over the high country. From his place on the talus slope Chee could see, across Begay's empty homestead, a hundred miles to the southeast all the way to the dark blue bump on the horizon that was Mount Taylor, Mary Landon's favorite mountain. (Now Mary would be finished with her school day, finished with her supper, out for her evening walk—sitting someplace, probably, looking at it from much closer quarters. Chee could see her vividly, her eyes, the line of her cheek, her mouth…)
Old Man Begay had taken time to clean out his hogan and pack his stuff on his horses. Why hadn't he taken the time to collect the few yucca roots required to make the suds to wash his kinsman's hair? What had hurried him? Had it been fear? An urgent need to attend to some duty? Chee stared down at the homestead, trying to visualize the old man smashing with his ax at the broken wall where the corpse hole was formed, destroying what must have been important to him for much of his life.
Then he heard the sound.
It came to him on the still, cold air, distant but distinct. It was the sound of a horse. A whinny. The sound came from the arroyo—from the spring or from Begay's corral just beyond it. Chee had been there two hours earlier and had spent thirty minutes establishing from tracks and manure that no animal had been there for days. Nor was this the season for open range grazing this high in the mountains. Livestock had been taken, long since, to lower pastures, and even strays would have moved downhill, out of the intense morning cold. Chee felt excitement growing. Ashie Begay had come home to collect something he'd forgotten.
The horse was exactly where Chee expected it to be—at the spring. It was an elderly pinto mare, roan and white, fitting the description of the one stolen from Two Gray Hills. It wore a makeshift rope halter on its ugly hammer head. Another bit of rope secured it to a willow. Hardly likely that Hosteen Begay, who owned horses of his own, would have taken it. Who had? And where was he?
The night breeze was beginning now as it often did with twilight on the east slope of mountains. Nothing like the morning's dry gusts, but enough to ruffle the mare's ragged mane and replace the dead silence with a thousand little wind sounds among the ponderosas. Under cover of these whispers, Chee moved along the arroyo rim, looking for the horse thief.
He checked up the arroyo. Down the arroyo. Along the ponderosa timber covering the slopes. He stared back at the talus slope, where he had been when he'd heard the horse. But no one could have gotten there without Chee seeing him. There was only the death hogan and the holding pen for goats and the brush arbor, none of which seemed plausible. The thief must have tied his horse and then climbed directly up the slope across the arroyo. But why?
Just behind him, Chee heard a cough.
He spun, fumbling for his pistol. No one. Where had the sound come from?
He heard it again. A cough. A sniffling. The sound came from inside Hosteen Begay's hogan.
Chee stared at the corpse hole, a black gap broken through the north wall. He had cocked his pistol without knowing he'd done it. It was incredible. People do not go into a death hogan. People do not step through the hole into darkness. White men, yes. As Sharkey had done. And Deputy Sheriff Bales. As Chee himself, who had come to terms with the ghosts of his people, might do if the reason was powerful enough.
But certainly most Navajos would not. So the horse thief was a white. A white with a cold and a runny nose.
Chee moved quietly to his left, away from the field of vision of anyone who might be looking through the hole. Then he moved silently to the wall and along it. He stood beside the hole, back pressed to the planking. Pistol raised. Listening.
Something moved. Something sniffed. Moved again. Chee breathed as lightly as he could. And waited. He heard sounds and long silences. The sun was below the horizon now, and the light had shifted far down the range of colors to the darkest red. Over the ridge to the west he could see Venus, bright against the dark sky. Soon it would be night.
There was the sound of feet on earth, of cloth scraping, and a form emerged through the hole. First a stocking cap, black. Then the shoulders of a navy pea coat, then a boot and a leg—a form crouching to make its way through the low hole.
'Hold it,' Chee said. 'Don't move.'
A startled yell. The figure jumped through the hole, stumbled. Chee grabbed.
He realized almost instantly he had caught a child. The arm he gripped through the cloth of the coat was small, thin. The struggle was only momentary, the product of panic quickly controlled. A girl, Chee saw. A Navajo. But when she spoke, it was in English.
'Turn me loose,' she said, in a breathless, frightened voice. 'I've got to go now.'
Chee found he was shaking. The girl had handled this startling encounter better than he had. 'Need to know some things first,' Chee said. 'I'm a policeman.'
'I've got to go,' she said. She pulled tentatively against his grip and relaxed, waiting.
'Your horse,' Chee said. 'You took her last night from over at Two Gray Hills.'
'Borrowed it,' the girl said. 'I've got to go now and take her back.'
'What are you doing here?' Chee asked. 'In the hogan?'
'It's my hogan,' she said. 'I live here.'
'It is the hogan of Hosteen Ashie Begay,' Chee said. 'Or it was. Now it is a
It was a foolish question. After all, he'd just caught her coming out of the corpse hole. She didn't bother to answer. She said nothing at all, simply standing slumped and motionless.
'It was stupid going in there,' Chee said. 'What were you doing?'
'He was my grandfather,' the girl said. For the first time she lapsed into Navajo, using the noun that means the father of my mother. 'I was just sitting in there. Remembering things.' It took her a moment to say it because now tears were streaming down her cheeks. 'My grandfather would leave no
