“Uncle! You have to come see this!” he breathlessly replied.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like this, it was flying and fell to the ground. There are beings in it, and they are all dead. I got there just in time for one of the beings to talk to my spirit as he died.”
“Beings? You spoke with one of them”
“Yes, Uncle. He was greatly out of harmony. I stayed with him until he died.”
“What did he say?”
“He felt ashamed and was crying for his wife.”
“Was he in a hogan?”
“Perhaps. I do not know what their hogans look like.”
“Did you enter that dwelling?”
“No, Uncle.”
“Tell me about the beings.”
“They’re not Navajo, human, or animal. Could be skin walkers or Yei Bechei.”
George studied the boy carefully. Ben was not a fearful boy. He’d seen him hold off black bears and coyotes with nothing more than a staff and two dogs. Whatever he found disturbed him, but strangely, he did not appear out of harmony.
“Put the flock back in the pen and we’ll go look.”
The flock hadn’t been grazing yet, but Ben put a handful of corn in a bucket and placed it in the backside of the pen. When the goats saw it, they went in and the sheep blindly followed. Ben put the pole gate back up and joined his uncle.
His uncle considered it for a moment and decided it was probably a helicopter crash from the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, or one of the other government agencies. He climbed into the saddle of his horse, and with one motion pulled Ben up into the saddle behind him.
Arriving back at the crash site, they dismounted, and puzzled, approached the vessel. It had quit humming and what appeared to be a loading ramp’s door seemed to be cracked open on one side. Ben’s uncle motioned to the boy to stay back as he looked inside the vessel. His uncle was both amazed and horrified by what he saw. The fate of his nation bore its entire weight on George’s shoulders. Not since Iwo Jima had he felt so out of harmony. He had no intention of telling the authorities about Ben’s “conversation” with the strange beings; lest someone misunderstand and accuse the boy of being a witch. What happened next could be disastrous if it were handled wrong.
Sergeant Michael Roanhorse of the Navajo Tribal Police was travelling south on HWY 666 on patrol. Standing five feet, eight inches tall, he was lean and well-built with narrow hips typical of Navajos. He had very dark eyes and hair, high cheekbones, and eyes shaped more like an Asian’s, which he inherited from his Anasazi ancestors who’d crossed over the Bering Sea.
He was a man of modern and traditional beliefs, and unquestionably loyal to the Navajo Nation. Earlier this year, the Navajo council had finally gotten their voice heard and formed the Navajo Tribal Police. But, it came with a price. Each NTP officer was also deputized in all of the counties his district covered, and when in that capacity—under white men’s authority. The odd thing was most of these counties were totally swallowed up by the reservation. Major crimes like drug running and murder were officially under the jurisdiction of the FBI, or as the NTP officers called them, the “Federal Bureau of Ineptitude.” A former marine, Roanhorse decided not to re-enlist when he was offered a position as sergeant in the NTP. For him, this was a dream come true.
He had returned home to the sacred Four Corners Reservation. Single at twenty-six, he lived with his mother in a rented house in Shiprock. A Many Goats Clan woman, she was on the lookout for a suitable wife of the right clan to keep him among his people forever and bring her grandchildren. Michael seemed amused by her efforts but assured her he was not in a hurry and wasn’t leaving the reservation.
Roanhorse stopped by the Sheep Springs Trading Post for some tobacco and cigarette papers. The owner had a pot of coffee on and offered him a cup, which he accepted, with sugar, no cream. He swapped reservation news with the owner for a while, then rolled a Bull Durham cigarette which he smoked while finishing his second cup of coffee. After finishing his cigarette, he pinched out the amber on the end, and wiped off his nicotine-stained fingers on his pant leg. It was time to get back on patrol. There had been some reports of cattle rustling toward Two Gray Hills. Putting on his Stetson hat, he walked back to his car. Roanhorse recognized George Etsitty riding up to his car on a horse and leading a second horse behind him.
“Yá’át’ééh, Sergeant Roanhorse.”
