Read Hillerman, Tony - [Leaphorn & Chee 02] for Free Online Page B

binoculars. In a moment, Leaphorn intended to deal with the cold. He would get up and climb briskly down to the commune below him and learn there whatever it was possible for him to learn. But now he ignored the discomfort, concentrating in his orderly fashion on this minor phase of the job of finding George Bowlegs.
    A less precise man by now would have written off as wasted effort the mile walk from the point where he had parked his carryall and the climb to this high point overlooking the commune. It didn't occur to Leaphorn to do so. He had come here because his hunt for George Bowlegs logically led him to the commune. And before he entered it, he would study it. The chance that Bowlegs was hiding there seemed to Leaphorn extremely slight. But the chance existed and the operating procedure of Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn in such cases was to minimize the risk. Better spend whatever effort was required to examine the ground than chance losing the boy again by carelessness.
    At the moment Leaphorn was examining, through the magnification of the binocular lenses, a denim jacket. The jacket hung on the corner post of a brush arbor beside a hogan some two hundred yards below where Leaphorn sat. The hogan was a neat octagon of logs built as the Navajo Way instructed, its single entrance facing the point of sunrise and a smoke hole in the center of the roof. Behind it Leaphorn could see a plank shed and behind the shed a pole corral that contained huddled sheep—probably about twenty. Leaphorn presumed the sheep belonged to the occupants of the commune, who currently numbered four men and three women. The allotment of land on which the sheep grazed belonged to Frank Bob Madman and the hogan, from which a thin plume of smoke now rose into the cold moonlight, belonged by Navajo tradition to the ghost of Alice Madman.
    Leaphorn had learned this, and considerably more, by stopping at a hogan about four miles up the wagon track. With the young Navajo couple who lived there he had discussed the weather, the sagging market for wool, a Tribal Council proposal to invest Navajo funds in the construction of livestock ponds, the couple's newborn son, and—finally—the group of Belacani who lived in the hogan down the wagon track. He had been told that Frank Bob Madman had abandoned the hogan almost three years before. Madman had gone to Gallup to buy salt and had returned to find that his wife of many years had died in his absence. ("She'd had a little stroke before," Young Wife said. "Probably had a big one this time.") There had been no one there to move Alice Madman out of the hogan so that her ghost—at the moment of death—might escape for its eternity of wandering. Therefore the chindi had been caught in the hogan. Madman had got a Belacani rancher over near Ramah to bury the body under rocks. He had knocked a hole in one wall and boarded up the smoke hole and the entrance, as was customary with a death hogan, to keep the ghost from bothering people. These duties performed, Madman had taken his wagon and his sheep, and left. Young Wife believed he had gone back to his own clan, the Red Foreheads, somewhere around Chinle. And then, a year ago last spring, the Belacani had arrived. There had been sixteen of them in a school bus and a Volkswagen van. They had moved into the Madman place, living in the death hogan and in two big tents. And then more had arrived until, by the end of summer, thirty-five or forty had lived there.
    The number had declined during the winter, and in the coldest part of the year, in the very middle of the Season When the Thunder Sleeps, there had been another death in the hogan of the ghost of Alice Madman. The population had stabilized during the spring and declined sharply again with the present autumn, until only four men and three women were left.
    "The death?" Leaphorn asked. "Who was it? How did it happen?"
    It had been a young woman, a very fat girl, a very quiet girl, sort of ugly. Somebody had said Ugly