“Very little.”
Chee waited, hoping he’d add to that. From what Dashee had told him Leaphorn knew enough about George Ironhand to have him on the list of names he asked Potts about. But Leaphorn obviously wasn’t going to explain that.
“They say a Ute by that same name, about ninety or so years ago, used to lead a little band of raiders down across the San Juan into our territory. Steal horses, sheep, whatever they could find, kill people, so forth. The Navajos would chase them, but they’d disappear in that rough country along the Nokaito Bench. Maybe into Chinle Wash or Gothic Creek. It started a legend that Ironhand was some sort of Ute witch. He could fly. Our people would see him down in the canyon bottom, and then they’d see him up on the rimrock, with no way to get there. Or sometimes the other way around. Top to bottom. Anyway, Ironhand was never caught.”
Leaphorn took a small bite of the hamburger steak he’d ordered, and looked thoughtful.
“Louisa,” he said, "have you ever picked up anything like that in your legend collecting?”
“I’ve read something sort of similar,” Professor Bourebonette said. “A man they called Dobby used to raid across the San Juan about the same time. But that was farther west. Down into the Monument Valley area. I think that’s more or less on the record. A Navajo named Littleman finally ambushed them in the San Juan Canyon. The way the story goes, he killed Dobby and two of the others. But they were Paiutes, and that happened earlier—in the eighteen nineties, I think it was.”
Leaphorn nodded. “I’ve heard the old folks in my family talk about that. Littleman was Red Forehead Dine‘, in my mother’s clan.”
“It produced a sort of witch story, too,” Louisa said. “Dobby could make his men invisible.”
Leaphorn put down his fork. “That old Ute you’re interviewing at Towaoc tomorrow. Why not see what she remembers about the legendary Ironhand?”
“Why not,” Professor Bourebonette said. “It’s right down my scholarly alley. And the man you’re after is probably Ironhand Junior. Or Ironhand the Second or Third.”
She smiled at Chee. “Nothing changes. A century later and you have the same problem in the same canyons.”
Chee nodded and returned the smile, but he was thinking there was one big difference. In the 1890s, or 1910s, or whenever it was, the local posse didn’t have the FBI city boys telling them how to run their hunt.
Chapter Fourteen
From where Joe Leaphorn sat, he could see the odd shape of Sleeping Ute Mountain out one window, and the Ute Casino about a mile down the slope out of another. If he looked straight ahead, he could watch Louisa and Conrad Becenti, her interpreter. They sat at a card table putting a new tape in their recording machine. Beyond them, on a sofa of bright blue plastic against the wall, sat an immensely old and frail-looking Ute woman named Bashe Lady, her plump and middle-aged granddaughter and a girl about twelve who Leaphorn presumed was a great-granddaughter. Leaphorn himself was perched upon a straight-backed kitchen chair, perched far too long with no end in sight.
Only Bashe Lady and Louisa seemed to be enjoying this session—the old woman obviously glorying in the attention, and Louisa in the role of myth hunter happy with what she was collecting. Leaphorn was fighting off sleep, and the occupants of the sofa had the look of those who had heard all this before, and far too often.
They’d been hearing that Bashe Lady had been born into the Mogche band of the Southern Utes but had married into the Kapot band. With that out of the way, she had used the next hour or so enthusiastically giving Louisa the origin story of both bands. Leaphorn had been interested for thirty minutes or so, but mostly in Professor Bourebonette’s technical skills—the questions she chose to direct the interview and the way she made sure she understood what Becenti was telling her. Becenti was part-Ute, part-Navajo and probably part something else. He had studied mythology with Louisa at Northern Arizona and seemed to still maintain that awe-stricken student-to-teacher attitude.
Leaphorn squirmed into a slightly less uncomfortable position. He watched a truck towing a multi-sized horse trailer pulling into the Ute Casino parking lot, watched its human occupants climb out and head for the gaming tables, noticed a long column of vehicles creeping south on U.S. 666, the cork in this traffic bottle being an overloaded flatbed hauling what seemed to be a well-drilling rig. He found himself wondering if the campaign by Biblical fundamentalists to have the highway number changed from ‘the mark of the Beast’ to something less terrible (turning the signs upside down to make it 999 had been suggested) had any effect on patronage of the casino. Probably not. He shifted from that to trying to decide how the casino management dealt with the problem of chips that surely must have been snatched from roulette tables when the lights went off during the robbery. Probably they had borrowed a different set from another casino. But the discomfort inflicted by the wooden chair seat drove that thought away. He shifted into getting-up position and reached for his empty glass—intending to sneak into the kitchen with it without being rude.
No such luck. The great-granddaughter had been watching him, and apparently watching for her own excuse to escape. She leaped to her feet and confronted him.
“I’ll get you some more iced tea,” she said, snatched the glass and was gone.
Leaphorn settled himself again, and as he did, the interview got interesting.
“… and then she said that in those days when the Bloody Knives were coming in all the time and stealing everything and killing people, the Mogches had a young man named Ouraynad, but people called him Ironhand, or sometimes The Badger. And he was very good at killing the Bloody Knives. He would lead our young men down across the San Juan and they would steal back the cattle the Bloody Knives had stolen from us.”
“OK, Conrad,” Louisa said. “Ask her if Ouraynad was related to Ouray?”
Becenti asked. Bashe Lady responded with a discourse incomprehensible to Leaphorn, except for references to Bloody Knives, which was the Ute nickname for the hated Navajos. Leaphorn hadn’t been bothered by that at first. After all, the Navajo curing ceremonial used the Utes to symbolize enemies of the people and the Hopi phrase for Navajos meant ‘head breakers,” with the implication his forefathers killed people with rocks. But now Leaphorn had been hearing the translator rattle off uncomplimentary remarks about the dine’ for about two hours. He was beginning to resent it.
Bashe Lady stopped talking, gave Leaphorn an inscrutable look, and threw out her hands.
“A lot of stuff about the heroism and bravery of the Great Chief Ouray,” Becenti said, ”but nothing that’s not already published. Bottom line was she thought this Ironhand was related to Ouray in some way, but she wasn’t sure.”
Leaphorn leaned forward and interrupted. “Could you ask her if this Ironhand had any descendants with the same name?”
Becenti looked at Louisa. Louisa looked at Leaphorn, frowning. “Later,” she said. “I don’t want to break up her line of thought.” And to Becenti: "Ask her if this hero Ironhand had any magical powers. Was he a witch? Anything mystical?”
Becenti asked, with Bashe Lady grinning at him.
The grin turned into a cackling laugh, which turned into a discourse, punctuated by more laughter and hand gestures.
“She says they heard the Navajos [Becenti had stopped translating that into Bloody Knives in deference to Leaphorn sitting behind him] were fooled so often by Ironhand that they began believing he was like one of their witches — like a Skinwalker who could change himself into an owl and fly, or a dog and run under the bushes. She said they would hear stories the Navajos told about how he could jump from the bottom of the canyon up to the rim, and then jump down again. But she said the Mogche people knew he was just a man. Just a lot smarter than the Navajos who hunted him. About then they started calling him Badger. Because of the way he fooled the Navajos.”
Leaphorn leaned forward, into the silence which followed that, and began: "Ask her if this guy had a son.”
Louisa loo
ked over her shoulder at him, and said, “Patience. We’ll get to that.” But then she shrugged and turned back to Becenti.
“Ask her if Ironhand had any children?”
He had several, both sons and daughters, Bashe Lady said. Two wives, one a Kapot Ute and the other a Paiute woman. While Becenti was translating that, she burst into enthusiastic discourse again, with more laughter and gestures. Becenti listened, and translated.
“She said he took this Paiute woman when he was old, after his first wife died, and she was the daughter of a Paiute they called Dobby. And Dobby was like Ironhand himself. He killed many Navajos, and they couldn’t catch him either. And Ironhand, even when he was an old, old man, had a son by this Paiute woman, and this son became a hero, too.”
Louisa glanced back at Leaphorn, looked at Becenti, said, “Ask her what he did to become a hero.”
Bashe Lady talked. Becenti listened, inserted a brief question, listened again.
