Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 01] by jpg] The Blessing Way (v1) [html Read Free Book Online

cause, when he found it, now would likely be something isolated and outside the usual social pattern. He decided to pursue this point very gingerly.
    "Who is the Navajo who says this Wolf is a stranger?" McKee asked.
    "I heard that from my husband. He said they told him that one of the Tsosie boys found the place in an arroyo over that way"—Old Woman Gray Rocks made a vague gesture with her lips toward the Lukachukai slopes—"where the Wolf had camped. It was a dry camp and there was a spring just a mile up the arroyo. If he lived around here he would have known where the water was."
    "How did they know it was the Wolf's camp?" McKee asked.
    They said to my husband that the boot tracks were the same tracks that Tsosie Begay found around his sheep pen after the Wolf came there."
    So, thought McKee.
    "Is this boy of the family of Charley Tsosie?" he asked.
    "It is the son of Charley," Old Woman Gray Rocks said. "He didn't get married so he is still with the clan."
    "And the Tsosie place is the one the Wolf came to?"
    "That's what is said. Charley Tsosie was one of them he bothered."
    "Do you know the name of the other ones?" McKee asked. Before their meal she had assured him that she didn't know the identity of anyone who claimed to be troubled by a Wolf. McKee considered this small lie, now gracefully retracted, not as an indication of a Navajo secrecy but as a further demonstration of the mystery of womanhood. He had no theory concerning why Old Woman .Gray Rocks had withheld this information earlier, and no theory concerning why she had decided to confide it to him now, and no idea whether she would tell him more. McKee had concluded years ago that the intricacies of feminine logic were beyond his comprehension.
    Old Woman Gray Rocks seemed not to have heard the question. She was looking down the slope toward the pole corral, where two young grandsons were putting a saddle on a scrubby-looking horse.
    "I heard at the trading post that the other one the Wolf came after was a man they called Afraid of His Horse," McKee said. "But someone else said that wasn't right. And someone else told it was a fellow named Shelton Nakai, but they didn't know where he lived now."
    "Who told you it was Afraid of His Horse?" Old Woman Gray Rocks asked.
    "I don't remember who it was now," McKee said. It had been Mr. Shoemaker at the trading post, and Shoemaker had also told him that Afraid of His Horse was the son-in-law of Old Woman Gray Rocks.
    "Maybe it was Ben Yazzie the witch was after," the woman said slowly. "I don't know where he lives now. He used to graze some sheep way up on the high slopes over there by Horse Fell and Many Ruins Canyon- That's where he used to have his summer hogan."
    McKee thought she looked nervous, and he thought he knew why. She didn't want her son-in-law connected, even in gossip, with witching, so she was turning his attention to Yazzie. He would find Charley Tsosie, Ben Yazzie, and Afraid of His Horse later, and talk to them, but now he would change the subject. He wanted to learn more, if Old Woman Gray Rocks would tell him, about why this witch was thought to be a stranger.
    "I don't know why they think this Wolf doesn't live around here," McKee said. "Maybe he made that dry camp in the arroyo because he thought somebody would come to the spring and he didn't want them to find him."
    "Somebody saw him one night," the old woman said. She spoke very slowly, weighing what she would say, and how much she would say. "Witches come out mostly when there is a moon and there was a moon that night. This man he woke up in the night and heard a coyote singing and he went out to see about some lambs he had penned up out there and he saw the witch there in the moonlight. It wasn't anyone who has his hogan around here."
    McKee started to ask the name of this man, and thought better of it. This "someone" would be Afraid of His Horse, the old woman's son-in-law.
    "But how did this man know he was seeing a witch?" McKee