A round stone hogan with a domed dirt roof, a peak-roofed frame house, a pole corral, a storage shed, and a lean-to of poles, planks, and tar-paper, built against the wall of a low cliff. Smoke was coming from the hogan, hanging in the wet air and creating a blue smudge across the narrow cul-de-sac where the Goldtooth outfit had built its place. An old truck was parked beside the plank house. From behind the house, the back end of an ancient Ford sedan was visible. Chee could see a dim light, probably a kerosene lamp, illuminating one of the side windows of the house. Except for that, and the smoke, the place had an abandoned look.
He parked a polite distance from the house and sat for a moment with his headlights on it, waiting. The front door opened and the light outlined a shape, wearing the voluminous long skirt and long-sleeved blouse of the traditional Navajo woman. She stared out into Chee's headlights, then made the traditional welcoming motion and disappeared into the house.
Chee switched off the lights, opened the door, and stepped out into the resuming rain. He walked toward the house, past the parked truck. He could see now that the Ford had no rear wheels. The damp air carried the thousand smells aroused by rain. But something was missing. The acrid smell that fills the air when rain wets the still-fresh manure of corrals and sheep pens. Where was that? Chee's intelligence had its various strengths and its weaknesses—a superb memory, a tendency to exclude new input while it focused too narrowly on a single thought, a tendency to be distracted by beauty, and so forth. One of the strengths was an ability to process new information and collate it with old unusually fast. In a millisecond, Chee identified the missing odor, extracted its meaning, and homogenized it with what he had already noticed about the place of the Goldtooth outfit. No animals. The place was little used. Why use it now? Chee's brain identified an assortment of possible explanations. But all this changed him, midstride, from a man happily walking through the rain toward a long-anticipated meeting, to a slightly uneasy man with a memory of being shot at.
It was just then that Chee noticed the oil.
What he saw was a reflection in the twilight, a slick blue-green sheen where rainwater had washed under the truck and picked up an oil emulsion. It stopped him. He looked at the oily spot, then back at the house. The door was open a few inches. He felt all those odd, intense sensations caused when intense fear triggers the adrenaline glands. Maybe nothing, one corner of his brain said. A coincidence. Leaky oil pans are usual enough among the old trucks so common on the reservation. But he had been foolish. Careless. And he turned back toward his pickup, walking at first, then breaking into a trot. His pistol was locked in the glove compartment.
He was not conscious of any separation between the boom of the shotgun and the impact that staggered him. He stumbled against the hogan, catching the edge of the door lintel for support. Then the second shot hit him, higher this time, the feel of claws tearing against his upper back and neck muscles and the back of his head. It knocked him off balance and he found himself on his knees, his hands in the cold mud. Three shots, he remembered. An automatic shotgun legally choked holds three shells. Three holes torn through the aluminum skin of his trailer. Another shot would be coming. He slammed against the hogan door, pushed his way through it, just as he heard the shotgun again.
He pushed the door shut, sat against it, trying to control the shock and the panic. The hogan was empty, stripped bare and lit by flickering coals of a fire built on the earthen floor under the smoke hole. His ears were ringing with the sound of the shots, but through that he could hear the splashing sound of someone running through the rain. His right side felt numb. With his left hand he reached behind him and slid the wooden latch.
Something pushed, tentatively, against the door.
He pressed his shoulder against it. "If you open the door, I'll shoot you," Chee said.
Silence.
"I am a police officer," Chee said. "Why did you shoot me?"
Silence. The ringing in his ears diminished. He could distinguish a pinging noise—the sound of the rain hitting the metal shield placed over the smoke hole to keep the hogan dry. The sound of feet moving on muddy ground. Metallic sounds. Chee strained to hear them. The shotgun was being reloaded. He thought about that. Whoever had shot him hadn't bothered to reload before running after him. He had seen Chee had been hit, knocked down. Apparently it was presumed the shots had killed him. That Chee was no danger.
The pain was fierce now—especially the back of his head. He touched it gingerly with his fingers and found the scalp slick with blood. He could also feel blood running down his right side, warm against the skin over his ribs. Chee looked at his palm, tilted it so that the weak glow from the coals would reach it. In that light the fresh blood looked almost black. He was going to die. Not right away, probably, but soon. He wanted to know why. This time he shouted.
"Why did you shoot me?"
Silence. Chee tried to think of another way to get an answer. Any response. He tried his right arm, found he could move it. The worst pain was the back of his head. A teeth-gritting ache in what seemed to be twenty places where shotgun pellets had struck the skull bone. Overlying that was the feeling that his scalp was being scalded. The pain made it hard to think. But he had to think. Or die.
Then the voice: "Skinwalker! Why are you killing my baby?"
It was a woman's voice.
"I am not," Chee said, slowly and very plainly.
No reply. Chee tried to concentrate. In not very long, he would bleed to death. Or, before that happened, he would faint, and then this crazy woman would push open the hogan door and kill him with her shotgun.
"You think I'm a witch," he said. "Why do you think that?"
"Because you are an adan'ti," she said. "You shot a bone into me before my baby was born, or you shot a bead into my baby, and now it is dying."
That told him just a little. In the Navajo world, where witchcraft is important, where daily behavior is patterned to avoid it, prevent it, and cure it, there are as many words for its various forms as there are words for various kinds of snow among the Eskimos. If the woman thought he was adan'ti, she thought he had the power of sorcery—to convert himself into animal form, to fly, perhaps to become invisible. Very specific ideas. Where had she gotten them?
"You think that if I confess that I witched your baby, then the baby will get well and pretty soon I will die," Chee said. "Is that right? Or if you kill me, then the witching will go away."
"You should confess," the woman said. "You should say you did it. Otherwise, I will kill you."
He had to keep her here. Had to keep her talking until he could make his mind work. Until he could learn from her what he had to learn to save his life. Maybe that was impossible. Maybe he was already dying. Maybe his life wind was already blowing out of him—out into the rain. Maybe there was nothing he could learn that would help him. But Chee's conditioning was to endure. He thought, frowning with concentration, willing away the pain and the dreadful consciousness of the blood running down his flanks and puddling under his buttocks. Meanwhile he had to keep her talking.
"It won't help your baby if I confess, because I am not the witch. Can you tell me who told you I was the witch?"
Silence.
"If I were a witch… if I had the power of sorcery, did someone teach you what I could do?"