“Yá’át’ééh, Uncle.” He overcame his curiosity and practiced proper Navajo manners with the elder man by waiting for him to speak.
Holding the lead to the second horse, the elder man offered it to the young policeman. “I have something to show you.”
“Is there trouble? Do I need help?”
“No crime committed. Trouble maybe, but help probably not needed.” Help probably not needed didn’t fit the expression George wore. He looked like a man who’d seen an evil spirit, or maybe suffering from ghost sickness.
“George, what’s bothering you? You look like a man out of harmony.”
“There was an accident on Mary’s grazing lease. A flying machine crashed. There are many dead on the mountain; it’s not just the dead but who they are.”
“Who are they?”
“I have no idea. I thought you might help me figure that out.”
Roanhorse’s immediate concern was that George might be afflicted with ghost sickness. “Did you touch any of the bodies, or enter the vessel?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Roanhorse called into his dispatcher Gladys Chavez and advised he would be going up to Mary Yazzie’s hogan up on the Chuska Mountains west of Sheep Springs to look at something with George Etsitty. He followed George to the Sheep Springs Chapter House. Retrieving his shotgun from under the dash, he locked the car and made arrangements for someone to see that no one messed with his patrol car.
Roanhorse accepted the reigns of the black stud and they rode five miles past where HWY 32 reached the foot of the Chuskas. Both men rode the long climb to the Yazzie hogan and arrived about two pm. It was good manners to stop and speak with Mary Yazzie.
“Yá’át’ééh, Ama’ Sa’ ni?” (Hello, is it good, grandmother?)
“Yá’át’ééh. (Hello, it is good.) I made some mutton stew and coffee; come and eat.” He’d skipped dinner, and was starving after the ride up the mountain. He looked at George, who nodded his head. What he had to show him could wait.
Mary Yazzie was about fifty years old. She wore a red velvet blouse adorned with silver buttons and pins on the yoke and sleeves, and a crimson colored velvet skirt, with a squash blossom silver pin in her long, dark-black hair. George was blessed with a good natured mother-in-law. Sometimes the son-in-law wasn’t treated well, as with all cultures, but more so in a matrilineal culture. She had two daughters living and one son, whom she lost in Korea. His widow lived near her mother’s hogan with her two daughters. The handsome young policeman recited his family lineage upon introduction. Mary’s daughters were both married and her granddaughters were not old enough for her to explore the possibilities of this young policeman’s single status. Pity, she thought. He is a very handsome man, and employed.
George hadn’t discussed with the women what he found at the crash site, saying only that a flying machine had gone down and that he had to go get the lawman. He solemnly charged Ben to speak of the crash site to no one, and to take the herd to the north to graze.
The women didn’t ask SGT Roanhorse anything about the crash because he hadn’t been there yet. The women asked the policeman about the news of the Diné (Navajo people). He chatted with them politely and gave them updates of general reservation news. He refused a second bowl of stew claiming he couldn’t ride very well on two helpings, but he did accept a cup of coffee. He and George rolled and smoked a cigarette after dinner and then decided it was time to leave.
The two men mounted their horses and rode to the crash site.
Roanhorse was puzzled and uneasy when he beheld it. There in the clearing in the stand of blue grama grass was a large metallic disc. This can’t be anything but trouble, he thought. If it was a military prototype of a new fighter aircraft, then the government had to be alerted. Even if it were, this could cause a backlash with the local shamans. They could make some kind of religious thing out of it, resulting in a curse or witching of the mountain. He hoped it was the military. If it wasn’t, and the shamans found out, it would be worse. He dismounted and approached the craft, noticing that a door like a loading ramp was partially opened. He peered inside and sharply inhaled… Nothing could have prepared him for what he found. This was trouble, big trouble. He composed himself long enough to address George.
“Uncle, can you use your knife to cut juniper branches and cover this up so it cannot be seen from the sky?”
“Yes. Do you know what they are?”
