At break, instead of the sedate game of hopscotch she might be enjoying at her nursery school, Devil’s Slide kids scramble up the piñon and juniper of the rock face and throw stones at each other’s heads – and Emmy, who, on flat ground, is the clumsiest thing imaginable, collecting broken toes and dents in her forehead like other children collect baseball cards, scrambles with the best of them.

‘Today I cut my head so deep you could see my brain,’ she says proudly.

‘How great! What colour was it?’

‘Mummy!’

‘Are you trying to tell me you haven’t checked it out in the mirror?’

More chuckling.

‘Jack, get over here! Let’s take a look.’

‘I’m not looking at her disgusting brain.’

At bath time she presents me with her battle scars: arms decorated with a myriad of raw scratches, vermilion-coloured bruises like stepping stones up and down her legs, blackened torn fingernails caked in dust. ‘School is cool,’ Emmy announces. At lunch, older children regale juniors with details from their winter project on prehistoric cultures, the local Hohokam, farmers of the desert, and far more interesting, of course, the cannibalistic Anasazi who apparently liked nothing better than to nibble on their fellow Indians in the fourteenth century, and whose remains are scattered around the desert caves of the Four Corners region to the north. Devil’s Slide itself is the cliff from where a group of Apaches, their weapons depleted, chose to freefall to their death rather than give in to the grisly torture of their enemies, all of which Emmy laps up with ghoulish fascination. Any day now, I expect her to arrive home flexing a tattoo of a fat green snake on her left bicep, sign of a newly minted member of the notorious Cobra gang, modern-day warriors who rule the darker areas of the Indian rez.

Instead of the grind of homework, I give the children Spanish lessons, courtesy of my Waterstone’s tapes. Forget the blind leading the blind, this is the dumb leading the deaf.

‘El río está helado, I intone on the way home in the car.

‘¿Sí? ¿Qué? they reply politely.

Brilliantly, though, I have tricked them into believing that chores – sweeping the deck, setting the mousetraps, securing garbage against the raccoons – are a legitimate fixture of their after-school curriculum. Woodwork, a particular success, takes the form of me lying on the sofa drinking margaritas while they struggle in and out of blistering winds fetching blocks of wood for the fire and scorching their little fingers on damp matchbooks printed with ‘God Bless America’.