Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 01] (2 page)

He stopped by a dead juniper, broke off a crooked limb and started whittling a throwing stick. He could sometimes hit a rabbit with one, but usually not prairie dogs. They were too careful. While he shaped the stick he stared out across the Kam Bimghi. Nothing at all was moving now, and that probably meant it wasn't a rocket down. There would be a lot going on now if it was that. Besides, they wouldn't have been hunting a rocket at night.

He didn't have a chance to use the throwing stick. The burrows of the colony were bunched below a hummock of piñon and one of the rodents saw him long before he was in range. There was a chittering outburst of warning calls, and in a second the dogs were in their holes.

Horseman put the throwing stick in his hip pocket and broke a smaller limb from a piñon. He sharpened one end, split the other. Back at the prairie-dog colony, Horseman selected a hole which faced the west. He stuck the stick in the ground in front of it, pulled a thin sheet of mica from his medicine pouch, and slipped it into the split. He adjusted the mica carefully so that it reflected the light from the rising sun down the hole.

Now he could only wait. In time the light would attract one of the curious prairie dogs. It would come out of its hole blinded by the reflected sun. And he would be close enough to use the stick. He glanced around for a place to stand. And then he saw the Navajo Wolf.

He had heard nothing. But the man was standing not fifty feet away, watching him silently. He was a big man with his wolf skin draped across his shoulders. The forepaws hung limply down the front of his black shirt and the empty skull of the beast was pushed back on his forehead, its snout pointing upward.

The Wolf looked at Horseman. And then he smiled.

"I won't tell," Horseman said. His voice was loud, rising almost to a scream. And then he turned and ran, ran frantically down the dry wash which drained away from the prairie-dog colony. And behind him he heard the Wolf laughing.

That night the Wind People moved across the Reservation. On the Navajo calendar it was eight days from the end of the Season When the Thunder Sleeps, the 25th of May, a night of a late sliver of moon. The wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau and carved shapes in the winter snowpack on San Francisco peaks, the Sacred Mountain of Blue Flint Woman. Below, at Flagstaff airport, it registered gusts up to thirty-two knots—the dry, chilled wind of high-country spring.

On the west slope of the Lukachukai Mountains, the Wind People whined past the boulder where Luis Horseman was huddled, his body darkened by ashes to blind the ghosts. Horseman was calm now. He had thought and he had made his decision. The witch had not followed him. The man in the dog skin didn't know him, had no reason to destroy him. And there was no place else to hide. Soon Billy Nez would know he was on this plateau and would bring him food, and then it would be better. Here the Blue Policeman could never find him. Here he must stay despite the Navajo Wolf.

Horseman opened his medicine pouch and inspected the contents. Enough pollen but only a small pinch of the gall medicine which was the best proof against the Navajo Wolves. He removed the turquoise bear and set it on his knee.

"Horn of the bica, protect me," he chanted. "From the Darkness to Be One, protect me." He wished, as he wished many times now that he was older, that he had listened when his uncle had taught him how to talk to the Holy People.

A hundred miles south at Window Rock, the Wind People rattled at the windows of the Law and Order Building, where Joe Leaphorn was working his way through a week's stack of unfinished case files. The file folder bearing the name of Luis Horseman was third from the bottom and it was almost ten o'clock when Leaphorn reached it. He read through it, leaned back in his chair, lit the last cigarette in his pack, tapped his finger against the edge of his desk and thought.
I know where Horseman is. I'm sure I know. But there is no hurry about it. Horseman will keep
. And then he listened to the voices in the wind, and thought of witches, and of Bergen McKee, his friend who studied them. He smiled, remembering, but the smile faded. Bergen, himself, was the victim of a witch—the woman who had married him, and damaged him, and left him to heal if he could. And apparently he couldn't.

He considered the letter he had received that week from McKee—talking of coming back to the Reservation to continue his witchcraft research. There had been such letters before, but McKee hadn't come. And he won't come this time, Leap-horn thought. Each year he waits to pick up his old life it will be harder for him. And maybe now it's already too hard. And, thinking that, Leaphorn snapped off his desk lamp and sat a moment in the dark listening to the wind.

At Albuquerque, four hundred miles to the east, the wind showed itself briefly in the apartment of Bergen McKee, as it shook the television transmission tower atop Sandia Crest and sent a brief flicker across the face of the TV screen he wasn't watching. He had turned off the sound an hour ago, intending to grade final-examination papers. But the wind made him nervous. He had mixed a shaker of martinis instead, and drank slowly, making them last until, finally, he could sleep.

Tomorrow, perhaps, there would be the answer to his letter, and Joe Leaphorn would tell him that it was a good season for witchcraft gossip, or a poor season, or a fair season. And maybe, if prospects were good, he would go to the Reservation next week and spend the summer completing the case studies he needed to finish the book that no longer mattered to him. Or maybe he wouldn't go.

He snapped on the radio and stood by the glass door opening on his apartment balcony. The wind had raveled away the cloud cover over Sandia Mountain and its dark outline bulked against the stars on the eastern horizon.

Ten stories below, the lights of the city spread toward the foothills, a lake of phosphorescence in an infinity of night. Behind him the radio announced that tomorrow would be cooler with diminishing winds. It then produced a guitar and a young man singing of trouble.

