The Ghostway

Chee had chosen it—stepped through the corpse hole into the darkness freely and willingly, having decided to do so rationally. Having chosen Los Angeles over Shiprock, and Mary Landon over the loneliness and poverty and beauty of hozro. Chee squatted on his heels, and looked around him, and tried to think of what he should be looking for. Instead, he remembered the song from the hogan blessing ceremonial.

This hogan will be a blessed hogan.

It will become a hogan of dawn,

Dawn Boy will live in beauty in it,

It will be a hogan of white corn,

It will be a hogan of soft goods,

It will be a hogan of crystal water,

It will be a hogan dusted with pollen,

It will be a hogan of long-life happiness,

It will be a hogan with beauty above it,

It will be a hogan with beauty all around it.

The words of Talking God came back to Chee. They would have been sung here, when Begay's family had gathered to help him bless this hogan a long time ago. Chee got to his feet, took out his knife again, and walked to the east wall. Here, under the end of the base log just atop the foundation stones, the singer hired by Ashie Begay to conduct his hogan ceremonial would have placed a choice piece of Begay's turquoise. Chee chipped away with the knife tip at the dried adobe plaster, dislodged a chunk of it, and crumbled it in his fingers. The turquoise was there, a polished oval of clear blue gemstone. Chee wiped it on his shirt, inspected it, and put it back under the log. He walked to the west wall, dug under the end of the foundation log, and extracted a white seashell. The abalone shell symbolized the great yei Abalone Boy, just as the turquoise represented the Turquoise Boy spirit. But what had finding them told him? Nothing, Chee thought, that he hadn't believed he knew —that Begay was orthodox, that this hogan had been properly blessed, that Begay, in abandoning his home, had left these ritual jewels behind. Would that be orthodox? Probably, Chee thought. Unless Begay had thought to remove them before Albert Gorman died they wouldn't be removed at all—just as no wood from this hogan would ever be used again, not even for a fire. But removing them before Gorman died would have been prudent, and Begay must have seen the death coming, and Bentwoman had described her grandson as a prudent man. What would a prudent man salvage from his hogan if he saw death approaching it?

What had Bentwoman expected him to find in here?

Of course! Chee walked around the stove to the east-facing entrance. He felt along the log lintel above the door, running his fingers through the accumulated dust. Nothing. He tried to the right of the door. There, his fingers probing into the space over the log encountered something.

Chee held it in his left hand, a small brown pouch of dusty doeskin tied at the top with a leather thong. His fingers squeezed it, feeling exactly what he expected to feel. The pouch contained four soft objects. Chee untied the thong and dumped into his palm four smaller pouches, also of doeskin. He held Ashie Begay's Four Mountains Bundle.

The instant he saw it, he knew that Ashie Begay was dead.

Chee stepped through the corpse hole into snow. The wind now was carrying small, light flakes, which blew across the yard of Ashie Begay's hogan as dry as dust. He climbed down to the corral, the Four Mountains Bundle tucked in his coat pocket, to where he had tied his horse—thinking about what he'd found. The bundle represented weeks of work, a pilgrimage to each of the four sacred mountains to collect from each the herbs and minerals prescribed by the Holy People. Chee had collected his own the summer of his junior year at the University of New Mexico. Mount Taylor and the San Francisco Peaks had been easy enough, thanks to access roads to Forest Service fire lookouts on both of their summits. But Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristos and Hesperus Peak in the Las Platas had been a different matter. Begay would have gone through that ordeal in harder times, before roads led into the high country. Or he might have inherited it from his family. Either way, he would never have left it behind in a death hogan. It would have been his most treasured belonging, an heirloom beyond price.

So what had happened at Ashie Begay's hogan?

Chee had brought the horse because he intended, no matter what he might find in the hogan, to make a general search of Ashie Begay's home territory. Now that search took on new purpose. The horse stomped and whinnied as he approached, cold and ready to move. Chee untied it, dusted the snow off its haunches, and swung into the saddle. What had happened at this hogan? Could Begay have gone away, returned to find Gorman dead, and forgot the sacred pouch when he abandoned the hogan?

That was inconceivable. So what had happened?

Had someone else come after Albert Gorman after Lerner had failed to stop him, and found him at Ashie Begay's hogan, and killed them both, and then taken the time for Gorman's ceremonial burial, emptying the hogan and hiding Begay's body? Chee considered that. Possibly. In fact, something like that must have happened. But what would be the motive? He could think of none that made sense.

Chee circled the hogan yard and then rode east on a sheep trail leading down the arroyo rim. He rode slowly, looking for anything that might deviate in any way from normal. After more than a mile of finding absolutely nothing, he trotted the horse back to the hogan yard. It was snowing more heavily now and the temperature was dropping sharply. The second trail he tried led up past the talus slope, past the place where Gorman's body had been left, and followed under the cliff west of the hogan. It took him into the wind, making the horse reluctant and visibility difficult. He pulled his hatbrim down and rode with head bowed to keep the snowflakes out of his eyes—plodding along studying the ground, knowing what he was looking for without letting the thought take any exact shape in his mind. The snow was sticking, accumulating fast. Soon it would cover everything and make his search futile. He should have done this long ago. Should have used his head. Should have attended his instinctive knowledge that Hosteen Ashie Begay would not have abandoned this place to a ghost, would not have left his nephew half prepared for the journey to the underworld. There was this trail to check out, and at least two more, and there wouldn't be time to do it all before the snow covered everything.

There almost wasn't time.

Chee saw the horse without realizing he was seeing anything more than a round boulder coated with snow. But there was something a little wrong with the color where the snow hadn't stuck, a redness that was off-key for the gray granite of this landscape. He pulled up on the reins, and wiped the snowflakes out of his eyebrows, and stared. Then he climbed down out of the saddle. He saw the second horse only when he'd walked down into the trail-side