The First Eagle

'Any agency in particular?'

'Well, maybe the FBI.'

'Oh,' Chee said. 'What have you heard?'

'It has been said that the FBI would hesitate to handle sensitive business with you over the telephone.'

Chee laughed. 'Man, oh man,' he said. 'How fast the word does travel. Did you hear that this morning?'

'Last night already,' Leaphorn said.

'Who?'

'Kennedy called me from Albuquerque. Remember him? We worked with him a time or two, and then the Bureau transferred him. He was asking me about a thing we were looking into just before I retired. He's retiring himself at the end of the year and he wanted to know how I liked being a civilian. Asked about you, too. And he said you had made yourself some enemies. So I asked him how you managed that.'

'And he said I'd taped a telephone call without per mission,' Chee said. 'Thereby violating a federal statute.'

'Yeah,' Leaphorn said. 'Did he have it right?'

Chee nodded.

'It's nice you don't want that promotion then,' Leaphorn said. 'Had you decided that before or after you turned on the tape recorder?'

Chee thought for a moment. 'Before, I guess. But I didn't really realize it.'

They turned up the track toward Yells Back Butte, circled around a barrier of tumbled boulders and found themselves engulfed in goats. And not just the goats. There, beside the track was an aged woman on a large roan horse watching them.

'Lucked out,' Leaphorn said. He climbed out of the patrol car, said 'Ya'eeh te'h' to Old Lady Notah and introduced himself, reciting his membership in his born to and born for clans. Then he introduced Jim Chee, by maternal and paternal clans and as a member of the Navajo Tribal Police at Tuba City. The horse stared at Chee suspiciously, the goats milled around, and Mrs. Notah returned the courtesy.

'It is a long way to Tuba City,' Mrs. Notah said. 'And I have seen you here before. I think it must be because the other policeman was killed here. Or because the Hopi came to steal our eagles.'

'It is even more than that, mother,' Leaphorn said. 'A woman who worked with the health department came here the day the policeman was killed. No one has seen her since. Her family asked me to look for her.'

Mrs. Notah waited a bit to see if Leaphorn had more to say. Then she said: 'I don't know where she is.' Leaphorn nodded. 'They say you saw a skinwalker somewhere near here. Was that the day the policeman was killed?'

She nodded. 'Yes. It was that day it rained. Now I think it might have been somebody who helps the man who works in that big motor home.'

Chee sucked in his breath.

Leaphorn said: 'Why do you think that?'

'After that day I saw that man come out of his place carrying a white suit. He walked way up the slope with it, and through the junipers, and then he put it on and put a white hood over his head.' She laughed. 'I think it is something to keep the sickness off of them. I saw something like that on television.'

'I think that's right,' Leaphorn said. And then he asked Mrs. Notah to try to tell them everything she had seen or heard around Yells Back Butte that morning. She did, and it took quite a while.

She had risen before dawn, lit her propane burner, warmed her coffee and ate some fry bread. Then she saddled her horse and rode there. While she was rounding up the goats, she heard a truck coming up the track toward the butte. About sunup, she had seen a man climb up the saddle and disappear over the rim onto the top of the butte.

'I thought it must be one of the Hopi eagle-catchers come to get one. They used to come out here a lot before the government changed the boundary, and I had seen this same man the afternoon before. Just looking around,' she said. 'That's the way they used to work. Then they would come back before daylight the next morning and go up and catch one.' Chee asked: 'Did you tell anyone about this?'

'I was down by the road when a police car came by. I told him I thought the Hopis were going to steal an eagle again.'

Chee nodded. Mrs. Notah had been Kinsman's confidential source.

Next in Mrs. Notah's narration was the arrival of the black Jeep.

'It was going too fast for those rocks,' Mrs. Notah said. 'I thought it would be the young woman with the short hair, but I couldn't see who it was.'

'Why the woman with the short hair?' Leaphorn asked.

'I have seen her driving that car before. She drives too fast.' Mrs. Notah emphasized her disapproval with a negative shake of her head. 'Then I had to go get that goat there.' She pointed at a black and white male that had wandered far down the track. 'Maybe a half-hour later, when I moved the goats back up near the butte, I saw somebody moving behind the trees, and then I saw the thing in the white suit.'

She paused, rewarded them with a wry smile. 'I went away for a while then, and on the way back to the goats, I heard a car coming, very, very slowly, up the trail. It was a police car, and I thought, That policeman knows how to drive over rocks. When I came back to the goats, I saw the man who works in that motor home was over at the old Tijinney hogan. He was right in there, and I thought bilagaana don't know about death hogans, or maybe that's the skinwalker. A witch, well, he don't care about chindis.'

'What was he doing?' Leaphorn asked. 'I couldn't see much over the wall from where I was,' she said. 'But when he came out, I could see he was carrying a shovel.'