The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  Jano would have known about this track. These were his eagle-catching grounds. He could have escaped easily. Instead he chose the path that led him directly to where Kinsman was waiting.

  Chee started his descent carefully, remembering the dislodged stone that had almost sent him tumbling down the slope. It had been a bad day so far. He’d climbed the saddle thinking that Jano was a man who had killed in what probably had been a frantic effort to avoid arrest and then made up unlikely lies to save himself from prison. At the foot of the saddle, Chee stood for a moment to catch his breath. He glanced at his watch. He’d locate the van now, find out if whoever was with it had been here on the fateful day and—if they had been—whether they’d seen anything. If they hadn’t, that, too, could be useful as a sort of negative evidence.

  When he’d climbed Yells Back Butte he had nursed a vague, ambiguous hope that maybe he could find something to suggest Jano wasn’t lying, that Jano wouldn’t have to face the death penalty or (worse, in Chee’s opinion) life in prison. To be honest, he had wanted to discover something that would restore his prestige in the eyes of Janet Pete. But now he knew that the murder of Benjamin Kinsman had been a deliberate, premeditated, and savage act of revenge.

  The van was parked on the sandy bed of a shallow wash, partly shaded by a cluster of jumpers and screened by a growth of four-winged salt-bush. No one was visible, but what looked like an oversized air-conditioning unit was purring away on its roof. Chee stood on the fold-down step beside its door and rapped on the metal, then rapped again, and—harder this time—once again. No response. He tried the doorknob. Locked. He leaned his ear against the door and listened. Nothing at first, except the vibrations from the air conditioner, then a faint, rhythmic sound.

  Chee stepped back from the van and inspected it. It had a custom-made body mounted on a heavy GMC truck chassis with dual rear wheels. It looked expensive, fairly new and—judging from the dents and abrasions—heavily (or carelessly) used in rough country. Except for the lack of a door, nothing was different on the driver’s side. Built against the rear was a fold-down metal ladder to provide access to the roof and a rack, which now held a dirt bike, a folding table and two chairs, a five-gallon gasoline can, a pick, a shovel, and an assortment of rodent traps and cages. There were no windows on the rear and the only side windows were high on the wall. Placed high, Chee guessed, to allow more space for storage cabinets.

  He knocked again, rattled the knob, shouted, received no response, put his ear against the door again. This time he heard another faint sound. Something scratching. A tiny squeak, like chalk on a blackboard.

  Chee folded down the access ladder, climbed onto the roof, dropped to his stomach, and secured a firm grip on the air-conditioner engine mount. Then he squirmed over the edge and leaned down to look into the high windows. All he saw was darkness and a streak of light reflecting from a white surface.

  “Ho, there,” a voice shouted. “Whatcha doing?”

  Chee jerked his head up. He looked down into a face staring up at him, expression quizzical, bright blue eyes, dark, sun-peeled face, tufts of gray hair protruding from under a dark blue cap that bore the legend SQUIBB. The man carried what looked like a shoebox containing what seemed to be a dead prairie dog inside a plastic sack.

  “Is that your car I saw back there?” the man asked. “The Navajo Tribal Police car?”

  “Yeah,” Chee said, trying to scramble to his feet without further loss of dignity. He pointed down to the roof under his boots. “I heard something in there,” he stammered. “Thought I did, anyway. Something squeaking. And I couldn’t raise anyone, so—”

  “Probably one of the rodents,” the man said. He put down the shoebox, extracted a key ring from a pocket and unlocked the doors. “Come on down. How about a drink of something?”

  Chee scrambled down the ladder. The man under the Squibb cap was holding the door open for him. Cold air rushed out.

  “My name’s Chee,” he said, extending a hand. “With the Navajo Tribal Police. I guess you’re with the Arizona Health Department.”

  “No,” the man said. “I’m Al Woody. I’m working on a research project up here. For the National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service, so forth. But come on in.”

