The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  “Just a second,” Chee said. “You had the eagle in the cage when I arrested you. The cage was beside the rocks, just a few feet away. Remember?”

  “That was the second eagle,” Jano said.

  “You’re saying you caught an eagle, released it and then caught a second one?”

  “Yes,” Jano said.

  “Will you tell me why you released the first one?”

  Jano looked at Janet.

  “No, he won’t,” she said.

  “He’ll be asked at the trial,” Chee said.

  “If it goes to trial, he will say his reason involves religious beliefs that he is not free to discuss outside his kiva. He may say that two of its tail feathers were pulled out in the struggle, eliminating its ritual use. And then, if I have to do it, I will call in an authority on the Hopi religion who will also explain why a eagle thus stained by bloody violence could not be used in the role assigned to it in this religious ceremonial.”

  “Okay,” Chee said. “Please continue, Mr. Jano. What happened next?”

  “I took the rabbit and walked maybe two miles down the rim of the butte to where another eagle has its hunting ground, got into the blind there and waited. Then the eagle you saw came for the rabbit and I caught it.”

  Jano stopped, looked at Chee as if waiting for an argument and then went on.

  “This time I was more careful.” He smiled and displayed his forearm. “No injury this time.”

  Jano said he had seen the Navajo Tribal Police car driving up the trail while he was carrying the eagle down the saddle toward his truck. He said he’d hidden behind an outcrop of rock for a while, hoping the policeman would leave, and then had crept down the rest of the way, thinking he had not been seen.

  “Then I heard a loud voice. I think it was the policeman. I heard him several times. And then—”

  Chee held up his hand. “Hold it there. Did you hear a response from the person he was talking to?”

  “I just heard that one voice,” Jano said.

  “A man’s voice?”

  “Yes. It sounded like he was giving orders to someone.”

  “Orders? What do you mean?”

  “Yelling. Like he was arresting someone. You know. Ordering them around.”

  “Could you tell where the voices were coming from?”

  “Just one voice,” Jano said. “From about over where I found Mr. Kinsman.”

  “I want you to skip back a little,” Chee said. “When you were climbing down the saddle, was the Jeep still parked where you first saw it parked?”

  Jano nodded, then looked at the microphone and said: “Yes, the Jeep was still there.”

  “Okay. Then what did you do when you heard the voice?”

  “I hid behind a juniper for a while, just listening. I could hear what sounded like walking. You know, boots on rocky ground and sort of coming in my direction. Then I heard a voice saying something. And then I heard a sort of a thumping sound.”

  Jano paused, looking at Chee. “I think it might have been Mr. Kinsman being hit on the head with something. And then there was a clatter.”

  Jano paused again, pursed his lips, seemed to be remembering the moment.

  “Then what?” Chee asked.

  “I just waited there behind the juniper. And after it was silent a while, I went to look. And there was Mr. Kinsman on the ground, with the blood running out of his head.” He shrugged. “Then you walked up and pointed your gun at me.”

  “Did you recognize Kinsman?”

  Janet Pete said: “Hold it. Hold it.” She frowned at Chee. “What are you trying to do, Jim? Establish malice?”

  “The D.A. will establish that Kinsman had arrested Mr. Jano before,” Chee said. “I wasn’t trying anything tricky.”

  “Maybe not,” she said. “But this looks like a good place to cut this off.”

  “Just one more question,” Chee said. “Did you see anyone else when you were there? Anyone at all? Or anything? Going in, or coming out, or anything?”

  “I saw a bunch of goats over on the other side of the saddle,” Jano said. “Lot of trees over there. I couldn’t tell for sure. But maybe there was somebody with them.”

  “Okay,” Janet said. “Mr. Jano and I have some things to talk about. Good-bye, Jim.”

  Chee stood, took a step toward the door, turned back. “Just one more thing,” he said. “I found a blind at the rim of Yells Back where you may have caught an eagle.” He described the location and the blind. “Is that right?”