“He was in the war. He was one of the soldiers who wore the green hats. She said he shot a lot of men and got shot twice himself, and they gave him medals and ribbons,” Becenti said. “I asked which war. She said she didn’t know, but he came home about when they were drilling the new oil wells in the Aneth field. So it must have been Vietnam.”
During all this, Great-Granddaughter emerged from the kitchen and handed Leaphorn his renewed glass of iced tea — devoid now of ice cubes. What Bashe Lady had been saying had brought Granddaughter out of lethargy. She listened intently to Becenti’s translation, leaned forward. “He was in the army,” she said. “In the Special Services, and they put him on the Cambodian border with the hill tribes. The Montegnards. And then they sent him over into Cambodia.” She laughed. “He said he wasn’t supposed to talk about that.”
She paused, looking embarrassed by her interruption. Leaphorn took advantage of the silence. Granddaughter obviously knew a lot about this younger version of Ironhand. He put aside his manners and interjected himself into the program.
“What did he do in the army? Was he some sort of specialist?”
“He was a sniper,” she told Leaphorn. “They gave him the Silver Star decoration for shooting fifty-three of the enemy soldiers, and then he was shot, so he got the Purple Heart, too.”
“Fifty-three,” Leaphorn said, thinking this had to be George Ironhand of the casino robbery, thinking he would hate to be prowling the canyons looking for him.
“Do you know where he lives?”
Granddaughter’s expression suggested she didn’t like this question. She studied Leaphorn, shook her head.
Becenti glanced back at him, said something to Bashe Lady. She responded with a few words and a couple of hand gestures. In brief she said Ironhand raised cattle at a place north of Montezuma Creek - approximately the same location Leaphorn had been given by Potts and had seen in Jorie’s suicide note.
Leaphorn interrupted again.
“Louisa, could you ask her if anyone knows how the first Ironhand got away from the Navajos?”
Becenti was getting caught up in this, too. He didn’t wait for approval. He asked. Bashe Lady laughed, answered, and laughed again. Becenti shrugged.
“She said the Navajos thought he got away like a bird, but he got away like a badger.”
About then Granddaughter said something in rapid Ute to Bashe Lady, and Bashe Lady looked angry, and then abashed, and decided she knew absolutely nothing more about Ironhand.
When the interview was over and they were heading back toward Shiprock, Louisa wanted to talk about Ironhand Junior, as she had begun calling him. The session had gone well, she said. A lot of it was what had already been collected about Ute mythology, religion and customs. But some of it, as she put it, “cast some light on how the myths of preliterate cultures evolve with generational changes.” And the information about Ironhand was interesting.
Having said that, she glanced at Leaphorn and caught him grinning.
“What?” she said, sounding suspicious.
The grin evolved into a chuckle. “No offense, but when you talk like that it takes me right back to Tempe, Arizona, and sleepy afternoons in the poorly air-conditioned classrooms of Arizona State, and the voices of my professors of anthropology.”
“Well,” she said, ”that’s what I am." But she laughed, too. “I guess it gets to be a habit. And it’s getting even worse. Postmodernism is in the saddle now, with its own jargon. Anyway, Bashe Lady was a good source. If nothing else, it shows that hostility toward you Bloody Knives still lingers on like Serb versus Croat.”
“Except these days we’re far too civilized to be killing one another. We marry back and forth, buy each other’s used cars, and the only time we invade them it’s to try to beat their slot machines.”
“OK, I surrender.”
But Leaphorn was still a bit chafed from a long day listening to his people described as brutal invaders. “And as you know very well, Professor, the Utes were the aggressors. They’re Shoshoneans. Warriors off the Great Plains moving in on us peaceful Athabascan farmers and shepherds.”
“Peaceful shepherds who stole their sheep from who?” Louisa said. “Or is it whom? Anyway, I’m trying to calculate the chronology of this second Ironhand. Wouldn’t he be too old now to be the bandit everyone is looking for?”
