The First Eagle

by Tony Hillerman

  “No,” Chee said. “Not quite.”

  “So tell me then,” Nakai said. “What brings you?”

  So Chee told Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai of the death of Benjamin Kinsman, the arrest of the Hopi eagle poacher, of Jano’s unlikely story of the first and second eagles. He told him of the death sentence and even of Janet Pete. And finally Chee said: “Now I am finished.”

  Nakai had listened so silently that at times Chee—had he not known the man so well— might have thought he was asleep. Chee waited. Twilight had faded into total darkness while he talked and now the high, dry night sky was a-dazzle with stars.

  Chee looked at them, remembered how the impatient Coyote spirit had scattered them across the darkness. He hunted out the summer constellations Nakai had taught him to find, and as he found them, tried to match them with the stories they carried in their medicine bundles. And as he thought, he prayed to the Creator, to all the spirits who cared about such things, that the medicine had worked, that Nakai was sleeping, that Nakai would never awaken to his pain.

  Nakai sighed. He said: “In a little while I will ask you questions,” and was silent again.

  Blue Lady came out with a blanket, spread it carefully over Nakai and adjusted the lantern. “He likes the starlight,” she said. “Do you need this?”

  Chee shook his head. She turned off the flame and walked back into the hogan.

  “Could you catch the eagle without harming it?”

  “Probably,” Chee said; “I tried twice when I was young. I caught the second one.”

  “Checking the talons and the feathers for dried blood, would the laboratory kill it then?”

  Chee considered, remembering the ferocity of eagles, remembering the priorities of the laboratory. “Some of them would try to save it, but it would die.”

  Nakai nodded. “You think Jano tells the truth?”

  “Once I was sure there was only one eagle. Now I don’t know. Probably he is lying.”

  “But you don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “And never would know. Even after the federals kill the Hopi you would wonder.”

  “Of course I would.”

  Nakai was silent again. Chee found another of the constellations. The small one, low on the horizon. He could not remember its Navajo name, nor the story it carried.

  “Then you must get the eagle,” Nakai said. “Do you still keep your medicine jish? You have pollen?”

  “Yes,” Chee said.

  “Then take your sweat bath. Make sure you remember the hunting songs. You must tell the eagle, just as we told the buck deer, of our respect for it. Tell it the reason we must send it with our blessings away to its next life. Tell it that it dies to save a valuable man of the Hopi people.”

  “I will,” Chee said.

  “And tell Blue Lady I need the medicine that makes me sleep.”

  But Blue Lady had already sensed that. She was coming.

  This time there were pills as well as a drink from the cup.

  “I will try to sleep now,” Nakai said, and smiled at Chee. “Tell the eagle that he will also be saving you, my grandson.”

  Where was Acting lieutenant Jim Chee? He’d gone to Phoenix yesterday and hadn’t checked in this morning. Maybe he was still there. Maybe he was on his way back. Check later. Leaphorn hung up and considered what to do. First he’d take a shower. He flicked on the television, still tuned to the Flagstaff station he’d been watching before sleep overcame him, and turned on the shower.

  They had good showerheads in this Tuba City motel, a fine, hard jet of hot water better than the one in his bathroom. He soaped, scrubbed, listened to the voice of the television newscaster reporting what seemed to be a traffic death, then a quarrel at a school board meeting. Then he heard “—murder of Navajo policeman Benjamin Kinsman.” He turned off the shower and walked, dripping soapy water, to stand before the set.

  It seemed that Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney J. D. Mickey had held a press conference yesterday evening. He was standing behind a battery of microphones at a podium with a tall, dark-haired man stationed uneasily slightly behind him. The taller man was clad in a white shirt, dark tie and a well-tailored dark business suit, which caused Leaphorn to immediately identify him as an FBI agent—apparently a new one to this part of the world, since Leaphorn didn’t recognize him, and probably a special agent in charge, since he had come to take credit for whatever discoveries had been made in an affair that produced the sort of headlines upon which the Bureau fed.