  Inside Chee turned down a beer and accepted a glass of water. Woody opened the door of a built-in floor-to-ceiling refrigerator and brought out a bottle white with frost. He scraped away the ice crystals and showed Chee a Dewar’s scotch label.

  “Antifreeze,” he said, laughing, and began pouring himself a drink. “But once I was preserving some tissue and turned the fudge down so low that even the whiskey froze up on me.”

  Chee sipped his water, noticing it was stale and had a slightly unpleasant taste. He searched his brain for a proper apology for trying to peek into the man’s window. He decided there wasn’t one. He’d just forget it and let Woody think whatever he wanted to think.

  “I’m doing some back-checking on a homicide case we had up here,” Chee said. “It was July eighth. One of our officers was killed. Hit on the head with a rock. You probably heard about it on the radio or saw it in the paper. We’re trying to find any witnesses we might have overlooked.”

  “I heard about that,” Woody said. “But the man down at the trading post told me you’d caught the killer right in the act.”

  “Who told you?”

  “That grouchy old man at the Short Mountain Trading Post,” Woody said, frowning. “I think his name was Mac something. Sounded Scotch. Did he have it wrong?”

  “About as close as you can get,” Chee said. “The smoking gun was a bloody rock.”

  “The old man said it was a Hopi and the cop had arrested the same guy before,” Woody said, looking pensive. Then he nodded, understanding it. “But out here you’d get Hopis on the jury. So you’re trying not to leave them any grounds for reasonable doubts.”

  “Yeah,” Chee said. “I guess that about sums it up. Were you working up here that day? If you were, did you see anybody? Or anything? Or hear anything?”

  “July eighth, was it?” He punched buttons on his digital watch. “That would make it a Friday,” he said, and frowned, thinking about it. “I drove down to Flagstaff, but I think that was Wednesday. I think I was up here Tuesday early, and then I drove over to Third Mesa. That’s one of the prairie dog colonies I’m watching. Over there by Bacavi. That and some kangaroo rats.”

  “It rained that day,” Chee said. “Thundershower. Little bit of hail.”

  Woody nodded. “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “I’d stopped at the Hopi Cultural Center to get some coffee, and you could see a lot of lightning over that side of Black Mesa and southwest over the San Francisco Peaks, and it looked like it was pouring down at Yells Back Butte. I was feeling glad I got down that road before it got muddy.”

  “Did you see anybody when you were driving out? Meet anyone coming in?”

  Woody had been unzipping the plastic bag while he talked, and a puff of escaping air added another unpleasant aroma to the room. Now he pulled out the prairie dog, stiff with rigor mortis, and laid it carefully on the tabletop. He stared at it, felt its neck, groin area and under the front legs. He looked thoughtful. Then he shook his head, dismissing some troublesome notion.

  “Going out?” he said. “I think I saw that old lady that herds her goats over on the other side of the butte. I think that was Tuesday I saw her. And then, when I was turning out onto the gravel, I remember seeing a car coming from the Tuba City direction.”

  “Was it a police car?”

  Woody looked up from the prairie dog. “It might have been. It was too far away to tell. But, you know, he never did pass me. Maybe he turned in toward the butte. Maybe that was your policeman. Or maybe the Hopi.”

  “Possibly,” Chee said. “About when was it?”

  “Morning. Fairly early.”

  Woody reclosed the bag, shook it vigorously, reopened it, and poured its contents onto a white plastic sheet on the table.<
br />
  “Fleas,” he said. He selected stainless-steel tweezers from a tray on a lab table, picked up a flea and showed it to Chee. “Now, if I’m lucky, the blood in these fleas is laced with Yersinia pestis and”—Woody poked the prairie dog with the tweezers—“so is the blood of our friend here. And if I’m very lucky, it will be Yersinia X, the new, modified, recently evolved fast-acting stuff that kills mammals much quicker than the old stuff.” He redeposited the flea among its brethren on the plastic, grinned at Chee. “Then, if fortune continues to smile on me, the autopsy I’m about to do on this dog here will confirm what not finding any swollen glands suggests. That this fellow here didn’t die of bubonic plague. He died of something old-fashioned.”

