When I was in high school in Southern California, I made friends with brothers who recently moved to town from Gallup, New Mexico. At one point, they told me a story about driving in the desert at night near Gallup. They saw a coyote-like animal come out of the bush and run alongside the car. Thing is, they were on the highway and driving 55 miles per hour! The coyote looked right at them, as though evaluating them, then disappeared into the brush beside the road again. They were convinced that they had encountered a beast the Diné people of Northern New Mexico call yee naaldlooshii, which means “by means of it, it goes on all fours.” In English we’ve come to know this creature as a skinwalker. Essentially, it’s said to be a sorcerer who can transform into an animal.

Four years ago, Danielle Ackley-McPhail of eSpec Books asked me to write a cryptid story for a line of novellas. I proposed a few ideas, but the one inspired by my friends’ tale of an encounter with a skinwalker is the one they decided to go with. The challenge of telling such a story is that it’s a sensitive topic since it’s tied so closely to Native American culture. I wanted to tell the story from a perspective that was as close to the one I’ve lived as I possibly could. Most of my ancestors came from Europe and settled in the Americas circa the 17th century, then became part of groups that moved west during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In short, I’m a white guy, but one whose family has lived in the west for a long time and who currently works at an observatory on the Tohono O’Odham Nation in Southern Arizona. Over the years I’ve worked there, I’ve learned to respect the traditions of Native Americans.

One of my own memorable experiences of visiting Gallup, was stopping in a cafe and talking to an older gentleman who claimed to be one of the original Navajo Code Talkers during World War II. These were folks hired to transmit information in the Diné language. Because a written orthography for Navajo was so new, German and Japanese agents couldn’t break the code. Because my dad grew up in New Mexico and joined the marines as soon as he graduated high school in World War II, I was inspired to write a story about a mystery surrounding marines recruiting young Diné people to be code talkers. In the meantime, Gallup’s sheriff is investigating a series of strange occurrences, some of which have been attributed to a skinwalker.

Around the time I wrote this, I heard interviews with author Ryan Skinner, who has looked into skinwalker sightings and who took an interest in the place called Skinwalker Ranch in Utah. In one interview, he told a story about seeing balls of light over a field that moved around and changed size. Suddenly one of the balls of light exploded and there was a wolf very near to them. I decided to associate sightings of mysterious glowing orbs with skinwalkers in my story.

The final ingredient from my story came from some real life history. In early 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which marked the beginning of Japanese-Americans being rounded up and placed in internment camps. To me, this is an example of how fear can make people take scary actions. As it turns out, Gallup had a rather sizable population of Japanese-Americans at the time and I wanted to compare and contrast the characters’ response to both the national events and to the local monster and mystery.

If you want to see how I mixed and matched all these pieces of history and lore, check out my novella Breaking the Code. You can find it at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08RW4CMR8/