Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (17 page)

How long would the paralysis last? He remembered a wildlife film he had seen on television—a rhino shot with such a dart for study by a biologist. What had they said about it? Several hours, he thought. How many is several? How would it affect a man? And what sort of drug had been used? No profit in speculation. He turned to other thoughts, impressed with how clearly his mind was working. Impressed, too, with how immense the rising moon looked emerging over the eastern horizon. Susanne had stopped trying to talk to him, recognizing that he could not respond. She sat beside him, her back to the dark. Where had the man got the rig? It would be easy enough, Leaphorn guessed. Veterinary-supply houses would have the dart guns and the serums. Maybe the drug would require a prescription. Leaphorn guessed that if it did, just about any rancher or game ranger or zoologist could manage to get the stuff.

He noticed, with mild surprise, that he could hear Susanne breathing. Faintly rasping intake, sighing exhalation. He could hear incredibly well. Somewhere on the cliff above, a night bird was moving. At some immense distance on the mesa a coyote yipped twice and then sang its warbling song. And somewhere to his front, somewhere behind the screen of rabbit brush and juniper on this rocky hill, there were the footsteps of a human. They were slow footsteps, carefully placed—the footsteps of a hunter stalking. Leaphorn found himself wishing almost casually that he could force his tongue to tell Susanne about this danger. At another level of consciousness he wondered about this lack of fear, this immense gain in ability to hear, and this odd feeling of detachment. He remembered a similar sensation from years ago at Arizona State when he and Tom Bob and Blackie Bisti and another Indian student had gone to a meeting of the Native American Church and he had sampled the bitterness of a ceremonial peyote button. He noticed that he could remember this incident with exact and detailed clarity. He was in the smoky room, acrid with some unfamiliar incense, seeing the sweat darkening the back of Blackie's shirt, everything. The stuffiness of rebreathed air, the drone of words, the grim face of the Kiowa preacher giving them their instructions. He listened to the sermon again, thinking now as he had then that it contained an odd mixture of Christianity, mysticism, and Pan-Indian nationalism. And now, as then, Leaphorn was quickly bored with it. And he left the smoky room, drifting out through time and space, and was again under the moon, which was approaching now, so close, so large, that its dark yellow form filled his entire skull with cold. He could no longer see around it. There was only moon in his field of vision, an immense disk of ice pulsing in the black sky. And then Susanne was speaking to him. Her whisper thundered around his head, the words indescribably slow. "Mr. Leaphorn, can you hear me? I think there is something out there. I think I hear something. Mr. Leaphorn!
Mr. Leaphorn!
Her hand was on his chest, her face close to his, her hair blotting out the yellow disk, fear in her eyes, her face almost frantic. And more words. "Mr. Leaphorn. Please don't die." I won't, Leaphorn thought. I will never die.

But perhaps he would die. He could hear the footsteps of the hunter clearly. The hunter now stood behind the tangle of chamiso and juniper which the moonlight had turned from gray to silver. Now the hunter moved again, closer. He stopped behind the juniper with the broken limb. There now in the darkness diluted by the moonlight was the face of whatever it was that made these creaking footfalls. Obviously it was a bird. Perhaps a bird extinct since Folsom Man had hunted here. It was much larger than any physical bird, odd and angry. Its eyes stared, round and blank and dead, from a face that was black and yellow and blue, but mostly black. The eye sockets were empty, he saw. The bird's skull was hollow. And being hollow must be dead. Yet it moved. The rampant plume of feathers at its summit bristled with movement and its rigid beak angled outward past a juniper limb, reflecting the moonlight.

Beside him Susanne sucked in her breath and made a strangled sound. Leaphorn's pistol rose in her hand. It shattered the moon with a great flash of light and blast of sound. Now there was the smell of exploded powder. The echo rolled away around the mesa walls. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Finally it melded into the other night sounds and faded away. The bird was gone now. Leaphorn could hear only the sound of crying. His hand fell from his leg and crashed into the ground. Leaphorn willed for a moment that it would rise again and restore itself to its perch away from the stony ground. But the hand simply lay there and Leaphorn retreated from it, and lost himself, falling, falling, falling into a glittering psychedelic dream in which the cold moon again pulsed in an inky void and a hunter sat naked on a ridge, working with infinite patience, chipping out lance points from pink ice, breaking them, dropping the broken parts onto the earth beside him, taking defeat after defeat without a show of anger.

