Leaphorn smiled. "Nobody admitted they'd seen him. There wasn't any reason for them to admit it. They know how the system works. But that old man who came in the wagon…" Leaphorn picked his clipboard of notes off the dashboard and inspected it. "Nagani Lum, it was. He damned sure knew something about it. Did you notice how interested he was?"
"Lum was one who was telling me about a witching case," McKee recalled. "Pretty standard stuff." A two-headed colt had been born. Lum hadn't seen it but a relative had. The brother-in-law of an uncle, as McKee remembered it. And then the boy who herded sheep for his uncle's brother-in-law had actually seen the Navajo Wolf. Thought it was a dog bothering the sheep, but when he shot at it with his.22, he saw it had turned into a man. But it was getting dark and he didn't think he'd hit it. As usual, McKee thought, it was a little too dark to really see and, as usual, the source was a boy.
"I think that joker who was buying himself the new hat knew something about Horseman, too," Leaphorn was saying. "The one who was kidding you about your witch stories."
"He said he didn't."
"He also said somebody stole his hat."
"What do you mean?" McKee asked.
"Did you see that concho hatband? Why would anybody steal an old felt hat and leave behind all that fancy silver?"
They had passed Chinle now, Leaphorn driving the white carryall at a steady seventy. The highway skirted the immense, lifeless depression which falls away into the Biz-E-Ahi and Nazlini washes. It was lit now by the sunset, a fantastic jumble of eroded geological formations. The white man sees the desolation and calls it a desert, McKee thought, but the Navajo name for it means "Beautiful Valley."
"Can you tell me why that man would lie about somebody stealing his hat?" Leaphorn asked. His face was intent with the puzzle. "Or, if he wasn't lying, who would steal an old felt hat and leave that silver band behind?"
Chapter 5
Joseph Begay awakened earlier than usual. He lay still a moment, allowing consciousness to seep through him, noticing first the pre-dawn chill and that his wife had captured most of the blankets they shared. Then he registered the rain smells, dampened dust, wet sage, piсon resin and buffalo grass. Now fully awake, he remembered the sudden midnight shower which had awakened them in the brush arbor and driven the family to shelter in the hogan. Through the open hogan door, he saw the eastern horizon was not yet brightening behind the familiar upthrusting shape of Mount Taylor, seventy miles away in New Mexico. Reaches for the Sky was one of the four sacred mountains which marked the four corners of the Land of the People, and Joseph Begay thought, as he had thought many mornings, that he had chosen this site well. The old hogan which he and his brothers-in-law had built near his mother-in-law's place had been located on low ground, near water but closed in with the hills. He had never liked the site. When the son they had called Long Fingers had died of the choking sickness in the night—died so suddenly that they had not had time to move him out of the hogan so that the ghost could go free—he had not been sorry that they had to leave the site. He had boarded up the door himself and covered the smoke hole so the ghost of Long Fingers would not bother his in-law people and had decided right away that this place on the mesa would be the place for the new hogan.
And, when he had built it, he had not faced the door exactly east as the Old People had said it must be faced, but very slightly north of east so that when he awoke in the morning he would see Reaches for the Sky outlined by the dawn, and remember that it was a place of beauty where Changing Woman had borne the Hero Twins. It would be a good thought to awaken with, and because he had not made the door exactly east he had been very careful to follow the Navajo Way with the remainder of the construction. He had driven a peg and used a rope to mark off the circle to assure that the hogan wall would be round and of the prescribed circumference. He had put the smoke hole in exactly the proper place and, when he had plastered the stones with adobe, he had sprinkled a pinch of corn pollen on the mud and sung the song from the Blessing Way.
Joseph Begay slipped off the pallet and pulled on his pants and shirt, moving silently in the darkness to avoid awakening his wife and two sons, who slept across the hogan. He moved around their feet, with the Navajo's unconscious care not to step over another human being, and ducked through the door. His boots, forgotten in the brush arbor, were only slightly damp. He put them on as he heated water for a cup of coffee.
He was a short, round-faced man with the barrel chest characteristic of a Navajo-Pueblo blood mixture, from a clan which had captured Pueblo brides and with them the heavier, shorter bone structure of the Keresan Indians. He poured the coffee into a mug and sipped it while he ate a strip of dried mutton. The rain had been light, a brief shower, but it was a good omen.
He knew the Callers of the Clouds had been at work on the Hopi and Zuсi reservations and that along the Rio Grande, far to the east, the Pueblo Indians were holding their rain dances. The magic of these pueblo dwellers had always been strong, older than the medicine of the Navajos and more potent. It was a little early for this first shower and Begay knew that was promising.
Begay finished his coffee before he allowed his thoughts to turn to his reasons for rising early. In a very few hours he would see his daughter, his daughter whom he hadn't seen since last summer. He would drive to the bus stop at Ganado, and the bus would come and he would put her suitcases and her boxes in the pickup truck and drive with her back to the hogan. She would be with them all summer. Begay had deliberately postponed thinking about this, because the Navajo Way was the Middle Way, which avoided all excesses—even of happiness. The shower at midnight and the smell of the earth and the beauty of the morning had been enough. But now Begay thought of it as he started the pickup truck and drove in second gear down the bumpy track across the mesa. And, as he drove, he sang a song his great uncle had taught him:
It was brightening on the eastern horizon as he shifted into low gear to wind down the switchback down the long slope toward the highway. The descent took almost fifteen minutes, and at the bottom, skirting the base of the mesa, was Teastah Wash. If it had rained harder elsewhere on the mesa, he might not be able to drive through the wash until the runoff water cleared. He stopped just as his truck tilted down the steep incline, put on the emergency brake, and stepped out. The headlights, illuminating the bottom of the wash, showed only a slight trickle of water across the sandy expanse. What little runoff there had been was mostly gone now.
It was when he was turning to climb back into the pickup that he saw the owl. It flew almost directly at the truck, startling him, flitted through the headlight beams, and disappeared abruptly in the dawn half-light up the wash. He sat behind the wheel a moment, feeling shaken. The owl had acted strangely, he thought, and it was known that ghosts sometimes took on that form when they moved in the darkness. It looked like a burrowing owl, Begay thought, but maybe it was a ghost returning with the dawn to a grave or a death hogan.
He was still thinking of the owl as he let the pickup ease slowly down the steep bank and then raced it across the soft bottom. And he was thinking of it as the truck climbed out of the arroyo, its motor laboring in low gear. But by now the mood of the morning had recaptured him and he thought that it was just a burrowing owl, going home from the night's hunting and confused by his headlights. It was just beyond the rim of the shallow canyon, just after the pickup had regained level ground and he had shifted into second gear, that he saw that he was wrong.