The First Eagle

'That was the last entry about Nez?' Chee asked. 'No,' Louisa said. She flipped back through the pages. ''July 6. Krause says he heard Dr. Woody checked Nez into the hospital. Krause not answering his telephone. Will get to Flag manana and see what I can learn.' ''July 7. Can't believe what I heard at Flag today. Somebody is lying. Yells Back Butte manana, collect fleas, find out.''

Louisa shut the notebook. 'That's it. The final entry.'

Chapter Sixteen

'IT'S FUNNY,' LEAPHORN SAID, 'how you can look at something a half dozen times and not see it.'

Louisa waited for him to explain that, decided he didn't intend to and said, 'Like what?'

'Like what Catherine Pollard wrote in that journal,' Leaphorn said. 'I should have noticed the pattern. The incubation period of that bacteria. I should have wondered why she would be coming up here.'

They were jolting up the rocky tracks that had once given the Tijinney family access to the world outside the shadow of Yells Back Butte and Black Mesa. Over Black Mesa afternoon clouds were forming, hinting that the rainy season might finally begin.

'How?' Louisa said. 'Did you know when Mr. Nez died?'

'I could have found out,' Leaphorn said. 'That would have been as easy as making a telephone call.'

'Oh, knock it off,' Louisa said. 'I've noticed males have this practice of entertaining themselves with self- flagellation. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. We females find that habit tiresome.'

Leaphorn considered that awhile. Grinned.

'You mean like Jim Chee blaming himself for not getting up here quick enough to keep Kinsman from getting himself hit on the head.'

'Exactly.'

'Okay,' Leaphorn said. 'You're right. I guess I couldn't have known.'

'On the other hand, you shouldn't get too complacent,' Louisa said. 'I hope you noticed that I figured it out pretty quick.'

He laughed. 'I noticed it. It took me a while to deal with that. Then two thoughts occurred. You could translate Pollard's scribbles and I couldn't, and you were paying attention while Professor Perez was educating us about pathogenic bacteria last night and I was just sitting there letting my mind wander. I decided that you just have a much higher tolerance for boredom than I do.'

'Academics have to be boredom-invulnerable, Louisa said. 'Otherwise we'd walk out of faculty meetings, and if you do that, you don't get tenure. You have to go get real jobs.' Jim Leaphorn shifted into second and followed the established tire tracks through the arroyo where Chee had left his car that fatal day. They ran out of old tracks on the little hump of high ground that overlooked on what was left of the old Tijinney place. Leaphorn stopped and turned off the ignition, and they sat looking down on the abandoned homestead.

'Mr. Chee said Woody had his van parked over closer to the butte,' Louisa said. 'Over there where all those junipers are growing by the arroyo.'

'I remember,' Leaphorn said. 'I just wanted to take a look.' He waved at the ruined hogan, its door missing, its roof fallen, its north wall tumbled. Beyond it stood the remains of a brush arbor, a sheep pen formed of stacked stones, two stone pylons that once would have supported timbers on which water storage barrels had rested. 'Sad,' he said.

'Some people would call it picturesque.'

'People who don't understand how much work went into building all that. And trying to make a living here.'

'I know,' Louisa said. 'I was a farm girl myself. Lots of work, but Iowa had rich black dirt. And enough rain. And indoor plumbing. Electricity. All that.'

'Old Man McGinnis told me kids had vandalized this place. It looks like it.'

'Not Navajo kids, I'll bet,' she said. 'Isn't it a death hogan?'

'I think the old lady died in it,' Leaphorn said. 'You notice the north wall's partly knocked down.'

'The traditional way to take out the body, isn't it? North, the direction of evil.' Leaphorn nodded. 'But McGinnis was complaining that a lot of young Navajos, not just the city ones, don't respect the old ways these days. They ignore the taboos, if they ever heard of them. He thinks some of them tore into this place, looking for stuff they could sell. He said they even dug this deep hole where the fire pit was. Apparently they thought something valuable was buried there.'

Louisa shook her head. 'I wouldn't think there would be anything very valuable left in that hogan. And I don't see any sign of a big deep hole.'

Leaphorn chuckled. 'I don't either. But then McGinnis never certifies the accuracy. He just passes along the gossip. And as for the value, he said they were looking for ceremonial stuff. When that hogan was built, the owner probably had a place in the wall beside the door where he kept his medicine bundle. Minerals from the sacred mountains. That sort of thing. Some collectors will pay big money for some of that material, and the older it is the better.'

'I guess so,' Louisa said. 'Collecting antiques is not my thing.'

Leaphorn smiled at her. 'You collect everybody's antique stories. Even ours. That's how I met you, remember. One of your sources was in jail.'

'Collect them and preserve them,' she said. 'Remember when you were telling me about how First Man and First Woman found the baby White Shell Girl on Huerfano Mesa and you had it all wrong?'

'I had it exactly right,' Leaphorn said. 'That's the version we hold to in my Red Forehead Clan. That makes it correct. The other clans have it wrong. And you know what, I'm going to take a closer look at that hogan. Let's see if McGinnis knew what he was talking about.'