She was Never Scared to Travel

Seitaad (more accurately spelled Séít'áád) is a creature from traditional Navajo (Diné) folklore. It is described as a mythical sand monster associated with deserts and sand dunes, said to swallow or bury its victims beneath the sand.

What the dunes remember is the sun had gone down an hour ago, but the sand still held its heat. Walking With Wind could feel it through the soles of her boots as she picked her way along the ridge above Comb Wash, a flashlight in one hand and her grandmother's warning rattling around in her skull like a stone in a gourd.

Don't walk the dunes after dark. Not this stretch. Not since the Bilagáana boy went missing in '09.

She wasn't planning to walk far. Her truck had died two miles back — belt snapped, radiator hissing — and the nearest place with a signal was the overlook at the top of the wash. She told herself that was the only reason she was out here, in the cooling dark, with the dunes breathing around her like something asleep.

That was when she saw the light.

Not her own. A second one, bobbing low near a stand of dead junipers, moving the way a person moves when they're limping, or lost, or both.

"Hello?" she called, and immediately regretted it. Sound carried strange out here. It always had.

The light stopped. Then it swung toward her.

"Hey — hey, over here!" A man's voice, young, cracking with relief. "Please tell me you're real."

He came stumbling out of the dark a minute later — tall, maybe her age, jacket torn at the shoulder, sand caked into his hair like he'd been rolling in it. He said his name was Dallin. Said his jeep had gone off the two-track a mile east, said he'd been walking in circles for what felt like hours, said the weirdest thing —

"The ground kept moving," he said. "Not shifting. Moving. Like something was under it, keeping pace with me."

Walking With Wind felt the hair lift on her arms.

"You should've stayed with your jeep," she said, because it was easier to say than what she was actually thinking.

"I couldn't. It's — " He laughed, short and humorless. "It's stupid. I felt like if I stopped walking, the sand under my feet was going to open up."

She didn't tell him it wasn't stupid. She didn't tell him about Séít'áád — the old story her grandmother told when the wind kicked up dust devils out past the hogan, about the thing in the sand that doesn't chase you, because it doesn't have to. It waits until you stand still. Until you're tired enough, or scared enough, or lost enough to stop moving. And then the ground simply — decides you belong to it.

She didn't believe it. Not really. Not in the daylight, anyway.

But it wasn't daylight, and the dune at the bottom of the wash was breathing.

She saw it now that she was looking — the way the surface rippled, slow, like something enormous turning over in its sleep beneath a thin sheet. No wind stirred the junipers. No wind moved the sand. And yet it moved.

"We need to keep to the rock," she said, backing toward the sandstone shelf above them. "Stay off the loose ground. Come on — now."

Dallin didn't argue. Whatever he'd already seen out there had cured him of arguing with anyone who sounded like they had a plan.

They climbed together, boots scraping stone, and behind them the dune exhaled — a long, dry sound, like a held breath finally let go, like sand sliding down the inside of some vast and patient throat. Dallin flinched and grabbed her sleeve.

"Don't look back," she said. "Just climb."

"What is that?"

"Something old," she said, because it was the truest short answer she had. "Something that only wants you if you stop."

They reached the rim of the wash breathless, the dead juniper stand and the rippling dune spread out below them in the moonlight, still now, innocent-looking, the way a held breath looks like nothing at all. Walking With Wind's phone buzzed once in her pocket — one bar, just enough.

"We wait here," she said. "Till first light. It doesn't come up onto the rock. That much I remember."

Dallin sat down hard against the sandstone, hands shaking, and for a while neither of them said anything. Then he asked, quietly, like he already suspected the answer:

"You knew what that was. Before we even saw it move."

She looked out at the dune, silver and still under the stars, patient as it had always been, as it would always be.

"My grandmother used to say the old things don't disappear," she said. "They just wait for people to stop believing in them. That's when they get strong again."

Below them, faint but unmistakable, the sand shifted once more — and went still, as if it had heard her, and didn't mind waiting a little longer.

The rest of the night passed without incident. At dawn, Walking With Wind and Dallin picked their way down off the rock in the gray early light, giving the dune at the bottom of the wash a wide, wide berth. Neither of them looked directly at it. Neither of them stopped walking until the two-track came into view, and the world felt like the world again.

She never told him the last part of her grandmother's story — that Séít'áád doesn't forget a face it's seen. That it only ever waits.