Much later he became aware that Susanne had again fired the pistol. There was a thunder of sound all around him which forced the moon back into the sky. He was cold. Freezing, he thought. His hands were freezing. He managed some sort of sound, something between a sigh and a grunt. "You're all right," Susanne's voice whispered at his ear. "Your breathing sounds good, and your pulse seems O.K., and I think everything is going to be all right." She picked up his hand, turned it, looked at his wristwatch. "It's been almost four hours now, so maybe that stuff won't be working much longer." She stared into his face. "You can hear me, can't you? I can tell. You're getting awful cold. Your hands are like ice. I'm going to build a fire."

He focused every molecule of his will on an effort to say "No." He managed only a grunt. The psychedelic dream was gone for the moment and his mind was clear of hallucinations. She shouldn't build the fire. The Man Who Wore Moccasins might still be out there, waiting. By firelight, he might have light enough to shoot them. Again he managed a grunt, but the effort exhausted him. Susanne was away in the darkness. He could hear her moving. Gathering sticks. The moon had moved now, climbing up the sky and edging southward far enough behind the rim of the mesa so that the shadow extended ten yards beyond his feet. Outside the shadow, the landscape glittered gray and silver with moonlight. Nothing moved. His hearing still seemed to be unusually acute. From far, far away he heard the song of the coyote again, so dim by distance that it seemed to drift down from the stars. And then there was the sound, from much closer, of a hunting owl. The grotesque bird he had seen in his hallucination, the bird that had vanished after Susanne fired at it, must have been a kachina mask. Leaphorn thought about it. He recognized the mask. The bristling black ruff around the neck, the fierce plume of eagle feathers atop the head, the long tubular beak.

He had seen the mask before, in the moonlight behind the hogan at Jason's Fleece, and painted in the mural in the Zuñi mission. It was the Salamobia, the warrior who carried a whiplike sword of tight-woven yucca. He tried to summon from his memory what he knew of this kachina. There were two of them at Shalako ceremonials, dancing attendance on the other members of the Council of the Gods. But each of the six Zuñi kivas was represented by one—so the total must be six. So six such masks must exist. And each would be carefully guarded by the Zuñi who had been chosen by his kiva for the honor of personifying this figure. The mask would be kept in its own room, provided with food and water, and the spirit which resided within it honored by prayer.

Susanne was lighting the fire now. Having accepted that it was impossible to warn her, Leaphorn ignored this. What would be, would be. He would enjoy being warm again. Now, while he could, he would think. But no more of the mask. The genuine masks would be guarded, but anyone could make a counterfeit.

The flame spread through the pile of leaves and twigs, crackling, casting a flickering yellow light. The dart had been intended for George. Apparently not meant to kill him. At least not immediately. Why not? Was it because this person—like Leaphorn—wanted to talk to the boy?

And why had George taken the gall from the deer? Dried, it would be useful as medicine, for use in curing ceremonials. And why take the fat from under the deerskin? There was something Leaphorn should remember about that. Something to do with Zuñi hunting procedures. He had heard about it from his roommate. He and Rounder had compared Navajo and Zuñi origin myths, emergence myths, migration myths, methods of doing things. Part of it, he remembered, concerned hunting.

The Navajo myth cautions against killing any of the sixty or so beings which had joined the First People in their escape from the Fourth World to Earth Surface World, which limited hunting pretty well to deer, antelope, and a few game birds. The Zuñi legend told of the great war against Chakwena, the Keeper of the Game, which was won only after the Sun Father created the two Zuñi War Gods to lead them. There had been beer and talk far into the night. He forced his mind to recall it. Rounder, his moon face bland, telling them how Father Coyote had taught Clumsy Boy the prayers that would persuade the deer that the hunter brought not harm, but evolution into a higher being. The fire flared up through the dry wood and Leaphorn felt the heat against his face. He felt, again, that odd sense of being detached from himself. He was slipping into another hallucinogenic nightmare. The sound of the fire became a clamorous rattle and crackle. The stars were brighter than they should be on such a night of moon. Yikaisdahi, the Milky Way, the billion bright footprints left by spirits on their pathway across the sky, glittered against the night. Leaphorn forced himself to concentrate. He could see Rounder, slightly drunk, his two hands framing the beer mug on the table, his face earnest, chanting it in Zuñi, and then the translation:

