noticed a gap in its fan of tail feathers. Probably an old one. Tail feathers aren't lost to molting.
Even with Janet's directions, it took Chee half an hour to find Jano's blind. The Hopi had roofed a crack in the butte's rimrock with a network of dead sage branches and covered that with foliage cut from nearby brush. Much of that was broken and scattered now. Chee climbed into the crack, squatted, and examined the place, reconstructing Jano's strategy.
He would have first assured himself that the eagle he wanted routinely patrolled this place. He would have probably come in the evening to prepare his blind—or more likely to repair one members of his kiva had been using for centuries. If he'd changed anything noticeable, he would have waited a few days until the eagle had become accustomed to this variation in his landscape. That done, Jano would have returned early on the morning he was fated to kill Ben Kinsman. He would have brought a rabbit with him, tied a cord to the rabbit's leg and put it atop the blind's roof. Then he would have waited, watching through the cracks for the eagle to appear. Since the eyes of raptors detect motion far better than any radar, he would have made sure the rabbit moved when the proper moment came. When the eagle seized it with its talons, he'd pull the rabbit downward, throw his coat over the bird to overpower it, and push it into the cage he'd brought.
Chee checked the ground around him, looking for any proof that Jano had been there. He didn't expect to find anything, and he didn't. The rock where Jano must have sat while he waited for his eagle was worn smooth. Anyone might have sat there that day, or no one. He found not a trace of the bloodstains Jano might have left here had the eagle gashed him. as he caught it. The rain might have washed blood away, but it would have left a trace in the grainy granite. He climbed out of the crack, bringing with him only a bedraggled eagle feather from the sandy floor of the blind and a cigarette butt that looked like it had weathered much more than last week's shower. The feather was from the body—not one of the strong wingtip or tail feathers valued for ceremonial objects. And neither the feather nor the butt showed any sign of bloodstains. He tossed them back into the blind. Chee spent another hour or so making an equally fruitless check around the butte. He came across another blind a half mile down the rim, and several places where stones had been stacked with little painted prayer sticks placed among them and feathers tied to nearby sage branches. Clearly the Hopis considered this butte part of their spiritual homeland, and it probably had been since their first clans arrived about the twelfth century. The federal government's decision to add it to the Navajo Reservation hadn't changed that, and never would. The thought made him feel like a trespasser on his own reservation and did nothing good for Chee's mood. It was time to say to hell with this and go home.
The desk work required of an acting lieutenant had not helped the muscle tone in Jim Chee's legs, nor his lungs. He was tired. He stood at the rim, looking across the saddle, dreading the long climb down. An eagle soared over Black Mesa and the shape of another was outlined against the clouds far to the south over the San Francisco Peaks. This was eagle country and always had been. When the first Hopi clans founded their villages on the First Mesa, the elders had assigned eagle-collecting territory just as they'd assigned cornfields and springs. And when the Navajos came along a couple of hundred years later they, too, soon learned that one came to Black Mesa when one's medicine bundle required eagle feathers.
Chee took out his binoculars and tried to locate the bird he'd seen against the cloud. It was gone. He found the one hunting over the mesa and focused on it—thinking it might be the one he'd watched earlier. It wasn't. This one had a complete fan of tail feathers. He swung the binoculars downward, focused on the place where he'd found Jano beside Ben Kinsman's dying body and tried to re-create how that tragedy must have happened. Jano might not have seen Kinsman below, because Kinsman would have concealed himself. But looking down from here, he could hardly have missed noticing Kinsman's patrol car where he'd left it down the arroyo. Jano had been arrested once for poaching an eagle. He would have been nervous, and careful.
So why climb down to be captured? Probably because he had no choice. But why not just release the eagle, hide the cage, climb down and tell the cop he was up here meditating and saying his prayers? Jano's faded red pickup had been parked below the low point of the saddle and Kinsman had left his patrol car near the arroyo maybe a half mile away. Even without binoculars, Jano would have seen that Kinsman had his escape route blocked.
Chee scanned the valley again, picking up the ruins of what must have been the tumbled stones that once formed the walls of the Tijinney hogan, its sheep pens and its fallen brush arbor. Beyond the hogan site, a glint of reflected sunlight caught his eye. He focused on the spot. The side mirror of some sort of van parked in a cluster of junipers. What would that be doing up here? Two of last spring's plague victims had come from this quadrant of the reservation. The van might be Arizona Health Department people collecting rodents and checking fleas. He remembered Leaphorn had told him the woman he was looking for had come up this way working on a plague case.
On the opposite side of the saddle, away from the van, the Tijinney 'death hogan' and the murder site, motion caught Chee's peripheral vision. He focused on it. A black-and-white goat grazing on a bush. And not just one. He counted seven, but there might be seventeen or seventy scattered through that rough area.
While counting them, he found the track. Actually, two tracks, probably formed by the vehicle of whomever held this grazing lease and drove in now and then to see about his flock.
It was not something even a sheep-camp Navajo would dignify by calling a road, but as Chee traced the track back toward the access road through his binoculars, he realized its importance. Jano did have a way out—a way to avoid capture without giving up his eagle. He could have slipped down the other side of the saddle, invisible to the officer waiting to arrest him. He could have left the eagle in some safe place, made the easy climb over the low point of the saddle with nothing to incriminate him. Then he could have recovered his Pickup truck, driven back to the gravel road, followed it a mile or two back toward Tuba City, and then circled back °n this goatherd's track to recover his captive bird.
Jano would have known about this track. These were his eagle-catching grounds. He could have escaped easily. Instead he chose the path that led him directly to where Kinsman was waiting.
Chee started his descent carefully, remembering the dislodged stone that had almost sent him tumbling down the slope. It had been a bad day so far. He'd climbed the saddle thinking that Jano was a man who had killed in what probably had been a frantic effort to avoid arrest and then made up unlikely lies to save himself from prison. At the foot of the saddle, Chee stood for a moment to catch his breath. He glanced at his watch. He'd locate the van now, find out if whoever was with it had been here on the fateful day and—if they had been—whether they'd seen anything. If they hadn't, that, too, could be useful as a sort of negative evidence.
When he'd climbed Yells Back Butte he had nursed a vague, ambiguous hope that maybe he could find something to suggest Jano wasn't lying, that Jano wouldn't have to face the death penalty or (worse, in Chee's opinion) life in prison. To be honest, he had wanted to discover something that would restore his prestige in the eyes of Janet Pete. But now he knew that the murder of Benjamin Kinsman had been a deliberate, premeditated, and savage act of revenge.
Chapter Thirteen
THE VAN WAS PARKED on the sandy bed of a shallow wash, partly shaded by a cluster of junipers and screened by a growth of four-winged saltbush. No one was visible, but what looked like an oversized air- conditioning unit was purring away on its roof. Chee stood on the fold-down step beside its door and rapped on the
