Free Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 03] by Listening Woman [txt] Page B

up. If it doesn’t, the world ends.” She is a formidable young woman, Leaphorn thought. He didn’t want her with him when he first approached Hosteen Tso’s place.
    Whether she liked it or not, she’d wait in the carryall while he determined who, or what, waited at the hogan.
    Had Leaphorn’s timing been perfect, he would have arrived on the mesa rim overlooking the Tso hogan at dawn. In fact, he arrived perhaps an hour early, the moon almost down on the western horizon and the starlight just bright enough to confirm the dim shape of the buildings below. Leaphorn sat and waited. He sat far enough back from the mesa edge so that the downdrift of cooling air would not carry his scent. If the dog was there, Leaphorn didn’t want it alerted. The dog had been very much on his mind as he found his way down the dark wagon track toward the hogan and up the back slope of this small mesa. Leaphorn doubted that it would be out hunting, but anything seemed possible in this peculiar affair. The thought of the dog had increased his caution and tightened his nerves. Now, sitting motionless with his back protected by a slab of stone, he relaxed.
    If the animal was prowling, he would hear it in time to react to an attack. The danger—if indeed there had been danger—was gone now.
    Silence. In the dim, still, predawn universe, scent dominated sight and hearing. Leaphorn could smell the acrid perfume of the junipers just behind him, the aroma of dust and other scents so faint they defied identification. From somewhere far behind him there came a single, almost inaudible snapping sound. Perhaps a stone cooling and contracting from yesterday’s heat, perhaps a predator moving suddenly and breaking a stick, perhaps the earth growing one tick older. The sound turned Leaphorn’s thoughts back to the dog, to the eyes staring at him out of the car, to what had happened to the sheepdogs at the water hole, and to witch dogs, the Navajo Wolves, of his people’s ancient traditions. The Navajo Wolves were men and women who turned from harmony to chaos and gained the power to change themselves into coyotes, dogs, wolves or even bears, and to fly through the air, and to spread sickness among the Dinee. As a boy he had believed, fervently and fearfully, in this concept of evil. Two miles from his grandmother’s hogan was a weathered volcanic upthrust which the People avoided. In a cave there the witches supposedly gathered to initiate new members into theirthe Clan of Wolves. As a sophomore at Arizona State, he had come just as fervently to disbelieve in the ancient ways. He had visited his grandmother, and gone alone to the old volcano core. Climbing the crumbling basalt crags, feeling brave and liberated, he had found two caves—one of which seemed to lead downward into the black heart of the earth. There had been no witches, nor any sign that anything used these caves except, perhaps, a den of coyotes. But he hadn’t climbed down into the darkness. Now for many minutes, Leaphorn’s imagination had been suggesting a dim opalescence along the eastern horizon, and presently his eyes confirmed it. A ragged division between dark sky and darker earth, the shape of the Chuska Mountains on the New Mexico border. At this still point, another sound reached Leaphorn. He realized he had been aware of it earlier somewhere below the threshold of hearing. Now it became a murmuring which came and died and came again. It seemed to come from the north. Leaphorn frowned, puzzled. And then he realized what it must be. It was the sound of running water, the San Juan River moving over its rapids, sliding down its canyon toward Lake Powell. At this season the river would be low, the snow melt of the Rockies long since drained away.
    Even in this stillness Leaphorn doubted if the sound muffled by the depth of its canyon would carry far. One of the river bends must bring it to within a couple of miles of Tso’s hogan. Leaphorn’s eye caught a flick of movement in