  “The evidence the FBI has collected makes it clear that this crime was not only a murder done in the commission of a felony, which would make it a capital crime under the old law, but that it fits the intent of Congress in the passage of the legislation allowing the death penalty for such crimes committed on federal reservations.” Mickey paused, looked at his notes, adjusted his glasses. “We didn’t decide to seek the death penalty casually,” Mickey continued. “We considered the problem confronting the Navajo Tribal Police, and the police of the Hopis and Apaches and all the other reservation tribes, and the same problems shared by the police of the various states. These men and women patrol vast distances, alone in their patrol cars, without the quick backup assistance that officers in the small, more populous states can expect. Our police are utterly vulnerable in this situation, and their killers have time to be miles away before help can arrive. I have the names of the officers who have been killed in just—”

  Leaphorn switched off the mortality list and ducked back into the shower. He had known several of those men. Indeed, six of them were Navajo policemen. And it was a story that needed to be told. So why did he resent hearing Mickey tell it? Because Mickey was a hypocrite. He decided to skip breakfast and wait for Chee at the police station.

  Chee’s car was already in the parking lot, and Acting Lieutenant Chee was sitting behind his desk, looking downcast and exhausted. He looked up from the file he was reading and forced a smile.

  “I’ll just ask a couple of questions and then I’ll be out of here,” Leaphorn said. “The first one is, do you have a report yet from the crime scene people? Did they list what they found in the Jeep?”

  “This is it,” Chee said, waving the file. “I just got it.”

  “Oh,” Leaphorn said.

  “Sit down,” Chee said. “Let me see what’s in it.”

  Leaphorn sat, holding his hat in his lap. It reminded him of his days as a rookie cop, waiting for Captain Largo to decide what to do with him.

  “No fingerprints except the radio thief,” Chee said. “I think I already told you that. Good wiping job. There were prints on the owner’s manual in the glove box, presumed to be Catherine Pollard’s.” He glanced up at Leaphorn, turned a page and resumed reading.

  “Here’s the list of items found in the Jeep,” he said, and handed it across the desk to Leaphorn. “I didn’t see anything interesting on it”

  It was fairly long. Leaphorn skipped the items in the glove box and door pockets and started with the backseat. There the team had found three filter-tip Kool cigarette butts, a Baby Ruth candy wrapper, a thermos containing cold coffee, a cardboard box containing fourteen folded metal rodent traps, eight larger prairie dog traps, two shovels, rope, and a satchel that contained five pairs of latex gloves and a variety of other items that, while the writer could only guess at their technical titles, were obviously the tools of the vector control trade.

  Leaphorn looked up from the list. Chee was watching him.

  “Did you notice the spare tire, the jack and the tire tools were all missing?” Chee asked. “I guess our radio thief didn’t limit himself to that and the battery.”

  “This is all of it?” Leaphorn asked. “Everything that they found in the Jeep?”

  “That’s it,” Chee said, frowning. “Why?”

  “Krause said she always carried a respirator suit in the Jeep with her.”

  “A what?”

  “They call ’em PAPRS,” Leaphorn said. “F
or Positive Air Purifying Respirator Suit. They look a little like what the astronauts wear, or the people who make computer chips.”

  “Oh,” Chee said. “Maybe she left it at her motel. We can check if you think it’s important.”

  The telephone on Chee’s desk buzzed. He picked it up, said, “Yes.” Said, “Good, that’s a lot faster than I expected.” Said, “Sure, I’ll hold.”

  He put his hand over the receiver. “They’ve got the report on the bloodwork.”

  Leaphorn said: “Fine,” but Chee was listening again.

  “That’s the right number of days,” Chee told the telephone, and listened again, frowned, said:

  “It wasn’t? Then what the hell was it?” listened again, then said: “Well, thanks a lot.”

  He put down the telephone.

  “It wasn’t human blood,” Chee said. “It was from some sort of rodent. He said he’d guess it was from a prairie dog.”

  Leaphorn leaned back in his chair. “Well now,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Chee said. He tapped his fingers on the desktop a moment, then picked up the telephone, punched a button and said: “Hold any calls for a while, please.”

  “Did you see the dried blood on the seat?” Leaphorn asked.

  “I did.”

  “How’d it look? I mean, had it been spilled there, or smeared on, or maybe an injured prairie dog had been put there, or dripped, or what?”

