He stopped a hundred yards short of the buildings and shouted, calling first for Tso and then for the girl. Silence. The rocks steamed. Leaphorn shouted again. He walked to the hogan. The door stood open.
He peered into its dark interior. Two bedrolls, side by side. Theodora Adams’s overnight case and duffel bag. The scant luggage of Father Tso. A box of groceries, cooking utensils. Everything was neat. Everything in order. Leaphorn turned from the doorway and surveyed the surroundings. The rain had swept the ground clean of tracks, and nothing had been here since the rain had stopped. Father Tso and Theodora had left the hogan before the storm arrived. And they had been too far afield to return to its shelter when the rain began. But where could they go? Behind the hogan, the wall of the mesa rose. It was mostly cliff, but breaks made it easy enough to climb in half a dozen places. To the north, northwest and northeast, the ground fell away into a labyrinth of vertical-walled canyons which he knew drained, eventually, into the San Juan River. The track he had taken circled in from the south, through a wilderness of eroded stone. Tso and the girl had probably climbed the mesa, or wandered southward, though the canyons would make forbidding, and dangerous, walking.
A faint breeze stirred the air and brought the distant sound of thunder from the retreating storm. The sun was low now, warm against the side of Leaphorns face. He looked down the wagon track toward the place where Listening Woman had seen her vision and had been, for some reason, herself unseen by a murderer. So the murderer had not used the only easy exit route. If he had climbed the mesa, it, too, would have offered him an open view of the woman. That left only the canyons. Which made no sense. Leaphorn looked northward. A reasonably agile man could climb down off this bench to the canyon floor, but canyons would lead him nowhere. Only into an endless labyrinth-deeper and deeper into the sheer-walled maze.
Leaphorn turned suddenly, ducked through the hogan door and sorted through Tsos supplies. His groceries included about twenty cans of meats, fruits and vegetables, two-thirds of a twenty-pound sack of potatoes, and an assortment of dried beans and other staples. Tso had come, obviously, for a long stay. Leaphorn checked the girls duffel bag, and the priests suitcases, and found nothing that seemed helpful.
Then as he looked toward the hogan door, he saw marks on the floor which were almost too faint to register. They were visible only because of the angle of light between Leaphorn and the doorway. They were nothing more than the damp paw prints of a very large dog left on the hard-packed earthen floor. But they were enough to tell Leaphorn that he had failed in carrying out his instructions to take care of Theodora Adams.
Leaphorn studied the hogan floor again, his cheek to the packed earth as he examined the stirred dust against the light. But he learned little. The dog had evidently come here during the rain or immediately after it. And someone had been with the dog, since several of its damp footprints had been scuffed. That could have been Goldrims, or Tso and Adams, or perhaps all three. The dog might even have arrived pre-rain, and have run out into the rain, and returned wet-footed. And all had left while enough rain was still falling to erase their tracks.
He stood at the door. Too much coincidence. Leaphorn didn’t believe in it. He believed nothing happened without cause. Everything intermeshed, from the mood of a man, to the flight of the corn beetle, to the music of the wind. It was the Navajo philosophy, this concept of interwoven harmony, and it was bred into Joe Leaphorns bones. There had to be a reason for the death of Hosteen Tso, and it had to be connected with why Goldrims or at least Goldrims's dog had been drawn to the Tso hogan. Leaphorn tried to think it through. He knew Listening Woman had sensed some unusual evil behind the troubled spirit of Hosteen Tso. She had decided to recommend that a Mountain Way be performed for the old man, and that the Black Rain Chant also should be done. It was an unusual prescription. Both of the curing ceremonials were ritual recreations of a portion of the myths that taught how the Dinee had emerged from the underworld and become human clans. The Mountain Way would have been intended to restore Hosteen Tsos psyche with the harmony that had been disrupted by his witnessing some sort of sacrilegious taboo violation the disrespect to the holy sand paintings probably. But why the Black Rain Chant? Leaphorn should have asked her more about that. It was an obscure ritual, rarely performed. He remembered that its name came from the creation of rain. First Coyote had a role in it, Leaphorn recalled. And a fire played a part somehow. But how could that be involved with the curing of Hosteen Tso? He leaned against the hogan doorframe, recalling the lessons of his boyhood. Hosteen Coyote had visited Fire Man, and had tricked him, and had stolen a bundle of burning sticks and escaped with the treasure tied to his bushy tail. And in running, he had spread flames all across Dinetah, and the Holy Land of the People was burning, and the Holy People had met to consider the crisis.
