Free The Wailing Wind - Leaphorn & Chee 17 by Tony Hillerman Page B

Hostiin Yellow had warned her, white men will kill for gold. She thought of that warning. Hostiin Yellow had seemed unusually forceful and emphatic about it, but at the time she had passed that off as a fond uncle trying to deal with a willful niece. Now it suggested he had some well-informed reason to think the canyon she was looking for was dangerous. Right as usual. She had a wise old uncle. Too bad Hostiin Yellow didn't have a wiser niece.
    Bernie could think of nothing to do now except wait and listen. Which she did, ears straining against the silence, eyes alert for any sign of motion. Normally in such a canyon there would be a variety of birds around harvesting the autumn crop of seeds and dried berries. But the fire that had swept through here had left nothing to eat but ashes. This narrowed place in the canyon must have produced an intensely hot fire, fueled by a decades deep accumulation of dead wood. Now that Bernie had a quiet moment to think of it, she deduced what had happened here. The same endless years that had deposited post-rainfall gold dust in the sluice had been depositing dead trash to hide it. Fire had reduced the trash to ash. Runoff had swept the ash from the stream bottom. The old secret lay exposed.
    The ash deposits had survived where Bernie was huddling, too high to be cleansed by runoff water, and those weeds that thrive in the wake of forest fires had made scant progress. A few yards below, moisture from a seep had kept the soil damp. There the brown and gray were replaced by splotches of green. And there, ground-clinging puncturevines had spread—their tough-as-stone little seeds impervious even to such intense heat.
    Bernie arose from the ash pile on which she'd been sitting, overcame an impulse to slip out to the damp area in search of Doherty's boot tracks—clinching proof that he'd been here, if not absolute evidence he'd been shot here. That impulse was squelched immediately by the image of someone looking at her over his rifle sights. She sat again. What to do?
    She could wait here. When it got dark, she could slip up canyon, climb out—(Could she climb out? Probably, but doing it in the dark would be dangerous)—and then walk out. Out to where? The climb would take her to the top, so to speak and more or less, of Mesa de los Lobos. Southward there was the Iyanbito Refinery, but getting there meant climbing down the rampart of cliffs north of the Santa Fe Railroad and Interstate 40. No way. Miles to the east was the Church Rock uranium mine, if that was still operating. Rough country over the mesa to get there, but she could do it. About then, another mood overcame Bernie. Anger.
    What was she doing, just sitting here like a wimp. She was a law enforcement officer, commissioned by the Navajo Tribal Police and deputized by the
San Juan
County
sheriffs department. Someone had shot at her. Shooting at a cop was a felony. Her duty, clearly, was to arrest this felon, take him in, and lock him up. Why hadn't she brought her cellphone along? Not that it would work in this canyon. She had just proved that she deserved better than the total lack of respect she was receiving from Jim Chee, and Captain Largo, and everybody. How much respect would she deserve if she just sat here waiting for some of those men to come and rescue her? Or rescued herself and had to admit she had run away from her duty?
    Bernie got up again, took a tight grip on her pistol, edged to the end of the slab, and looked around it. She saw nothing. Heard nothing. She studied every place she imagined a sniper might be hiding. Nothing suspicious. The man who had shot at her might be miles away by now. Probably was. Anyway, who wants to live forever. She took a deep breath, stepped away from her sheltering slab, and hurried over to the growth of puncturevine.
    Preserved in the damp earth were boot prints, some crushing tendrils of the weed. True, they were a common boot print pattern, but it was also true they had left the