Hunting Badger

That is who you are talking to. You tell them the Power that made us made all this above us and around us and we are part of the Power and if we do as we are taught we can bring ourselves back into hozho. Back into harmony. Then they will again know beauty all around them.”

Nakai closed his eyes, gripped Chee’s hand.

“That is hard to believe,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

“Yes.”

“To be restored, they must believe you.”

Nakai opened his eyes, stared at Chee.

“Yes,” Chee said.

“You know the chants. You sing them without a mistake. And your sand paintings are exactly right. You know the herbs, how to make the emetics, all that.”

“I hope so,” Chee said, understanding now what Hosteen Frank Sam Nakai was telling him.

“But you have to decide if you have gone too far beyond the four Sacred Mountains. Sometimes you can never come all the way back into Dinetah again.”

Chee nodded. He remembered a Saturday night after he’d graduated from high school. Nakai had driven him to Gallup. They had parked on Railroad Avenue and sat for two hours watching the drunks wandering in and out of the bars.

He’d asked Nakai why he’d parked there, who they were looking for. Nakai hadn’t answered at first, but what he said when he finally spoke Chee had never forgotten.

“We are looking for the dine’ who have left Dinetah. Their bodies are here, but their spirits are far beyond the Sacred Mountains. You can go east of Mount Taylor to find them, or west of the San Francisco Peaks, or you can find them here.”

Chee had pointed to a man who had been leaning clumsily against the wall up the avenue from them, and who now was sitting, head down on the sidewalk. “Like him?” he asked.

Nakai had waved his hand in a motion that included the bar’s neon Coors sign and the drunk now trying to push himself up from the pavement. But went beyond them to follow a polished white Lincoln Town Car rolling up the avenue toward them.

“Which one acts like he has no relatives?” Nakai had asked him. “The drunk who leaves his children hungry, or the man who buys that car that boasts of his riches instead of helping his brother?”

Nakai’s eyes were closed now, and his efforts to breathe produced a faint groaning sound. Then he said, “To cure them you must make them believe. You must believe so strongly that they feel it. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Chee said. Nakai was telling him he had failed to meet Nakai’s standards as a shaman whose conduct of the curing ways would actually cure. And Nakai was forgiving him—freeing him to be the sort of modern man he was becoming. There was a sense of relief in that, mixed with a dreary sense of loss.

 Chapter Twelve

It was just a bit after noon when Captain Largo caught him.

Through his dreams Chee heard the sound of something thumping, which gradually became pounding, which suddenly was augmented by an angry shout.

“Damn it, Chee, I know you’re in there. Unlock the door.”

Chee unlocked the door and stood, naked except for boxer shorts and befuddled by sleep, staring at the captain.

“Where the hell have you been?” Largo demanded, pushing past Chee into the trailer. “And why don’t you answer your telephone?”

The captain was staring at the telephone as he said it, noticing the little red light blinking on the answering machine.

“I’ve been away,” Chee said. “Just got back, and I had a lot of family business to take care of.”

He reached over, punched the button, awake enough now to be glad he’d been smart enough to erase the call from Cowboy Dashee. The machine reproduced the grouchy voice of Captain Largo saying: ‘This is Captain Largo. Get your ass down here. The feds located that damned airplane, and we’re going to be the beagles on one of their fox hunts again.'

The machine showed two other calls waiting and Chee clicked it off before they, whatever they were, got him into any trouble.

“I should have listened to that,” he said. “But I just got in about nine this morning, and I was worn-out.' He told Largo how he and