The Blessing Way

by Tony Hillerman

  So, Leaphorn thought. No doubt now why the Hand Trembler had prescribed the Enemy Way instead of the Prostitution Way. Here’s why they thought the witch was a foreigner—an enemy ghost to be exorcised. But the man in the Land-Rover, the man with the black hat, had been a Navajo. Leaphorn was certain of it.

  Anyway, Billy Nez was saying, his uncle had said he didn’t pay much attention to witches when he needed grass for his sheep and the sheep of his wife, and the man had driven away. But after that his uncle had known something was going to be wrong.

  The first week they were back in the high country a young coyote had trailed his uncle, followed his horse all the way across the mesa one morning. That was the Coyote People telling him to watch out. The Coyote People caused a lot of trouble, Billy Nez said, but they were good about warning people.

  A little bit after that, at night, his uncle heard the Wolf on top of his hogan. Some dirt had fallen down from the roof on the east side of the hogan (and now, Leaphorn thought, the other three compass points), and then on the south side, and then on the west side and then some dirt fell down on the north side. And then his uncle had known the Wolf would be looking down the smoke hole to see where they were and to blow some corpse powder down on them. But the uncle of Billy Nez was not afraid of a Wolf. He ran outside the hogan to chase him away but he didn’t see anything for sure. Maybe he saw a dog running away but he wasn’t sure.

  “That would have been about the first part of May?” Leaphorn asked.

  “A little bit before that,” Billy Nez said. “The moon was in its last quarter two cycles so it would have been in the last part of April.”

  Almost two weeks before Luis Horseman came home to die.

  But the second time his uncle had seen the Wolf. It was daylight then, sundown but still daylight, and his uncle was bringing some of the sheep in for watering and he had thought something was watching him maybe. He looked up to the rim of the mesa and there was this witch standing there, looking at him. He was up on the mesa rim on the rocks with this wolf skin on him, but his uncle could tell it was a man. His uncle had said this witch had stood there looking at him and then made some medicine with his hands. His uncle had thought he might be calling to the other witches to come out of their cave and help. His uncle drove the sheep down to the hogan then and they sprinkled pollen and sang the songs from the Night Way. The songs against witches.

  “What day was that?”

  “That was three or four days after the first time on the roof,” Billy Nez said. “I think it was three days.”

  After that, his uncle had taken his .30-30 with him when he herded the sheep and he had left one of the boys at the hogan with his wife, in case the witch would come there while he was gone. And he thought he had better track this Wolf and kill it. He went up on the mesa where he had seen the Wolf, and he found tracks there. Some of them were big boot tracks and some were like a big dog. It was still the Season When the Thunder Sleeps and the ground was damp from the snow thaw and tracking was easy.

  “My father is a brave man,” said the cousin of Billy Nez, and was instantly embarrassed by his rudeness. They smoked a moment in silence to let the incident pass. Then Billy Nez resumed his story.

  Under the other slope of the mesa, his uncle had found tire tracks. The Wolf had driven up there and left his truck and then come back to it and driven away. After that the Wolf had started bothering the livestock. That first night, his uncle had heard the horses whinnying like they were scared and then he heard one of them screaming, and when he ran out there to where he had them penned, two of them had their tendons cut and his uncle had to kill them.

  Leaphorn raised a hand in interruption. This surprised him. He had expected nothing so concrete.

  “My nephew, did you see these horses?”

  “I saw them. The Wolf must have done it with a hand ax. He cut both of the rear tendons on the mare and he hit the colt so hard that it broke his legbone.”

  Good enough, thought Leaphorn. I’ve got another reason for finding this son of a bitch. The Tribal Council had a law against cruelty to animals. Besides, Leaphorn didn’t like a man who would do that to a horse.

  After that, Billy Nez continued, it was the sheep. His uncle lay out all night with his .30-30 but the Wolf didn’t come back any more for a while. And then the moon came and one white night he heard some rifle shots and he ran out there and the witch had been shooting into where the flock was sleeping. Three of them were dead and he had to butcher some of the others that were hurt.

