A Thief of Time

by Tony Hillerman

  Egrets, he thought, were like snow geese and wolves and those other creatures—like Leaphorn himself—that mated only once and for life. That would explain its presence here. It was living out its loneliness in this empty place. Leaphorn’s kayak slid out of the darkness under the cliff and into a moonlit eddy. His shadow streaked out from that of the kayak, making a strange elongated shape. It reminded him of the bird, and he waved the paddle to magnify the effect. As he rested with his arms relaxed, he became the stick figure of the yei Black God as Navajo shamans represented him in the dry painting of the Night Chant. Bent over the paddle, pulling his weight against the water, he was Kokopelli, with his hunched back full of sorrows. He was thinking that, as the current swept him around the cliff into the dark. Here, with all black except the stars directly overhead, the shout of the river drowned out everything.

  As the San Juan drops toward its rendezvous with the mighty Colorado, its rapids are relatively mild. It is the goal of those who run rivers for joy to nose their tough little kayaks into the throats of these cataracts for the thrill of being buried under the white water. It was Leaphorn’s goal to skirt the bedlam and keep dry. Even so, he emerged soaked from the waist down and well splashed elsewhere. The river here had cut through the Comb Ridge anticline—what millions of years of erosion had left of the Monument Upwarp. Here, eons ago, the earth’s crust had bulged outward in a massive bubble of bending stone layers. Leaphorn drifted past slanting layers of stone which, even in this dim light, gave the eerie impression of sliding toward the center of the earth.

  Beyond the anticline, he used his flashlight to check another sandy bench and the mouth of two washes. Then, around another bend and through another rapids, he guided the kayak into the eddy where Many Ruins Wash drained a huge expanse of the Navajo Reservation into the San Juan. If he had a specific destination when he left Sand Island, this was it.

  Leaphorn had long since stopped trying to keep dry. He waded knee-deep through the eddy, pulled the kayak well ashore, and sat on the sand beside it, catching his breath. He was weary. He was wet. He was cold. Abruptly, he was very, very cold. He found himself shaking and unable to control the motion. His hands shook. So did his legs. His teeth chattered. Hypothermia. Leaphorn had suffered it before. It frightened him then and it frightened him now.

  He pushed himself to his feet, staggered down the sand, the flashlight beam jittering erratically ahead of him. He found a place where a flash flood had left a tangle of twigs. He fumbled the lip balm tube in which he kept kitchen matches out of his jacket, managed to get his shaking fingers to open it, managed to stuff desiccated grass under a pile of twigs, managed on the third match to get the fire going. He added driftwood, fanned the fire into a blaze with his hat, and stood beside it, panting and shaking.

  In his panic he had made the fire in the wrong place. Now, with his jeans steaming and some warmth returning to his blood, he looked around for a better place. He built this new fire where two walls of stone formed a sand-floored pocket, collecting enough heavy driftwood to keep it going until morning. Then he dried his clothing thoroughly.

  This was where he’d expected to find the kayak. Up this canyon somewhere he expected to find the site that had drawn Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. When the river delayed him, he’d decided to wait for daylight to hunt the kayak. But now he couldn’t wait. Tired as he was, he picked up the flashlight and walked back to the water.

  She had hidden it carefully, dragging it with more strength than he credited her with far up under the tangled branches of a cluster of tamarisks. He searched, expecting to find nothing, and finding only a little nylon packet jammed under the center tube. It held a red nylon poncho. Leaphorn kept it. Back at the fire, he kicked himself a loosened place in the sand, spread the poncho as a ground cloth and lay down to sleep, leaving his boots close enough to the flames to complete the drying process.

  The flames attracted flying insects. The insects attracted the bats. Leaphorn watched them fluttering at the margin of the darkness, darting to make their kill, flashing away. Emma had disliked bats. Emma had admired lizards, had battled roaches endlessly, had given names to the various spiders that lived around their house and—all too often—in it. Emma would have enjoyed this trip. He had always planned to take her, but there was never time, until now, when time no longer mattered. Emma would have been intensely interested in the affair of Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, would have felt a rapport with her. Would have asked him, if he’d forgotten to report, what progress was being made. Would have had advice for him. Well, tomorrow he would find that woman. A sort of gift, it would be.

