“Turn up there,” she ordered, pointing to the road that led toward Ship Rock, “and I’ll show you the hay.” Chee remembered very well the location of the loosened fence posts, but the beauty of the morning had turned him amiable. With Manuelito, he would work on correcting one fault at a time, leaving this one for a rainy day. He turned as ordered, parked when told to park, and followed her over to the fence. With the snow cover now evaporated, it was easy to see that the dirt had been dug away from the posts. It was also easy to see, scattered among the sage, juniper, and rabbit brush, what was left of several bales of alfalfa after the cattle had dined.
“Did you tell Delmar Yazzie about this?” Chee asked.
Officer Manuelito looked puzzled. “Yazzie?”
“Yazzie,” Chee said. “The resource-enforcement ranger who works out of Shiprock. Mr. Yazzie is the man responsible for keeping people from stealing cattle.”
Officer Manuelito looked flustered. “No, sir,” she said. “I thought we could sort of stake this place out. Keep an eye on it, you know. Whoever is putting out this hay bait will be back and once he gets the cows used to coming here, he’ll—”
“He’ll rig himself up a sort of chute,” Chee said, “and back his trailer in here, and drive a few of ’em on it, and . . . “ Chee paused. Her flustered look had been replaced by the smile of youthful enthusiasm. But now Chee’s impatient tone had caused the smile to go away.
Acting Lieutenant Chee had intended to tell Officer Manuelito some of what he’d learned in digesting the brand inspector training manual. If they did indeed catch the cattle thief and managed to get a conviction, the absolute maximum penalty for his crime would be a fine “not to exceed $100” and a jail term “not to exceed six months.” That’s what it said in section 1356 of subchapter six of chapter seven of the Livestock Inspection and Control Manual. Reading that section just after Manuelito’s call had fueled Chee’s urge to get out of the office and into the sunlight. But why was he venting his bad mood on this rookie cop? Even interrupting her to do it—an inexcusable rudeness for any Navajo. It wasn’t her fault, it was Captain Largo’s. And besides, Finch had hurt his pride. He wanted to deflate that pompous jerk by catching Finch’s Zorro before Finch got him. Manuelito looked like a valuable help in that project.
Chee swallowed, cleared his throat. “. . . and then we’d have an easy conviction,” he concluded.
Officer Manuelito’s expression had become unreadable. A hard lady to mislead.
“And put a stop to one cow thief,” he added, conscious of how lame it sounded. “Well, let’s go. Let’s see if anyone’s at home at the Sam place.”
The Rural Electrification Administration had run a power line across the empty landscape off in the direction of the Chuska Mountains, which took it within a few miles of the Sam place, and the Navajo Communication Company had followed by linking such inhabited spots as Rattlesnake and Red Rock to the world with its own telephone lines. But the Sam outfit had either been too 32 of 102
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far off the route to make a connection feasible, or the Sam family had opted to preserve its privacy. Thus the fence posts that lined the dirt track leading to the Sam hogan were not draped with telephone wire, and thus there had been no way for Jim Chee to warn Ms. Sam of the impending visit.
But as he geared down into low to creep over the cattle guard and onto the track leading into the Sam grazing lease, he noticed the old boot hanging on the gate post was right side up. Someone must be home.
“I hope someone’s here,” Officer Manuelito said.
“They are,” Chee said. He nodded toward the boot.
Officer Manuelito frowned, not understanding.
“The boot’s turned up,” Chee said. “When you’re leaving, and nobody’s going to be home, you turn the boot upside down. Empty.
Nobody home. That saves your visitor from driving all the way up to the hogan.”
“Oh,” Manuelito said. “I didn’t know that. We lived over near Keams Canyon before Mom moved to Red Rock.” She sounded impressed. Chee became aware that he was showing off. And enjoying it. He nodded, said: “Yep. You probably had a different signal over there.” And thought it would be embarrassing now if nobody was home. The trouble with cattle guard signaling was that people forgot to stop and change the boot.
But Lucy Sam’s pickup was resting in front of her double-wide mobile home and Lucy Sam was peering out of the screen door at them. Chee let the patrol car roll to a stop amid a flock of startled chickens. They waited, giving Ms. Sam the time required to prepare herself for receiving visitors. It also gave Chee time to inspect the place.
The mobile home was one of the flimsier models but it had been placed solidly on a base of concrete blocks to keep the wind from blowing under it. A small satellite dish sat on its roof, helping a row of old tires hold down the aluminum panels as well as bringing in a television signal. Beside this insubstantial residence stood the Sam hogan, solidly built of sandstone slabs with its door facing properly eastward. Chee’s practiced eyes could tell that it had been built to the specifications prescribed for the People by Changing Woman, their giver of laws. Beyond the hogan was a hay shed with a plank holding pen for cattle, a windmill with attendant water tank, and, on top of the shed, a small wind generator, its fan blades spinning in the morning breeze. Down the slope a rusty and long-deceased Ford F100 pickup rested on blocks with its wheels missing. Farther down stood an outhouse. Beyond this untidy clutter of rural living, the view stretched away forever.
It reminded Chee of a professor he’d had once at the University of New Mexico who had done a research project on how Navajos place their hogans. The answer seemed to Chee glaringly obvious. A Navajo, like a rancher anywhere, would need access to water, to grazing, to a road, and above all a soul-healing view of—in the words of one of the curing chants—“beauty all around you.” The Sam family had put beauty first. They had picked the very crest of the high grassy ridge between Red Wash and Little Ship Rock Wash. To the west the morning sun lit the pink and orange wilderness of erosion that gave the Red Rock community its name.
Beyond that the blue-green mass of the Carrizo Mountains rose. Far to the north in Colorado, the Roman nose shape of Sleeping Ute Mountain dominated, and west of that was the always-changing pattern of lights and shadows that marked the edge of Utah’s canyon country. But look eastward, and all of this was overpowered by the dark monolith of the Rock with Wings towering over the rolling grassland. Only five or six million years old, the geologists said, but in Chee’s mythology it had been there since God created time or, depending on the version one preferred, had flown in fairly recently carrying the first Navajo clans down from the north.
