thoroughly.
This was where he'd expected to find the kayak. Up this canyon somewhere he expected to find the site that had drawn Eleanor Friedman-Bernal. When the river delayed him, he'd decided to wait for daylight to hunt the kayak. But now he couldn't wait. Tired as he was, he picked up the flashlight and walked back to the water.
She had hidden it carefully, dragging it with more strength than he credited her with far up under the tangled branches of a cluster of tamarisks. He searched, expecting to find nothing, and finding only a little nylon packet jammed under the center tube. It held a red nylon poncho. Leaphorn kept it. Back at the fire, he kicked himself a loosened place in the sand, spread the poncho as a ground cloth and lay down to sleep, leaving his boots close enough to the flames to complete the drying process.
The flames attracted flying insects. The insects attracted the bats. Leaphorn watched them fluttering at the margin of the darkness, darting to make their kill, flashing away. Emma had disliked bats. Emma had admired lizards, had battled roaches endlessly, had given names to the various spiders that lived around their house and--all too often--in it. Emma would have enjoyed this trip. He had always planned to take her, but there was never time, until now, when time no longer mattered. Emma would have been intensely interested in the affair of Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, would have felt a rapport with her. Would have asked him, if he'd forgotten to report, what progress was being made. Would have had advice for him. Well, tomorrow he would find that woman. A sort of gift, it would be.
He shifted himself into the sand. A chunk of driftwood fell, sending a shower of sparks up toward the stars. Leaphorn slept.
The cold awakened him. The fire had burned to dim embers, the moon was down, and the sky over him was an incredible dazzle of stars humans can see only when high altitude, clear, dry air, and an absence of ground light combine. Below these black thousand-foot cliffs, it was like looking into space from the bottom of a well. Leaphorn rebuilt the fire and dozed off again, listening to the night sounds. Two coyotes were on their nocturnal hunt now somewhere up the canyon and he could hear another pair very distant across the river. He heard a saw-whet owl high in the cliffs, a cry as shrill as metal rubbing metal. Just as he fell into sleep he heard the sound of a flute. Or perhaps it was just part of his dream.
When he awoke again, he was shivering with cold. It was late dawn, with the coldest air of night settled into this canyon slot. He got up, flinching against the stiffness, restarted the fire, drank from his canteen, and looked for the first time into the sack of food Irene Musket had sent with him--a great chunk of fry bread and a coil of boiled Polish sausage. He was hungry, but he would wait. He might need it much more later.
Despite their age, he found a fair set of Eleanor Friedman-Bernal's tracks pressed into the hard sand under the tamarisks--where the hanging vegetation had protected them from the moving air. Then he methodically searched the rest of this junction of canyons. He wanted to confirm that this was the place Houk had come, and he did. In fact, Houk seemed to have come here often. Probably it was his monthly destination. Someone, presumably Houk, had repeatedly slid a kayak up the sloping sand at the extreme upper end of the bench and left it under a broken-off cottonwood. From there a narrow trail took an unlikely course about five hundred yards through the brush, through the little dunes of blown sand, and down into the bottom of Many Ruins. It stopped at a little cul-de-sac of boulders.
Leaphorn spent a half-hour in that much-used spot, partly because he could find no sign that Houk had gone beyond it. This sheltered place seemed to be where Houk's moonlit journeys ended. Again, he was looking for confirmation of what he was now sure must be true. This damp and protected place held footprints well, and Houk's were everywhere. Many were fresh, evidence of the final visit before his murder. On these Leaphorn focused his attention, narrowing it finally to two prints. Both had been pressed upon by something heavy and partly erased. A soft, edgeless pressure. But not a moccasin. Something odd about it. Finally, looking at both prints from every possible angle, Leaphorn realized what caused the strange lines. Fur. But they weren't animal tracks. When patched together in Leaphorn's mind, the pressed places had the shape of a man's foot.
With nothing else to learn, Leaphorn started up-canyon. While he walked he considered what he was now almost certain were the facts. Brigham Houk probably had not drowned. Somehow he had managed to get across the river. Brigham Houk, the boy who had slaughtered his mother, his brother, and his sister, was somewhere in this canyon. Had been here almost twenty years, living away from people as he had longed to live. Houk had found the boy after the hue and cry of murder died away, had sustained him secretly all these years with whatever this born hunter had needed to stay alive. Nothing else seemed to explain Houk's note. Nothing else Leaphorn could think of would have motivated the man to stop an admittedly futile effort to build a hiding place to write a note. Houk didn't want this mad son of his abandoned here. He wanted him found by the same policeman who had once shown some awareness of the boy's humanity. He wanted him cared for, and he'd given up whatever minuscule chance he'd had of living to write his note. The writing had been tiny, Leaphorn remembered, and started at one end of the card. What would Houk have said had time allowed? Would he have explained about Brigham? He'd never know.
About two miles up the twisting canyon Leaphorn found the only sign of modern human occupancy. The bare poles of an old sweat bath stood on the broad shelf above the canyon floor. The ashes under it suggested it hadn't been used for years. If the canyon had ever been grazed, it hadn't been recently. He found no tracks of horses, sheep, or goats. The only hoofprints he found were mule deer, and there seemed to be plenty of rabbits, porcupines, and small rodents. He noticed three game trails leading to a deep spring-fed pothole at the canyon bottom. Four miles up, he stopped in a shady place and ate a small piece of the bread and a couple of inches of the sausage. There was heavy cloud cover over the northwest sky now. It was colder and yesterday's wind was back again now with a vengeance. It blew cross-canyon, forming powerful eddies of air that swirled this way here, and that way there. It made the odd sounds wind makes when it pours through stony crevices. It sent whirlwinds of fallen leaves sweeping around Leaphorn's legs. It blotted out all other sound.
The wind made walking difficult, and the crooked, erratic nature of the canyon bottom made estimating distance -- even for one as experienced as Leaphorn -- little more than guesswork. Double guesswork, he thought. He had to guess how much of this climbing over tumbled boulders and detouring around brush would have added to the five and a half miles Etcitty had estimated. It would be less than that, he was sure, and he'd been looking for the landmarks Etcitty had mentioned since about mile three. Just ahead, where the canyon bottom made a sharp bend, he saw a crevice in the cliff walled in with stones--an Anasazi storeroom. On the cliff below it, half obscured by tall brush, he saw pictographs. He climbed the soft earth to the floor of the bench and pushed his way through the heavy growth of nettles for a closer look.
The dominant shape was one of those broad-shouldered, pin-headed figures that anthropologists believe represented Anasazi shamans. It looked, as Etcitty had described it, 'like a big baseball umpire holding up a pink chest protector.' Leaphorn recrossed the canyon bottom and climbed the shelf on the other side. He saw what he had come to find.
Near its beginnings in the Chuska Mountains, Many Ruins Canyon is cut deep and narrow through the Chinle sandstone formation of that plateau. There its cliffs rise sheer and vertical almost a thousand feet above a narrow, sandy bottom. It is much shallower by the time it emerges into Chinle Valley and becomes a mere drainage wash as it meanders northward toward Utah through the Greasewood Flats. But the cut deepens again in its passage through the Nokaito Bench to the San Juan. Here the crazy mishmash geology of the earth's crust had given Many Ruins a different shape. One climbed out of it on a series of steps. First the low, sometimes earthen cliffs that
