Read The Wailing Wind - Leaphorn & Chee 17 Online
Authors: Tony Hillerman
It was near noon but still chilly at this canyon bottom, and Bernie stood out in the warming sunlight while she examined the place—the stone building, a little shed, a fallen-down sheep pen, and a plank outhouse near the canyon bottom. The track she had been following seemed to end up the slope by the hogan, but no vehicle was there now. Nor was any smoke coming from the pipe, suggesting neither coffee nor anything else was brewing for lunch.
She walked up the track to the foot of the slope, went through the polite formula of shouting greetings, and waiting, and shouting again, and waiting, until the visitor was assured either that no one was at home, or, if they were, they didn't want to be bothered.
Finding the hogan was a disappointment. It seemed to make it less likely that Doherty would be finding his gold dust upstream from an occupied residence—as this one obviously would be when the occupants returned from where duty had taken them. Within a mile she found another seep—plenty of damp earth here but no puncturevines in view.
She had seen no vehicle tracks since the hogan. Now the canyon had become too narrow, too steep, and too rocky for anything on wheels, and she saw the first signs of that epic "summer of fire" that had swept through the high-country forests of the mountain West in 1999. The stems of fire-killed ponderosa pines lined the ridge above her. Ahead, the canyon was littered with the blackened trunks of fallen trees. Some places on the cliffs were splotched with the flame-retardant chemicals dropped to check the blaze. Other sections, where the fire had spread through deep accumulations of dead brush, the rock was marked with broad streaks of black. Runoff from three seasons of rain had swept the sandy bottom clean, but above the runoff level new vegetation was restoring itself in some places, and others showed only the black and gray of soot and ashes.
All this was bad news to that segment of Bernie's brain that was hunting a murder site. The segment that was amateur botanist and enthusiastic naturalist was elated. She had before her a laboratory display of how much nature can recover in three years after a disaster. For example, she could see no sign that the chamisa that flourished around the hogan had made any comeback at all in the fire zone. The thread-and-needle grass was back, and so were the snakeweed, johnsongrass, asters, and (alas) the sandburs. She hurried along up-canyon, finding more damp places, more seeps, more varieties of plants—including infant ponderosa, piñon, and juniper seedlings. What would be the elevation here, she wondered. Probably getting close to seven thousand feet. As the altitude increased, so had the precipitation. At this level the vegetation had been heavier, the residue of dead trees and brush thicker at canyon bottom and the fire more intense.
Bernie climbed over a barrier of broken boulders into a flatter stretch of streambed. On the shaded side of the canyon she noticed a seep where the stones were still shiny with moisture. Below that she found her first punc-turevine by the usual method—stepping on its goathead thorns. She sat on the rocks to extract these from her boot soles, and noticed as she did that she'd smeared her hands with the same sort of soot she'd found on them at Doherty's truck.
It was there she saw the owl. It was perched on the limb of a fire-damaged ponderosa that leaned over the canyon some fifty yards upstream. Bernie sucked in her breath and stared. No Navajo child of her generation grew up without being told that the owl was the symbol of death and disaster. Told by someone that he flew at night to do his killing, and appeared in daylight only as a warning. Bernie had put that belief more or less behind her. Yet it was a large owl, it was looking at her, and something about this fire-blackened place had already made her uneasy. So she sat a bit, staring back at the motionless bird, and finally decided to ignore it. The next start it gave her came when she was much, much closer. She stopped again to inspect it and noticed it didn't look quite natural. It seemed to be tied to its limb. In fact, it was an artificial owl. The sort one buys to perch in fruit trees to keep birds from harvesting the cherries. Why put it there? The only reason that seemed possible to Bernie was to warn Navajos to stay away.
More evidence, Bernie thought, that this must be the canyon. This had to be it. But would Chee and
Largo
and the rest of them believe her? As she considered that question she noticed another oddity. The bottom sand ahead of her looked unnaturally flat and unnaturally divided into levels. She hurried upstream.
A sequence of logs had been dug into the streambed to form four little check dams—each about fifteen feet upstream and a foot or so higher than the one below. Clearly their purpose was to slow stream flow after rains, causing the current to drop more of its sand. Gravity being at work, the first stuff to sink would be the heavy gold particles. She was looking at a gold-panning sluice, and if she'd had a shovel and a bucket, she was pretty sure she could take home enough gold-rich sand to pay for the gasoline she'd used getting here. In fact, from where she stood, she could see the hole where, just a few days ago, Thomas Doherty had mined himself a little of the stuff for his
Prince Albert
can.
And she would do so herself—just enough in her jacket pocket to deflate any doubters, to restore her status as an equal among equals in the world of law enforcement. Officer Bernadette Manuelito, filled with that special form of joy and exuberance produced when despairing disappointment is abruptly replaced with utter success, trotted happily up the streambed, her tired legs no longer tired, and jumped over the half-buried log into the sand.
She would always wonder if that was why the shot missed her.
Chapter Ten
It took bernie some small fraction of a second to identify the mixture of sounds—the sharp crack of a bullet breaking the sound barrier as it zipped past her head, the sharp whack as it struck a few yards ahead, the bang of the rifle that fired it. Identification made, Bernie scrambled for cover in the rocks along the canyon wall.
