Hunting Badger

Why not, indeed. “I’ll be there,” he said.

Chee had given up on putting on his left sock, and was easing a sandal on that foot when he heard a vehicle bumping down his access road. It stopped, the west wind blew a puff of dust past his screen door, and a few moments later Officer Bernadette Manuelito appeared. She was carrying what seemed to be a tray covered with a white cloth, holding the cloth against the breeze with one hand, tapping on the screen with the other.

“Ya’eeh te’h,” she said. “How’s the ankle? Would you like something to eat?”

Chee said he would. But not right now. He had a can’t-wait errand to run.

Bernie had been looking at the sandal on his left foot, frowning at it. It was not a pretty sight. She shook her head.

“You can’t go anywhere,” she said. “You can’t drive. What do you think you’re doing?” She put the tray on the table.

“It’s just over to the Farmington Airport,” Chee said. “Of course I can drive. Why not? You use your right foot for the gas pedal and the brake.”

“Take off the sandal,” Officer Manuelito said. “We’ll wrap it up in the bandage again. If you think it can’t wait, I’ll drive you over there.”

Which was, of course, what happened.

The woman who Chee presumed was P.J. turned out to be the same small, slightly sunburned blonde he’d noticed at the helicopter when he’d come to talk to Jim Edgar. She was standing beside the craft holding a black metal box, the box being linked by an insulated cable to the big white pod mounted on the copter’s landing skid. When she noticed Chee limping up, her expression was skeptical. Not surprising, he thought. He was wearing his worn and wrinkled ‘stay at home’ jeans and a blue T-shirt on which some of the mutton stew Bernie had brought him had splashed when she drove too fast over a bumpy place.

Chee introduced Officer Bernadette Manuelito, who looked uncharacteristically neat and spiffy in her uniform, and himself.

P.J. smiled. “I’m Patti Collins. Just a minute until I get this data unloaded.”

Jim Edgar was leaning on the doorframe of his hangar watching them. He held up his hand in salute, shouted, “Heard you found Old Man Timms’s airplane,” and disappeared back in the direction of his workbench.

P.J. was unjacking the cable. “You got here fast,” she said. “Let’s take this into the lab and see what we have.”

The lab was a standard-looking Winnebago mobile home, its white exterior badly in need of washing but the interior immaculate.

“Have a seat somewhere,” P.J. said. She connected her black metal box to an expensive-looking console built into the back of the vehicle and did those incomprehensible things technicians do.

The console made computer sounds. The attached printer began spewing out a roll of paper. P.J. studied it. “Well, now,” she said. “I don’t know if this is going to help you much, but it’s interesting.” She detached a couple of feet of paper and laid it on a large scale U.S. Geological Survey map spread across the tabletop where Chee and Bernie were sitting.

“See this,” she said, and traced her finger down a tight squiggle of lines on the computer printout. “That coordinates with this.' She traced the same fingertip down Gothic Creek on the USGS map.

It was meaningless to Chee. He said, “Oh.”

“It shows there’s been a distribution of radioactive material downstream from here,” P.J. said, tapping her finger on the h in Gothic Creek on the map legend.

“Would that suggest the mine waste dump might have been there?” Chee asked. “That would be interesting.”

“Yeah,” P.J. said, studying the printout again. “Now my problem is whether it’s interesting enough to divert the copter a couple of miles tomorrow to get a closer scan.”

“It would be a big help to us,” Chee said.

“I’ll talk to the pilots,” P.J. said. “It would just take another twenty minutes or so. And if it’s hot enough, we ought to get it on the map anyway.”

“Would there be room for me to go along?”