  “After that my uncle talked about it with my aunt and they decided to bring those sheep out of there. They didn’t think they could catch that witch and he might get them. So they came on down here.”

  Leaphorn passed around his cigarette pack again.

  “When was it he shot those sheep?”

  “Night just like this,” Billy Nez said. He looked at the moon, which was two nights short of full phase.

  “Be about twenty-six, twenty-seven days ago. One moon back.”

  “And when did you go after the witch?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Well, my uncle’s father came over to our place with some of the other men of the outfit and they talked it over. And then they got that Hand Trembler in and he sang the hand-trembling songs and held his arm out over my uncle and it shook and shook. He said the reason he’d been having these dreams was this foreign witch was bothering him.”

  Billy Nez took another deep drag on the cigarette.

  “Or maybe it was the ghost of the witch. Anyway, after that they tried it out by having a blackening. My uncle slept that night with the ashes on him and he didn’t have any dreams, so they decided the Hand Trembler was right. The ghost couldn’t find him with those ashes on him. So the next night they got together again there in our hogan and decided they ought to find a Singer who knew the Enemy Way.”

  Billy Nez paused again.

  “And my cousin told them he would find the Wolf and carry the scalp,” the younger boy said.

  “My grandfather didn’t want me to do it. He said it was supposed to be an older man who got the scalp. Somebody who’d had an Enemy Way sung over him. But finally they said I could do it.”

  “You know the Tracking Bear Song?” Leaphorn asked.

  “My grandfather taught me that,” Billy Nez said. He laid his cigarette on the ground and chanted softly:

  “In shoes of dark flint I track the Ute warrior,

  In armor of flint I slay the Ute enemy.

  With Big Snake Man I go, tracking the warrior.

  I usually slay the Ute men and slay the Ute women.

  Tracking Bear I go, taking Ute scalps.”

  Billy Nez stopped, suddenly embarrassed, and recovered his cigarette.

  The three sat in silence a long moment. The chanting had started at the fire again, another sway dance. This time the song was old, a pattern of rhythmic monosyllables which had lost coherent meaning somewhere in time.

  “How did you know where to look for the scalp?” Leaphorn asked.

  That had taken time, Billy Nez said. His uncle had drawn for him the way the tracks of that truck had looked.

  “Like this,” Billy Nez said. He smoothed the bare earth with his palm and opened his pocket knife.

  “The front tires had a track like this.” He drew the tread pattern in the earth. “And the outside of the track, it wasn’t as deep. Like he needed a front end job on his truck. Tires wearing on the outside. And the back tires were like this.” He drew the pattern of high-traction mud treads. “Cut real deep. I thought I could find them.”

  “And I guess you did,” Leaphorn said.

  It had taken Billy Nez almost a week. Three hard days on a horse before he had picked up the first of the tracks—old ones, already almost erased by the wind. On the fourth day, he had caught a glimpse of the Land-Rover. He had been on Talking Rock Mesa and had seen it moving down a wash into the Kam Bimghi Valley. After sunrise the next day he found where the witch was working�
��clearing a track for his truck up the sloping backside of Ceniza Mesa. And, later that day, he had made his scalp coup.

  “I left my horse hobbled up there on top,” Billy Nez said, “and I hid out there in the rocks, down near where he was working. He was rolling those rocks out of the way and cutting brush to clear the track. Finally he stopped awhile and sat down under a piñon there and ate some stuff and some canned peaches and threw away the can. I thought maybe I’d get that can he’d ate out of for the scalp but that wouldn’t be very good and so later on I got the hat.”

  “Tell how you got it,” the younger cousin urged.

  “Well, along later in the afternoon the clouds built up the way they do and it got shady and the wind got up. He was wrestling with those rocks and his hat kept blowing off. So the next time he moved that truck farther up the slope, he left that hat there on the seat of the truck. When he was working again, I slipped up there and got it.”

  “And took off the hatband and left it behind,” Leaphorn said.

  Billy Nez looked surprised. “Yeh. It was silver conchos.”

  “There was a rifle there in the truck,” younger cousin said.

