Nightwing

✍ Scribed by Smith, Martin Cruz

• Book ID: 107530588
• Publisher: W. W. Norton
• Year: 1977
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 256 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0393087832

✦ Synopsis

NIGHTWING

The old Indian sits in the heat of his shack in the Painted Desert. The Hopis, his people, are dying a slow death, the death of the desert. Navajos are taking their land, the Indian Bureau is selling Hopi water, and the energy companies are ripping apart the sacred mesa.

Against such power what can one old medicine man do? The colored sands hiss through his hand into an intricate painting. Black for death, red for blood. “I’m going to end the world,” the old man tells Youngman Duran, a bemused and cynical ex-convict the Hopis have made into a deputy, but not quite into a lawman.

“When?” Youngman smiles.

“Today.”

Next morning the old medicine man is dead, bled to death where he lies in the center of his painting. That is the start of his prophecy come true. Every night from then on Death stirs. Its call is a whisper, its wings are wide and gossamer thin, its teeth are sharp as knives, its grotesque appetite insatiable. As carrier for the most virulent of all diseases, this Death becomes a tide that threatens to sweep man from the American Southwest.

The burden of destroying the death falls on Youngman, who alone has understood the words of the painting, and on the obsessed scientist Hayden Paine, whose life is the pursuit of death.

Together, in this chilling novel of suspense, they journey to the one place of the Hopi, both holy and infected, where, as the wise man had told, the choice must be made—to live or to die—and be made quickly. For night is falling.