  Chee frowned, not quite understanding Woody’s excitement. “So he died of what?”

  “That’s not the question. Could be old age, any of those ills that beset elderly mammals. Doesn’t matter. The question is, why didn’t the plague kill him?”

  “But that’s nothing new, is it? Haven’t you guys known for years that when the plague comes through, it always leaves behind a colony here and there that’s immune or something? And then the stuff spreads again, from them? I thought—”

  Woody had no patience for this. “Sure, sure, sure,” he said. “Reservoir colonies. Host colonies. They’ve been studied for years. How come their immune system blocks the bacteria? If it kills the bacteria, how come the toxin released doesn’t kill the dog? If our friend here just has the original version of Pasteurella pestis, as we used to call it, then he just gives us another chance to poke around in the blind alley. But if he has—”

  It had been a hard and disappointing day for Chee, and this interruption rankled him. He interrupted Woody:

  “If he has developed immunity to this new fast-acting germ, you can compare—”

  “Germ!” Woody said, laughing. “I don’t hear that good old word much these days. But yes. It gives us something to check against. Here’s what we know about the blood chemistry of the dogs who survived the old plague.” He suggested a big box with his hands. “Now we know this modified bacteria is also killing most of those survivors. We want to know the difference in the chemistry of those who survived the new stuff.”

  Chee nodded.

  “You understand that?”

  Chee grunted. He’d taken six hours of biology at the University of New Mexico to help meet the science requirement for his degree in anthropology. The teacher had been a full professor, an international authority on spiders who had made no effort to hide his boredom with basic undergraduate courses nor his disdain for the ignorance of his students. He’d sounded a lot like Woody.

  “That’s easy enough to understand,” Chee said. “So when you solve the puzzle, you develop a vaccine and save untold billions of prairie dogs from the plague.”

  Woody had done something to the flea that produced a brownish fluid and put a bit of it into a petri dish and a drop on a glass slide. He looked up. His face, already unnaturally flushed, was now even redder.

  “You think it’s funny?” he said. “Well, you’re not the only one who does. A lot of the experts at the NIH do, too. And at Squibb. And the New England Journal of Medicine. And the American Pharmaceutical Association. The same damn fools who thought we won the microbe war with penicillin and the streptomycin drugs.”

  Woody slammed his fist on the countertop, his voice rising. “So they misused them, and misused them, and kept on misusing them until they’d evolved whole new variations of drug-resistant bacteria. And now, by God, we’re burying the dead! By the tens of thousands. Count Africa and Asia and its millions. And these damn fools sit on their hands and watch it get worse.”

  Chee was no stranger to anger barely under control. He’d seen it while breaking up bar fights, in domestic disputes, in various other ugly forms. But Woody’s rage had a sort of fierce, focused intensity that was new to him.

  “I didn’t mean to sound flippant,” Chee said. “I’m just not familiar with the implications of this sort of research.”

  Woody took a sip of his Dewar’s, his face flushed. He shook his head, studied Chee, recognized repentance.

  “Sorry I’m so damned touchy about this,” he said, and laughed. “I think it’s because I’m scared. All the little beasties we had beaten ten years ago are back and meaner than ever. TB is an epidemic again. So is malaria. So is cholera. We had the staph bacteria whipped with nine different antibiotics. Now none of ’em work on some of it. And then there’s the same story with viruses. Viruses. They’re what makes this most important. You know that Influenza A, that Swine Flu that came out of nowhere in 1918 and killed maybe forty million people in just a few months. That’s more than were killed in four years of war. Viruses scare me even more than bacteria.”

  Chee raised his eyebrows.

  “Because nothing stops them except your immune system. You don’t cure a viral sickness. You try to prevent it with a vaccine. That’s to prepare your immune system to deal with it if it shows up.”

  “Yeah,” Chee said. “Like polio.”

  “Like polio. Like some forms of influenza. Like a lot of things,” Woody said. He refilled his whiskey glass. “Are you familiar with the Bible?”

