The Dark Wind

A son of Female Wind. I stand near you

With a black bow in my right hand,

With a yellow-feathered arrow in my left hand.

I am the Talking God, standing ready…'

He sang all the verses, dropped to his hands and knees, and ducked through the sweat house entrance into the hot darkness inside. He poured water from one of the plastic containers onto the sizzling boulders and pulled the heavy canvas cover down over the entrance. In the steamy blackness he sang three other songs, recounting how Talking God and the other yei figures of this legend had caught Black God in his guise as a crow, and how Black God had removed his suit of black feathers, and how Black God had been tricked, finally, into releasing all the game animals which he had held captive.

With that ritual finished, Chee was not certain how he should proceed. It was not the sort of question he would have ever thought to ask Frank Sam Nakai. 'How, Uncle, does one prepare himself for a hunt which will take him into a Hopi village on a Holy Night when the kachina spirits are out? How does one prepare himself to trap another man?' Had he ever asked, he knew Frank Sam Nakai would have had an answer. He would have lit a cigaret, and smoked it, and finally he would have had an answer. Chee, his sweat bath songs finished, sat in the choking wet heat and thought about it in the Navajo Way—from east through north. The purpose of the hunting ceremony—the Stalking Way—was to put hunter and prey in harmony. If one was to hunt deer, the Stalking Way repeated the ancient formula by which man regained his ability to be one with the deer. One changed the formula only slightly to fit the animal. The animal, now, was man. An Anglo-American, ex-husband of a Hopi woman, trader with the Navajos, magician, wise, shrewd, dangerous. Chee felt the sweat pouring out of him, dripping from his chin and eyebrows and arms, and thought how to change the song to fit it to West. He sang:

'I am the Talking God. The Talking God.

I am going after him.

Below the east, I am going after him.

To that place in Wepo Wash, I am going after him.

I, being the Talking God, go in pursuit of him.

To Black Mesa, to the Hopi villages,

The chase will take me.

I am the Talking God. His luck will be with me.

His thoughts will be my thoughts as I go after him.'

Verse after verse he sang, adopting the ancient ceremonial songs to meet this new need. The songs invoked Talking God, and Begochidi, and Calling God, and Black God himself, and the Predator People: First Wolf, First Puma, First Badger; recounting the role of Game Maker, and all the other Holy People of the Great Navajo myth of how hunting began and how man became himself a predator. Through it all, verse by verse, the purpose was the same as it had been since his ancestors hunted along the glaciers: to cross the prehuman flux and once again be as one with the hunted animal, sharing his spirit, his ways, thoughts, his very being.

Chee simply substituted 'the man West' for 'the fine buck' and sang on.

'In the evening twilight, the man West is calling to me.

Out of the darkness, the man West comes toward me.

Our minds are one mind, the man West and I, the Talking God.

Our Spirits are one spirit, the man West and I, the Talking God.

Toward my feathered arrow, the man West walks directly.

Toward my feathered arrow, the man West turns his side.

That my black bow will bless him with its beauty.

That my feathered arrow will make him like the Talking God.

That he may walk, and I may walk, forever in Beauty.

That we may walk with beauty all around us.

That my feathered arrow may end it all in Beauty.'

There should be a final ceremony, and a final verse. In the old, traditional days, the bow of the hunter would have been blessed. These days, sometimes it was done to the rifle before a deer hunt. Chee unsnapped his holster and extracted his pistol. It was a medium-barrel Ruger .38. He was not particularly good with it, making his qualifying score each year with very little to spare. He had never shot at any living thing with it, and had never really decided what he would do if the situation demanded that some fellow human be fired upon. Given proper need, or proper provocation, Chee presumed he would shoot, but it wasn't the sort of decision to be made in the abstract. Now Chee stared at the pistol, trying to imagine himself shooting West. It didn't work. He put the pistol back in the holster. As he did, it occurred to him that the final verse of the usual sweat bath ceremonial could not be done now. The prescribed verse was the Blessing Song from the Blessing Way. But Jim Chee, a shaman of the Slow Talking People, could sing no blessing songs now. Not until this hunt was finished and he had returned to this sweat bath to purify himself again. Until then, Jim Chee had turned himself into a predator, dedicated by the Stalking Way songs to the hunt. The Blessing Song would have to wait. It put one in harmony with beauty. The Stalking Way put one in harmony with death.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Jim chee waited for West, or for Ironfingers, or for whoever would come, just as a mountain lion waits for game at a watering place. He picked a place which gave him a good view of the burial place of the suitcases and from which he could move quickly to make an arrest. He had checked the area and found no sign that West's jeep, or any other vehicle, had been here since Johnson's futile search. He poked his jack handle into the sand until he felt the steel tapping against aluminum. The bait was still in place. Then he sat behind a screen of junipers on the bank of the wash and waited. He didn't expect West to come. But if West did come, Chee would be waiting.