Hunting Badger jlajc-14

by Tony Hillerman

  Nakai replaced his oxygen mask and spent a few moments inhaling.

  “Ironhand,” Chee said, probably too softly for Nakai to hear him.

  Nakai removed the mask again.

  “They say Dobby and his people came out of the canyons at night and stole the sheep and horses at the place of woman of the tl’igu dinee, and they killed her and her daughter and two children. And the son-in-law of this old woman was a man they called Littleman, who married into the Salt Clan but was born to the Near the Water Dine’. And they say he forgot the Navajo Way and went crazy with his grief.”

  Nakai’s voice grew weaker, and slower, as he related how Littleman, after years spent hunting and watching, had finally found the narrow trail the raiders had used and finally killed Dobby and his men.

  “It took summer after summer for many years for the Salt Clan to catch Dobby,” Nakai said. “But no one ever caught the Ute they called Ironhand.”

  The moon was down, the dark sky overhead adazzle with stars, and Chee was feeling the high-altitude chill. He leaned forward in his chair and tucked the blankets around Nakai’s shoulders.

  “Little Father,” he said, "I think you should sleep now. Do you need more of the medicine for that?”

  “I need you to listen,” Nakai said. “Because while our people never caught Ironhand, we know now why we didn’t. And we know he had a son and a daughter, and I think he must have a son or a grandson. And I think that is who you will be hunting, and what I will tell you will help.”

  Chee had to lean forward now, his ear close to Nakai’s lips, to hear the rest of it. After two of his raids, the Navajos had managed to trace Ironhand and his men into the Gothic Creek Canyon, and then down Gothic toward the San Juan under the rim of Casa Del Eco Mesa. There tracks turned into a steep, narrow side canyon where the Utes and Mormon settlers from Bluff dug coal. They found a corpse in one of the coal mines. But the canyon was a dead end with no way out. It was as if Ironhand and his men were witches who could fly over the cliffs.

  Nakai’s voice died away. He replaced the mask, inhaled, and removed it again.

  “I think if there is a young man named Ironhand, he robs and kills people, he would know where his grandfather hid in that canyon, and how he escaped from it.

  “And now,” Hosteen Nakai said, "before I sleep, I must teach you the last lesson so you can be a hataalii." He took a labored breath. “Or not be one.”

  To Chee, the old man seemed utterly exhausted. “First, Father, I think you should rest and restore yourself. You should -"

  “I must do it now,” Nakai said. “And you must listen. The last lesson is the one that matters. Will you hear me?”

  Chee took the old man’s hand.

  “Know that it is hard for the people to trust outside their own family. Even harder when they are sick. They have pain. They are out of harmony. They see no beauty anywhere. All their connections are broken. That is who you are talking to. You tell them the Power that made us made all this above us and around us and we are part of the Power and if we do as we are taught we can bring ourselves back into hozho. Back into harmony. Then they will again know beauty all around them.”

  Nakai closed his eyes, gripped Chee’s hand.

  “That is hard to believe,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “To be restored, they must believe you.”

  Nakai opened his eyes, stared at Chee.

  “Yes,” Chee said.

  “You know the chants. You sing them without a mistake. And your sand paintings are exactly right. You know the herbs, how to make the emetics, all that.”

  “I hope so,” Chee said, understanding now what Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai was telling him.

  “But you have to decide if you have gone too far beyond the four Sacred Mountains. Sometimes you can never come all the way back into Dinetah again.”

  Chee nodded. He remembered a Saturday night after he’d graduated from high school. Nakai had driven him to Gallup. They had parked on Railroad Avenue and sat for two hours watching the drunks wandering in and out of the bars.

  He’d asked Nakai why he’d parked there, who they were looking for. Nakai hadn’t answered at first, but what he said when he finally spoke Chee had never forgotten.

  “We are looking for the dine’ who have left Dinetah. Their bodies are here, but their spirits are far beyond the Sacred Mountains. You can go east of Mount Taylor to find them, or west of the San Francisco Peaks, or you can find them here.”

