Luis Horseman had chosen this camp with care. Here the plateau was cut by one of the hundred nameless canyons which drained into the depth of Many Ruins Canyon. Along the rim, the plateau's granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away, had fractured under its own weight. Some of these great blocks of stone had crashed into the canyon bottom, leaving behind room-sized gaps in the rimrock. Others had merely tilted and slid. Behind one of these, Horseman knelt over his fire. It was a small fire, built in the extreme corner of the natural enclosure. With nothing overhead to reflect its light, it would have been visible only to one standing on the parapet, looking down. Now its flickering light gave the face of Luis Horseman a reddish cast. It was a young face, thin and sensitive, with large black eyes and a sullen mouth. The forehead was high, partly hidden by a red cloth band knotted at the back, and the nose was curved and thin. Hawklike. He sat crosslegged on the hump of sand drifted into the enclosure from the plateau floor above. The only sound was the hissing of grease cooking from the strip of porcupine flesh he held over the flame. The animal had been a yearling, and small, and he ate about two-thirds of it. He sprinkled sand on the fire and put the remainder of the meat on the embers to be eaten in the morning. Then he lay back in the darkness. The moon would rise sometime after midnight, but now there were only the stars overhead. For the first time in three days, Luis Horseman felt entirely safe. As he relaxed, he felt an aching weariness. He would sleep in a little while, but first he had to think.
Tomorrow, if he could, he would build a sweat house and take a bath. He would have to get a Singer somehow when it was safe and have a Blessing Way held for him, but that would have to wait. A sweat bath would have to do for now. It would take time, but tomorrow he would have time. He had what was left of the porcupine and he would have kangaroo rats. He was sure of that. He put out twelve or thirteen deadfalls baited with blood and porcupine fat and he thought the chant had been about right. Not exactly, but probably close enough. He would not think beyond tomorrow. Not now. By then they would know he had not gone back down to the Tsay-Begi country, to the clan of his in-laws, and they would be looking for him here.
Horseman felt the dread again, and wished suddenly that he had his boots and something that would hold water. It was a long climb down into the canyon to the seep. They would be looking anywhere there was water and even if he covered his tracks, there would be a sign-broken grass at least. The porcupine stomach would hold a little water, enough for a day. He would use that until he could find something or kill something bigger. But there was nothing he could do about his feet. They hurt now, from all day walking in town shoes, and the shoes wouldn't last if he had to cover much country.
Then Horseman became aware of the sound, faint at first and then gradually louder. It was unmistakable. A truck. No. Two trucks. Driving in low gear. A long way off to the west. The light night breeze shifted slightly and the sound was gone. And when it blew faintly again from the west, he could barely hear the motors. Finally he could hear nothing. Only the call of the nighthawk hunting across the plateau and the crickets chirping down by the seep. Must have been in Many Ruins Canyon, Horseman thought. It sounded like they were going down the canyon, away from him. But why? And who would it be? None of his clan would be in the canyon. His Red Forehead people stayed away from it, stayed clear of the Anasazi Houses. The Ye-i and the Horned Monster had eaten the Anasazi long ago-before the Monster Slayer came. But the ghosts of the Old People were there in the great rock hogans under the cliffs and his people stayed away. That was one of the reasons he had come here. Not too close to the Houses of the Enemy Dead, but close enough so the Blue Policeman wouldn't think to look.
Horseman felt his knife in his pocket pressing painfully against his hip. He shifted his weight, took it out, opened the long blade and laid it across his chest. Soon the moon rose over the plateau, and lit the figure of a thin young man sleeping, barefoot, on a hump of drifted sand.
Horseman was at the seep a little after daylight. He drank thirstily from the pool under the rock and then cleaned the porcupine stomach sac thoroughly with sand, rinsed it, knotted the tube to the intestine and filled it with water. It held about two cups. The sweat bath would have to wait. He couldn't risk building the sweat house here. And, if he built it in the protection of his camp, he had nothing large enough to carry water to pour on the rocks after he had heated them. He erased his tracks thoroughly with a brush of rabbit brush, and kept to the rocks on the long climb back to the canyon rim.
Four of his deadfalls had been sprung but he found dead kangaroo rats under only two of the stones. Another yielded a wood mouse, which he threw away in disgust, and the other was empty. He glumly reset the traps. Two rats were not enough. There were frogs around the seep, but killing frogs would make you a cripple. He would try for the prairie dogs. A grown one would make a meal.
The place Horseman had seen the prairie-dog colony was about a mile to the east. He used thirty minutes covering the distance, remembering the sound of the truck motors and moving cautiously. Maybe another of those rockets had fallen. He remembered the first time that had happened. It was the year he was initiated and there had been Army all over. Trucks and jeeps and helicopters flying around the valley, and they had come around to all the hogans and said there would be $10,000 paid to anyone who found it. But nobody ever did. Then they cut that road up Tall Poles and built the radar place and when the next rocket fell a year ago they had found it in two or three days.
He stopped by a dead juniper, broke off a crooked limb and started whittling a throwing stick. He could sometimes hit a rabbit with one, but usually not prairie dogs. They were too careful. While he shaped the stick he stared out across the Kam Bimghi. Nothing at all was moving now, and that probably meant it wasn't a rocket down. There would be a lot going on now if it was that. Besides, they wouldn't have been hunting a rocket at night.
He didn't have a chance to use the throwing stick. The burrows of the colony were bunched below a hummock of pinon and one of the rodents saw him long before he was in range. There was a chittering outburst of warning calls, and in a second the dogs were in their holes.
Horseman put the throwing stick in his hip pocket and broke a smaller limb from a pinon. He sharpened one end, split the other. Back at the prairie-dog colony, Horseman selected a hole which faced the west. He stuck the stick in the ground in front of it, pulled a thin sheet of mica from his medicine pouch, and slipped it into the split. He adjusted the mica carefully so that it reflected the light from the rising sun down the hole.
Now he could only wait. In time the light would attract one of the curious prairie dogs. It would come out of its hole blinded by the reflected sun. And he would be close enough to use the stick. He glanced around for a place to stand. And then he saw the Navajo Wolf.
He had heard nothing. But the man was standing not fifty feet away, watching him silently. He was a big man with his wolf skin draped across his shoulders. The forepaws hung limply down the front of his black shirt and the empty skull of the beast was pushed back on his forehead, its snout pointing upward.
The Wolf looked at Horseman. And then he smiled.
'I won't tell,' Horseman said. His voice was loud, rising almost to a scream. And then he turned and ran, ran frantically down the dry wash which drained away from the prairie-dog colony. And behind him he heard the Wolf laughing.
Chapter 2
That night the Wind People moved across the Reservation. On the Navajo calendar it was eight days from the