"But," the singer promised, "life goes on."

The sentiment parodied McKee's mood so perfectly that he laughed. He walked back to his desk—a bulky, big-boned, tired-faced man who looked at once powerful and clumsy. He shuffled the ungraded exam papers together, dumped them into his briefcase, poured a final martini from the shaker, and took it into the bedroom. He looked at the certificate framed on the wall. It needed dusting. McKee brushed the glass with his handkerchief.

The proclamation had been laboriously hand-lettered in Gothic script, embossed with a notary public's seal, and signed by all seven members of McKee's seminar. Signed six years ago, the year he had won tenure on the University of New Mexico anthropology faculty—full membership in the elite of the students of man with W. W. Hill, and Hibben, Ellis and Gonzales, Schwerin, Canfield, Campbell, Bock and Stan Newman, Spuhler, and the others. The year he became part of a team unmatched between Harvard and Berkeley. The last good year. The year before coming home to this apartment and finding Sara's closets empty and Sara's note. Fourteen words in blue ink on blue paper. The last year of excitement, and enthusiasm, and plans for research which would tie all Navajo superstitionsjnto a tidy, orderly bundle. The last year before reality.

McKee drained the martini, switched off the lights and lay in the darkness, hearing the wind and remembering how it had been to be Monster Slayer.

Bergen McKee approached his faculty mailbox on the morning of May 26 as he habitually approached it—with a faint tickle of expectation. Years of experience, of pulling out notices to the faculty, lecture handbills, and book advertisements, had submerged this quirk without totally extinguishing it. Sometimes when he had other things on his mind, McKee reached into the box without this brief flash of optimism, the thought that today it might offer some unimaginable surprise. But today as he walked through the doorway into the department secretary's outer office, said good morning to Mrs. Kreutzer, and made the right turn to reach the mail slots, he had no such distraction. If the delivery was as barren as usual, he would be required to turn his thoughts immediately to the problem of grading eighty-four final-examination papers by noon tomorrow. It was a dreary prospect.

"Did Dr. Canfield find you?" Mrs. Kreutzer was holding her head down slightly, looking at him through the top half of her bifocals.

"No ma'am. I haven't seen Jeremy for two or three days."

The top envelope was from
Ethnology Abstracts
. The form inside notified him that his subscription had expired.

"He wanted you to talk to a woman," Mrs. Kreutzer said. "I think you just missed her."

"O.K.," McKee said. "What about?" The second envelope contained a mimeographed form from Dr. Green officially reminding all faculty members of what they already knew—that final semester grades must be registered by noon, May 27.

"Something about the Navajo Reservation," Mrs. Kreutzer said. "She's trying to locate someone working out there. Dr. Canfield thought you might know where she could look."

McKee grinned. It was more likely that Mrs. Kreutzer had decided the woman was unattached and of marriageable age, and might—in some mysterious way—find McKee attractive. Mrs. Kreutzer worried about people. He remembered then that he had met a woman leaving as he came into the Anthropology Building, a young woman with dark hair and dark eyes.

"Was she my type?" he asked. The third and last letter was postmarked Window Rock, Arizona, with the return address of the Division of Law and Order, Navajo Tribal Council. It would be from Joe Leaphorn. McKee put it into his pocket.

Mrs. Kreutzer was looking at him reproachfully, knowing what he was thinking, and not liking his tone. McKee felt a twinge of remorse.

"She seemed nice," Mrs. Kreutzer said. "I'd think you'd want to help her."

"I'll do what I can," he said.

"Jeremy told me you were going to the reservation with him this summer," Mrs. Kreutzer said. "I think that's nice."

"It's not definite," McKee said. "I may have to take a summer-session course."

"Let somebody else teach this summer," Mrs. Kreutzer said. She looked at him over her glasses. "You're getting pale."

McKee knew he was not getting pale. His face, at the moment, was peeling from sunburn. But he also knew that Mrs. Kreutzer was speaking allegorically. He had once heard her give a Nigerian graduate student the same warning, and when the student had asked him what Mrs. Kreutzer could possibly have meant by it, McKee had explained that it meant she was worrying about him.

"You ought to tell them to go to hell," Mrs. Kreutzer said, and the vehemence surprised McKee as much as the language. "Everybody imposes on you."

"Not really," McKee said. "Anyway, I don't mind."

But as he walked down the hall toward his office he did mind, at least a little. George Everett had asked him to take his classes this summer, because Everett had an offer to handle an excavation in Guatemala, and it irritated McKee now to remember how sure Everett had been that good old Bergen would do him the favor. And he minded a little being the continuing object of Mrs. Kreutzer's pity. The cuckold needs no reminder of his horns and the reject no reminder of his failure.

He took the Law and Order envelope from his pocket and looked at it, neglecting his habitual glance through the hallway window at the chipping plaster on the rear of the Alumni Chapel. Instead he thought of how it had been to be twenty-seven years old in search of truth on the Navajo Reservation, still excited and innocent, still optimistic, not yet taught that he was less than a man. He couldn't quite recapture the feeling.

It wasn't until he had opened the blinds, turned on the air conditioner and registered the familiar creak of his swivel chair as he lowered his weight into it that he opened the letter.

Dear Berg: