"Well, at least we could try," she added.
"I guess that's about all we can do now," Chee said. "Somebody should wait here, where they could see him if he's still coming down the trail, or if he's already down, meet him if he comes back looking for us."
He looked at Dashee. Dashee nodded. He looked at Bernie. "Bernie, you wait here. If Tuve shows up, keep him here until Cowboy and I get back."
"Sergeant Chee," Bernie said, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the river and the clamor of the mating-season frogs, and maybe even a little louder than that, "I want to remind you that I am no longer Officer B. Manuelito of your Navajo Tribal Police squad. I am a private regular citizen."
"Sorry," Chee said, sounding suitably repentant. "I just thought-"
"Okay. I'll stay here," Bernie said. Dashee was grinning at her.
"Thanks," Chee said. "I'm going to suggest that I work my way downstream looking for that sort of side canyon Tuve mentioned, and get back here in.let's say ninety minutes or so. Quicker if we've found something. And Cowboy, would you do the same upstream? Up to the confluence where the Little Colorado runs in to the big river and-"
"Got it," Dashee said.
Bernie leaned her weary self against a convenient boulder, let her body slip slowly down it until she was sitting comfortably on a sandstone slab. She watched Cowboy working his way along the cluster of boulders upstream until he disappeared behind the curve of the cliff. She watched Chee moving downstream along the very edge of water, keeping his eyes on the ground. She found herself wishing he would look back, at least a glance, but he didn't. Found herself wishing she hadn't sounded so grouchy. Hadn't been so grouchy. When he got back, she would tell him she was sorry. Tell him she was tired. Which was true. And now she would just wait. Maybe find one of those noisy frogs. Tree frogs probably, or maybe red-spotted toads. Take a look at the algae on those damp rocks at water's edge. Think her thoughts. Wish it hadn't taken Jim Chee so long to realize that he had fallen in love with her. Wish she had recognized his hang-ups and made her interest in him a little more obvious. Even a lot more obvious.
And after a lot of that, the shadows would be working up the canyon walls, and Jim and Cowboy would be back, and they would make a little fire, probably, and eat some of the stuff they had brought, and talk a lot and roll out their sleeping bags, and Jim would probably want to put theirs close together and a distance from Dashee's, and she would have to deal with that. Her clan taught its daughters that too much intimacy before nuptial promises were officially and ceremonially confirmed before both clans and both families tended to have very bad effects in the married years to come. Therefore, as her mother had put it, "some sand should be kept between you and your police sergeant" until that had happened.
So she would sit here and watch the changing light change the colors on the cliffs, and wait, and think about how good it would be when all this indecision was behind her. But that sort of happy thinking kept drifting away into questions. Was Jim really the man she thought he was, that he seemed to be? Or was he the hard-voiced sergeant who would never, ever really be her man? Was what she was doing at this very moment-following his orders, waiting for the next instructions, waiting to be told what was going on-indicative of what she was getting into? She didn't think so. In fact, she didn't even want to think about it. She wanted to think about where she was-at the very middle of the stupefying grandeur of this canyon, surrounded by all its weird variations of the natural world she knew from the Earth Surface World a mile above her head.
About then the changing light must have touched off some sort of signal to the biology about her. Suddenly the violet-green swallows were out, doing their acrobatic dives, skimming the water for rising insects. Somewhere behind her an owl was out early, making some sort of call that only her oldest uncle could translate, and the spotted toads were adding their grunts to the general birdsong symphony.
Why was she just sitting here? Bernie asked herself. She zipped open the top of her backpack, got out her water bottle, hung her bird-watcher binoculars over her shoulder, then dipped back into the pack for her birder's notebook. She tore out a blank back page, took out her pen, and started writing.
MR. TUVE-I AM WALKING UP RIVER A WAY. BACK SOON. WAIT HERE FOR US.
Bernie
She left the note on the boulder where she had been sitting, put another rock at a corner to hold it down, and started walking-first over to the cliff-side tamarisk trees to investigate a bird nest she'd noticed there, and then down toward an outcropping that a long time ago (probably a few billion years ago) had formed a lava flow obstruction and a noisy little rapid in the Colorado.
The flotsam kicked out at the rapid revealed nothing she hadn't expected, being mostly debris washed down one or another of the little streams that flowed in from the cooler, wetter mesa tops a mile above. She identified the hulls of pi¤on nuts, Ponderosa needles, twigs from Utah junipers, and a variety of grass samples, many probably blown in but some local needle grass which thrived in this hot, dry bottom. Nothing here she hadn't expected.
Through her binoculars, she checked the place where Jim and Dashee had left her. No sign of them or of Tuve, nor did she spot anyone on the few points high up in the cliffs of the Salt Trail where she thought he might be descending. She focused in as sharply as she could on the boulder where she had left her note. She couldn't see that, either. That either meant that one of the men had come back, found it, and was now (she hoped) awaiting her, or that Tuve had arrived, taken it, and went on his way. Or it meant that these lenses were just not potent enough for her to make it out from where she was standing.
She focused down the cliffs. The angle of the sunlight now made it clear why one of the early explorers she had read-John Wesley Powell, she thought it was-had described them as "parapets." They formed a seemingly infinite row of light and shadow, sort of like looking down a picket fence, with each shadowed space representing a place where drainage from the mesa top had-down through a million or so years of draining off snowmelt and rainwater-eroded itself its own little canyon in its race to get to the Colorado and on to the Pacific Ocean.
Those canyons would be more interesting than the scene at the riverside. And a side canyon was what both Jim and Cowboy were looking for. An undercut place where their fantastical dispenser of diamonds was living, or had been living. Presuming he had ever existed, which had always seemed doubtful to Bernie.
She skirted past the rapids outcrop and walked downstream. The first opening in the cliff was a dead end for her purposes, blocked with brush and a jumble of boulders swept down by some long-past flash flood. She pushed her way through the barrier far enough to see it offered not much possibility of a cave large enough for occupation.
More walking, with brief checks into four other drain-off cuts in the cliffs, brought her to a more promising-looking drainage mouth. She had been noticing now and then the tracks left by Jim's boots, mostly in the damp sand very close to the putty-toned water of the Colorado. Now she saw them again. They led across the blow sand leading into the mouth of the same opening that attracted her. They went in, out again, then back toward the river, and on downstream.
Ah, well, Bernie thought, he'd be coming back after a while, and when the shadows were longer, the temperature would drop. Her schoolgirl trip into the canyon had been made in the cooler days of late autumn. She'd read that summer heat at the canyon bottom sometimes soared as much as twenty degrees above the temperature on the mesa a mile above. Now she believed it. Even in the shade, it seemed dangerously torrid. She walked up the slot far enough to find a spot where the interior cliffs hadn't been cooking all day under the Southwestern sun. She'd rest awhile and cool off.
Typical of Bernadette Manuelito, the rest period was brief. She noticed tracks of Chee's boots again, scuffing across the thin layer of blow sand near the opposite wall. She'd test the tracking skills she'd been taught in her tour with the Border Patrol.
The tracks disappeared in a tan
gle of dead, dry tumbleweeds and assorted other sticks and stems, then showed up again where the most recent runoff had left the stone floor bare and subject to scuffing marks. It was, of course, a strictly up-slope walk, and it soon came to a junction where a smaller post-rainstorm stream joined the major flow. She was able to find Chee's tracks only a few yards up the narrower canyon, and then they resumed their climb up the bigger one and came to another junction, this one through a very narrow cut in the cliffs, at which point there was another very short side trip of boots marks.
From this, a comparatively cool downdraft flowed, bringing with it the aroma of the high-country flora-pi¤on resin, cliffrose, and the slightly acid smell of claretcup cactus. It was comfortable and pleasant here. The bedrock under her feet was damp with a minuscule trickle of water from a narrow horizonal seepage between layers of stone on the opposite wall. A swarm of midges was dining on a growth of moss there, and below them squatted one of the spotted toads common to the deep canyon. He sat so utterly motionless that Bernie wondered for a moment if he was alive. He answered that question with a sudden leap, and scuttled across the stony floor.
Why? Bernie quickly saw the answer. The head of a small snake emerged from under a fallen slab, slithered onto the bedrock floor after the toad. It stopped. Coiled. Swiveled its head and its tongue emerged, testing the air for the strange odor of Bernie, a new species of intruder in the snake's hunting ground.
Bernie had been conditioned from toddling years to look upon everything alive as fellow citizens of a tough and unforgiving natural cosmos. Each and all, be they schoolgirl, scorpion, bobcat, or vulture, had a role to play and was endowed with the good sense to survive-provided good sense was used. Thus Bernie was not afraid of snakes. Even rattlesnakes, which this one obviously was, because after coiling he had raised his terminal tip and sent his species' nameplate warning signal.
But this one was pink, which brought a huge smile to Bernie's face and the immediate thought of Dr. William Degenhardt, her favorite professor at the University of New Mexico. Degenhardt, an internationally acclaimed herpetologist, was an authority on snakes, salamanders, and other such cold-blooded beasts, and was known, in fact, as their friend, with a huge portrait of a coiled rattler on his living room wall. Bernie remembered his lectures fondly, and in one the Pink Grand Canyon Rattlesnake was the subject-not just because it was rare but because it was such a wonderful demonstration of how a species could adapt itself in size, color, and hunting techniques to the weird environment the Grand Canyon offered.
Bernie found herself wishing she had a camera. She could hardly wait to tell Degenhardt about this. Maybe she could catch the thing and take it back to him. But the professor would never approve of such a disruption of nature. Besides, she couldn't keep it alive in her backpack. So she simply stared at it, shifting her memory into the Save mode, and recorded every variation in color, shade, and tone, size and number of rattles, shape of head, and so forth-all of the features the professor would want to compare with the illustrations in his textbook on such beasts. But the snake tired eventually of this scrutiny, thrust out his tongue to test the air a final time, and slithered away to hide himself again back under a stone slab.
The cry of a peregrine falcon snapped Bernie out of thinking about snakes and professors, and back into the duty to which Sergeant Chee had assigned her. It was time to climb out of this slot and find a place from which she could see if Tuve had climbed down the Salt Trail to join this expedition. Or if Chee, or Dashee, or both were awaiting her down at the Salt Woman Shrine.
Reaching the spot that looked most promising as a lookout post involved scrambling up a broken section of the opposing wall of the canyon she had followed up from the river. It was a tough climb, made even slower because the Pink Rattler had reminded Bernie that snakes like hanging out in hidden little spaces under rocks. She was very, very careful where she put her hands while pulling herself up to the shelf she had chosen.
It was a good choice. From that vantage point, her binoculars could scan down into a substantial stretch of the Colorado River, and two small waterfalls flowing out of cliff-side drainage across the river. Upriver her view took in the stream flowing in from the Little Colorado, forming the deep, cool pool of bluish water near the Salt Woman Shrine and lightening the muddy tone of the Colorado.
More important, she could see the spot where Sergeant Chee had commanded her to await his return. Well, the sergeant hadn't returned from his hunt downriver. Nor did Cowboy Dashee seem to be back from his excursion up the river. No sign of Tuve, either. Unless he had come and gone again. For that matter, maybe Chee and Dashee had been back and were off again hunting for her.
Bernie felt a touch of uneasy guilt. Jim really hadn't asked much of her. Just to help out a little on their mission of mercy for Billy Tuve. She could have postponed her botanical research project. Jim's opinion of her would be dented some if he returned and found her missing.
But that twinge of guilt was quickly submerged under another thought. Unlikely as it seemed, maybe they had actually found what they were looking for-the haunt of this fellow who had, so they believed, dished out diamonds to passersby. Perhaps they had reached their goal and just hadn't bothered to come and invite her to join in the excitement of the discovery. Or maybe Chee had broken a leg climbing the rocks. Or Dashee had been hurt and Chee had gone to help him. Or maybe they were just looking longer, and being slower, than she had expected.
Bernie had found her bird-watching binoculars in a military surplus store in Albuquerque, and they had been designed for a more serious purpose, being much more optically powerful than normal bird-watchers need, and much heavier than anything they would want to lug around on their walks. She lowered them. Wiped the perspiration from her eyebrows, relaxed her wrists for a moment, and then raised them again for another look.
A man walked right into her circle of view. He took a water bottle out of the pocket on the side of his trouser leg, pushed off his hat, and took a drink. The man was big and blond and looked young. He was also barefoot. Bernie watched him walk gingerly through the hot sand to the boulder where she had rested. He sat on it, reached into the shade behind it, and extracted a pair of hiking boots. He pulled the socks out of the boots, massaged each foot carefully, and then reshod himself.
Who could he be? Probably just another tourist. But maybe not. River runners boating down the Colorado were not allowed to drop people off here, out of deference to the Hopi religious sites. He could have walked down, of course. He was still massaging his feet and that suggested that he might have. But the Salt Trail was the only fairly easy access and it, too, was forbidden to him without Hopi permission and an escort.
Bernie left him caring for his feet and rescanned the scene around her. Still no sign of Jim, Cowboy, Billy Tuve, or anyone else. The only sign of life she detected was a herd of four horses taking their leisure under the shade of what seemed to be Russian olive trees across the river. She switched her binoculars back to the blond man. He had his hat on now and a pair of binoculars-even larger than hers-to his eyes. He seemed to be slowly and methodically scanning the slopes around him. Back and forth, up and down, looking for something. For what?
Bernie had a sudden and alarming thought that he might be looking for her. That he might have already spotted her. That he might be someone who had seen one of those posters Chee and Dashee had talked about, offering the reward for recovering the bones. That he might be somebody involved in whatever had caused Washington to nudge the FBI into this. That he might be dangerous.
Bernie got up, took another look at the place where Chee had abandoned her near the Salt Woman Shrine. Cautious now, barely peeking over the edge of the stone shelf.
The big blond man had his back turned toward her now, looking the other way, apparently studying the higher reaches of the Salt Trail. Waiting for Tuve, she guessed. And that thought reminded her of Waiting for Godot, and the time they had wasted in her Literature 411 class discussing whether G
odot would ever arrive, and what difference it would make if he did. And now wasn't she sort of a perfect match for Beckett's ridiculous characters?
To hell with it. She would find Chee and tell him she was going home. Or wherever she could get from here. Or maybe just turn this into a sort of botanical field trip and let the sergeant and the deputy sheriff chase their mythological diamond dispenser on their own.
Climbing down the rock slide from her high perch was easier than ascending it, but trickier. And when she reached the bottom, she found a woman standing there, watching her and waiting.
16
"Girl," the woman said, "you shouldn't be here. Here it is dangerous for you."
Which left Bernie wordless for a moment. She mumbled the Navajo "Ye eeh teh" greeting, produced a sort of hesitant smile, dusted off her jeans, examined the hand she had scraped on the climb down, and glanced up. The woman was small and elderly, with a dark, weatherworn face and long white hair. She wore a long skirt of much-bleached denim, a long blue shirt, and carried a canvas bag on a strap over her shoulder. A Hopi, maybe, or one of the Supai from across the river, or perhaps from another of the Pueblo people.
Tony Hillerman - Leaphorn & Chee 17 - Skeleton Man Page 14