  “I don’t know,” Chee said. “I know it didn’t look like somebody had been stabbed, or shot, and bled there. It didn’t really look natural—like what you expect to see at a homicide scene.” He grimaced. “It looked more like it had been poured out on the edge of the leather seat. Then it had run down the side and a little onto the floor.”

  “She would have had access to blood,” Leaphorn said.

  “Yeah,” Chee said. “I thought of that.”

  “Why do it?” Leaphorn laughed. “It suggests she didn’t have a very high opinion of the Navajo Tribal Police.”

  Chee looked surprised, saw the point. “You mean we’d just take for granted it was her blood and wouldn’t check.” He shook his head. “Well, it could happen. And then we’d be looking for her body instead of for her.”

  “If she did it,” Leaphorn said.

  “Right. If. You know, Lieutenant, I sort of wish we were back in Window Rock right now, with that map of yours on the wall, and you’d be putting your pins in it.” He grinned at Leaphorn. “And explaining to me what happened.”

  “You’re thinking about where the Jeep was left? So far from anywhere?”

  “I was,” Chee said.

  “Way too far to walk to Tuba City. Too far to walk back to Yells Back Butte. So somebody had to meet her, or whoever drove the Jeep there, and give them a lift,” Leaphorn said.

  “Like who?”

  “Did I tell you about Victor Hammar?”

  “Hammar? If you did, I don’t remember.”

  “He’s a graduate student at Arizona State. A biologist, like Pollard. They were friends. Mrs. Vanders had him pegged as a stalker, a threat to her niece. He’d been out here just a few days before she disappeared, working with her. And he was out here the day I showed up to start my little search.”

  Chee’s expression brightened. “Well now,” he said, “I think we should talk to Mr. Ham-mar.”

  “The trouble is he told me he was teaching his lab course at ASU the day she vanished. Actually he wasn’t. He called in sick. Haven’t checked beyond that.”

  Chee nodded and grinned again. “I have a map.” He pulled open his desk drawer, rummaged and pulled out a folded Indian Country map. “Just like yours.” He spread it on the desktop. “Except it’s not mounted so I can stick pins in it.”

  Leaphorn picked up a pencil, leaned over the map and made some quick additions to terrain features. He drew little lines to mark the cliffs of Yells Back Butte and the saddle linking it to Black Mesa. A dot indicated the location of the Tijinney hogan. With that Leaphorn stopped.

  “What do you think?” Chee asked.

  “I think we’re wasting our time. We need a larger map scale.”

  Chee extracted a sheet of typing paper from his desk and penciled in the area around the butte, the roads and the terrain features. He drew a tiny h for the Tijinney hogan, an l for Woody’s lab, a faint irregular line from the hogan to represent the track in from the dirt road, and a little j and k for where Jano and Kinsman had left their vehicles. He examined his work for a moment, then added another faint line from the saddle back to the road.

  Leaphorn was watching. “What’s that?”

  “I saw a flock of goats on the wrong side of the saddle and a track leading in. I think it’s a shortcut the goatherd uses so he doesn’t have to climb over,” Chee said.

  “I didn’t know about that,” Leaphorn said. He took the pencil and added an x near the Yells

  Back cliffs. “And here is where an old woman McGinnis called Old Lady Notah told people she had seen a snowman. The same woman?

  Probably.”

  “Snowman? When was that?”

  “We don’t know the day. Maybe the day Miss Pollard disappeared. The day Ben Kinsman got hit on the head.” Leaphorn leaned back in his chair. “She thought she’d seen a skinwalker. First it was a man, then it walked behind a bunch of jumpers and when she saw it again it was all white and shiny.”

  Chee rubbed a finger against his nose, looked up at Leaphorn. “Which is why you were asking me about that filter respirator suit, isn’t it? You thought Pollard was wearing it.”

  “Maybe Miss Pollard. Maybe Dr. Woody. I’ll bet he has one. Or maybe somebody else. Anyway, I’m going to go talk to that old lady if I can find her,” Leaphorn said.

  “Dr. Woody, he’d have access to animal blood, too,” Chee said. “And so would Krause, for that matter.”

