The Dark Wind

killing a man out in Black Mesa somewhere?'

Cowboy laughed. 'Sure,' he said. 'You remember that body was picked up last July—the one that was far gone?' Cowboy wrinkled his nose at the unpleasant memory.

'John Doe?' Chee asked. 'A witch killed him? Where'd that come from?'

'And it was one of your Navajo witches,' Dashee said. 'Not one of our powaqa.'

Chapter Ten

Cowboy dashee didn't know much about why the gossipers believed John Doe had been killed by a witch. But once he got over his surprise that Chee was sincerely interested, that Chee would attach importance to such a tale, he was willing to run the rumor to earth. They took Dashee's patrol car up Third Mesa to Bacobi. There Cowboy talked to the man who had passed the tale along to him. The man sent them over to Second Mesa to see a woman at Mishongovi. Dashee spent a long fifteen minutes in her house and came out smiling.

'Struck gold,' Cowboy said. 'We go to Shi-paulovi.'

'Find where the report started?' Chee asked.

'Better than that,' Cowboy said. 'We found the man who found the body.'

Albert Lomatewa brought three straight-backed chairs out of the kitchen, and set them in a curved row just outside the door of his house. He invited them both to sit, and sat himself. He extracted a pack of cigarets, offered each of them a smoke, and smoked himself. The children who had been playing there (Lomatewa's greatgrandchildren, Chee guessed) moved a respectful distance away and muted their raucous game. Lomatewa smoked, and listened while Deputy Sheriff Dashee talked. Dashee told him who Chee was, and that it was their job to identify the man who had been found on Black Mesa, and to find out who had shot him, and to learn everything they could about it. 'There's been a lot of gossip about this man,' Dashee said, speaking in English, 'but we were told that if we came to Shipaulovi and talked to you about it, you would tell us the facts.'

Lomatewa listened. He smoked his cigaret. He tapped the ash off on the ground beside his chair. He said, 'It is true that there's nothing but gossip now. Nobody has any respect for anything anymore.' Lomatewa reached behind him, his hand groped against the wall, found a walking cane which had been leaning there, and laid it across his legs. Last week he'd gone to Flagstaff with his granddaughter's husband, he told them, and visited another granddaughter there. 'They all acted just like bahanas,' Lomatewa said. 'Drinking beer around the house. Laying in bed in the morning. Just like white people.' Lomatewa's fingers played with the stick as he talked of the modernism he had found in his family at Flagstaff, but he was watching Jim Chee, watching Cowboy Dashee. Watching them skeptically. The performance, the attitude, were familiar. Chee had noticed it before, in his own paternal grandfather and in others. It had nothing to do with a Hopi talking of sensitive matters in front of a Navajo. It involved being on the downslope of your years, disappointed, and a little bitter. Lomatewa obviously knew who Cowboy was. Chee knew the deputy well enough to doubt he was a solidly orthodox Hopi. Lomatewa's statement had drifted into a complaint against the Hopi Tribal Council.

'We weren't told to do it that way,' Lomatewa said. 'The way it was supposed to be, the villages did their own business. The kikmongwi, and the societies, and the kiva. There wasn't any tribal council. That's a bahana idea.'

Chee allowed the pause to stretch a respectful few moments. Cowboy leaned forward, raised a hand, opened his mouth.

Chee cut him off. 'That's like what my uncle taught me,' Chee said. 'He said we must always respect the old ways. That we must stay with them.'

Lomatewa looked at him. He smiled his skeptical smile. 'You're a policeman for the bahanas,' he said. 'Have you listened to your uncle?'

'I am a policeman for my own people,' Chee said. 'And I am studying with my uncle to be a yataalii.' He saw the Navajo word meant nothing to Lomatewa. 'I am studying to be a singer, a medicine man. I know the Blessing Way, and the Night Chant, and someday I will know some of the other ceremonials.'

Lomatewa examined Chee, and Cowboy Dashee, and Chee again. He took the cane in his right hand and made a mark with its tip in the dust. 'This place is the spruce shrine,' he said. He glanced at Cowboy. 'Do you know where that is?'

'It is Kisigi Spring, Grandfather,' said Cowboy, passing the test.

Lomatewa nodded. He drew a crooked line in the dust. 'We came down from the spring at the dawn,' he said. 'Everything was right. But about midmorning we saw this boot standing there in the path. This boy who was with us said somebody had lost a boot, but you could see it wasn't that. If the boot had just fallen there, it would fall over on its side.' He looked at Chee for agreement. Chee nodded.

Lomatewa shrugged. 'Behind the boot was the body of the Navajo.' He pursed his lips and shrugged again. The recitation was ended.

'What day was that, Grandfather?' Chee asked.

'It was the fourth day before the Niman Kachina,' Lomatewa said.

'This Navajo,' Chee said. 'When we got the body, there wasn't much left. But the doctors said it was a man about thirty. A man who must have weighed about one hundred sixty pounds. Is that about right?'

Lomatewa thought about it. 'Maybe a little older,' he said. 'Maybe thirty-two or so.'

'Was it anyone you had seen before?' Cowboy asked.

'All Navajos—' Lomatewa began. He stopped, glanced at Chee. 'I don't think so,' he said.

'Grandfather,' Cowboy said. 'When you go for the sacred spruce, you use the same trail coming and going. That is what I have been taught. Could the body have been there under that brush the day before, when you went up to the spring?'

'No,' Lomatewa said. 'It wasn't there. The witch put it there during the night.'

'Witch?' Cowboy Dashee asked. 'Would it have been a Hopi powaqa or a Navajo witch?'