  “I’ve read it,” Chee said.

  “Remember what the prophet says in the Book of Chronicles? ‘We are powerless against this terrible multitude that will come against us.’”

  Chee wasn’t sure how to take this. “Do you read that as an Old Testament prophet warning us against viruses?”

  “As it stands now, they are a terrible multitude and we are damn near powerless against them,” Woody said. “Not as well prepared as some of these rodents are anyway. Some of these prairie dogs here somehow have had their immune systems modified to deal with this evolved bacteria. And some of the kangaroo rats have learned to live with the hantavirus. We have to find out how.”

  Woody’s discourse had restored his good temper. He grinned at Chee. “We don’t want the rodents outlasting the humans.”

  Chee nodded. He slid off the stool, picked up his hat. “I’ll let you get back to work. Thanks for the time. And the information.”

  “I just had a thought,” Woody said. “The Indian Health Service has had people up here the last several weeks working through this area. Doing the vector control cleanup on that plague outbreak. You might ask them if they had anyone out there on that day.”

  “They did,” Chee said. “I was just going to get into that. One of their people was supposed to be checking on rodents around here the day Kinsman was killed. I was going to ask you if you’d seen her. And then I was going to be on my way.”

  “A woman? Did she notice anything helpful?”

  “Nobody even knows for sure if she got here. She’s missing,” Chee said. “So is the vehicle she was driving.”

  “Missing?” Woody said, startled. “Really? You think there could be some connection with the attack on your policeman?”

  “I don’t see how there could be,” Chee said. “But I’d like to talk to her. I understand she’s a sturdy-looking brunette, about thirty, named Catherine Pollard.”

  “I’ve seen some of those Arizona public health people here and there. That sounds like one of them,” Woody said. “But I don’t know her name.”

  “You remember the last time you saw her? And where she was?”

  “Nice-looking woman, was she?” Woody said, and glanced up at Chee, not wanting to give the wrong impression. “I don’t mean pretty, but good bone structure.” He laughed. “Looked like she might have been an athlete.”

  “She was around here?”

  “I think it was over at Red Lake that I saw her. Filling the gas tank on a Health Service Jeep, if that’s the right woman. She asked me about the van, if I was the man doing rodent research on the reservation. She asked me to let them know if I saw any dead rodents. Let her know if I saw anything that suggested the plague was killing the rodents.”

  He pushed himself up fr
om the cot. “By golly, I think she gave me a card with a phone number on it.” He sorted through a box labeled OUT on his desk, said “Ah,” and read: “’Catherine Pollard, Vector Control Specialist, Communicable Disease Division, Arizona Department of Public Health.’”

  He handed the card to Chee, grinned, and said: “Bingo.”

  “Thanks,” Chee said. It didn’t sound like bingo to him.

  “And, hey,” Woody added. “If the time’s important you can check on it. When I drove up there was a Navajo Tribal Police car there and she was talking to the driver. Another woman.” Woody grinned. “That one you really could call cute. Had her hair in a bun and the uniform on, but she was what we used to call a dish.”

  “Thanks again,” Chee said. “That would be Officer Manuelito. I’ll ask her.”

  But he wouldn’t. The timing didn’t matter, and if he asked Bernie Manuelito about it, he’d have to ask her why she hadn’t reported that Kinsman had been hitting on her. That was a can of worms he didn’t want to dig into. Claire Dineyahze, who as secretary in Chee’s little division, always knew such things, had already told him. “She doesn’t want to cause you any trouble,” Claire had said. Chee had asked her why not, and Claire had given him one of those female “you moron” looks and said: “Don’t you know?”

  As they drove northward out of Cameron, Leaphorn explained to Louisa what was troubling Cowboy Dashee.

  “I can see his problem,” she said, after spending a while staring out the windshield. “Partly professional ethics, partly male pride, partly family loyalty, partly because he feels Chee is going to think he’s trying to use their friendship for a personal reason. Is that about it? Have you decided what you’re going to do about it?”