The First Eagle

importance to Chee—making him mentor, spiritual adviser, confessor and friend. By trade he was a rancher and a shaman whose command of the Blessing Way ceremonial and a half dozen other curing rituals was so respected that he taught them to student hataalu at Navajo Community College. If anyone could tell Chee the wise way to handle the messy business of Kinsman, Jano and Mickey, it would be Nakai.

More specifically, Nakai would advise him on how he could deal with the problem posed by the first eagle. If it existed and he caught it, it would die. He had no illusions about its fate in the laboratory. There was a chant to be sung before hunting, asking the prey to know it was respected and to understand the need for it to die. But if Jano was lying, then the eagle he would try to lure to that blind would die for nothing. Chee would be violating the moral code of the Dine, who did not take lightly the killing of anything.

No telephone line came within miles of the Nakai summer hogan, but Chee drove along Navajo Route 12 with not a doubt that his granduncle would be there. Where else would he be? It was summer. His flock would be high in the mountain pastures. The coyotes would be waiting in the fringes of the timber, as they always were. The sheep would need him. Nakai was always where he was needed. So he would be in his pasture tent near his sheep.

But Hosteen Nakai wasn't in his tent up in the high meadows.

It was late twilight when Chee pulled his truck off the entry track and onto the hard-packed earth of the Nakai place. His headlight beams swept across the cluster of trees beside the hogan. They also caught the form of a man, propped on pillows in a portable bed, the sort medical supply companies rent. Chee's heart sank. His granduncle was never sick. Having the bed outside was an ominous sign.

Blue Lady was standing in the hogan doorway, looking out at Chee as he climbed out of the truck, recognizing him, running toward him, saying: 'How good. How good. He wanted you to come. I think he sent out his thoughts to you, and you heard him.'

Blue Lady was Hosteen's second wife, named for the beauty of the turquoise she wore with her velvet blouse when her kinaalda ceremony initiated her into womanhood. She was the younger sister of Hosteen Nakai's first wife, who had died years before Chee was born. Since Navajo tradition is matrilineal and the man joined his bride's family, practice favored widowers marrying one of their sisters-in-law, thereby maintaining the same residence and the same mother-in-law. Nakai, being most traditional and already studying to be a shaman, had honored that tradition. Blue Lady was the only Nakai grandmother Chee had known.

Now she was hugging Chee to her. 'He wanted to see you before he dies,' she said.

'Dies? What is it? What happened?' It didn't seem possible to Chee that Hosteen Nakai could be dying. Blue Lady had no answer to that question. She led him over to the trees and motioned him into a rocking chair beside the bed. 'I will get the lantern,' she said.

Hosteen Nakai was studying him. 'Ah,' he said, 'Long Thinker has come to talk to me. I had hoped for that.'

Chee had no idea what to say. He said: 'How are you, my father? Are you sick?'

Nakai produced a raspy laugh, which provoked a racking cough. He fumbled on the bed cover, retrieved a plastic device, inserted it into his nostrils and inhaled. The tube connected to it disappeared behind the bed. Connected, Chee presumed, to an oxygen tank. Nakai was trying to breathe deeply, his lungs making an odd sound. But he was smiling at Chee.

'What happened to you?' Chee asked. 'I made a mistake,' Nakai said. 'I went to a bilagaana doctor at Farmington. He told me I was sick. They put me in the hospital and then they broke my ribs, and cut out around in there and put me back together.' His voice was trailing off as he finished that, forcing a pause. When he had breath again, he chuckled. 'I think they left out some parts. Now I have to get my air through this tube.'

Blue Lady was hanging a propane lantern on the limb overhanging the head of the bed.

'He has lung cancer,' she said. 'They took out one lung, but it had already spread to the other one.'

'And all sorts of other places, too, that you don't want to even know about,' Nakai said, grinning. 'When I die, my chindi will be awful mad. He'll be full of malignant tumors. That's why I made them move my bed out here. I don't want that chindi to be infecting this hogan. I want it out here where the wind will blow it away.'

'When you die, it will be because you just got too old to want to live anymore,' Chee said. He put his hand on Nakai's arm. Where he had always felt hard muscle, he now felt only dry skin between his palm and the bone. 'It will be a long time from now. And remember what Changing Woman taught the people: If you die of natural old age, you don't leave a chindi behind.'

'You young people—' Nakai began, but a grimace cut off the words. He squeezed his eyes shut, and the muscles of his face clenched and tightened. Blue Lady was at his side, holding a glass of some liquid. She gripped his hand.

'Time for the pain medicine,' she said.

He opened his eyes. 'I must talk a little first,' he said. 'I think he came to ask me something.'

'You talk a little later. The medicine will give you some time for that.' And Blue Lady raised his head from the pillow and gave him the drink. She looked at Chee. 'Some medicine they gave him to let him sleep. Morphine maybe,' she said. 'It used to work very good. Now it helps a little.'

'I should let him rest,' Chee said. 'You can't,' she said. 'Besides, he was waiting for you.'

'For me?'

'Three people he wanted to see before he goes,' she said. 'The other two already came.' She adjusted the oxygen tube back into Nakai's nostrils, dampened his forehead with a cloth, bent low and put her lips to his cheek, and walked back into the hogan.

Chee stood looking down at Nakai, remembering boyhood, remembering the winter stories in his hogan, the summer stories at the fire beside the sheep-camp tent, remembering the time Nakai had caught him drunk, remembering kindness and wisdom. Then Nakai, eyes still closed, said: 'Sit down. Be easy.'

Chee sat.

'Now, tell me why you came.'

'I came to see you.'