Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] (4 page)

He found himself surrounded by carved rock without a trace of water or a hint of vegetation. He had searched in widening circles, climbing sandstone walls, skirting sandstone escarpments, engulfed in a landscape where the only colors were shades of pink and red.

Finally he had scrambled to the top of a flat-topped pinnacle and perched there. He scanned the surroundings below him with his binoculars— looking for a trace of green, which would declare water, or for something that would suggest the geological fault that would produce a spring. Finding nothing helpful, he waited. Bisti had been a boy in this country. He would not be mistaken about water. Surface water in this desert would be a magnet for life. In time, nature would reveal itself. Leaphorn would wait and think. He was good at both. The thunderhead that promised a shower to Tuba Mesa in the morning had drifted eastward over the Painted Desert and evaporated- -the promise unfulfilled. Now another, taller thunderhead had climbed the sky to the north—over the slopes of Navajo Mountain in Utah. The color under it was blue-black, suggesting that on one small quadrant of mountainside the blessed rain was falling. Far to the southeast, blue and dim with distance, another towering cloud had risen over the Chuskas on the Arizona-new Mexico border. There were other promising clouds to the south, drifting over the Hopi Reservation. The Hopis had held a rain dance Sunday, calling on the clouds—their ancestors—to restore the water blessing to the land.

Perhaps the kachinas had listened to their Hopi children. Perhaps not. It was not a Navajo concept, this idea of adjusting nature to human needs. The Navajo adjusted himself to remain in harmony with the universe. When nature withheld the rain, the Navajo sought the pattern of this phenomenon—as he sought the pattern of all things - comfffind its beauty and live in harmony with it. Now Leaphorn sought some pattern in the conduct of the man who had tried to kill a policeman rather than accept a speeding ticket. Into what circumstances would such an action fit? Leaphorn sat, motionless as the stone beneath him, and considered a variation of Captain Largo’s theory. The man with the gold-rimmed glasses was not Frederick Lynch.

He was a Navajo who had killed Lynch, and had taken his car, and was running for cover in familiar country. A dead Lynch could not report his car stolen. And that would explain why Goldrims had headed so directly and confidently into the desert. As Largo had suggested, he was merely going home. He hadn’t stopped for a drink at one of the nearer water holes because he had a bottle of water in the car, or because he had been willing to spend a hideously thirsty twenty-four hours rather than risk being tracked. Leaphorn considered alternative theories, found none that made sense, and returned to Goldrims-is-navajo. But what, then, about the dog? Why would a Navajo car thief take the victim’s dog with him? Why would the dog— mean enough to require a muzzle—allow a stranger to steal his master’s car? Why would the Navajo take the dog along with him at the risk of being bitten? Odder still, why had the dog followed this stranger? Leaphorn sighed. None of the questions could be answered.

Everything about this affair offended his innate sense of order. He began considering a Goldrims-is-Lynch theory and got nowhere with it.

A pair of horned lark flicked past him and glided over a great hump of sandstone near the mesa wall. They did not reappear. A half hour earlier a small flight of doves had disappeared for at least five minutes in the same area. Leaphorn had been conscious of that point- - among others—since seeing a young Cooper’s hawk pause in its patrol of the mesa rim to circle over it. He climbed carefully from his perch. The birds had found the water for him. The spring was at the bottom of a narrow declivity at a place where the sandstone met a harder formation of limestone. Thousands of years of wind had given this slot a floor of dust and sand, which supported a stunted juniper, a hummock of grama grass and a few tumbleweeds. Leaphorn had circled within a hundred yards of this hole without guessing its presence, and had missed a sheep trail leading into it through the tough luck of encountering the path at the place where it crossed track-resistant limestone. Now he squatted on the sand and considered what it had to tell him. There were tracks everywhere.

Old and new. Among the new ones, the cloven hoofs of a small flock of sheep and goats, the pawprints of dogs, at least three, and the prints of the same boots in which Goldrims had walked away from his abandoned Mercedes. Leaphorn examined a rim of sand in a bootprint near the water, fingered it, tested its moisture content, considered the state of the weather, and weighed in cool humidity in this shadowed place. Goldrims had been here not many hours ago—probably not long before noon. The dog was still with him. Those tracks, almost grotesquely large for a dog, were everywhere. The other dogs had been here about the same time. Leaphorn studied the sandy floor.

