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help."
    Moon stepped onto the low porch steps; the unpainted pine boards creaked under his weight. He counted the two-by-four porch rafters until he was seven from the south end. The Ute ran his fingers along an unpainted rafter, wiping away a thin veil of spider webs. He found the tarnished brass key where he had left it last year, hanging on a galvanized roofing nail. Nahum had not been a careful man, but he had been lucky. The windows were unbroken, the door lock showed no signs of tampering. There was no indication that vandals had entered the house. Maybe it was because of the persistent rumors that Nahum came back to sleep in the loft of his log cabin every night. And that he drank gallons of whiskey and would surely shoot anyone who was foolish enough to enter his home. But local folks craved such stories, and many believed Armilda's fantastic tale of a band of angels that carried the old shepherd up to heaven. Swing low, sweet chariot! It was all nonsense, of course. Self-delusion. But the Ute's stomach tightened as he opened the door.
    Armilda did not expect to find Nahum Yacüti in the house; she followed the policeman in quickly and flitted about the dusty space like a ragged old moth, touching this, rubbing dust off that, muttering her amazement that "… a man could live in such squalor."
    Moon thought the place was reasonably tidy. The downstairs was a single large room. A heavy redwood table had been placed at the west window, which had a view of the rolling waters of the Animas. This sturdy piece of furniture served for eating and, judging from the scattering of papers and lead pencils on its surface, as a desk. And everywhere, there were books. A tattered family bible. An English-Spanish dictionary. A cookbook entitled
The Complete Book of Baking
.
    "Too many books, too much reading," Armilda tapped her temple with an arthritic finger and assumed a sage expression, "that was Nahum's problem. Made him think too hard and the poor old man just wore out his mind."
    Moon opened the cookbook to a page that had been marked with a slip of yellowed paper. Macaroon Hats. Hazelnut Fingers. Ginger Snaps. Vanilla Paisleys. One and three quarter cups of flour. One half cup ground almonds. Margarine for greasing the pan. The Ute shook his head and smiled. It was hard to picture old Nahum spending his evenings baking cookies. But you never really knew people.
    He carefully placed the cookbook back into the rectangle of dustless space on the table and turned to study the room. It was just as the policeman remembered it. A large RC Cola calendar tacked to the wall over the sink displayed an im-possibly pretty brunette. A long, shapely leg was draped over a red bicycle; she held a bottled soft drink near barely parted lips. The Winchester carbine Moon had found in the Dodge pickup and hung on a rack over the back door was still in its place. There was a kerosene lamp on the thick pine mantle over the stone fireplace; the scarlet fuel in the glass chamber looked like cheap wine. A painted iron bed stood in a comer, the fine patchwork quilt still turned back on a blue sheet, inviting the old shepherd to rest his bones. An antique vacuum-tube radio in a varnished wooden cabinet sat mute in a dark comer.
    The policeman found his notebook and turned the dated pages back toward that cold autumn morning last year. Moon had made a record of the contents of the log house, including a detailed inventory of the food stored in a rough pine cupboard in the comer. Now he compared his notes to what he saw. Six cans of Bush's Best pinto beans, eight small tins of Hatch green chili. Ten cans of a generic store brand of sweet com. There was an unopened five pound bag of whole-wheat flour. A two gallon tin of com meal. A glass jar filled with brown sugar. A plastic bottle, half-filled with maple syrup. And an unopened glass jar of Aunt Nellie's Com Relish. It was all there, just as it had been last year. Waiting for the owner of the household to