But "Jim Chee" was only what his uncle would call his "white man name." His real name, his secret name, his war name, was Long Thinker, given him by Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai, the elder brother of his mother and one of the most respected singers among Four Corners Navajos. Since he had gone to Albuquerque to study at the University of New Mexico, he did not often think of himself as Long Thinker. But he did now. He stood on the talus slope above where he had found the Gorman corpse looking down at the Begay hogan as a Navajo would look at it. The east-facing door was boarded shut. (He had resealed it before he'd left, repairing the damage done by Sharkey.) The smoke hole was plugged. The chindi, which had left the body of Gorman at the moment of Gorman's death, was trapped inside—a summation of all in the dead man's life that was evil and out of harmony with the Navajo Way.
Everything in Long Thinker's training conditioned him to avoid chindis. "If you have to be out at night, go quietly," his mother had taught him. "The chindis wander in the darkness." And his uncle: "Never speak the name of the dead. Their chindi thinks you are calling it." He had come to terms with these ghosts in high school and reduced them to rational terms at the university, converting them into something like the dietary taboos of Jews and Moslems, the demons of Christians. But from this talus slope, in the dying light, in the dead stillness of this autumn evening, the rationality of the university was canceled.
And there was another side to all this. "You did it," Mary Landon would say. "When you stepped through that corpse hole, you proved that you can be a Navajo on an emotional plane but an assimilated man intellectually." And he would say, "No, Mary, you simply don't understand," and she would say…
He turned away from that and considered what he'd learned. Almost nothing. He'd driven straight from the place of Joseph Joe and started his work here with a meticulous examination of the hogan yard. He'd learned that Hosteen Begay used his sweat bath more than most, that he kept goats as well as sheep, and that he owned two horses (one newly shod).
Recent additions to Begay's garbage dump included an empty lard can, an empty Shurfine flour sack, and tin cans that had held peaches, creamed corn, and pork and beans. The garbage told him that Begay dipped snuff (an addiction unusual among Navajos), that he did not use beer, wine, or whiskey, and (judging from the discarded Dr. Scholl's footpads) that he suffered from bunions. None of that was helpful.
Nor had he found anything helpful in the second stage of his hunt, an equally careful sweep up and down the arroyo behind the hogan and around the wooded slopes above and below Begay's little meadow. He simply confirmed what he'd learned on his original inspection. Begay had, as would be expected of any prudent shepherd, taken his flocks to downhill pastures weeks ago, before early winter storms could trap them. And when he'd abandoned this place, he'd ridden the newly shod horse and led the other, heavily loaded. He'd headed downhill, probably for some shortcut he knew to reach the road to Two Gray Hills. Maybe, Chee thought, he could follow those tracks far enough to get some hint of his destination. But that seemed wildly unlikely. Time, wind, and the dry season made tracking doubtful, and even if he could track, his work would also certainly simply lead him to the road to the trading post.
Today's wind had been the sort any tracker hates—dry and abrasive, blasting sand against the face and erasing signs. But it had died away in late afternoon, and now the total calm of an autumn high-pressure area had settled over the high country. From his place on the talus slope Chee could see, across Begay's empty homestead, a hundred miles to the southeast all the way to the dark blue bump on the horizon that was Mount Taylor, Mary Landon's favorite mountain. (Now Mary would be finished with her school day, finished with her supper, out for her evening walk—sitting someplace, probably, looking at it from much closer quarters. Chee could see her vividly, her eyes, the line of her cheek, her mouth…)
Old Man Begay had taken time to clean out his hogan and pack his stuff on his horses. Why hadn't he taken the time to collect the few yucca roots required to make the suds to wash his kinsman's hair? What had hurried him? Had it been fear? An urgent need to attend to some duty? Chee stared down at the homestead, trying to visualize the old man smashing with his ax at the broken wall where the corpse hole was formed, destroying what must have been important to him for much of his life.
Then he heard the sound.
It came to him on the still, cold air, distant but distinct. It was the sound of a horse. A whinny. The sound came from the arroyo—from the spring or from Begay's corral just beyond it. Chee had been there two hours earlier and had spent thirty minutes establishing from tracks and manure that no animal had been there for days. Nor was this the season for open range grazing this high in the mountains. Livestock had been taken, long since, to lower pastures, and even strays would have moved downhill, out of the intense morning cold. Chee felt excitement growing. Ashie Begay had come home to collect something he'd forgotten.
The horse was exactly where Chee expected it to be—at the spring. It was an elderly pinto mare, roan and white, fitting the description of the one stolen from Two Gray Hills. It wore a makeshift rope halter on its ugly hammer head. Another bit of rope secured it to a willow. Hardly likely that Hosteen Begay, who owned horses of his own, would have taken it. Who had? And where was he?
The night breeze was beginning now as it often did with twilight on the east slope of mountains. Nothing like the morning's dry gusts, but enough to ruffle the mare's ragged mane and replace the dead silence with a thousand little wind sounds among the ponderosas. Under cover of these whispers, Chee moved along the arroyo rim, looking for the horse thief.
He checked up the arroyo. Down the arroyo. Along the ponderosa timber covering the slopes. He stared back at the talus slope, where he had been when he'd heard the horse. But no one could have gotten there without Chee seeing him. There was only the death hogan and the holding pen for goats and the brush arbor, none of which seemed plausible. The thief must have tied his horse and then climbed directly up the slope across the arroyo. But why?
Just behind him, Chee heard a cough.
He spun, fumbling for his pistol. No one. Where had the sound come from?
He heard it again. A cough. A sniffling. The sound came from inside Hosteen Begay's hogan.
Chee stared at the corpse hole, a black gap broken through the north wall. He had cocked his pistol without knowing he'd done it. It was incredible. People do not go into a death hogan. People do not step through the hole into darkness. White men, yes. As Sharkey had done. And Deputy Sheriff Bales. As Chee himself, who had come to terms with the ghosts of his people, might do if the reason was powerful enough.
But certainly most Navajos would not. So the horse thief was a white. A white with a cold and a runny nose.
Chee moved quietly to his left, away from the field of vision of anyone who might be looking through the hole. Then he moved silently to the wall and along it. He stood beside the hole, back pressed to the planking. Pistol raised. Listening.