The Arizona hikers had underestimated Monument Canyon. In this, they were neither the first nor the last. But when Jackson Clark, park ranger Russ, and their friends Nan and Joel made the 900-foot descent in October of 1987, they could not have guessed the rest of the story.
It was a warm autumn day, a perfect one chosen for their Monument Canyon excursion to explore the ancient Indian ruins on the canyon floor. Yet for such adventures, an explorer’s greatest enemy is not the weather, but waning daylight. Before they knew it, Jackson, Russ, and the rest were staring up at a violet sky that had been a bright turquoise only minutes before. In a few more minutes, it would be indigo, and they would be engulfed in the searching shadows of the near-thousand-foot canyon walls.
“I don't want to climb that winding trail in the moonlight,” Jackson said.
“There is no moonlight tonight,” Joel replied coldly.
The hikers hurried. Night came, and it did not embrace them; it attacked them. Overhead, the stars shone brightly, but they cast none of their light on the precipitous path. Grim Navajo legends loomed in Jackson's brain as he groped through the blackness. His eyeglasses, which he had fumbled and dropped into the chasm half a mile back, would have been useless anyway. All of the hikers, even the experienced park ranger, were blind and helpless.
All except for their native guide.
This man had hunted in those parts all his life. He knew where the narrow, switchback trail ended and nothingness began. With astonishing confidence, he led the tender-footed group slowly and surely upward. Occasionally, the anxious adventurers would call ahead to him, and he would answer in a reassuring tone, urging them on. When the group made a wrong turn and almost toppled into the abyss, he calmly summoned them back to the right path. When Jackson stumbled approaching a sharp turn, the native guide came back to stem his burgeoning panic with a gentle touch.
For an hour, maybe more, the hikers climbed upward toward the mocking stars, trusting only the local hunter, born and bred in the land of the Navajo. Every step of their arduous journey was guided by his reckoning in the dark—the beckoning call of a native they had never met, whom they had encountered for the first time only an hour before in the blackness, whose face they had never seen.
Nor would they ever see it.
For when the hikers reached the canyon rim at last, the hunter who had led them to safety departed as strictly and silently as he had arrived. They never even got to thank him. But they would never forget him.
For you see, in the lore of the Navajo, certain animals’ figure more prominently than others, and one in particular—one whose very presence is considered a matter of destiny, a matter of life and death.
So, if only for this moment, may you share in the wonder of four hikers who were nearly conquered by Monument Canyon, and yet who were steered from the brink of oblivion by a mysterious stranger, a night hunter. For back in the gloom, with soft cries and the brushing of wings, an unseen savior had kept them on the safe path.
An owl.
And now you know the rest of the story.
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