  “Think it was a Remington,” Billy Nez said. “Had a long barrel and a telescopic sight. Looked like a .30-06 deer rifle.”

  “Anything else in there?” Leaphorn asked.

  “There was a map folded up there over the dashboard. I think it was a map. And a paper sack on the seat. Maybe part of his lunch. And there was a set of pulleys in the back.” The boy paused, thinking.

  “A block-and-tackle?” Leaphorn suggested.

  “Yes,” Nez said.

  “Anything else?”

  “No. I didn’t look much. Just got that hat and then I thought I didn’t want to steal that concho band so I took it off. Tied a yucca thong to that hat and tied it on the scalp stick like my grandfather said to do with the scalp—that’s so you aren’t handling it with your hands so much. And then when I got back up on the mesa away from there, I sang the Tracking Bear Song and used pollen and rode on back to the hogan.”

  Leaphorn gave the boys each a third cigarette.

  “And now,” he said, “I want you to tell me about your brother. I want you to tell about Luis Horseman.” He tried to read Billy Nez’s face. Was it surprise, or fear, or anger? The boy looked at the tip of the cigarette, and then took a long drag and blew out the smoke.

  “I heard Law and Order already found him,” Billy Nez said. “I heard Luis Horseman is dead.”

  “We found his body,” Leaphorn said. “He was way down by Ganado when we found him, a hundred miles south of here. We don’t know how he got there.”

  “I don’t know,” Billy Nez said. “He was staying up there on the plateau between Many Ruins and Horse Fell canyons.”

  “And you went up there to tell him that he didn’t kill that Nakai at Gallup—that the man got well and he should come in and talk to us about it,” Leaphorn said. “You did that, didn’t you?” His voice was gentle.

  “I heard you telling that at Shoemaker’s,” Billy Nez said. “And I thought you were right. It would be better if Luis Horseman went in to Window Rock and didn’t try to run and hide any more. But when I went up there to tell him and take him some food he was gone.”

  “That was four days ago,” Leaphorn said. “Tuesday. The day I was at Shoemaker’s?”

  Nez nodded.

  “What time did you go? What time did you get there?”

  “I waited until it got dark,” Billy Nez said. “Luis Horseman told me to do that so nobody would see. But he wasn’t there. I got there maybe two hours after midnight and he was gone.”

  “Blue Policeman,” the smaller boy said, “my cousin found something strange there.”

  “I looked around where he was camping in some rocks and I thought he had taken everything he had with him,” Billy Nez said. “And then I looked around some more and I found that the food he had left was buried there—just covered up with sand.”

  “Were the ashes covered up, too?” Leaphorn asked.

  “Covered up with sand and smoothed over.”

  “Did you see anything else?”

  “It was dark. I rode on down into the Chinle Valley and slept until it was light and then I went back up again. Then I found those tracks again.”

  “The tracks like the Land-Rover left?”

  “Same tracks,” Billy Nez said. “Up there on the mesa, maybe a half mile from where Luis Horseman was.” He paused. “My brother would have taken that food with him. He wouldn’t have spoiled it like that.”

  They sat, smoking in silence.

  “I told Luis Horseman that wasn’t a good place to stay. Too many houses of the Old People down in those canyons,” Billy Nez said. “Too many ghosts. Nobody likes that country but witches.”

  The boy was silent again, staring at the fire where the sway dancers were again being moved by the drums in two rhythmic lines.

  “I think that Wolf killed my brother,” Billy Nez said. His tone was flat, emotionless.

  “Listen, my nephew,” Leaphorn said. “Listen to me. I think you might be right. But you might be wrong.” Leaphorn paused. It would do no good at all to warn this boy against any danger. “This is our business now—Law and Order business. If you hunt this man you would hunt him to kill him and that would be wrong. That man might not be the one who did it. Don’t hunt him.”

  Billy Nez got up and dusted off his jeans.

  “I must go now, my uncle, and dance with Chinle High School Girl. Go in beauty.”

  “Go in beauty,” Leaphorn said.

  He sat against the truck, thinking about it, sorting out what he knew.