  He shifted himself into the sand. A chunk of driftwood fell, sending a shower of sparks up toward the stars. Leaphorn slept.

  The cold awakened him. The fire had burned to dim embers, the moon was down, and the sky over him was an incredible dazzle of stars humans can see only when high altitude, clear, dry air, and an absence of ground light combine. Below these black thousand-foot cliffs, it was like looking into space from the bottom of a well. Leaphorn rebuilt the fire and dozed off again, listening to the night sounds. Two coyotes were on their nocturnal hunt now somewhere up the canyon and he could hear another pair very distant across the river. He heard a saw-whet owl high in the cliffs, a cry as shrill as metal rubbing metal. Just as he fell into sleep he heard the sound of a flute. Or perhaps it was just part of his dream.

  When he awoke again, he was shivering with cold. It was late dawn, with the coldest air of night settled into this canyon slot. He got up, flinching against the stiffness, restarted the fire, drank from his canteen, and looked for the first time into the sack of food Irene Musket had sent with him—a great chunk of fry bread and a coil of boiled Polish sausage. He was hungry, but he would wait. He might need it much more later.

  Despite their age, he found a fair set of Eleanor Friedman-Bernal’s tracks pressed into the hard sand under the tamarisks—where the hanging vegetation had protected them from the moving air. Then he methodically searched the rest of this junction of canyons. He wanted to confirm that this was the place Houk had come, and he did. In fact, Houk seemed to have come here often. Probably it was his monthly destination. Someone, presumably Houk, had repeatedly slid a kayak up the sloping sand at the extreme upper end of the bench and left it under a broken-off cottonwood. From there a narrow trail took an unlikely course about five hundred yards through the brush, through the little dunes of blown sand, and down into the bottom of Many Ruins. It stopped at a little cul-de-sac of boulders.

  Leaphorn spent a half-hour in that much-used spot, partly because he could find no sign that Houk had gone beyond it. This sheltered place seemed to be where Houk’s moonlit journeys ended. Again, he was looking for confirmation of what he was now sure must be true. This damp and protected place held footprints well, and Houk’s were everywhere. Many were fresh, evidence of the final visit before his murder. On these Leaphorn focused his attention, narrowing it finally to two prints. Both had been pressed upon by something heavy and partly erased. A soft, edgeless pressure. But not a moccasin. Something odd about it. Finally, looking at both prints from every possible angle, Leaphorn realized what caused the strange lines. Fur. But they weren’t animal tracks. When patched together in Leaphorn’s mind, the pressed places had the shape of a man’s foot.

  With nothing else to learn, Leaphorn started up-canyon. While he walked he considered what he was now almost certain were the facts. Brigham Houk probably had not drowned. Somehow he had managed to get across the river. Brigham Houk, the boy who had slaughtered his mother, his brother, and his sister, was somewhere in this canyon. Had been here almost twenty years, living away from people as he had longed to live. Houk had found the boy after the hue and cry of murder died away, had sustained him secretly all these years with whatever this born hunter had needed to stay alive. Nothing else seemed to explain Houk’s note. Nothing else Leaphorn could think of would have motivated the man to stop an admittedly futile effort to build a hiding place to w
rite a note. Houk didn’t want this mad son of his abandoned here. He wanted him found by the same policeman who had once shown some awareness of the boy’s humanity. He wanted him cared for, and he’d given up whatever minuscule chance he’d had of living to write his note. The writing had been tiny, Leaphorn remembered, and started at one end of the card. What would Houk have said had time allowed? Would he have explained about Brigham? He’d never know.

