Hunting Badger

along the sheet to his arm. Not the burly arm Chee remembered. Not much more than a bone covered with dry skin.

“I will go away soon,” Nakai said. He spoke with his eyes closed, in slow, careful Navajo. “The in-standing wind will be leaving me, and I will follow it to another place.' He tapped his forearm with a finger. “Nothing will be left here but these old bones then. Before that, I must tell something. There is something I left unfinished. I must give you the last of your lessons.”

“Lesson?” Chee asked, but instantly he knew what Nakai meant. Years ago, when Chee had still believed he could be both a Navajo Policeman and a hataalii, Nakai had been teaching him how to do the Night Way ceremony. Chee had memorized the actions of the Holy People involved in myth and how to reproduce this story in the sand paintings. He’d sung the chants that told the story. He’d learned the formula for the emetic required, how to handle the patient, everything required to produce the magic that would compel the Holy People to end the sickness and restore the harmony of natural life. Everything except the last lesson.

The tradition of Navajo shamanism required that. The teacher withheld the ultimate secret until he was certain the student was ready for it. For Chee, that moment had never come. Once he had gone away to Virginia to study at the FBI Academy, once he had flown to Los Angeles to work on a case, once he’d gone to Nakai’s winter hogan to be tutored and Nakai had said the season and the weather were wrong for it. Finally, Chee had concluded that Nakai had seen that he would never be ready to sing the Night Way. He had been hurt by that. He had suspected that Nakai disapproved of assimilation of the white man’s ways, of his plan to marry Janet Pete, had understood that having a Navajo father would never prepare her for the sacrifices required of a shaman’s wife. Whatever the reason, Chee had respected Nakai’s wisdom. He would have to forget that boyhood dream. He was not to be entrusted the power to cure. He had come to accept that.

But now—? Had Nakai changed his mind? What could he say?

“Here?” he said. He gestured at the white, sterile walls. “Could you do that here?”

“A bad place,” Nakai said. “Many people have died here, and many are sick and unhappy. I hear them crying in the hallway. And the chindi of the dead are trapped within its walls. I hear them, too. Even when they give me the medicine that makes me sleep, I hear them. What I must teach you should be done in a holy place, far away from evil. But we have no choice.”

He replaced the mask over his face, inhaled oxygen, and removed it again.

“The bilagaana do not understand death,” he said. “It is the other end of the circle, not something that should be fought and struggled against. Have you noticed that people die just at the end of night, when the stars are still shining in the west and you can sense the brightness of Dawn Boy on the eastern mountains? That’s so Holy Wind within them can go to bless the new day. I always thought I would die like that. In the summer. At our camp in the Chuskas. With the stars above me. With my instanding wind blowing free. Not dying trapped in-'

Nakai’s voice had become so faint that Chee couldn’t understand the last words. Then it faded into silence.

Chee felt Bernie’s touch at his elbow.

“Jim. If this is something ceremonial, shouldn’t I leave?”

“I guess so,” Chee said. “I really don’t know.”

They stood, watching Nakai, his eyes closed now.

Chee replaced the oxygen mask over his face, felt Bernie’s touch on his elbow.

“He hates this place,” Bernie said. “Let’s get him out of here.”

“What do you mean?” Chee said. “How?”

“We tell the nurse we’re taking him home. And then we take him home.”

“What about all that?” Chee asked, pointing at the oxygen mask, the tubes that tied Nakai to life, and the wires that linked him to the computers which measured the Holy Wind within him and reduced it to electronic blips racing across television screens. “He’ll die.”

“Of course he’ll die,” Bernie said, her tone impatient. “That’s what the nurse told us. He’s dying right now. That’s what he was telling you. But he doesn’t want to die here.”

“You’re right,” Chee said. “But how do -'

But Bernie was walking out. “First, I call the ambulance service,” she said. “While they’re coming I’ll start trying to check him out.”

It was not quite as simple as Bernie made it sound. The nurse was