He examined an indentation, made by an oblong rectangle eighteen inches long and eight inches wide. It was either fairly heavy, or had been dropped on the damp sand. He examined another place, much more vague, where some sort of pressure had smoothed the sand. He studied this from several angles, with his face close to the earth.

He concluded, finally, that Goldrims might have rested a canvas backpack here. Not far from where the backpack had been, Leaphorn picked up a bead-sized ball of sand. It flattened between thumb and forefinger into a sticky, gritty red. A droplet of drying blood.

Leaphorn sniffed it, touched it with his tongue, cleaned his fingers with sand, and trotted partway up the sloping wall of the pocket. He stood looking down on the basin. Across the shallow pool a section of sand was smooth—itso collection of tracks erased. Leaphorn did not think about what he might find. He simply dug, scooping the damp sand out with his hands and piling it to the side. Less than a foot below the surface, his fingers encountered hair. The hair was white.

Leaphorn rocked back on his heels, giving himself a moment to absorb his surprise. Then he poked with an exploring finger. The hair was attached to a dog’s ear, which, when pulled, produced from the engulfing sand the head of a large dog. Leaphorn pulled this body from its shallow grave. As he did so he saw the foreleg of a second dog. He stretched the two animals side by side near the water, dipped his hat into the pool to rinse the sand from the bodies, and began a careful examination. They were a large brown-and-white male mongrel and a slightly smaller, mostly black female. The female had teeth gashes across its back but had apparently died of a broken neck. The male had its throat torn out. Leaphorn put on his wet hat, tipped it back and stood looking down at the animals. He stood long enough to feel the chill of evaporation on the back of his head, and to hear the call of a horned lark from somewhere back among the boulders, and the voice of an early owl from the mesa. And then he climbed out of the darkening basin and began walking rapidly back toward the place he had left his carryall. The San Francisco Peaks made a dark blue bump against the yellow glare of the horizon. The cloud over Navajo Mountain was luminescent pink and the sandstone wilderness through which Leaphorn walked had become a universe of vermilion under this slanting light. Normally Leaphorn would have drunk in this dramatic beauty, and been touched by it. Now he hardly noticed it. He was thinking of other things. He thought of a man named Frederick Lynch who had walked directly across thirty miles of ridges and canyons to a hidden spring. And when Leaphorn pushed this impossibility aside, his thoughts turned to sheepdogs and how they work, and fight, as a trained team. He thought of Lynch and his dog reaching the water hole, finding the flock there with the two dogs that had brought the sheep on guard. He tried to visualize the fight—the male dog staging a fighting retreat probably, while the female slashed at the flank. Then, with this diversion, the male going for the throat. Leaphorn had seen many such dogfights. But he’d never seen the single dog, no matter how fierce, manage better than a howling defeat. What would have happened had the shepherd— probably a child—come along with his dogs? And what would this shepherd think tomorrow when he came and found his dead helpers?

Leaphorn shook his head. Incidents like this kept the tales of skinwalkers alive. No boy would be willing to believe his two dogs could be killed by a single animal. But he could believe, without loss of faith in his animals, that a witch had killed them. A werewolf was more than a match for a pack of dogs. Nothing could face a skinwalker. Leaphorn turned away from this unproductive thought, to the fact that Goldrims seemed not to be running away from his affair with the Navajo police, but hurrying toward something. But what? And where? And why? Leaphorn drew an imaginary line on an imaginary map from the place where Lynch had abandoned the car to the water hole. And then he projected it northward. The line extended between Navajo Mountain and Short Mountain—into the Nokaito Bench and onward into the bottomless stone wilderness of the Glen Canyon country, and across Lake Powell Reservoir. It ran, Leaphorn thought, not far at all from the hogan on Nokaito Bench where an old man named Hosteen Tso and a girl named Anna Atcitty had been killed three months ago. Leaphorn wound his way through the sandstone landscape, his khaki-uniformed figure dwarfed by the immense outcroppings and turned red by the dying light. He was thinking now about why these two persons might have died. By the time he reached his vehicle, he decided he would get to the Short Mountain Trading Post tomorrow. Tonight he would read the Tso-Atcitty file and try to find an answer to that question.