She huddled there a moment, collecting her scattered wits and making an inventory of the situation. Bernie's scramble had taken her behind a great slab of fallen stone—a place that had the advantage of being unquestionably bulletproof and the disadvantage of offering no easy way out which provided good cover. She sat with her back against the stone, unsnapped the strap on her holster, removed the pistol, and looked at it. It was a standard-issue police revolver, which held six .38-caliber rounds. Bernie had qualified with a high score at the firing range, but she hadn't developed any fondness for the thing. It was heavy, bulky, and cold, and it symbolized the one side of police work that did not appeal to her. She had worked at it, imagining situations in which she shot someone (always a fiercely aggressive male) in defense of some innocent life. In these situations Bernie had managed to merely disable and disarm the aggressor, ignoring the standard police policy of not drawing your gun unless prepared to shoot it, and not shooting unless you shot to kill. Now she knew, or thought she knew, that she would shoot if this situation required it, and shoot for the middle of the man trying to kill her.
And who might that be? A man, of course. Bernie could not visualize a woman as sniper. Probably the same man who'd shot Thomas Doherty in the back—and probably for the same reason, which would be something involving this gold deposit. As Hostiin Yellow had warned her, white men will kill for gold. She thought of that warning. Hostiin Yellow had seemed unusually forceful and emphatic about it, but at the time she had passed that off as a fond uncle trying to deal with a willful niece. Now it suggested he had some well-informed reason to think the canyon she was looking for was dangerous. Right as usual. She had a wise old uncle. Too bad Hostiin Yellow didn't have a wiser niece.
Bernie could think of nothing to do now except wait and listen. Which she did, ears straining against the silence, eyes alert for any sign of motion. Normally in such a canyon there would be a variety of birds around harvesting the autumn crop of seeds and dried berries. But the fire that had swept through here had left nothing to eat but ashes. This narrowed place in the canyon must have produced an intensely hot fire, fueled by a decades deep accumulation of dead wood. Now that Bernie had a quiet moment to think of it, she deduced what had happened here. The same endless years that had deposited post-rainfall gold dust in the sluice had been depositing dead trash to hide it. Fire had reduced the trash to ash. Runoff had swept the ash from the stream bottom. The old secret lay exposed.
The ash deposits had survived where Bernie was huddling, too high to be cleansed by runoff water, and those weeds that thrive in the wake of forest fires had made scant progress. A few yards below, moisture from a seep had kept the soil damp. There the brown and gray were replaced by splotches of green. And there, ground-clinging puncturevines had spread—their tough-as-stone little seeds impervious even to such intense heat.
Bernie arose from the ash pile on which she'd been sitting, overcame an impulse to slip out to the damp area in search of Doherty's boot tracks—clinching proof that he'd been here, if not absolute evidence he'd been shot here. That impulse was squelched immediately by the image of someone looking at her over his rifle sights. She sat again. What to do?
She could wait here. When it got dark, she could slip up canyon, climb out—(Could she climb out? Probably, but doing it in the dark would be dangerous)—and then walk out. Out to where? The climb would take her to the top, so to speak and more or less, of
Mesa
de los Lobos. Southward there was the Iyanbito Refinery, but getting there meant climbing down the rampart of cliffs north of the Santa Fe Railroad and Interstate 40. No way. Miles to the east was the Church Rock uranium mine, if that was still operating. Rough country over the mesa to get there, but she could do it. About then, another mood overcame Bernie. Anger.
What was she doing, just sitting here like a wimp. She was a law enforcement officer, commissioned by the Navajo Tribal Police and deputized by the
Bernie got up again, took a tight grip on her pistol, edged to the end of the slab, and looked around it. She saw nothing. Heard nothing. She studied every place she imagined a sniper might be hiding. Nothing suspicious. The man who had shot at her might be miles away by now. Probably was. Anyway, who wants to live forever. She took a deep breath, stepped away from her sheltering slab, and hurried over to the growth of puncturevine.
Preserved in the damp earth were boot prints, some crushing tendrils of the weed. True, they were a common boot print pattern, but it was also true they had left the same pattern she'd memorized from the bottom of Doherty's boot. Another happy truth: The sniper hadn't taken another shot at her.
She walked over to the sluice, and from the bottom of the hole where she presumed Doherty had made his extraction, she scooped out a handful and dumped it into her jacket pocket. That done, she started walking very cautiously down-canyon, using cover when she could and with frequent stops to look and listen. When she reached the point from which she could see the hogan, she stopped a longer time. Still no sign of a vehicle there. She saw no sign of life. She heard nothing.
Her truck was just where she'd left it. In a little while she was pulling off the dirt road onto the asphalt of Navajo Route 9. There she stopped and just sat for a while, getting over a sudden onset of shakes before she drove home.
Chapter Eleven
For the first time since those awful puberty years of high school, Jim Chee found himself trying to find the wisdom, if any, imparted by the "separation of the sexes" part of Navajo mythology. As in the Old Testament or the New, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, the teachings of Buddha or Muhammad, or any of the other religious texts Chee had read in his philosophy of religions course at unm, the complex poetry of the Navajo version of Genesis mixed lessons in survival as part of teaching your relationship with your Creator and the cosmos.
Hostiin Frank Sam Nakai, Chee's senior maternal uncle, had tried to explain this business of sexual relationships and gender responsibilities one night long ago—the same summer night he'd taken Chee into Gallup after his high school graduation. He'd parked in the bar-and-pawnshop section of