Tsegi Ruins

Katie Reynolds is a modern Navajo Indian. They call themselves the Diné. Early in her life Katie was bitten with the bug, the bug to help animals. Hard work and intelligence paid off, she became a veterinarian, a first in her Navajo nation, and fell in love with Rory in veterinary school.
The two lovers managed to overcome turbulent issues during school, but the relationship begins to crack from their cultural and physical distances. They come together for a time in California, where Rory is building a practice. Although he hasn’t intended on going into small animal practice, he arranges to open a clinic so both he and Katie would have enough work to make a living, build a home.
Katie continues to feel the tug of advanced learning, still hoping to strengthen her people in the land where evilness rampant on the res ran her off. These spirits want something from Katie, yet she’s unsure what it is. They don’t want to kill her otherwise she’d be toast by now. The answer becomes clearer following an all night peyote tipi rite.
That’s when she runs into Tal and Pelipe, her Ute friends from a neighboring reservation.
During a tour of Hearst Castle Katie is overcome by malevolent spirits when a 3,000 year-old statue jumps off the shelf, causing her to collapse, and lose time. She recovers in a hospital but cannot recollect events of the entire day.
Worries about marrying Rory emerge from this, as she wonders if the spirits are warning her. The indecision is compounded when she and Tal go on a road trip to San Francisco, then Davis, where Katie’s post-graduate schooling is starting her on a new quest to understand the ravages of disease and evil in humans and animals.
Rory realizes the tug on Katie might pull her from him, and he ups the ante by hoping to marry his sweetheart before she returns to school.