Chapter 9
Bergen McKee honked the horn of his pickup when he crossed the final eroded ridge and saw the hogan of Ben Yazzie on the slope below. It was an unnecessary gesture-since the engine could have been heard long before the horn-but a courteous one. It gave official notice to the hogan that a visitor was coming and McKee guessed it was a universal custom among rural people. His father, he remembered, would never approach another's farmhouse without pausing at the gate to holler, 'Hello,' until properly acknowledged. Among people who depended more upon distance from neighbors than window blinds to preserve their privacy it was a practical habit.
The place consisted of two octagonal hogans of unpeeled ponderosa logs, a small plank storage shack, and two brush arbors, all built in a cluster of cedar at the edge of a small arroyo. Just over the lip of the arroyo, two sheep pens had been built of cedar poles, with the arroyo bank furnishing one wall. The pens were empty now, and as McKee coasted his truck slowly past them he saw that the hogans were equally deserted.
No cooking pots hung under the brush shelter, no clothing hung out to air, none of the accumulated odds and ends of Navajo living cluttered the area. He climbed out of the truck and sat in the scanty shade, feeling tired and disappointed.
McKee lit a cigarette and considered his next step. In time, he could relocate the Yazzie family through Shoemaker. They traded there and some of Ben Yazzie's silver concho belts were in pawn there. But it might be weeks before any of the Yazzie family, or anyone who knew where he had moved, showed up at the store. That left just two possible sources in the Many Ruins area; Afraid of His Horse, whose sheep camp was supposed to be somewhere north of the canyon, and Charley Tsosie. Tsosie would be occupied at the Enemy Way for at least two days. Sheep camp tended to move with the grazing and would be hard to find. But he would look for Afraid of His Horse.
It was easy to see why Yazzie had built his hogan here. Behind the habitations, the sandstone cliffs of a butte rose abruptly to the north and west-a hundred centuries of talus at its base, then two hundred feet of sheer, smooth reddish stone, with streaks of dark discoloration from seepage, then a softer gray layer of perlite, pocked and carved with blowholes and caves, and above this the overhanging cap of hard, black igneous rock. It gave the hogans shelter from the southwest winds and shade from the late-afternoon sun. To the north and east, the country was a fantastic jumble of colossal erosion dominated by another towering flat-topped butte. All the colors of the spectrum are there, McKee thought. Everything but pure green. What little grass there was was out of sight, hidden in the pockets where soil could collect to hold roots and where runoff from the immensity of rocks could be held and absorbed. He had passed several such grassy places following the wagon trail here. Some, he had noticed, had been heavily grazed by sheep. Most had not. Yazzie must have been badly frightened to move his flock away from grass.
The clouds were building now above the Lukachukai peaks and McKee thought there might be a thunder shower over Many Ruins Canyon by sundown. He and Canfield had camped well up off the floor of the canyon, safe from flash floods, but he had left most of his gear outside the tent. Canfield might be there to take care of things, or he might be out digging into the burial site at one of the ruins; when he was working, Canfield could not be depended upon to notice it was raining.
McKee butted out his cigarette and pushed himself to his feet, noticing the stiffness of his muscles and thinking ruefully that sitting behind a desk was poor conditioning for a field trip. It was then he noticed the smell.
It was a faint smell, borne on a sudden light breeze which had fanned up the arroyo past the hogans. McKee recognized it instantly. The smell of death and decaying flesh. He stood stockstill beside the truck, studying the silent hogans. If the odor had come from them, he would have noticed it earlier. He walked slowly down the slope. Beyond the brush arbor he stopped and stood silently again, listening. Behind the hogans, the arroyo curved sharply around a high outcropping of rock topped by a growth of juniper and pinon. Something behind this ridge was making a sound, a tuneless symphony of low notes which would not have been audible except for the otherwise eerie silence of the place. He walked slowly toward the trees, listening, feeling the tenseness of irrational nervousness. Then the sound explained itself.
A raven flapped out of one of the pinons with a raucous caw. A second later a cloud of the black scavenger birds erupted from the arroyo in an explosion of flapping. McKee stood a moment feeling simultaneously weak from the sudden start and foolish at his skittishness. He trotted to the top of the ridge to see what had attracted the scavengers.
In the arroyo bend, against the perpendicular wall of eroded sandstone, Ben Yazzie had built a third pole sheep corral. In it were bodies of five rams with the heavy dark wool of Merinos. Looking directly down into the pen, McKee could see its floor was blackened in several places where blood had soaked into the sand. He could also see that the ravens, now raising a noisy clamor from the trees fifty yards down the arroyo, had been at work on the throats of the animals. That meant, McKee thought, they had been killed by a wolf, or coyotes, or perhaps by dogs.
It took almost exactly an hour for McKee to cover the nine miles of wagon road from the Yazzie hogans to the mouth of Many Ruins Canyon. Even before he left the place he had concluded that the dead rams, and the cause of their death, probably explained the origin of at least some of the witchcraft gossip. When he found Yazzie he would learn that Yazzie had lost many sheep to this 'witch' and that he had decided to abandon his traditional grazing grounds and his hogan because a witch is, after all, more than a man can be expected to cope with. Yazzie would not be likely to admit, even to himself, that he could not deal with coyotes, or even with an unusually bold wolf of the natural, four-legged variety. When McKee found Afraid of His Horse, he would learn the coyotes were also active this season north of Many Ruins. Taken together, he thought, the two linked incidents would provide the first of the specific examples he needed to support his scapegoat thesis. He felt suddenly optimistic.
It was not until he had turned the truck up the sandy bottom of Many Ruins Canyon that McKee realized that he wasn't sure exactly how a coyote could have gotten into the rams' pen. The pen was built in a rough half-circle extending from the arroyo wall. McKee remembered he had not been able to look over the pen from the arroyo bed. That meant the pole wall was about six feet high-too high for a coyote, or even a wolf, to jump. It occurred to him then that Yazzie must surely have built the corral with coyotes or wolves much in mind and designed it to keep them out. The poles were wired together, top and bottom, and the bases had been buried in the sandy soil. The gate, a narrow door of poles held together by horizontal braces, had also been wired securely shut. McKee remembered this clearly because of the time it had taken him to unfasten the wires. If Yazzie had carelessly left the gate insecurely fastened the night the wolf got in, why would he have bothered to fasten it so securely after the damage was done?
McKee drove slowly along the hard-packed canyon floor. The cloud he had noticed earlier had built higher now and there had been a shower somewhere. The breeze was cool and smelled of wet pine. In places the going was slow and rocky. Here the canyon walls closed in, sheer smooth cliffs which funneled the water of the occasional flash floods into a narrow torrent. But generally the road was smooth and the canyon bottom broadened to a hundred yards or more. The runoff stream here required only a small portion of the canyon floor. Its bed wandered between tumbled hills of rocky debris and there were grass and even a few cottonwoods. Here the sandstone had been softer and more readily destroyed by wind and water. It was in places like these that the Anasazis had built on the talus slopes and high under the overhanging shelter of the canyon walls the cliff houses which gave the canyon its name. McKee passed three of these stone ruins on his way to the campsite without giving them more than a glance. He was, by then, thoroughly disgusted with himself for his oversight at the sheep pens-carelessness