  About two miles up the twisting canyon Leaphorn found the only sign of modern human occupancy. The bare poles of an old sweat bath stood on the broad shelf above the canyon floor. The ashes under it suggested it hadn’t been used for years. If the canyon had ever been grazed, it hadn’t been recently. He found no tracks of horses, sheep, or goats. The only hoofprints he found were mule deer, and there seemed to be plenty of rabbits, porcupines, and small rodents. He noticed three game trails leading to a deep spring-fed pothole at the canyon bottom. Four miles up, he stopped in a shady place and ate a small piece of the bread and a couple of inches of the sausage. There was heavy cloud cover over the northwest sky now. It was colder and yesterday’s wind was back again now with a vengeance. It blew cross-canyon, forming powerful eddies of air that swirled this way here, and that way there. It made the odd sounds wind makes when it pours through stony crevices. It sent whirlwinds of fallen leaves sweeping around Leaphorn’s legs. It blotted out all other sound.

  The wind made walking difficult, and the crooked, erratic nature of the canyon bottom made estimating distance—even for one as experienced as Leaphorn—little more than guesswork. Double guesswork, he thought. He had to guess how much of this climbing over tumbled boulders and detouring around brush would have added to the five and a half miles Etcitty had estimated. It would be less than that, he was sure, and he’d been looking for the landmarks Etcitty had mentioned since about mile three. Just ahead, where the canyon bottom made a sharp bend, he saw a crevice in the cliff walled in with stones—an Anasazi storeroom. On the cliff below it, half obscured by tall brush, he saw pictographs. He climbed the soft earth to the floor of the bench and pushed his way through the heavy growth of nettles for a closer look.

  The dominant shape was one of those broad-shouldered, pin-headed figures that anthropologists believe represented Anasazi shamans. It looked, as Etcitty had described it, “like a big baseball umpire holding up a pink chest protector.” Leaphorn recrossed the canyon bottom and climbed the shelf on the other side. He saw what he had come to find.

  Near its beginnings in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins Canyon is cut deep and narrow through the Chinle sandstone formation of that plateau. There its cliffs rise sheer and vertical almost a thousand feet above a narrow, sandy bottom. It is much shallower by the time it emerges into Chinle Valley and becomes a mere drainage wash as it meanders northward toward Utah through the Greasewood Flats. But the cut deepens again in its passage through the Nokaito Bench to the San Juan. Here the crazy mishmash geology of the earth’s crust had given Many Ruins a different shape. One climbed out of it on a series of steps. First the low, sometimes earthen cliffs that crowded its narrow streambed, then a broken sandstone shelf hundreds of yards wide, then more cliffs, rising to another shelf, and still more cliffs rising to the flat top of Nokaito Mesa.

  In the spring when the snowpack melts a hundred miles away in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins carries a steady stream. In the late-summer thunderstorm season it rises and falls between a trickle and booming flash floods, which send boulders tumbling like marbles down its bottom. In late autumn it dries. The life that occupied it finds water then only in spring-fed potholes.

  From where he stood on the sandstone shelf above such a pothole, Leaphorn could see the second of the ruins Etcitty had described. Two ruins, in fact.

  Part of the wall of one was visible in an alcove in the second level of cliffs above him. Another, reduced to little more than a brushy hump, had been built along the base of the cliff not two hundred yards from the alcove.

  All this day he had fought down his sense of excitement and urgency. He had a long ways to go and he went at a careful walk. Now he trotted across the sandstone bench.

  He stopped when the alcove came in full view. Like those invariably picked as building sites by the Anasazi, it faced the low winter sun, with enough overhang to shade it in the summer. A cluster of brushy vegetation grew under it, telling him it was also the site of seep. He walked toward it, more slowly now. He didn’t consider Brigham Houk particularly dangerous. Houk had called him schizophrenic—unpredictable but not likely to be a threat to a stranger. Still, he had killed once in an insane rage. Leaphorn unsnapped the flap that held his pistol in its holster.

  Eons of water running down the inner face of the alcove had worn a depression several feet into the sandstone below it. Water stains indicated this held a pool about four feet deep in wetter seasons. Now only a foot or two was left—still fed by a tiny trickle from a mossy crevice in the cliff, and now green with algae. It was also the home of scores of tiny leopard frogs, which hopped away from Leaphorn’s feet.

  Only some of them hopped.

