Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] (15 page)

He worked his way away from the lake, searching in an expanding circle along game trails and sandy drainage bottoms. Susanne followed, asking a few questions at first, then falling silent. By 2 P.M. Leaphorn was absolutely certain that George Bowlegs hadn't come to this lake. He sat under a juniper, offered the girl a cigarette and smoked one himself, as he tried to imagine where else George might go to find his kachinas. There didn't seem to be an answer. He finished the cigarette and resumed the search. Within five minutes he found, clear and unmistakable, the shape of the left forefoot of George's horse. It was in the bare earth where the bulk of a rabbit bush shielded it from the wind. Leaphorn then found the right front hoofprint in the open, so wind-erased that he would have missed it if he hadn't known where to look.

"So he did come," Susanne said. "But where do we look for him now?"

"He was here either before or during that little storm," Leaphorn said. "It must have been still light. So he made part of the trip Monday night after he left the note for Cecil and then finished the ride Tuesday."

And then what? Leaphorn examined the ground around the bush, picking up traces of hoof tracks in places where the ground cover or earth contour had offered some protection from the blasting wind. The short distance he scouted suggested that George had ridden up this ridge from the northeast—the direction of Zuñi Village. The boy had sat his horse for a considerable time behind a growth of piñon, and then had ridden some thirty yards along the ridge and away toward the southeast. Southeast there was the gray-green shape of the Zuñi escarpment. He had found the lake and then he had ridden away. Why? To wait? To wait for what? For Cata's spirit to arrive tomorrow for its descent into the underworld? Maybe. Leaphorn shook his head. Susanne was looking at him doubtfully.

"You're sure about him not taking food from the commune?" he asked.

"I'm sure," she said. "Halsey wouldn't let him have any."

"So he must have been hungry by the time he got here. The boy's hungry and he's proud of his ability as a deer hunter, and he's brought along his deer rifle. So I'd guess he'd go deer hunting." Otherwise, if he was waiting for Cata's spirit, he would have had two full days to pass without any food. There were no deer tracks here. The herds would still be back on the plateau, not yet driven down to low ground by snow and cold. If George was smart he'd head for the plateau, find a place with shelter, and hole up. And then he would find a herd territory and set up over a deer trail, and have meat to eat while he waited for whatever he waited for.

And because George Bowlegs knew how to find deer, Leaphorn knew how to find Bowlegs. That left the question of what to do with this skinny girl. Leaphorn looked at her speculatively, and explained the alternatives. They were simple enough. She could find her way back to the truck and wait for him there—perhaps until sometime late tomorrow. Or she could come along, which would involve a substantial amount of longdistance walking, and maybe spending a cold night on the plateau. "I don't know if it's dangerous," Leaphorn said. "I don't think George killed the Cata boy, but some people think so, and if he did maybe he'd want to shoot me because I'm hunting him. I doubt it, but then, as I said, everybody says he's sort of crazy. If he is crazy enough to take a shot at somebody, all he's got is a worn-out short-range 30-30. But actually, if he's good enough to stalk deer with that thing, I wouldn't want him stalking me." He paused. Was there anything he'd overlooked? He had a feeling there might be. "Another thing. He's almost sure to see us before we see him. Because we'll have to be moving and he probably won't be."

Susanne was smiling at him. "On the other hand," she said, "George likes me and he trusts me and he isn't going to shoot at me. I don't think he's going to shoot at anybody else, either, and I'd rather come along than be at that truck all night by myself. And if I don't come along you'll never find him, because when he sees a strange man, he'll hide. But if he sees me, he'll come out and talk. I'd rather come along."

Leaphorn led the way down the ridge at a fast walk.

The route Bowlegs must have taken—the shortest and easiest way up the mesa—was a saddle-backed ridge which provided access up the mesa wall. He would track just long enough to confirm this and then head directly for the saddle. Susanne was hurrying along behind him.

"I'm kinda scared," she said. "I bet you are a little, too, aren't you? But I really
do
think George needs somebody to help him."