“No. I have never seen anything like them. When you are through, go back to the hogan and wait for me. I have to go back to my car and call Captain Fowler, and I will be back in the morning. Speak of this to no one, particularly the women, and do not let anyone come back here. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but Mary will want to know more.”
Roanhorse ran his hand through his thick black hair, considering. “Tell her a flying machine crashed and all its crew is dead. She knows Navajos do not have any aircraft, so she will assume it is bilagaana. Allow her to think this. Tell her to keep everyone away, because of the dead bodies and the chindi. She will dutifully take charge and no one will come here. Advise her we will have the bilagaana come get their aircraft, and we will have the pilots buried.”
In Navajo metaphysics, contamination by a corpse can cause ghost sickness, which would require a Night Way or Ghost Way chant by a shaman at great time and expense to the afflicted. The ghost sickness is brought about by the person’s chindi, which is released upon death. A chindi is all the dark parts of a person: the avarice, hate, lust, malice, greed and all things ugly in the human spirit. Contamination by exposure to the person’s chindi could result in becoming ghost sick and losing hozho, harmony. It was a good bet Mary Yazzie would keep her clan away from the site.
George went to work cutting juniper branches with his bowie knife to cover the odd vessel, while Roanhorse took the horse back down the mountain. He made sure not to get careless riding downhill. He wasn’t willing to risk an accident by trying to get there too fast. It was late afternoon by the time he reached the Chapter house where his car was parked. He turned on his radio, keyed the mike and hailed the dispatcher.
“Gladys?”
“Yes, is that you Mike?”
“Yes, I need to speak with Captain Fowler.”
“Okay.” In the background, he could hear her calling for his captain.
“This is Fowler.”
“Captain, I need you to come down to the Sheep Springs Chapter House in the morning, along with Lieutenant Nez and Chairman Jones if he is still in Shiprock.”
“He is, but what is going on?”
“I cannot discuss it over the air, and the Chapter House does not have a phone. Please bring a horse trailer and three horses. You are going to need them.”
“All right, we will be there very early in the morning.”
“I’ll spend the night here at the Chapter House.”
Captain David Fowler of the Navajo Tribal Police was almost fifty years old. He’d spent time breaking horses for the white ranchers and doing the rodeo circuit before he enlisted in the Marines’ Code Talker program. His mother’s clan was the Black Streak Wood People, and his father’s clan was Chíshí, part of the Chiricahua Apaches who had been rounded up, mixed together with the Navajos and sent on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo. He’d served in the Marines as a code talker in both Japan and Korea. He left the Marines when his enlistment ended because the council had received government approval to form the NTP. He gladly accepted the position of captain of the Shiprock District. A tall man over six feet, he was built like an ox, but starting to put on a few pounds now that he had a desk job. A large nose dominated his face, accented with high cheekbones and dark eyes with long, jet-black hair tied in a ponytail, peppered with a light graying at the temples. A horseback ride up the mountain would do him good, he thought. It would be good to see his fellow code talker George Etsitty again.
He wondered what was so serious that required Chairman Jones to be present. Roanhorse hadn’t alluded to any crime having been committed. What could be so important that the three of them must come, and he wouldn’t even discuss it on the radio?
This didn’t fit the pattern of what they normally dealt with: domestic violence related to alcohol, theft of livestock, and violence related to suspicion of skin walkers. The latter was nasty business. Skin walkers, Navajo witches, also called wolves, were reputed to have the power to change their form into birds or animals, fly, and to witch someone with corpse sickness. It was this belief that caused trouble. Fowler wasn’t sure he even believed in skin walkers. The trouble was that all the traditional Navajos did. Stories of skin walkers were deeply woven into their religious stories and folklore. It was easier to believe that skin walkers were responsible for a tragedy, like cancer or mysterious illness than to have no explanation. In Navajo metaphysics, there was certainly a cause and effect for everything. This calmed the people’s spirits and helped them to walk in harmony. All it took was a sick person and whispers of a skin walker, and a normally peaceful person might be provoked to kill the offending witch. This was the ugly side of the traditional Navajo beliefs that in most other ways encouraged them to walk in truth and beauty, in harmony with their world. Fowler hated anything stupid or senseless blamed on the “skin walker nonsense,” as he called it. The first Navajo chairman, Henry Chee Dodge, had started the campaign to eliminate skin walker related violence, yet it was still a problem today.
