which meant he would have to return to the Yazzie hogans and find out exactly how the coyotes had gotten in. He was so immersed in this problem that it was not until he turned his truck up the slope to the campsite that he noticed Canfield's camper truck was gone.
McKee switched off the ignition and sat silently a moment. The exhaust noise echoed up and down the canyon and then died, leaving an utter stillness. The butane campstove was unlit, McKee noticed, and there was no sign that Canfield had started cooking supper, although it was his turn for the chore.
'Where in the devil could he have gone?' McKee said aloud. He was inside the tent when he saw the note, a sheet of typing paper on the folding table weighted by a turquoise frog-Canfield's proof against witches.
Bergen-
A Navajo dragged himself up here with a leg all swollen up with snakebite. I'm taking him to Teec Nos Pas. Be back tomorrow morning.
McKee reread the note and stared at the signature; Dr. J. R. Canfield's first name was Jeremy, not John.
Chapter 10
Sandoval squatted beside the sand painting and told Charley Tsosie to put his knees on the knees of the Corn Beetle. He showed him how to lean forward with one hand on each hand of the figure. When Tsosie was just right, Sandoval began singing the part about how the corn beetles called out to tell the Changing Woman that her Hero Twins, the Monster Slayer and the Water Child, were coming home again safely. His voice rose in pitch on the 'lo- lo-loo' cry of the beetle, and then fell as he chanted the part about the Hero Twins visiting the sun, and slaughtering the monster Ye-i. It was stifling in the hogan and Tsosie's bare back was glistening with sweat. Even his loin cloth was discolored with it. That was good. The enemy was coming out. And now Sandoval was ready for the next part. He sprinkled a pinch of corn pollen on Tsosie's shoulders and had him stand up and step off the sand painting-carefully so that the pattern wouldn't be disturbed.
Sandoval felt good about the painting. He hadn't done an Enemy Way since just after the foreign war when the young men had come back from the Marines. He was afraid he might have forgotten how to do it. But it had worked out just right. The arroyo sand he had poured out on the hogan floor for the base was a little darker than he liked but he had known it was going to work all right when he poured out the colored sand to make the Encircling Guardian. He had made it in a square as his father had taught him, with the east side open to keep from trapping in any of the Holy People. The Guardian's head was at the north end, with his two arms inward, and his feet were at the south end. His body was four alternating lines of red and yellow sand, and at the opening Sandoval had drawn the elaborate figure of Thunder, wearing the three crooked arrows in his headdress and carrying the crooked arrows under his wings.
'Put Thunder there when you sing for a witching,' his father had told him. 'His lightning kills the witches.'
Sandoval repaired the Corn Beetle deftly, sifting colored sand through his fingers to reform the lines where Tsosie's hands and knees had pressed. He added a tiny sprinkle of black sand to the single feather in the headdress of Big Fly.
Sandoval stood up then and looked into the pot where he had brewed the medicine. The water was still steaming and the juniper leaves he had mixed into it had turned the solution milky. It looked about right but Sandoval thought it would have been better if he had had a waterproof basket so it could have been done the old way. The People are losing too many of the old ways, Sandoval thought, and he thought it again when he had to tell Tsosie how to sit on the feet of Big Fly, and even had to remind him to face the east. When Sandoval was a boy learning the ways from his father, his father had not had to tell people how to sit. They knew.
Sandoval sang then the chant of the Big Fly, and how he had come to The People to tell them that Black God and the warriors were returning victorious from their war against the Taos Pueblo and how the two girls had been sent by the people to carry food to the war band. This was the last chant before the vomiting and Sandoval was glad of that. It was the second day of the Enemy Way. His voice was hoarse and he was tired and there was still much to be done, much ritual to be completed before this man was free of the witch trouble. His daughter had been right and he should have listened to her. He was eighty-one (or eighty-two by the white man's way of counting) and loaded with too many years to conduct a three-day Sing like an Enemy Way.
Sandoval dipped the ceremonial gourd into the pot, filling it with the hot, milky fluid, and handed the gourd to Tsosie.
'Drink all of it,' he ordered, thinking you shouldn't have to tell a man that. And, while Tsosie drank, he sang the last two chants. He refilled the gourd and handed it to Agnes Tsosie and then to the two sons. Let the others get their own, Sandoval thought, and he ducked past the double curtains hung over the hogan doorway to see if the time was right.
Outside the air was cool, almost cold after the closeness of the hogan. The eastern horizon was turning from red to yellow and Sandoval saw it was about the right time. He pulled back the curtains and called to Tsosie.
'Go out there behind the brush shelter,' he ordered, 'and remember that to make it right you want to vomit out the witching just as you can see the top rim of the sun coming up.' When Tsosie came past the curtain, Sandoval handed him a chicken feather.
'Just when the sun is first coming up,' Sandoval reminded him. 'If the medicine isn't working, stick that feather down your throat.'
Sandoval sat on the ground and leaned back on the wall of the hogan, relishing the coolness. He would have about thirty minutes before the vomiting was finished and then one more chant to sing while Tsosie and his family were rubbing the juniper stew on their bodies. Then it would be time for the people from the Stick Receivers to arrive. Sandoval yawned and stretched and looked out across the brush flats where the visitors were camping. Probably four or five hundred, he thought, and there would be more arriving today, mostly women bringing their girls to look for husbands at the Girl Dance tonight, and young men looking for girls, and gambling, and drinking, and trouble. Sandoval had meant to think about the ceremonial, to think just good thoughts and keep in harmony with the event. But he couldn't help thinking how times were changing. Mostly they came in their pickups and cars now. There were dozens of them parked out there and just a few wagons. And that was part of it. The white man's machines made it easy to travel about and people came just to visit and fool around. In the old days there wouldn't have been any drinking and gambling at a ceremonial like this. Sandoval watched a white carryall with the humped buffalo insignia of Law and Order drive up across the flat, and a man in blue jeans and a checked shirt get out of it and talk to a woman starting a cook fire near one of the pickups. The woman pointed in Sandoval's direction and the man came walking toward him.
He was short, with heavy shoulders and a Roman nose, and when he stopped in front of Sandoval and said, 'My grandfather, I hope all is well with you,' his voice was very clear and distinct. Sandoval, who had noticed lately that most young people mumbled, liked this. He invited the young man to sit beside him.
