Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 01] by jpg] The Blessing Way (v1) [html Page B

looked down. "It was nothing very much," he said. And then, remembering his manners, added, "My uncle." For the first time in a long day, Leaphorn felt he was handling someone exactly right.
    "And yet nobody else got the scalp for this Sing. It was you, Hosteen Nez."
    "Billy tracked him three days," the younger boy said. He grinned at Leaphorn. "I'm Billy's uncle's son."
    "We might sit here by this pickup and smoke," Leaphorn said. He took a cigarette and handed the pack to the younger boy. And when the pack came to Billy Nez he took a cigarette, and lit it, and told Joe Leaphorn everything he knew. And he started, as Leaphorn knew he would start, from the beginning.
    The witch had first come around the summer hogans of his uncle at mid-spring not long after his uncle's family had driven the sheep up from the winter grazing in the Chinle Valley to the summer range in the Lukachukais.
    Two days after they had settled down, he and the two boys were driving the sheep up there on the plateau. His uncle was driving his own sheep and the boys were driving his uncle's wife's sheep. And they saw this truck coming across this arroyo there. It wasn't really a truck. More like a jeep, only bigger and with a cloth top on it.
    "Was it a Land-Rover?" Leaphorn said.
    "I don't know," Billy Nez said. "I never saw another one like it. It was gray."
    The Big Navajo had left Shoemaker's store in a Land-Rover, Leaphorn thought. Gray and hard to see and I wonder if that's a coincidence.
    The truck had stopped at first and his uncle had seen the driver looking at them. And then it drove up and the man asked my uncle where he was taking those sheep and how long he was going to keep them in that high country. His uncle had said all summer and the man had asked if he didn't know there was a witch cave up in that country and a bunch of wolves up there that got after people that came into their territory.
    Billy Nez took a long drag on his cigarette, inhaled, and then blew out the smoke.
    "What'd your uncle say?" Leaphorn asked, and was instantly irked with himself for his impatience.
    "He thought it was kind of funny this Nakai knowing so much about Navajo Wolves."
    Leaphorn looked at Billy Nez sharply.
    "Why Nakai? Did your uncle think this man was a Mexican?"
    "Nakai, or Belacana, or something," Billy Nez said. "Anyhow my uncle said he didn't talk much good Navajo. Wanted to talk in English and my uncle don't talk that much, so he tried to talk in Spanish and this man didn't know that good." Billy Nez paused. "So I guess he wasn't a Nakai, come to think of it. Maybe a Ute or something."
    So, Leaphorn thought. No doubt now why the Hand Tremble had prescribed the Enemy Way instead of the Prostitution Way. Here's why they thought the witch was a foreigner—an enemy ghost to be exorcised. But the man in the Land-Rover, the man with the black hat, had been a Navajo. Leaphorn was certain of it.
    Anyway, Billy Nez was saying, his uncle had said he didn't pay much attention to witches when he needed grass for his sheep and the sheep of his wife, and the man had driven away. But after that his uncle had known something was going to be wrong.
    The first week they were back in the high country a young coyote had trailed his uncle, followed his horse all the way across the mesa one morning. That was the Coyote People telling him to watch out. The Coyote People caused a lot of trouble, Billy Nez said, but they were good about warning people.
    A little bit after that, at night, his uncle heard the Wolf on top of his hogan. Some dirt had fallen down from the roof on the east side of the hogan (and now, Leaphorn thought, the other three compass points), and then on the south side, and then on the west side and then some dirt fell down on the north side. And then his uncle had known the Wolf would be looking down the smoke hole to see where they were and to blow some corpse powder down on them. But the uncle of Billy Nez was not afraid of a Wolf. He ran outside the