  Chee had pointed to a man who had been leaning clumsily against the wall up the avenue from them, and who now was sitting, head down on the sidewalk. “Like him?” he asked.

  Nakai had waved his hand in a motion that included the bar’s neon Coors sign and the drunk now trying to push himself up from the pavement. But went beyond them to follow a polished white Lincoln Town Car rolling up the avenue toward them.

  “Which one acts like he has no relatives?” Nakai had asked him. “The drunk who leaves his children hungry, or the man who buys that car that boasts of his riches instead of helping his brother?”

  Nakai’s eyes were closed now, and his efforts to breathe produced a faint groaning sound. Then he said, “To cure them you must make them believe. You must believe so strongly that they feel it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Chee said. Nakai was telling him he had failed to meet Nakai’s standards as a shaman whose conduct of the curing ways would actually cure. And Nakai was forgiving him—freeing him to be the sort of modern man he was becoming. There was a sense of relief in that, mixed with a dreary sense of loss.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was just a bit after noon when Captain Largo caught him.

  Through his dreams Chee heard the sound of something thumping, which gradually became pounding, which suddenly was augmented by an angry shout.

  “Damn it, Chee, I know you’re in there. Unlock the door.”

  Chee unlocked the door and stood, naked except for boxer shorts and befuddled by sleep, staring at the captain.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Largo demanded, pushing past Chee into the trailer. “And why don’t you answer your telephone?”

  The captain was staring at the telephone as he said it, noticing the little red light blinking on the answering machine.

  “I’ve been away,” Chee said. “Just got back, and I had a lot of family business to take care of.”

  He reached over, punched the button, awake enough now to be glad he’d been smart enough to erase the call from Cowboy Dashee. The machine reproduced the grouchy voice of Captain Largo saying: ‘This is Captain Largo. Get your ass down here. The feds located that damned airplane, and we’re going to be the beagles on one of their fox hunts again.'

  The machine showed two other calls waiting and Chee clicked it off before they, whatever they were, got him into any trouble.

  “I should have listened to that,” he said. “But I just got in about nine this morning, and I was worn-out." He told Largo how he and Officer Manuelito had brought his mother’s oldest brother home from the hospital, about how the old man had managed to hold death at bay until he saw sunlight on the mountaintop, how Bernadette had gone to bring Blue Woman’s sisters to help prepare the body for the traditional funeral. Under his uniform Largo was a traditional, a Standing Rock Dine’. He recalled the old man’s fame as a singer and his wisdom and, like Chee himself, avoided speaking the name of the dead. He offered Chee his condolences, sat on the edge of Chee’s fold-down cot, shook his head.

  “I’d give you some time off if I could,” he said, ignoring the fact that Chee was officially still on vacation, "but you know how it is. We’ve got everybody out looking for those bastards, so I’m just going to give you a minute to get your uniform on, and while you do that I’ll fill you in, and then I want you out there getting things a little better organized.”

  “OK,” Chee said.

  A sudden and unpleasant thought struck the captain. “M
anuelito was with you, then,” Largo said, looking murderous. “She didn’t bother to tell me, though. Did she bother to tell you I was looking all over for you?”

  “I didn’t ask her,” Chee said, and busied himself getting his pants on, buttoning his shirt, hoping Largo wouldn’t notice how he’d evaded the question, thinking of nothing to say to take the heat off Bernie, and now, happy to see the captain heading out the door.

  “I’ll bring you up to speed in my office,” Largo said. “In exactly thirty minutes.”

  Approximately thirty minutes later Chee was sitting in the chair in front of Largo’s desk, listening to the captain’s end of a telephone conversation. “OK,” the captain said. “Sure. I understand. Will do. OK.” He hung up, sighed, looked at Chee and his watch. “All right,” he said. “Here’s the situation.”