Exactly, Leaphorn thought. George, and Ted Isaacs, and the pale young man with nightmares, and a younger sister left somewhere back in cruel country, and a world full of losers—they all need Susanne's help, and they'll get it if she can reach them. Which is what keeps her from being a loser, too. He walked fast, picking up the wind-faded hoofprint here and there, knowing Susanne would keep up, and trying without any luck at all to understand the choice Ted Isaacs had made.

THEY FOUND THE TRACKS of George's horse on the saddleback slope, about where Leaphorn expected to find them.

"You're good at this, aren't you," Susanne said.

"I've been doing it a long time," Leaphorn said.

She was squatting on her heels at the deer trail beside him, inspecting the hoofprint. Her left hand continued to tug absently at her right cuff, pulling the frayed fabric over the scar. The reflex of a bruised spirit. How badly bruised? Leaphorn set his mind to building a set of circumstances under which this too-thin child-woman would have killed Ernesto Cata in some schizophrenic perversion of good purpose. His imagination managed that job, but failed at the next one—which attempted to place her in the Bowlegs hogan with a weapon raised over the head of a helpless drunk.

From the mesa top above them there came the raucous cry of a piñon jay. Leaphorn listened, heard nothing else. The breeze was dead now. Nothing moved. On the western horizon, somewhere over central Arizona, a grayish fringe of clouds had formed. Leaphorn wished he had listened to the weather forecast. He felt suddenly nervous. Had something startled the jay? Was George Bowlegs with his old 30-30 looking down at them from the rimrock? Had he guessed wrong about the boy? George couldn't have killed his father. He was a day's ride away from the hogan. But he could have killed Cata. Could he be not just a mixed-up way-out kid but literally insane? Living some fantasy of sorcery-witchcraft unreality that made murder just another part of the dream? The question occupied Leaphorn on the steep climb up the saddle over the lip of the mesa and caused him to move more slowly and cautiously as he went about his work. Even so, within an hour he had accumulated most of the information he needed.

In this season, this end of the mesa was the grazing territory for a herd of perhaps twenty to twenty-five mule deer. They watered at a seep under the rimrock and had two regular sleeping places—both on heavily brushed hummocks where updrafts would carry the scent of predators toward them. Within two hours he had a fair idea of the pattern the herd followed in its dawn, twilight, and nocturnal feedings. This feeding pattern, he explained to Susanne, was followed with almost machinelike rigidity by mule deer—varying only with changing weather conditions, wind, temperature, and food supplies.

"From what you tell me about George, he's going to know all this," Leaphorn said. "If he got up here when we think he did, he would have been trying to get one about dusk. He'd have done enough track reading to figure out where the deer browsed when they came out of their afternoon sleeping place. Then he'd set up an ambush and just wait."

The ravens led them to the spot. The guard bird rose, cawing an alert. A dozen feeders flapped skyward in his wake, noisy with alarm. And down the slope they found the small clearing where George had shot his deer.

The animal, a small two-year-old buck, still lay beside the trail in the shadow of an outcropping of cap rock boulders. Leaphorn stood on one of the boulders surveying the scene and feeling good about it. For the first time since he had heard of George Bowlegs, something seemed to be working out with that rational harmony Leaphorn's orderly soul demanded. He explained it to Susanne, showing her the scuff marks on the lichens where George had crouched on the boulders; explaining how, at dusk, the cooling air would be moving down the trail, taking George's scent away from the approaching herd and allowing him to perch almost directly over their route.

"From here we pick up his tracks and find where he spent last night. He'll have the horse hobbled somewhere close, so that should be easy. And if he's marking time until tomorrow…" Leaphorn's voice trailed off. His expression, which had been blandly satisfied, deteriorated into a puzzled frown. He broke the self-created silence by muttering something in Navajo. A moment ago this scene had clicked tidily into the framework his logic had built—a deer killed where, when, and how the deer should have been killed. Why hadn't he seen the glaring incongruity? Leaphorn's frown decayed into a glower.

Susanne was looking at him, surprised. "What's the matter?"

"You wait right here," he said. "I want a closer look at this."