Something clicked suddenly into place. The hero of this particular myth adventure was First Frog. Hosteen Frog had used his magic, inflated himself with water, and carried aloft by First Crane-had produced black rain to save Dinetah from fire. And Listening Woman had mentioned that Hosteen Tso had killed a frog or caused it to be killed by a falling rock.
Leaphorn frowned again. Killing a frog was a taboo, but a minor one. A personal chant would cure the guilt and restore beauty. Why had the death of this frog been weighted so heavily? Because, Leaphorn guessed, Tso associated it with the other, grimmer sacrilege.
Had there been frogs near the place where the sand paintings were desecrated?
Leaphorn glanced again at the mesa, where his common sense suggested that Father Tso and Theodora Adams must have gone and away from the dead-end waste of canyons which led absolutely nowhere except if you followed them far under the drowning waters of Lake Powell. Yet, Leaphorn thought, if the man who had killed Hosteen Tso had failed to see Listening Woman, he must have gone into the canyons. And if there was a secret place nearby where the sand paintings and the medicine bundle of the Way to Cure the Worlds End had waited out the generations, it might well be in a deep, dry cave and caves again meant the canyons. Finally, the mesa offered no water, and thus no possibility of frogs. Leaphorn walking fast headed for the canyon rim.
The branch canyon that skirted past the Tso hogan was perhaps eighty vertical feet from the cap rock to its sandy bottom. The trail that connected the two had been cut by goats at a steep angle and at the bottom Leaphorn found tracks which proved to him he had guessed right. The rocks were dry now and the humans humanlike had avoided the rainwater puddles between them. But the dog had not. At several places Leaphorn found traces left by its wet paws. They led down the narrow slot, and here a narrow strip of sand was wet. Two persons had stepped in it perhaps three. Large feet and a small foot.
Adams and Father Tso? Adams and Goldrims? Had the party included a third member, who had stepped from rock to rock and left no footprints? Leaphorn turned to the spring. It was little more than a seep, emerging from a moss-covered crack and dripping into a catch basin which Tso had probably dug out. There were no frogs here, and no sign of a rock slide. Leaphorn tasted the water. It was cold, with a slightly mineral taste. He drank deeply, wiped his mouth, and began walking as quietly as he could down the hard-packed sand of the canyon bottom.
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Leaphorn had been walking almost three hours, slowly, cautiously, trying to follow tracks in the gathering darkness, when he heard the sound. It stopped him, and he held his breath, listening. It was a soprano sound, made by something living human or otherwise. It came from a long distance, lasted perhaps three or four seconds, cut off abruptly in mid note, and was followed by a confusion of echoes. Leaphorn stood on the sand of the canyon bottom, analyzing the diminishing echoes. A human voice? Perhaps the high-pitched scream of a bobcat? It seemed to come from the place where this canyon drained into a larger canyon about 150 yards below him. But whether it originated up or down the larger canyon, or across it, or above it, Leaphorn could only guess. The echoes had been chaotic.
He listened a moment longer and heard nothing. The sound seemed to have startled even the insects and the insect-hunting evening birds. Leaphorn began to run as quietly as he could toward the canyon mouth, the whisper of his boot soles on the sand the only sound in an eerie silence. At the junction he stopped, looking right and left. He
