"Look over there, Luke," Kenobi ordered, pointing to the southwest. The landspeeder continued to race over the gravelly desert floor beneath them. "Smoke, I should think." Luke spared a glance at the indicated direction. "I don’t see anything, sir." "Let’s angle over that way anyhow. Someone may be in trouble." Luke turned the speeder. Before long the rising wisps of smoke that Kenobi had somehow detected earlier became visible to him also.
Topping a slight rise, the speeder 0dropped down a gentle slope into a broad, shallow canyon that was filled with twisted, burned shapes, some of them inorganic, some not. Dead in the center of this carnage and looking like a beached metal whale lay the shattered hulk of a jawa sandcrawler.
Luke brought the speeder to a halt. Kenobi followed him onto the sand, and together they began to examine the detritus of destruction.
Several slight depressions in the sand caught Luke’s attention. Walking a little faster, he came up next to them and studied them for a moment before calling back to Kenobi.
"Looks like the sandpeople did it, all right. Here’s Bantha tracks…" Luke noticed a gleam of metal half-buried in the sand. "And there’s a piece of one of those big double axes of theirs." He shook his head in confusion. "but I never heard of the Raiders hitting something this big." He leaned back, staring up at the towering, burned-out bulk of the sandcrawler.
Kenobi had passed him. He was examining the broad, huge footprints in the sand. "They didn’t," he declared casually, "but they intended that we—and anyone else who might happen onto this—should think so." Luke moved up alongside him.
"I don’t understand, sir." "Look at these tracks carefully," the older man directed him, pointing down at the nearest and then up at the others. "Notice anything funny about them?" Luke shook his head. "Whoever left here was riding Banthas side by side. Sandpeople always ride one Bantha behind another, single file, to hide their strength from any distant observers." Leaving Luke to gape at the parallel sets of tracks, Kenobi turned his attention to the sandcrawler. He pointed out where single weapons’ bursts had blasted away portals, treads, and support beams. "Look at the precision with which this firepower was applied. Sandpeople aren’t this accurate. In fact, no one on Tatooine fires and destroys with this kind of efficiency." Turing, he examined the horizon. One of those nearby bluffs concealed a secret—and a threat. "Only Imperial troops would mount an attack on a sandcrawler with this kind of cold accuracy." Luke had walked over to one of the small, crumpled bodies and kicked it over onto its back. His face screwed up in distaste as he saw what remained of the pitiful creature.
"These are the same jawas who sold Uncle Owen and me Artoo and Threepio.
I recognize this one’s cloak design. Why would Imperial troops be slaughtering jawas and sandpeople? They must have killed some Raider to get those Banthas." His mind worked furiously, and he found himself growing unnaturally tense as he stared back at the landspeeder, past the rapidly deteriorating corpses of the jawas.