He swung himself down off the boulders and squatted beside the carcass. It was stiff, dead not much less than a day. The smell of fresh venison and old blood rose into his nostrils. It was a fat, young, four-point buck, shot just behind the left shoulder from above and in front—a perfect shot for an instant kill and made, obviously, from the boulder at very short range. George had then rolled the buck on its back, removed the scent glands from its rear legs, tied off the anal vent, opened the chest cavity and the abdomen with a neat and precise incision through hide and muscles. He had rolled out the entrails, and then he had cut a long strip of hide and tied it to the buck's front ankles, presumably in preparation for hoisting the carcass from a tree limb to let it drain and cool away from ground rodents. But the carcass still lay there. Leaphorn scowled at it. He could have understood if George had simply sliced himself a substantial portion of venison and let the carcass lie. It would have gone against the grain, as Navajo and hunter, to waste the meat. But if he had been in a hurry George might have done it. Why this, though? Leaphorn rocked back on his heels and tried to re-create it.

The boy carefully scouting the herd without alerting it, checking its browsing routes, checking the wind drift, setting his ambush, waiting silently in the gathering darkness, picking the deer he wanted, firing the single precise shot in the proper place. Then bleeding his kill, taking each step in dressing the carcass, without sign of hurry. And then, with the job almost done, walking away and leaving the meat to spoil without even cutting himself a steak to roast.

"What are you doing?" Susanne asked. "Is something wrong?"

"Look around there and see if you can find the empty rifle shell."

"What would it look like?"

"Brass," Leaphorn said. "Smaller than a fountain pen cap." He poked through the entrails. The heart was missing, and the liver, and the gall bladder. The ravens had been at work, but they wouldn't have had time to finish off the large organs and would have avoided the bitter gall. It was useful to a Navajo only for ceremonial purposes, for medicine, to fend off witches. Leaphorn tried to remember if the gall of deer had any ritual use for the Zuñis. Something about a hunting fetish, he thought, but he didn't know much about their ceremonialism. He confirmed that George had taken no meat. At one point an incision had been made and some fat cut out. Why would George want tallow? Leaphorn could think of no answer. And why kill a deer for meat, start a neat butchering job, and then walk away with nothing but heart and liver? They'd said George was crazy, but insanity wouldn't explain this.

Leaphorn rose from the crouch, noticing that his muscles were tired. He began with little hope or enthusiasm to determine what sort of story the tracks around this clearing would tell.

Deer tracks were everywhere. Near the carcass their frantic hoofs had churned the trail. George had walked here. The sign of his boots was plain over the hoof marks.

So was the print of the moccasin.

Leaphorn stared at this track—a soft, medium-sized, foot-shaped impression. And then his hand was fumbling at the flap of his pistol holster as the implications of what he was seeing became clear. He stood motionless, his eyes scanning the brush which surrounded this small opening, his hand on the butt of the pistol. The footprint had been made yesterday—after George had killed his deer but not long afterward. Someone had followed George here. In some unmeasurable fraction of a second, mind and memory fit pieces together. Leaphorn saw Cecil's battered tin lunch-box with keepsakes disordered by a searching hand. He heard Cecil's voice saying that the note from George had been left in the box. In that instant Leaphorn knew what he had been overlooking for thirty-six hours. The note was missing from the box because the man who killed Shorty Bowlegs had found it, and from it had calculated where George had gone, and had relentlessly tracked him to this spot.

Leaphorn cursed himself vehemently in Navajo. How could he have been so stupid? This is what his subconscious had been prodding him to remember. Had he remembered it too late? He glanced at the carcass. This person must have arrived as George was dressing the deer, which explained why George had abandoned the job unfinished. So where was George now? Had the man killed him and hidden the body?

"Here it is." Susanne's voice was behind him. "It's more like a lipstick than a fountain pen cap." She was holding up an empty cartridge between thumb and forefinger, grinning. (It wouldn't be an empty 30-30 from George's old rifle, Leaphorn thought. It would be .45 caliber, or .38, or 30-06, and it would proclaim that George Bowlegs had been shot to death at this spot yesterday about the same time Lieutenant Joseph Leaphorn had been wasting his time chatting with a Catholic priest in Zuni.)