had seen in Jorie’s suicide note.
Leaphorn interrupted again.
“Louisa, could you ask her if anyone knows how the first Ironhand got away from the Navajos?”
Becenti was getting caught up in this, too. He didn’t wait for approval. He asked. Bashe Lady laughed, answered, and laughed again. Becenti shrugged.
“She said the Navajos thought he got away like a bird, but he got away like a badger.”
About then Granddaughter said something in rapid Ute to Bashe Lady, and Bashe Lady looked angry, and then abashed, and decided she knew absolutely nothing more about Ironhand.
When the interview was over and they were heading back toward Shiprock, Louisa wanted to talk about Ironhand Junior, as she had begun calling him. The session had gone well, she said. A lot of it was what had already been collected about Ute mythology, religion and customs. But some of it, as she put it, “cast some light on how the myths of preliterate cultures evolve with generational changes.” And the information about Ironhand was interesting.
Having said that, she glanced at Leaphorn and caught him grinning.
“What?” she said, sounding suspicious.
The grin evolved into a chuckle. “No offense, but when you talk like that it takes me right back to Tempe, Arizona, and sleepy afternoons in the poorly air-conditioned classrooms of Arizona State, and the voices of my professors of anthropology.”
“Well,” she said, ”that’s what I am.' But she laughed, too. “I guess it gets to be a habit. And it’s getting even worse. Postmodernism is in the saddle now, with its own jargon. Anyway, Bashe Lady was a good source. If nothing else, it shows that hostility toward you Bloody Knives still lingers on like Serb versus Croat.”
“Except these days we’re far too civilized to be killing one another. We marry back and forth, buy each other’s used cars, and the only time we invade them it’s to try to beat their slot machines.”
“OK, I surrender.”
But Leaphorn was still a bit chafed from a long day listening to his people described as brutal invaders. “And as you know very well, Professor, the Utes were the aggressors. They’re Shoshoneans. Warriors off the Great Plains moving in on us peaceful Athabascan farmers and shepherds.”
“Peaceful shepherds who stole their sheep from who?” Louisa said. “Or is it whom? Anyway, I’m trying to calculate the chronology of this second Ironhand. Wouldn’t he be too old now to be the bandit everyone is looking for?”
“Maybe not,” Leaphorn said. “The first one would have been operating as late as 1910, which is when we started getting some fairly serious law and order out here. She said the current Ironhand was a child of his old age. Let’s say Junior was born in the early forties. That’s biologically possible, and that would have him the right age to be in the Vietnam War.”
“I guess so. From what she said about him, if I was one of those guys out there trying to find him, I’d be hoping that I wouldn’t.”
Leaphorn nodded. He wondered how much the FBI knew about Ironhand. And if they did know, how much they had passed along to the locals. He thought about what Bashe Lady had said about how the original Ironhand had eluded the Navajos hunting him. Not like a bird, but like a badger. Badgers escaped when they didn’t just stand and fight by diving into their tunnel. Badger tunnels had an exit as well as an entrance. When the hunting ground was canyon country and coal-mining country, that was an interesting thought.
Chapter Fifteen
On the maps drawn by geographers it’s labeled the Colorado Plateau, with its eighty-five million acres sprawling across Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. It is larger than any of those states; mostly high and dry and cut by countless canyons eroded eons ago when the glaciers were melting and the rain didn’t stop for many thousand years. The few people who live on it call it the Four Corners, the High Dry, Canyon Land, Slick Rock Country, the Big Empty. Once a writer in more poetic times called it the Land of Room Enough and Time.
This hot afternoon, Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police had other names for it, all uncomplimentary and some, after he’d slid into a growth of thistles, downright obscene. He’d spent the day with Officer Jackson Nez, prowling cautiously along the bottom of one of those canyons, perspiring profusely under FBI-issued body armor, carrying an electronic satellite location finder and an infrared body-heat-detecting device and a scoped rifle. What weighed Chee down even more than all that was the confident knowledge that he and Officer Nez were wasting their time.
“It’s not a total waste of time,” Officer Nez said, ”because when the federals can mark off enough of these canyons as searched, they can declare those guys dead and call this off.”