“Maybe not,” Leaphorn said. “The first one would have been operating as late as 1910, which is when we started getting some fairly serious law and order out here. She said the current Ironhand was a child of his old age. Let’s say Junior was born in the early forties. That’s biologically possible, and that would have him the right age to be in the Vietnam War.”
“I guess so. From what she said about him, if I was one of those guys out there trying to find him, I’d be hoping that I wouldn’t.”
Leaphorn nodded. He wondered how much the FBI knew about Ironhand. And if they did know, how much they had passed along to the locals. He thought about what Bashe Lady had said about how the original Ironhand had eluded the Navajos hunting him. Not like a bird, but like a badger. Badgers escaped when they didn’t just stand and fight by diving into their tunnel. Badger tunnels had an exit as well as an entrance. When the hunting ground was canyon country and coal-mining country, that was an interesting thought.
Chapter Fifteen
On the maps drawn by geographers it’s labeled the Colorado Plateau, with its eighty-five million acres sprawling across Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. It is larger than any of those states; mostly high and dry and cut by countless canyons eroded eons ago when the glaciers were melting and the rain didn’t stop for many thousand years. The few people who live on it call it the Four Corners, the High Dry, Canyon Land, Slick Rock Country, the Big Empty. Once a writer in more poetic times called it the Land of Room Enough and Time.
This hot afternoon, Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police had other names for it, all uncomplimentary and some, after he’d slid into a growth of thistles, downright obscene. He’d spent the day with Officer Jackson Nez, prowling cautiously along the bottom of one of those canyons, perspiring profusely under FBI-issued body armor, carrying an electronic satellite location finder and an infrared body-heat-detecting device and a scoped rifle. What weighed Chee down even more than all that was the confident knowledge that he and Officer Nez were wasting their time.
“It’s not a total waste of time,” Officer Nez said, ”because when the federals can mark off enough of these canyons as searched, they can declare those guys dead and call this off.”
“Don’t count on it,” Chee said.
“Or the perps see us coming and shoot us, and the feds watch for the buzzards, and when they find our bodies, they get their forensic teams in here, and do the match to decide where the shots came from, and then they find the bad guys.”
“That makes me feel a little better,” Chee said. “Nice to be working with an optimist.”
Nez was sitting on a shaded sandstone slab with his body armor serving as a seat cushion
while he was saying this. He was grinning, enjoying his own humor. Chee was standing on the sandy bottom of Gothic Creek, body armor on, tinkering with the location finder. Here, away from the cliffs, it was supposed to be in direct contact with the satellite and its exact longitude/latitude numbers would appear on its tiny screen.
Sometimes, including now, they did. Chee pushed the send switch, read the numbers into the built-in mike, shut the gadget off and looked at his watch.
“Let’s go home,” he said. “Unless you enjoy piling on a lot more overtime.”
“I could use the money,” Nez said.
Chee laughed. “Maybe they’ll add it to your retirement check. We’re still trying to collect our overtime for the Great Canyon Climbing Marathon of ‘98. Let’s get out of here before it gets dark.”
They managed that, but by the time Chee reached Bluff and his room at the Recapture Lodge, the stars were out. He was tired and dirty. He took off his boots, socks, shirt and trousers, flopped onto the bed, and unwrapped the ham-and-cheese sandwich he’d bought at the filling station across the highway. He’d rest a little, he’d take a shower, he’d hit the sack and sleep, sleep, sleep. He would not think about this manhunt, nor about Janet Pete, nor about anything else. He wouldn’t think about Bernie Manuelito, either. He would set the alarm clock for 6 A.M. and sleep. He took a bite of the sandwich. Delicious. He had another sandwich in the sack. Should have bought a couple more for breakfast. He finished chewing, swallowed, yawned hugely, prepared for a second bite.
From the door the sound: tap, tap, tap, tap.
Chee lay still, sandwich raised, staring at the door. Maybe a mistake, he thought. Maybe they will go away.
Tap, tap, tap, followed by: "Jim. You home?”
The voice of the Legendary Lieutenant.
Chee rewrapped the sandwich, put it on the bedside table, sighed, limped over and opened the door.
Leaphorn stood there, looking apologetic, and beside him was the Woman Professor. She was smiling at him.
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