  Jano looked at Janet, who looked at Chee. She nodded.

  “Yes,” Jano said.

  “The first eagle, or the second one?”

  “The second one.”

  “Where did you catch the first eagle?”

  Jano didn’t glance at Janet this time for permission to answer. He sat, eyes on Chee, looking thoughtful.

  He won’t tell me, Chee thought, because there was only one eagle, or he won’t tell me because he isn’t willing to reveal the location of another of his kiva’s hidden hunting blinds.

  Janet cleared her throat, rose. “I’m going to cut this off,” she said. “I think—”

  Jano held up a hand. “Stand there on the rim at the top of the saddle. Look directly at Humphrey’s Peak in the San Franciscos. Walk straight toward it. About two miles you come to the rim again. It’s a place there where a slab tilted down and left a gap.”

  “Thank you,” Chee said.

  Jano smiled at him. “I think you know eagles,” he said.

  Leaphorn awoke in a silent house, with the early sun shining on his face. He had built their house in Window Rock with their bedroom window facing the rising sun because that pleased Emma. Therefore, both the sun and the emptiness were familiar. Louisa had left a note on the kitchen table, which began: “Push ON button on the coffee maker,” and went on to outline the availability of various foods for breakfast and concluded on a more personal note.

  “I have errands to run before class. Good hunting. Please call and let me know what luck you’re having. I enjoyed yesterday. A LOT. Louisa.”

  Leaphorn pushed the ON button, dropped bread into the toaster, got out a plate, cup, knife and the butter dish. Then he went to the telephone, began dialing Mrs. Vanders’s number in Santa Fe, then hung up. First he would call Chee. Perhaps that would give him something to tell Mrs. Vanders besides that he had nothing at all to tell her.

  “He hasn’t arrived yet, Lieutenant Leaphorn,” the station secretary said. “Do you want his home number?”

  “It’s ‘Just call me mister’ now,” Leaphorn said. “And thanks, but I have it.”.

  “Wait a minute. Here he comes now.”

  Leaphorn waited.

  “I was just going to call you,” Chee said. “We found the Jeep.” He gave Leaphorn the details.

  “You said the tire tracks showed the sand was still wet when it got there?”

  “Right.”

  “So it got there after Kinsman was hit.”

  “Right again. And probably not long after. It wasn’t a very wet rain.”

  “I guess it’s too early to have anything much from the crime lab about prints or—” Leaphorn paused. “Look, Lieutenant, I keep forgetting that I’m a civilian now. Just say no comment or something if I’m overstepping.”

  Chee laughed. “Mr. Leaphorn,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re always going to be Lieutenant to me. And they said they found a lot of prints everywhere matching the guy who stole the radio. But there was no old latent stuff in the obvious places. The steering wheel, gearshift knob, door handles—all those places had been wiped. Very thoroughly.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” Leaphorn said.

  “No,” Chee said. “Either she’s on the run and wanted to leave the impression she’d been abducted, or she actually was taken by someone who didn’t want to be identified. Take your pick.”

  “Probably number two if I had to guess. But who knows? And I guess it’s way too early to kn
ow anything about the blood,” Leaphorn said.

  “Way too early.”

  “Is there any chance you could find any samples of Pollard’s blood anywhere? Was she a blood bank donor? Or was she scheduled for any surgery that she’d stockpile blood for?”

  “That was one reason I was about to call you,” Chee said. “We can get next of kin and so forth from her employer, but it would be quicker to call that woman who hired you. Was it Vanders?”

  Leaphorn provided the name, address and telephone number.

  “I’m going to call her right now and tell her the Jeep was found and to expect a call from you,” Leaphorn added. “Anything you’ve told me that you want withheld?”

  A moment of silence while Chee considered. “Nothing I can think of,” he said. “You know any reason we should?”

  Leaphorn didn’t. He called Mrs. Vanders.

  “Give me a moment to get ready for this,” she said. “People who call early in the morning usually have bad news.”