  Largo was good at it. He named and described the surviving suspects. Nobody was at home at either man’s residence. None of the neighbors had seen either man since before the robbery, which meant absolutely nothing in Ironhand’s case because the nearest neighbor lived about four miles away. A horse trailer and two horses seemed to be missing from Ironhand’s place. Since nobody could guess when or why, that might be equally meaningless. With their airplane-escape theory shot down, the feds had resumed custody of the manhunt operation, roadblocks were up, and trackers were working over the area around the spot where the suspects had abandoned the escape vehicle.

  “Pretty much Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey again,” Largo said. “Three sets of state police involved, three sheriff’s departments, probably four, BIA cops, Ute cops, cops over from the Jicarilla Reservation, Immigration and Naturalization is sending up its Border Patrol trackers, federals galore, even Park Service security people. I’m putting you in Montezuma Creek. We have four people up there working with the FBI trying to locate some tracks. You’re reporting to Special Agent"—Largo consulted a notepad on his desk—"named Damon Cabot. I don’t know him.”

  “I’ve heard of him,” Chee said. “You remember that old poem: 'The Lodges spoke only to Cabots, and the Cabots spoke only to God.'”

  “No, I don’t,” Largo said, "and I hope you’re not going up there with that smart-aleck attitude.”

  Chee looked at his watch. “You want me up there today?”

  “I wanted you up there yesterday,” Largo said. “Be careful and keep in touch.”

  “OK,” Chee said, and headed for the door.

  “And Chee,” Largo said. “Use your head for once. Don’t get crosswise with the Bureau again. Have some manners. Give ’em some respect.”

  Chee nodded.

  Largo was grinning at him. “If you have trouble giving ‘em respect, just remember they get paid about three times more than you do.”

  “Yeah,” Chee said. "That’ll help.”

  The gathering place for the manhunt was the conference room of the Montezuma Creek Chapter House. The parking lot was crowded with a varied assortment of police cars, most easily identified by jurisdiction by Chee. He spotted Cowboy Dashee’s Apache County patrol unit resting off the gravel but under the shade of the lot’s solitary tree, a couple NTP units, two of the shiny black Ford sedans the FBI used and an equally shiny green Land Rover. That, he concluded, would be far too expensive to be owned by any of the nonfederal agencies here. Probably it had been seized in a drug raid and driven down from Salt Lake or Denver by whichever Special Agent had been put in charge of this affair.

  The conference room itself was as crowded as the lot and almost as hot. Someone had concluded that the feeble window-mounted air-conditioning unit wasn’t handling the body heat produced by the crowd and had opened windows. A dozen or so men, some in camouflage outfits, some in uniforms, some in suits, were crowded around a table. Chee saw Dashee perched on a folding chair beside one of them, reading something.

  Chee walked over. “Hey there, fella,” he said to Dashee. “Are you the Special Agent in Charge?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Cowboy said. “I don’t want the feds to know I associate with you. Not until this business is over, anyway. However, the man you want to report to is that tall guy with the black baseball cap with FBI on it. That doesn’t stand for Full Blood Indian.”

  “He looks sort of young. Do you think he understands this country?”

  Dashee laughed. “Well, he asked me about the trout fishing in the San Juan. He said somebody told him it was great. I think he’s based in St Louis.”

  “You tell him fishing was good?”

  “Come on, Chee. Ease up. I just told him it was great about two hundred miles upstream before all the muddy irrigation water gets dumped in. He seems like a good guy. Said he was new out here. Didn’t know whether to call a gully an arroyo, or a wash, or a cut, or a creek. His name’s Damon Cabot.”

  Up close Damon Cabot looked even younger than he had from the back of the room. He shook hands with Chee, explained that other detachments were handling other aspects of the hunt and that this group was trying to collect all possible evidence from the area where the escape vehicle had been abandoned.

  “Here’s where we have you,” he said, pointing to the map spread on the table and indicating a red X near the center of Casa Del Eco Mesa. “That’s our Truck Base. Where the perps abandoned the pickup truck. Are you familiar with that area?”

  “Just generally,” Chee said. “I worked mostly out of Shiprock and in the Tuba City district. That’s way west of here.”

