11
rules at the FBI Academy. And his first name, by golly, had been Melvin.
Leaphorn opened his Swiss army knife, slit the envelope, slid out the contents. A page of slick paper from a magazine with a letter clipped to it. He took off the clip and put the letter aside.
The page was from Luxury Living, and a color photograph dominated it. It showed a grand high-ceilinged room with a huge fireplace, a trophy-sized rack of elk antlers mounted above it, a tall wall of shelved books on one side, and a sliding-glass door on the other. The glass door offered a view into a walled garden and, above the wall, snow-capped mountains. Leaphorn recognized the mountains. The San Francisco Peaks, with Humphreys Peak lording over them. That told him this Luxury Living home was somewhere on the north edge of Flagstaff.
The assorted furniture looked plush and expensive. But Leaphorn’s attention was drawn away from this by an arrow inked on the photograph. It pointed to a weaving that was hanging beside the fireplace, and under the shank of the arrow were the words:
Hey, Joe, Ain’t this that rug you kept telling me about? And if it is, what does that do to that arson case of ours? Remember? The one that the wise men ruled was just a careless smoker.
And take a look at those antlers! Folks who know this guy tell me he’s a hunting fool.
See attached letter.
Leaphorn let the letter wait while he stared at the photograph. It did remind him of the rug he had described 12
TONY HILLERMAN
to Bork—a great rectangle of black, gray, red tones, blues, and yellows all partially encircled by the figure of Rainbow Man. It seemed to be just as his memory told him.
He noticed a symbol for Maii’—the Coyote spirit—at his work of turning order into chaos and others represent-ing the weapons that Monster Slayer and Born for Water had stolen from the sun to wage their campaign to make the Dineh safe from the evils that had followed them up from the underworld. But the photograph was printed much too small to show other details that had impressed Leaphorn when he’d seen the original in Totter’s trading post gallery before it burned. He remembered seeing faint suggestions of soldiers with rifles, for example, and tiny white dots scattered in clusters here and there, which someone at the gallery had told him the weaver had formed from parts of feathers. They represented big silver peso coins, the currencies in the mountain west in the mid-1860s. And thus they represented greed, the root of all evil in the Navajo value system.
That, of course, was the theme of the famous old rug.
And that theme made it a sort of bitter violation of the Navajo tradition. The Dineh taught its people to live in the peace and harmony of hozho, they must learn to forgive—a variation of the policy that belagaana Christians preached in their Lord’s Prayer but all too often didn’t seem to practice. And the rug certainly didn’t practice forgetting old transgressions. It memorialized the worst cruelty ever imposed on the Navajo. The Long Walk—the captivity, misery, and the terrible death toll imposed on the Navajo by the white culture’s fierce hunger for gold and silver—and the final solution they tried to apply to get the Dineh out of the way.
THE SHAPE SHIFTER
13
But could this picture torn from the magazine be of that same rug? It looked like it. But it didn’t seem likely.
Leaphorn remembered standing there examining the rug framed on the gallery wall behind its dusty glass.
Remembered someone there telling him of its antiquity and its historical value. If this was a pre-fire photo, then how had it gone from the wall of this lavish house at the edge of Flagstaff to Totter’s gallery. The other possibility was that it had been taken from the gallery before the fire. Furniture and other items in the room suggested the photo was recent. So did a distinctly modern painting on another wall.
Leaphorn put the magazine page back on the car seat, and considered another old and unpleasant memory the photo provoked from the day after the fire. The angry face of Grandma Peshlakai glowering at him through the window of his patrol car while he tried to explain why he had to leave—had to drive over to meet Captain Desbah, who had called him from Totter’s place.
“It’s a federal case,” he’d told her. “They had a fire over at Totter’s Trading Post Saturday. Burned up a man, and now the FBI thinks the dead man is a murderer they’ve been after for years. Very dangerous man. The federals are all excited.”
“He’s dead?”
Leaphorn agreed.
“He can’t run then,” Grandma said, scowling at him.
“This man I want you to catch is running away with my buckets of pinyon sap.”
Leaphorn had tried to explain. But Grandma Peshlakai was one of the important old women in her Kin Lit-sonii (Yellow House) clan. She felt her family was being 14
TONY HILLERMAN
slighted. Leaphorn had been young then, and he’d agreed that the problem of live Navajos should be just as important as learning the name of a dead belagaana. Remembering it now, much older, he still agreed with her.
Her case involved the theft of two economy-sized lard buckets filled with pinyon sap. They had been stolen from the weaving shed beside her hogan. She’d explained that the loss was much more significant than it might sound to a young policeman who had never endured the weary days of onerous labor collecting that sap.
“And now it’s gone, so how do we waterproof our baskets? How do we make them so they hold water and have that pretty color so tourists will buy them? And now, it is too late for sap to drip. We can’t get more. Not until next summer.”
Grandma had bitten back her anger and listened, with traditional Navajo courtesy, while he tried to explain that this dead fellow was probably one of the top people on the FBI’s most wanted list. A very bad and dangerous man. When he’d finished, rather lamely as he remembered, Grandma nodded.
“But he’s dead. Can’t hurt nobody now. Our thief is alive. He has our sap. Two full buckets. Elandra there”—
she nodded to her granddaughter, who was standing behind her, smiling at Leaphorn—“Elandra saw him driving away. Big blue car. Drove that direction—back toward the highway. You policemen get paid to catch thieves.
You could find him, I think, and get our sap back. But if you mess around with the dead man, maybe his chindi will get after you. And if he was as bad as you say, it would be very, very bad chindi.”
Leaphorn sighed. Grandma was right, of course.
THE SHAPE SHIFTER
15
And the sort of mass murderer that was high on the FBI’s Most Wanted list would, based on Leaphorn’s memory of his maternal grandfather’s hogan stories, be a formidable chindi. Since that version of ghost represented all of the unharmonious and evil characteristics that couldn’t follow the dead person into his last great adventure, they were the sort any traditional Navajo would prefer to avoid.
But, chindi or not, duty had called. He drove away, leaving Grandma staring resentfully after him. Remembering, too, the last theory she had offered. When he’d asked Grandma Peshlakai if she had any idea who would want to steal her pinyon sap, she stood silent a long moment, hesitating, looking around, making sure Elandra was out of hearing range.
“They say that sometimes witches need it for something. That sometimes a skinwalker might want it,” Grandma had said. That was a version of the witchcraft legend he had never heard before. Leaphorn remembered telling Grandma Peshlakai that he doubted if this very worst tribal version of witchcraft evil would be driving a car. She had frowned at him a moment, shook her head, and said: “Why you think that?”