The Shape Shifter

Born 1939, Ada, Okla. Came to Four-Corners Country when? Opened trading-post gallery when? Place burned autumn l965. Totter dies in Okla City in 1967. Leaves no kith nor kin, no survivors. So why did he go back to Oklahoma?

Leaphorn finished his coffee. Printed JASON DELOS on 114

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the sheet, got up to refill his cup in the kitchen, and then stood staring into the fire, thinking of the two empty five-gallon lard cans Grandma Peshlakai had found at Totter’s gallery. Navajos used lots of lard and usually got it in those cans because the cans themselves were so useful.

His own fire was burning hot now, and the room was filled with the wonderful perfume that only pinyon fires can produce. The aroma of the forest, of quiet places, of peace, tranquility. He sat again, picked up the pen and wrote:

Few days before Totter fire, Totter apparently stole pinyon sap from Grandma Peshlakai’s work shed.

Why? As fire accelerant? To get fire hot enough to destroy Shewnack’s body beyond identification?

Why would he do that? The burned man was apparently not a local. Nobody seemed to come forward to ask about him. Garcia guessed he was a tran-sient coming through who had noticed Totter’s HELP

WANTED sign. But coming through from where?

He looked at that, produced a wry smile, and added:

“Or for waterproofing some of his own baskets for sale to tourists?”

He started to scratch that out. Stopped. Shook his head. Instead wrote: Joe Leaphorn LOSING IT!!

Skipped some space on the page. Wrote:

“An’n ti’.” Frowned. Lined that out and wrote “an’ t I’.” Studied that sort of generic Navajo word for witchcraft in general, said it aloud, approved it, underlined it. Then he wrote an’t’zi, the Navajo word for the specie of witchcraft employing corpse powder poisons to cause fatal illnesses.

THE SHAPE SHIFTER

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Under that he wrote “ye-na-L o si,” underlined it, thought a moment and slashed an X over the entire list. The ye-na-L o si expression described what the belagaana schol-ars preferred to call skinwalkers, relating them to their European witchcraft stories of werewolves.

At the bottom of the page, he underlined Leaphorn LOSING IT!! And added: SEEMS LIKE I HAVE ALREADY

LOST IT.

He wadded the paper. Tossed it into the fire. Leaphorn didn’t believe in witchcraft. He believed in evil, firmly believed in it, saw it practiced all around him in its various forms—greed, ambition, malice—and a variety of others.

But he didn’t believe in supernatural witches. Or did he?

And he was dead tired and, to hell with it all, he was going to bed to get some sleep.

Easier said than done. He found himself thinking of Emma, missing her, yearning for her. Telling her about the carpet, about Delos, about Totter’s fire, about Shewnack, about the Handy case, about people who didn’t seem to have beginnings anywhere and who faded away into ashes and odd mailed-in obituary notices. And Emma smiling at him, understanding him all too well, telling him that she guessed he already had this all figured out and his problem was he just didn’t like his solution because he didn’t like the idea of “shape shifters,” of his suspects turning into owls and flying away. Which seemed painfully close to true.

He drifted from that into wishing that he could have been in the hogan all those winters when his elderly maternal relatives were telling their winter stories—

explaining the reasons behind the curing ceremonials, the basis for Dineh values. He’d missed too much of that.

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Emma hadn’t. Neither had Jim Chee. Chee, for example, had once passed along to him how Hosteen Adowe Claw, one of Chee’s shaman kinsmen, had clarified the meaning of the incident in the story of the Dineh emergence from the flooded third world into this glittering world, in which First Man realizes he had left his medicine bundle behind, with all of humanity’s greed, malice, and assorted other evils. And then sent a heron back into the flood waters of that world destroyed by God because of those evils and told that diving bird to find the bundle and bring it to him.

And tell the heron not to tell anyone that it contained evil, to just tell them it was “the way to make money.”

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It proved to be another uneasy sleep, broken by troublesome dreams, by long thoughts about whether the dead man found in the car was Mel Bork, and if not him, who, and what then had happened to Bork? When Leaphorn finally came fully awake, it was because he thought he had heard a door opening. He sat up, totally alert, tensed, listening. Now came the sound of the door closing. It would have been the garage/kitchen door. Now the sound of footsteps. Light footsteps. Someone trying not to disturb him. Probably Louisa, he thought. Probably she had cut off her southern Ute research a little early. Some of the tension went away. But not much. He slid across over the bed toward the nightstand, pulled open the drawer, feeling for the little .32-caliber pistol he kept there, finding it, clutching it, remembering that once, when someone with children was visiting, Louisa had persuaded him to leave it unloaded.

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The sound of another door opening. At Louisa’s adjoining bedroom just down the hall. More steps. Sounds of