The Sinister Pig - 15 by Tony Hillerman

JBP Mountain and—”
    “Hold it,” Chee said. “Show me on my map.”
    The cashier frowned, looked at the map, put her pencil tip on a hump labeled “JBP Mountain” and traced it along. “Then past Soldiers Farewell Hill, right here, and take the turn south toward the Cedar Mountains”—she tapped with her pencil point—“and then you pass Hattop Mountain”—another pencil tap—“and turn right on a dirt road there. It’s graded but they never put any gravel on it. You’ll see a big corner post at the junction pointing southward and a sign on it says ‘Tuttle Ranch.’ But if you’re [99] looking for Tuttle, he’s not there much. Lives somewhere back east.”
    The sign nailed to the corner post was painted in neat red block letters:TUTTLE RANCH—SEVEN MILES. The legend neatly painted below read:PRIVATE PROPERTY.ENTRY BY PERMISSION ONLY.
    Chee paused here a moment, comparing the landmarks Bernie had indicated on her napkin to the large-scale Benchmark map he kept in his truck. After about ninety minutes, several wrong turns, and much dust, he found the road along which Bernie had followed the Seamless Weld truck, and the ridge she had mentioned crossing just before she had reached the locked gate and encountered Tom O’day. He stopped on the ridge, got out his binoculars, and checked. He saw the gate, but no one was there to open it for him even if he could show them a reason they should. He scanned the landscape. Mountain ridges in every direction, but dry mountains here. Far to the east the Floridas and to the west, the Big and Little Hatchets. Far beyond them and blue with distance, the ragged shapes of the Animas and Peloncillos. Chee was comfortable with the emptiness of his tribe’s Four Corners country, but here all he could see seemed to be a lifeless total vacuum.
    But not quite lifeless. Across the fence and far down the ridge away from the locked gate his eye caught motion. He refocused the binoculars. Five great gray beasts, two with long curved horns, were walking in a line down a slope. But going where?
    Apparently into a playa where runoff water would collect if rain ever fell here. In the playa a windmill stood beside a circle of what seemed to be a water tank.
    [100] The sound of an engine. Chee shifted his binoculars toward it. A truck towing a horse trailer was rolling down the hill toward the gate.
    Chee climbed into his own pickup and headed for the gate. The driver of the ranch truck was standing behind it now, looking about thirty years younger than the man Bernie had described. About seventeen maybe, grinning, with his hat pushed to the back of his head.
    “ ’Fraid you hit a dead end here,” he said. “I can’t let you through.”
    “I saw your sign,” Chee said. “But maybe you can help me out with some information.”
    “If I can. Where you from?”
    “Up in San Juan County. Navajo Reservation.”
    “I saw you was Indian,” the boy said. “But down here we got a lot of Indians, but mostly the local tribe and some Apaches. Got three of them on our team.”
    Chee studied the boy, “Football, I’d say. You a tight end, or maybe fullback.”
    The boy laughed. “Little school there at Gage. We played six man. We didn’t have all those positions.”
    “If you could unlock that gate for me, I’d go down that road just far enough to take a look at that new watering tank you’re putting in.”
    “Watering tank down the road? I don’t know nothing about that. The only water tank out that direction is way over yonder.” He pointed in the direction of the playa where Chee had seen the windmill. “In the spring, and again after the rainy season, water drains down into that low place, and soaks in. They put a little windmill there to pump it into the drinking tank when the playa goes dry.”
    [101] “Well, I don’t know,” Chee said. “But a man at the Chevron station at Lordsburg told me about it. He’s a rancher around here somewhere, and I was telling him