  “It might be,” Leaphorn said. “The Jeep she was driving has been located. It had been abandoned in an arroyo about twenty miles from where she said she was going. There was no sign of an accident. But some dried blood was found on the passenger-side seat. The police don’t know yet how long the blood was there, whether it was hers or where it came from.”

  “Blood,” Mrs. Vanders said. “Oh, my.”

  “Dried,” Leaphorn said. “Perhaps from an old injury, an old cut. Do you remember if she ever told you of hurting herself? Or of anyone being hurt in that vehicle?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t think so. I can’t remember. I just can’t make my mind work.”

  “It’s too early to worry,” Leaphorn said. “She may be perfectly all right.” This was not the tune to tell her the Jeep had been wiped clean of fingerprints. He asked her if Catherine might have been a blood bank donor, if she had scheduled any surgery for which she would, have stockpiled blood. Mrs. Vanders didn’t remember. She didn’t think so.

  “You’ll be getting a call this morning from the officer investigating the case,” Leaphorn told her. “A Lieutenant Jim Chee. He’ll tell you if anything new has developed.”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Vanders said. “I’m afraid something terrible has happened. She was such a headstrong girl.”

  “I’m going now to talk to Mr. Krause,” Leaphorn said. “Maybe he can tell us something.”

  Richard Krause was not in his temporary laboratory at Tuba City, but a note was thumb-tacked to the door: “Out mouse hunting. Back tomorrow. Reachable through Kaibito Chapter House.”

  Leaphorn topped off his gasoline tank and headed northeast—twenty miles of pavement on U.S. 160 and then another twenty on the washboard gravel of Navajo Route 21. Only three pickups rested in the Chapter House parking lot, and none of them belonged to the Indian Health Service. Discouraging news.

  But inside Leaphorn found Mrs. Gracie Nakaidineh in charge of things. Mrs. Nakaidineh remembered him from his days patrolling out of Tuba City long, long ago. And he remembered Gracie as one of those women who always do what needs to be done and know what needs to be known.

  “Ah,” Gracie said after they had gotten through the greeting ritual common to all old-timers, “you mean you’re looking for the Mouse Man.”

  “Right,” Leaphorn said. “He left a note on his door saying he could be contacted here.”

  “He said if anyone needed to find him, he’d be catching mice along Kaibito Creek. He said he’d be about where it runs into Chaol Canyon.”

  That meant leaving washboard gravel and taking Navajo Route 6330, which was graded dirt circling up onto the Rainbow Plateau for twenty-six bumpy empty miles. Leaphorn avoided much of that journey. About eight miles out, he spotted an Indian Health Service pickup parked in a growth of willows. He pulled off onto the shoulder, got out his binoculars and tried to make out enough of the symbol painted on its dusty, brush-obscured door to determine whether it was the Indian Health Service or something else. Failing that, he scanned the area for Krause.

  A figure, clad head to foot in some sort of shiny white coverall, was moving through the brush toward the truck, carrying plastic sacks in both hands. Krause? Leaphorn couldn’t even tell whether it was a man or woman. Whoever was wearing the astronaut’s suit stopped beside the truck and began removing shiny metal boxes from the sacks, placing them in a row in the shade behind the vehicle. That done, he took one of the boxes to the truck bed, put it into another plastic sack, sprayed something from a can into the bag, and then began arranging a row of flat square pans on the tailgate.

  It must be Krause on his mouse-hunting expedition, and now he was performing whatever magic biologists perform with mice. He was working with his back to Leaphorn, revealing a curving black tube that extended from a black box low on his back upward into the back of his hood. Here was what Mrs. Notah had seen behind the screen of Junipers at Yells Back Butte. The witch who looked part snowman and part elephant.

  As that thought occurred to Leaphorn, Krause turned, and as he took the box from the sack, sunlight reflected off the transparent face shield—completing Mrs. Notah’s description of her skinwalker. He turned to watch Leaphorn approaching.

