Moqui Marbles

I like to imagine a young Native American man, little older than a boy, really, sitting in the shade of a juniper tree a thousand years ago in what’s now southern Utah, trying to perfect his technique as he knaps flint into arrowheads. From a slope above, there’s a muffled thud, then a dull rattle on sandstone, and then an ebony-brown rock the size of a walnut skitters past and comes to rest in a pothole. The young man doesn’t react—he knows there’s no enemy above, signaling its presence with a kicked stone, nor tasty game to be hunted. It’s just great-grandpa, he thinks, playing games again.

“Moqui,” I was told by a well-traveled desert rat deep in the Escalante backcountry one spring 15 years ago, means “dear departed ones” or “beloved ancestors.” As we stood just a few miles from some of the region’s most popular slot canyons, he gestured to the thousands of rounded rocks scattered in