  Leaphorn squatted, grunted with surprise. He studied the small scattered frog bodies, some already shriveled, some newly dead, each with a leg secured by a yucca thread to a tiny peg cut from a twig. He stood, trying to make sense of this. The pegs followed a series of faint concentric circles drawn around the pothole, the outside one perhaps four feet from the water. Some sort of game, Leaphorn guessed. He tried to understand the mind that would be amused by it. He failed. Brigham Houk was insane, probably dangerous.

  He considered. Brigham Houk almost certainly would already know he was here.

  Leaphorn made a megaphone of his hands. “Eleanor,” he shouted. “Ellie. Ellie.” Then he listened.

  Nothing. Outside the alcove, the wind made whimpering sounds.

  He tried again. Again, nothing.

  The Anasazi had built their structure on a stone shelf above the pool. About a dozen small rooms once, Leaphorn estimated, with part of it at two levels. He skirted around the pool, climbed over the tumbled walls, peered into the still-intact rooms. Nothing. He walked back to the pool, puzzled. Where to look next?

  At the edge of the alcove, a worn set of footholds had been cut into the sandstone—a climb-way leading to the shelf above the alcove. Perhaps that led to another site. He walked out of the alcove around the cliff to the brushy hump. Immediately he saw it had been plundered. A ditch had been dug along the outside wall. Bones were scattered everywhere. The digging had been recent—hardly any rain since the earth was disturbed. Leaphorn inspected it. Was this why Eleanor Friedman-Bernal had slipped away from Chaco, slipped down the San Juan? To search this site for her polychrome pots? So it would seem. And what had happened then? What had interrupted her? He checked in the disturbed earth for shards and collected a handful. They might be the sort that interested her. He couldn’t be sure. He looked down in the trench. Jutting from the earth was part of a pot. And another. In the bottom were a half-dozen shards, two of them large. Why had she left them there? Then he noticed an oddity. Among the bones littering the trench he saw no skulls. On the earth outside more than a dozen were scattered. None had jawbones. Natural, probably. The mandible would be attached only by muscle and gristle, which wouldn’t survive an eight-hundred-year burial. Then where were the missing mandibles? He saw five of them together beside the trench, as if discarded there. It reminded him of the jawbones lined so neatly at the dig site where Etcitty and Nails had died.

  But where was the woman who had dug the trench? He went back to the pool and inspected the footholds. Then he started climbing, thinking as he did that he was far too old for this. Fifty feet up the cliff, he was aware of two facts. These Anasazi footholds were in regular current use, and he was a damn fool to have attempted the climb. He clung to the stone, reaching blindly for the next handhold, wondering how many remained. Finally the slope eased. He looked up. He had done it. His head was almost even with the top. He
pulled himself up, his upper body over the edge.

  Standing there, watching him, was a man. He wore a beard cut straight across, a nylon jacket so new it still had the creases of its folds, a pair of tattered jeans, and moccasins that seemed to have been sewn together from deer hide.

  “Mr. Leaphorn,” the man said. “Papa said you coming.”

  NINETEEN

  AS HARRISON HOUK’S MESSAGE to him had promised, Dr. Eleanor Friedman-Bernal was still alive. She lay dozing under a gray wool blanket and a covering of sewn-together rabbit skins. She looked very, very ill.

  “Can she talk?” he asked Brigham.

  “A little,” he said. “Sometimes.”

  It occurred to Leaphorn that Brigham Houk might have been describing himself. He talked very little and sometimes not at all. What you’d expect, Leaphorn thought, after twenty years of no one to talk to except once every full moon.

  “How bad is it? Her injuries I mean?”

  “Knee’s hurt,” he said. “Arm broken. Place in her side. Place in her hip.”

  And probably all infected, Leaphorn thought. Thin as her face was, it was flushed.

  “You found her and brought her here?”

  Brigham nodded. Like his father, he was a small man, tightly built, with short arms and legs and a thick, strong torso.

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “The devil came and hurt her,” Brigham said in an odd, flat voice. “He hit her. She ran away. He chased. She fell down. He pushed her off. She fell into the canyon. Broke everything.”

  Brigham had made a bed for her by digging a coffin-shaped pit in the sand that had drifted into a room of the sheltered ruin. He’d filled it with a two-or three-foot layer of leaves. Open as it was to the air, it had the sickroom smell of urine and decay.