  Leaphorn restarted the engine and rolled his truck down the slope. He parked, got out, slammed the door noisily behind him.

  Krause spun around, yelling something and pointing to a hand-lettered sign on the pickup: if you can read this you’re too damned close.

  Leaphorn stopped. He shouted: “I need to talk to you.”

  Krause nodded. He held up a circled thumb and finger, and then a single finger, noted that Leaphorn understood the signals, and turned back to his work—which involved holding a small rodent in one hand over a white enamel tray and running a comb through its fur with the other. That job done, he held up the tiny form of a mouse, dangling it by its long tail, for Leaphorn to see. He dropped the animal into another of the traps, peeled off a pair of latex gloves, disposed of them in a bright red canister beside the truck. He walked toward Leaphorn, pushing back his hood.

  “Hantavirus,” he said, grinning at Leaphorn. “Which we used to call, in our days of cultural insensitivity, the Navajo Flu.”

  “A name which we didn’t like any better than the American Legion liked your name for Legionnaire’s disease.”

  “So now we give both of them their dignified Greek titles, and everybody is happy,” Krause said. “And anyway, what I was doing was separating the fleas from the fur of a Peromyscus, actually a Peromyscus maniculatus, and ninety-nine-point-nine chances out of a hundred, when we test both fleas and mammal, the tests will show I have murdered a perfectly healthy deer mouse who never hosted a virus in his life. But we won’t know until we get the lab work done.”

  “Are you finished here now?” Leaphorn asked. “Do you have time for some questions?”

  “Some,” Krause said. He turned and waved at the row of metal boxes in the shade. “But before I can peel off this uniform—which is officially called a Positive Air Purifying Respirator suit, or PAPR, in vector controller slang—I’ve got to finish with the mice in those traps. Separate the fleas and then it’s slice and dice for the poor little deer mice.”

  “I have plenty of time,” Leaphorn said. “I’ll just watch you work.”

  “From a distance, though. It’s probably safe. As far as we know, hantavirus spreads aerobically. In other words, it’s carried in the mouse urine, and when that dries, it’s in the dust people breathe. The trouble is, if it infects you, there’s no way to cure it.”

  “I’ll stay back,” Leaphorn said. “And I’ll hold my questions until you get out of that suit. I’ll bet you’re cooking.”

  “Better cooked than dead,” Krause said. “And it’s not as bad as it looks. The air blowing into the hood keeps your head cool. Stick your hand close here and feel it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Leaphorn said.

  He watched while Krause emptied the box traps one at a ti
me, combed the fleas out of the fur into individual bags and then extracted the pertinent internal organs. He put those in bottles and the corpses into the disposal canister. He peeled off the PAPR and dropped it into the same can.

  “Runs the budget up,” he said. “When we’re hunting plague, we don’t use the PAPRS when we’re just trapping. And after we’ve done the slice-and-dice work, we save ’em for reuse, unless we slosh prairie dog innards on them. But with hantavirus you don’t take any chances. But what can I tell you that might be useful?”

  “Well, first let me tell you that we found the Jeep Miss Pollard was driving. It had been left in an arroyo down that road that leads past Goldtooth.”

  “Well, at least she was going in the direction she told me she was going,” Krause said, grinning. “No note left for me about taking an early vacation or anything like that?”

  “Only a little smear of blood,” Leaphorn said.

  Krause’s grin vanished.

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “Blood. Her blood?” He shook his head. “From the very first, I’ve been taking for granted that one day she’d either call or just walk in, probably without even explaining anything until I asked her. You just don’t think something is going to happen to Cathy. Nothing that she doesn’t want to happen.”

  “We don’t know that it has,” Leaphorn said. “Not for sure.”

  Krause’s expression changed again. Immense relief. “It wasn’t her blood?”

  “That brings us to my question. Do you have any idea where we might find .a sample of Miss Pollard’s blood? Enough for the lab to make a comparison?”