And then showing them, using the beer mug as the muzzle of the deer, how the Zuñi hunter breathed in the animal's last breath. And the prayer. How had it gone? Leaphorn remembered only that it was a statement of thanks that went with the drinking of the Sacred Wind of Life. And then the details of how the deer must be dressed, and of the making of the ball of deer fat and gall and blood from the heart and hair from the proper places, and some fetish offerings to be buried when the deer had fallen.

Suddenly Leaphorn could hear Rounder's drunken voice. "Don't eat in the morning. The hungry hunter scents game against the wind." And he was seeing Rounder's placid face against the sky just above the brightness of So'tsoh—the North Star—between the constellations Ursa Major and Cassiopeia, which the Navajos called Cold Man of the North and his wife. Then the nightmare was on him again, worse than before. The sky filled with the chindi of the dead. They wore deerskin masks and their great beaks clacked. He saw Slayer of the Enemy Gods, standing on a rainbow bright against the sky, but above him towered something with a great blue face and a tall white forehead, its chest covered with prayer plumes, holding a great wand edged with obsidian. Leaphorn knew somehow that this was Uyuyewi, the Zuñi War God, and he felt a hopeless dread. Then there was a face against his, breathing his breath, taking the wind of his life as it left his nostrils. And next, the hand of Susanne on his face, her voice in his ear. "Mr. Leaphorn. It's all right. It's going to be good again. Don't be afraid."

There was cold gray light against the eastern horizon now. And the fire was nothing but hot embers, and Leaphorn's mind told his shoulder muscles to huddle against the cold. And they did huddle, and his hand, told to rub his icy shoulder, rubbed it. Leaphorn was suddenly wide awake, the hallucinations a memory. Susanne was curled by the fire, asleep, the pistol by her hand. Leaphorn tried his legs. They, too, moved to command. He felt a fierce joy. He was alive. He was sane. He tried to push himself to his feet. Made it. Staggered for two steps, and then fell against the stone cliff with a clatter. He could control some muscles well, others not so well. The noise awoke Susanne.

"Hey, you're O.K." She had dead leaves in her hair, dirt on her face. She looked absolutely exhausted and tremendously relieved.

It wasn't until after sunrise that Leaphorn had full control of all his muscles. His stomach bore a swollen red bruise where the dart had struck and fired its charge. He felt weak and sick. He suspected that would go away. He had planned to head for the lake, to try to reach it by sunrise—the sunrise of the fifth day, when Ernesto Cata's spirit would arrive to join the Council of the Gods. But while he could walk a little, he couldn't walk straight. So instead they had waited by the saddle on the slight chance that George Bowlegs had not been frightened by the sound of pistol shots during the night and would be passing by. George did not appear. Leaphorn exercised as quietly as he could, concentrated on regaining full use of his legs. And he thought about a diversity of things. About what Ernesto Cata had told Father Ingles, about the odd way in which George Bowlegs had behaved, about Zuñi hunting ritual, about Ted Isaacs' speculation on how a Stone Age hunter had made his lance points, and about Halsey and the pale young man named Otis whose psychedelic nightmares Leaphorn could now better appreciate. He thought about why whoever had set the trap for George Bowlegs had used a hypodermic gun instead of a shotgun, and of other matters. And when, finally, his right ankle would respond exactly as ordered, he told Susanne they would return to the deer carcass and then head back for the truck.

"We'll cut off enough venison for some breakfast," Leaphorn said.

They did that. And after he had made a fire on which to roast it, he examined the ground around the carcass. He found a place where a small hole had been cut into the earth beside the carcass. Buried in it was a still soft ball of clay, blood, tallow, gall, and deer hair, the fetish offering Rounder had described for the fallen animal. Leaphorn carried it back to the fire, sat on the boulder, and pulled it apart carefully. Inside the ball he found a turquoise bead, the broken tip of a stone lance point, and a small bit of abalone shell.