two magnificent buttes jutted up almost like the dorsal fins of some massive, mad creature, an avatar of erosion swimming in sand. The flash-flood wash we had crossed no doubt began between those buttes. In the other direction, the plateau was flat and covered with various bunch grasses and a few stunted trees, all the way to Kayenta and beyond. We took some canteens with us and began hiking up the mesa toward the buttes.
    » First thing I need you to do, « Coyote said halfway up, » is make a nice smooth graded ramp here to speed up the construction of a road. Down there where the car’s parked, « he pointed to the flat, arid plateau, » we’re going to build the work camp that will eventually become a town. And once we build the factories for our solar and wind companies, it’ll be a proper city. A carbon-neutral one too. « He put a hand next to his mouth and whispered as if he were sharing a secret, » I learned that carbon-neutral shit from a hippie in Canyon de Chelly. «
    We continued to hike until we crested the first terrace. The next layer, sort of like a wedding cake, loomed on either side. We walked west down a valley dotted with scrub cedar for about a quarter mile, until Coyote stopped and spread his arms wide to indicate the northern butte face. » Here is where you make my people rich, « he said. » Move the gold underneath this mesa. We’ll put the entrance to the mine in that little cave right there. « He pointed to a small depression at the base of the butte that qualified more as a niche than a cave.
    I shook my head. » You know, Coyote, this makes no sense geologically. You can’t put gold underneath this kind of rock. Geologists will scoop out their eyes with a melon baller and ruin their shorts when you start hauling precious metals out of here, because it will put the lie to everything they know. Then you’ll have prospectors searching for gold underneath every chunk of sandstone around the world and getting pissed when they don’t find any. «
    » I don’t care, Mr. Druid. This is the place. «
    » It has to be here? We can’t pick a spot elsewhere on this huge reservation that makes more sense in the natural world? «
    » It has to