That evening at Tuba City, Leaphorn read carefully through the three reports Largo had given him. The heroin affair provoked little thought. A small plastic package of heroin, uncut and worth perhaps five thousand dollars at wholesale, had been found taped behind the dashboard of an old stripped car which had been rusting away for years about seven miles from the Keet Seel ruins. The find had been made as a result of an anonymous call received at the Window Rock headquarters. The caller had been a female. The heroin had been removed and the package refilled with powdered white sugar and replaced. The cache had been watched, closely for a week and then loosely for a month. Finally it was merely checked periodically. No one had ever tampered with the plastic package. That could be easily explained. Probably the buyer or seller had scented the trap and the cache had been written off as a loss. And because it could be easily explained, it didn’t interest Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn. The affair of the missing helicopter was more challenging. The original sighting reports were familiar, as was the map on which a line had been penciled to connect them and recreate the copter’s path, because Leaphorn had studied them while the search was under way. The map’s line curved and jiggled erratically. Significantly, it tended to stick to empty country, avoiding Aztec, Farmington and Shiprock in New Mexico, and—as it entered the interior of the Big Reservation— skirting away from trading posts and water wells where people would be likely to see it. There had been a definite, clear-cut sighting fifteen miles north of Teec Nos Pos and after that the line became sketchy and doubtful. It zigzagged, with question marks beside most of the sighting points. Leaphorn flipped through more recent reports of sightings—those which had accumulated gradually in the months since the hunt had been called off. For the first two months, someone had kept the map current, revising the line to match the fresh reports. But this fruitless project had been abandoned.

Leaphorn fished out his ballpoint pen and spent a few minutes bringing the job up to date, which confirmed the existing line without extending it. It still faded away about one hundred miles east of Short Mountain—perhaps because the copter had landed, or perhaps because there simply were no people in the empty landscape to see it pass. Leaphorn put down the pen and thought. Almost forty men had hunted the copter, crisscrossing the Navajo Mountain-Short Mountain wilderness, questioning everybody who could be found to question, and finding absolutely nothing. The sightings had been sorted into three categories: “definite-probable,” “possible-doubtful,” and “unlikely.” The ghost and witchcraft talk was in the “unlikely” grouping. Leaphorn examined it. One sighting involved a twelve-year-old girl, hurrying to get home before dark. A noise and a light in the evening sky. The sounds of ghosts crying in the wind.

The sight of a black beast moving through the sky. The girl had run, crying, to her mother’s hogan. No one else had heard anything. The investigating officer discounted it. Leaphorn checked the location.

It was almost thirty miles south of the line. The next sighting was from an old man, again hurrying back to his hogan to avoid the ghosts which would be coming out in the gathering darkness. He had heard a thumping in the sky and had seen a wolf flying— outlined black against the dim red afterglow on the stone face of a mesa wall.

This, too, was south of the wildest zigzag of the line. The others were similar. An old woman cutting wood, startled by a sound and a moving light overhead, and the noise returning four times from the four symbolic directions as she crouched in her hogan; a Dinne-hotso schoolboy on a visit to a relative, watching a coyote on a cliff near the south shore of Lake Powell. He reported that the coyote disappeared and moments later he’d heard a flapping of wings and had seen something like a dark bird diving toward the lake surface and disappearing like a duck diving for a fish. And finally, a young man seeing a great black bird flying over the highway north of Mexican Water and turning itself into a truck as it passed him, and then flying again as it disappeared to the west. This report, picked up by an Arizona highway patrolman, bore the notation: “Subject reportedly drunk at time.” Leaphorn marked each sighting location on the map with a tiny circle. The flying truck was close enough to the line to fit the pattern and the diving coyotestbird would fit if the line was extended about forty miles westward and jogged sharply northward. Leaphorn yawned and slid the map back into the accordion file. Probably the helicopter had landed somewhere, refueled from a waiting truck, and flown through the covering night to a hiding place well away from the search area. He picked up the Atcitty-Tso homicide file, with a sense of anticipation. This one, as he remembered it, defied all applications of logic. He read swiftly through the uncomplicated facts. A niece of Hosteen Tso had arranged for Mrs. Margaret Cigaret, a Listener of considerable reputation in the Rainbow Plateau country, to find out what was causing the old man to be ill. Mrs. Cigaret was blind. She had been driven to the Tso hogan by Anna Atcitty, a daughter of Mrs. Cigaret’s sister. The usual examination had been conducted. Mrs. Cigaret had left the hogan to go into her trance and do her listening. While she was in her trance, someone had killed the Tso and Atcitty subjects by hitting them on the head with what might have been a metal pipe or a gun barrel. Mrs. Cigaret had heard nothing. As far as could be determined, nothing was taken from either of the victims or from the hogan. An FBI agent named Jim Feeney, out of Flagstaff, had worked the case with the help of a BIA agent and two of Largo’s men.