  “And so would Hammar, our man with the bum alibi. Now I think it might be worth the time to look into that.”

  They considered this for a while.

  “Did you know Frank Sam Nakai?” Chee asked.

  “The hataalii?” Leaphorn asked. “I met him a few times. He taught curing ceremonials at the college at Tsali. And he did a yeibichai sing for one of Emma’s uncles after he had a stroke. A fine old man, Nakai.”

  “He’s my maternal granduncle,” Chee said. “I went to see him last night. He’s dying of cancer.”

  “Ah,” Leaphorn said. “Another good man lost.”

  “Did you see the TV news this morning? The press conference J. D. Mickey called in Phoenix?”

  “Some of it,” Leaphorn said.

  “He’s going for the death penalty, of course. The sonofabitch.”

  “Running for Congress,” Leaphorn said. “What he said about cops out here having no backup help, lousy radio communications, all that’s true enough.”

  “It’s a funny thing,” Chee said. “I catch Jano practically red-handed standing over Kinsman. He was there, and nobody else was around. He had a fine revenge motive. And then there’s Jano’s blood mixed with Kinsman’s on the front of Kinsman’s uniform—just about where he would have cut himself on Kinsman’s buckle if they’d been struggling. You have a dead-cinch conviction—and all Jano can do is come up with a daydream story about the eagle he poached slashing him—and there’s the eagle right there with no blood on it, so he says not that eagle. That’s the second eagle, he says. I caught one earlier and turned it loose.” Chee shook his head. “And yet, I’m beginning to have some doubts. It’s crazy.”

  Leaphorn let that all pass without comment.

  “That other eagle story is so phony that I’m surprised Janet’s not too embarrassed to give it to the jury.”

  Leaphorn made a wry face, shrugged.

  “Jano claims he pulled out a couple of the first eagle’s tail feathers,” Chee said. “I saw one circling up there over Yells Back with a gap in its tail plume.”

  “So what are you going to do?” Leaphorn asked.

  “J
ano told me how to locate the blind where he caught the first eagle. I’m going to get myself a rabbit as eagle bait and go up there tomorrow and catch the bird. Or shoot it if I can’t catch it. If there’s no old blood in the grooves in its talons, or in its ankle feathers, then I don’t have any more doubts.”

  Leaphorn considered this. “Well,” he said. “Eagles are territorial hunters. It would probably be the same bird. But the blood could be from a rodent it caught.”

  “If there’s dried blood anywhere, I’ll take it in and let the lab decide. You want to come along?”

  “No thanks,” Leaphorn said. “I’m going to go find the lady with the goats and learn about that snowman she saw.”

  Acting Lieutenant Jim Chee reached Yells Back Butte early and well prepared. He climbed the saddle while the light of dawn was just brightening the sky over Black Mesa, carrying his binoculars, an eagle cage, his lunch, a canteen of water, a quart thermos of coffee, a rabbit and his rifle. He found the tilted slab of rimrock just where Jano said it would be, straightened out the disordered brush that formed the blind’s roof. He took out his medicine bag and removed from the doeskin pouch the polished stone replica of a badger, which Frank Sam Nakai had given him as his hunting fetish, and an aspirin bottle, which held pollen. He put the fetish in his right hand and sprinkled a pinch of pollen over it. Then he faced the east and waited. Just as the rim of the sun appeared, he sang his morning song and sprinkled an offering of pollen from the bottle. That done, he shifted into the hunting chant, telling the eagle of his respect for it, asking it to come and join in this sacrifice that would send it into its next life with his blessing and, perhaps, save the life of the Hopi whose arm it had slashed.

  Then he climbed down into the blind.

  By 10:00 a.m. he had watched two eagles patrolling the rim of the butte to the west of his position, neither the one he wanted. He’d found the feather he’d left behind on his original visit to the blind, retrieved it, wrapped it in his handkerchief and laid it aside. He’d consumed about fifty percent of his coffee and the apple from his lunch sack, and read two more chapters of Execution Eve, the Bill Buchanan book he’d brought along to pass the time. At 10:23, the eagle he wanted showed up.