We had come down off the mesa capstone, down a draw onto a hidden level. There were axe-cut junipers, a few chert flakes. Suddenly my companion gave a shout: On an anthill at the mesa edge, he had found a tiny crumb of turquoise.

It was the true-blue thing. Unworked, totally out of place on the sandstone. Who had dropped it, and when? A Navajo trader-silversmith? But we’d seen none of the stone circles that are the foundations of old hogans.

Or was it an offering? Contemporary Zunis mix bits of turquoise into the white cornmeal, k’aweawe, that is used for blessing, That remote mesa edge, now the middle of nowhere, was distant from Zuni in both space and time, but for thousands of years it had been the middle of a lively somewhere. Had someone once stood there on the east-facing mesa rim, sprinkling cornmeal for the morning prayer? 

No way to know. We said elakwah—“thank you” in Zuni—and left the turquoise with its ants.