The newly formed NTP was still figuring out its role in local law enforcement. Unlike local law enforcement elsewhere, the FBI had jurisdiction over murders on the reservation. The NTP was always the first to arrive after a murder had occurred. They were sometimes able to discern a motive that baffled the white FBI agents
Fowler informed both Chairman Paul Jones and Lieutenant Frank Nez of the trip in the morning. He also arranged for a truck, horse trailer, and three horses for the drive down to Sheep Springs. He made sure to pack his Polaroid Land Camera, which processed black and white pictures in about a minute, without needing to process the film through a commercial outlet. It might be useful to get pictures without sending them through a photo shop.
The three horses were loaded into the horse trailer early the next morning, along with their tack, bedrolls for the men, canteens, rifles, and jackets in case they got caught on the mountain after dark. Of course, they made sure to bring their all-important coffee thermoses. By seven a.m., they left Shiprock for Sheep Springs, arriving at the Sheep Springs Chapter House just before eight o’clock. They found Officer Roanhorse talking with two men on horses in front of the house. Nez pulled the truck and horse trailer up to the parking lot, put it in park and shut off the engine as Roanhorse approached the truck.
“Yá’át’ééh, Chairman, Captain, Lieutenant.”
“Yá’át’ééh, replied Nez, and the other two men nodded.”
“Well, what brings us all here so early?” asked Fowler.
“A flying machine crashed on the mountain on Mary Yazzie’s grazing lease. I never saw anything like this in the military. I did not enter the vessel, but all the crewmembers I saw were dead. They were not human.”
Captain Fowler turned to Chairman Paul Jones, who had remained silent so far. “How do you want to play this, sir?”
The chairman was curious about the description not human. “Sergeant, you did not call us out here to look at dead animals. What do you mean by not human?”
“Looks like something in a science fiction movie. Thay are small beings, hairless, no e
ars or eyebrows, pale skin, not like the bilagaana.”
Chairman Jones pondered the implications. His parents had been traditional Navajos, but he learned to read in a missionary school. To find beings, not from this world was an idea that would disturb anyone’s religious beliefs: Navajo, Christian or Mormon. He suspected but it was probably worse for the traditional Navajos.
“Was there any evidence of foul play?”
“No, sir, it looked like a crash, probably mechanical failure.”
Chairman Jones paused to consider the best course of action. Navajos did not consider silence to be awkward. Since Jones was rightfully in charge, the men all waited for him to speak again. The chairman seemed to have figured out what he wanted to do, and broke the silence. “Who are these men with you?”
“Sam and Pete Dooley, Salt Water Clan,” Roanhorse answered. “They live about ten miles toward Nava, and they are Mormons. I drove over to their house last night and asked them to ride up here on horseback with picks and shovels today to bury the sky travelers.&rdquo (Navajos who converted to Christianity or Mormonism were not concerned about getting ghost sickness. It was preferred to get a nontraditional Navajo to handle burials.)
“We need to see this for ourselves. Sergeant, you are right about the burial. If they are bilagaana, the government will want to collect the bodies for burial. But you say they are not… Ride with the Dooley brothers and go directly to the crash site and wait for us. Do not bury anything until we get there, and do not stop by Mary Yazzie’s hogan. I do not want her to know about the burial until we see the site.”
”Yes, sir.”
Roanhorse rode along with the Dooley brothers while the chairman made arrangements to look after his truck. The chairman locked his truck, and the three men mounted their horses and headed out to the Yazzie hogan.
The Sergeant had already been to the crash site and would be escorting the Dooley brothers there. The chairman and the two policemen would go to Mary Yazzie’s hogan first and George would guide them to the crash site.
Warzone: Nemesis: A Novel of Mars Page 2