  The Dinee, at least the Dinee who lived in the district east of Chinle, thought the Big Navajo was their witch. Billy Nez had found his Land-Rover tracks near Horseman’s camp. But they might be old tracks, and they would be gone now. It had rained tonight on the Lukachukai slopes. And the witch, whoever he was, was a violent witch, or a cruel one—a man who would cripple horses with an ax. That was all he knew. That, and the certainty that Billy Nez would be hunting the man who drove the Land-Rover, a danger to the man if he was innocent and a danger to the boy if he was not.

  The first sign of paleness was showing at the eastern edge of the night. Soon Charley Tsosie and his wife and sons would come out of the ceremonial hogan. Sandoval would sing the four First Songs and the Coyote Song, and the Tsosies would inhale the required four deep breaths of the air of the Dawn People. Then Charley Tsosie and his people would be cured and the witch who drove the gray Land-Rover and who might, or might not, have maimed two horses with an ax would have his witchcraft turned against him. The Origin Myth gave him one year to live. One year, if the Tsosies or Billy Nez didn’t find him first.

  > 13 <

  IT WAS A little more than an hour after daylight when McKee heard the car puttering up the canyon, its exhaust leaving a faint wake of echoes from the cliffs. Canfield had said Miss Leon would be driving a Volkswagen and this sounded like one. It certainly didn’t have the throaty roar of whatever it was the man who had stalked him had driven away in the night before.

  McKee moved out of the thicket of willows where he had been lying, and prepared himself for a moment he had been dreading. If the car which would soon round the corner ahead was a Volkswagen he would wave it to a stop. If the driver was Miss Leon, she would be confronted with the startling spectacle of a large man with a badly torn shirt, a bruised and swollen face, and an injured hand, who would tell her a wild, irrational story of being spooked out of his bed by a werewolf, and who would order her to turn around and flee with him out of the canyon. McKee had thought of this impending confrontation for hours, ever since it had occurred to him that he couldn’t simply escape from this canyon—and whatever crazy danger it held—and go for help to find Canfield. To do so would be to leave Miss Leon to face whatever he was running from.

  The car which came around the cliff into view was a baby-blue Volkswa
gen sedan, driven by a young woman with dark hair. McKee trotted down the slope onto the hard-packed sand, signaling it to stop.

  The Volkswagen slowed. McKee saw the woman staring at him, her eyes very large. And then, suddenly, she spun the wheel, the rear wheels spurted sand, and the car roared past him.

  “Miss Leon,” McKee screamed. “Stop.”

  The Volkswagen stopped.

  McKee ran to it and pulled at the door. It was locked. He looked through the window. The girl sat huddled against the door on the driver’s side, frightened eyes in a pale face.

  McKee cursed inwardly, tried to pull his gaping shirt together, and tapped on the window.

  “Miss Leon,” he said. “I’m Bergen McKee. I was supposed to meet you here. Dr. Canfield and I.”

  The girl, obviously, couldn’t understand him. McKee repeated it all, shouting this time, conscious that the man with the machine pistol must have heard the Volkswagen and might now be taking aim.

  The girl leaned across the front seat and pulled up the lock button; McKee was inside in an instant.

  “Start turning the car around,” McKee ordered. “Head it out of here.”

  “What’s wrong?” Miss Leon said. “Where’s Dr. Canfield?”

  “Drive,” McKee ordered. “Turn it around and drive and I’ll explain.”

  Miss Leon backed the car across the sand, cut the wheel sharply, and pulled the Volks back on the track. McKee opened his door and leaned out, staring back up the canyon. Nothing moved. He looked at Miss Leon, trying to decide how to start.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked again. “What are we doing?”

  She looked less frightened, but now as he turned toward her she saw the bruised side of his face, with the dried blood. Her expression became a mixture of shock and pity.

  “I’m Bergen McKee,” McKee repeated. He felt immensely foolish. “I’m not sure exactly what’s wrong, but I want you to get out of this canyon until I can find out.”

  Miss Leon looked at him wordlessly, and McKee felt himself flushing.