end of the Season When the Thunder Sleeps, the 25th of May, a night of a late sliver of moon. The wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau and carved shapes in the winter snowpack on San Francisco peaks, the Sacred Mountain of Blue Flint Woman. Below, at Flagstaff airport, it registered gusts up to thirty-two knots-the dry, chilled wind of high-country spring.
On the west slope of the Lukachukai Mountains, the Wind People whined past the boulder where Luis Horseman was huddled, his body darkened by ashes to blind the ghosts. Horseman was calm now. He had thought and he had made his decision. The witch had not followed him. The man in the dog skin didn't know him, had no reason to destroy him. And there was no place else to hide. Soon Billy Nez would know he was on this plateau and would bring him food, and then it would be better. Here the Blue Policeman could never find him. Here he must stay despite the Navajo Wolf.
Horseman opened his medicine pouch and inspected the contents. Enough pollen but only a small pinch of the gall medicine which was the best proof against the Navajo Wolves. He removed the turquoise bear and set it on his knee.
'Horn of the bica, protect me,' he chanted. 'From the Darkness to Be One, protect me.' He wished, as he wished many times now that he was older, that he had listened when his uncle had taught him how to talk to the Holy People.
A hundred miles south at Window Rock, the Wind People rattled at the windows of the Law and Order Building, where Joe Leaphorn was working his way through a week's stack of unfinished case files. The file folder bearing the name of Luis Horseman was third from the bottom and it was almost ten o'clock when Leaphorn reached it. He read through it, leaned back in his chair, lit the last cigarette in his pack, tapped his finger against the edge of his desk and thought.
He considered the letter he had received that week from McKee-talking of coming back to the Reservation to continue his witchcraft research. There had been such letters before, but McKee hadn't come. And he won't come this time, Leap-horn thought. Each year he waits to pick up his old life it will be harder for him. And maybe now it's already too hard. And, thinking that, Leaphorn snapped off his desk lamp and sat a moment in the dark listening to the wind.
At Albuquerque, four hundred miles to the east, the wind showed itself briefly in the apartment of Bergen McKee, as it shook the television transmission tower atop Sandia Crest and sent a brief flicker across the face of the TV screen he wasn't watching. He had turned off the sound an hour ago, intending to grade final-examination papers. But the wind made him nervous. He had mixed a shaker of martinis instead, and drank slowly, making them last until, finally, he could sleep.
Tomorrow, perhaps, there would be the answer to his letter, and Joe Leaphorn would tell him that it was a good season for witchcraft gossip, or a poor season, or a fair season. And maybe, if prospects were good, he would go to the Reservation next week and spend the summer completing the case studies he needed to finish the book that no longer mattered to him. Or maybe he wouldn't go.
He snapped on the radio and stood by the glass door opening on his apartment balcony. The wind had raveled away the cloud cover over Sandia Mountain and its dark outline bulked against the stars on the eastern horizon.
Ten stories below, the lights of the city spread toward the foothills, a lake of phosphorescence in an infinity of night. Behind him the radio announced that tomorrow would be cooler with diminishing winds. It then produced a guitar and a young man singing of trouble.
'But,' the singer promised, 'life goes on.'
'And years roll by,
And time heals all,
And soon we're dead,
We're peaceful dead.'
The sentiment parodied McKee's mood so perfectly that he laughed. He walked back to his desk-a bulky, big- boned, tired-faced man who looked at once powerful and clumsy. He shuffled the ungraded exam papers together, dumped them into his briefcase, poured a final martini from the shaker, and took it into the bedroom. He looked at the certificate framed on the wall. It needed dusting. McKee brushed the glass with his handkerchief.
'Whereas,' the proclamation began, 'it is commonly and universally known by all students of Anthropology that Bergen Leroy McKee, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., is in truth and in fact none other than MONSTER SLAYER, otherwise identified as the Hero Twin in the Navajo Origin Myth;
'And Whereas this fact is attested and demonstrated by unhealthy obsession and preoccupation of said Professor McKee, hereafter known as MONSTER SLAYER, with belaboring his students with aforesaid Origin Myth;
'And Whereas MONSTER SLAYER is known to have been born of Changing Woman and sired by the Sun;
'And Whereas the aforesaid sexual union was without benefit of Holy Matrimony, and is commonly known to have been illicit, illegal, un-sanctified and otherwise improper fornication;
'Therefore be it known to all men that the aforesaid MONSTER SLAYER meets the popular and legal definition of Bastard, and demonstrates his claim to this title each semester by the manner in which he grades the papers of his Graduate Seminar in Primitive Superstition.'
The proclamation had been laboriously hand-lettered in Gothic script, embossed with a notary public's seal, and signed by all seven members of McKee's seminar. Signed six years ago, the year he had won tenure on the University of New Mexico anthropology faculty-full membership in the elite of the students of man with W. W. Hill, and Hibben, Ellis and Gonzales, Schwerin, Canfield, Campbell, Bock and Stan Newman, Spuhler, and the others. The year he became part of a team unmatched between Harvard and Berkeley. The last good year. The year before coming home to this apartment and finding Sara's closets empty and Sara's note. Fourteen words in blue ink on blue paper. The last year of excitement, and enthusiasm, and plans for research which would tie all Navajo superstitionsjnto a tidy, orderly bundle. The last year before reality.
McKee drained the martini, switched off the lights and lay in the darkness, hearing the wind and remembering how it had been to be Monster Slayer.