  “Well, you know it a hell of a lot better than I do,” Cabot said. “I just got reassigned from Philadelphia to Salt Lake City about a week ago. Did you work in that 1998 manhunt?”

  Chee nodded.

  “From what I’ve been overhearing, the Bureau didn’t add any luster to its reputation with that one.”

  Chee shrugged. “Nobody did.”

  “What do you think? Are those two guys still out there?”

  “From 1998? Who knows? But a lot of people around here think so,” Chee said.

  “I guess the Bureau decided they’re dead,” Cabot said. “I just wondered -" He cut that off, and shifted into telling Chee how the fugitives were thought to be armed: assault rifles and perhaps at least one scoped hunting rifle. Chee noticed that Special Agent Cabot seemed slightly downcast. The man had been trying to be friendly. The realization surprised Chee. It made him a bit ashamed of himself.

  He brought that up with Cowboy as they drove in the deputy’s patrol car to the meeting place on Casa Del Eco Mesa.

  “Exactly what I’ve been telling you,” Cowboy said. “You pick on the feds all the time. Hostile. I think it grows out of your basic and well-justified inferiority complex. There’s a little envy mixed in there, too, I think. Healthy, good-looking guys, blow-dry haircuts, big salaries, good retirement, shiny shoes, Hollywood always making movies about them, heel-e-o-copters to fly around in, flak jackets, expense accounts, retirement pensions and"—Cowboy paused, gave Chee a sidewise glance -"and getting to associate with those real pretty Justice Department public-defender lawyers all the time.”

  Which was Cowboy’s effort to open the subject of Janet Pete. Chee had once asked Cowboy to be his best man if Janet insisted on the white people’s style of wedding Janet’s mother wanted instead of the Navajo wedding Chee preferred. He never really explained to Cowboy how that affair had crashed and burned, and he wasn’t going to do it now.

  “How about you, Cowboy?” Chee said. “Nobody ever accused you of loving the federals. You’re the one who told me the most popular course in the FBI Academy is Insufferable Arrogance 101.”

  “It’s Arrogance 201 that’s popular. They expect recruits to test out of 101. Anyhow, most of them are nice guys. Just a lot richer than us.”

  One of them was awaiting them at Truck Base, sitting in a black van, monitoring radio traffic with a book open on the seat beside him. He said the Special Agent running this part of the show had gone down in the canyon, and they were supposed to wait for instructions.

  Th
e radio tech pointed to the yellow police-line tape he’d parked beside.

  “Don’t go inside that,” he said. “That’s where the perps abandoned their truck. We can’t have people messing that up until the crime-lab team signs off on it.”

  “OK,” Cowboy said. “We’ll just wait.”

  They leaned against Cowboy’s patrol car.

  “Why didn’t you tell him you were the one who put up the tape?” Chee asked.

  “Just being nice,” Cowboy said. “You ought to try that. The feds respond well to kindness.”

  Chee let that one pass into a long silence, which he broke with a question.

  “Have you heard how the Bureau got the perps identified? I know they announced it to the press, which means they’re sure of ’em. So first I thought they’d found the inside man and got him to talk. This Teddy Bai guy they were holding at the hospital. Do you know if they got him to talk?”

  “All I know is fourth-hand,” Cowboy said. “I heard your old boss did it. Got the names for them.”

  “Old boss?”

  “Joe Leaphorn,” Dashee said. “The Legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn. Who else?”

  “Be damned,” Chee said. “How the devil could that have happened?” But he noticed that he wasn’t really surprised.

  “They said the sheriff got a call from some old friend from Aneth, or someplace like that—a former county cop named Potts. This Potts said Leaphorn came to his house and asked him about three men and then how to find this Jorie guy’s place. Hour or so later Leaphorn calls the cops from Jorie’s house and tells them Jorie’s killed himself. That’s all I know.”

  “Be damned,” Chee said again. “How in hell does -"

  “How long did you work for him?” Cowboy asked. “Three, four years?”