The Blessing Way

"You ought to tell them to go to hell," Mrs. Kreutzer said, and the vehemence surprised McKee as much as the language. "Everybody imposes on you."

"Not really," McKee said. "Anyway, I don't mind."

But as he walked down the hall toward his office he did mind, at least a little. George Everett had asked him to take his classes this summer, because Everett had an offer to handle an excavation in Guatemala, and it irritated McKee now to remember how sure Everett had been that good old Bergen would do him the favor. And he minded a little being the continuing object of Mrs. Kreutzer's pity. The cuckold needs no reminder of his horns and the reject no reminder of his failure.

He took the Law and Order envelope from his pocket and looked at it, neglecting his habitual glance through the hallway window at the chipping plaster on the rear of the Alumni Chapel. Instead he thought of how it had been to be twenty-seven years old in search of truth on the Navajo Reservation, still excited and i

It wasn't until he had opened the blinds, turned on the air conditioner and registered the familiar creak of his swivel chair as he lowered his weight into it that he opened the letter.

Dear Berg:

I asked around some in re your inquiry about witchcraft cases and it looks only moderately promising. There's been some gossip down around the No Agua Wash" country, and an incident or two over in the Lukachukais east of Chinle, and some talk of trouble west of the Colorado River gorge up on the Utah border. None of it sounds very threatening or unusual—if that's what you're looking for. I gather the No Agua business involves trouble between two outfits in the Salt Cedar Clan over some grazing land. The business up in Utah seems to center on an old Singer with a bad reputation, and our people in the Chinle subagency tell me that they don't know what's going on yet in the Lukachukai area. The story they get (about fourth-hand) is that there's a cave of Navajo Wolves somewhere back in that west slope canyon country. The witches are supposed to be coming around the summer hogans up there, abusing the animals and the usual. And, as usual, the stories vary depending on which rumor you hear.

The first two look like they fit the theories expressed in Social and Psychotherapeutic Utility of Navajo Wolf and Frenzy Superstitions, but you should know, since you wrote it. I'm not sure about the Lukachukai business. It might have something to do with a man we're looking for up there. Or maybe it's a real genuine Witch, who really turns himself into a werewolf and wouldn't that knock hell out of you scientific types?

There were two more paragraphs, one reporting on Leaphorn's wife and family and a mutual friend of their undergraduate days at Arizona State, and the other offering help if McKee decided to "go witch-hunting this summer."

McKee smiled. Leaphorn had been of immense help in his original research, arranging to open the Law and Order Division files to him and helping him find the sort of people he had to see, the unacculturized Indians who knew about witchcraft. He had always regretted that Leaphorn wouldn't completely buy his thesis—that the Wolf superstition was a simple scapegoat procedure, giving a primitive people a necessary outlet for blame in times of trouble and frustration.

He leaned back in the chair, rereading the letter and recalling their arguments—Leaphorn insisting that there was a basis of truth in the Navajo Origin Myth, that some people did deliberately turn antisocial, away from the golden mean of nature, deliberately choose the u

Jeremy Canfield walked in without knocking. "I've got a question for you," he said. "Where do you look on the Navajo Reservation for an electrical engineer testing his gadgets?"

He extracted a pipe from his coat pocket and began cleaning debris from the bowl into McKee's ashtray. "Just one more helpful hint. We know he has a light-green van truck. We don't know what kind of equipment it is, but this research needs to be away from such things as electrical transmission lines, telephone wires, and stuff like that."

"That helps a lot," McKee said. "That still leaves about ninety percent of the Reservation—ninety percent of twenty-five thousand square miles. Find one green truck in a landscape bigger than all New England."

"It's this daughter of a friend of mine. Girl named Ellen Leon," Canfield said. "She's trying to find this bird from U.C.L.A." He was a very small man, bent slightly by a spinal deformity, with a round, cheerful face made rounder by utter baldness.

"Goddamn flatlanders never know geography." Canfield said. "Think the Reservation's about the size of Central Park."

"Why's she looking for him?" McKee asked.

Canfield looked pained.

"You don't ask a woman something like that, Berg. Just imagine it's something romantic. Imagine she's hot for his body." Canfield lit the pipe. "Imagine she has spurned him, he has gone away to mend a broken heart, and now she has repented."

Or, McKee thought, imagine she's a fool like me. Imagine she's been left and is still too young to know it's hopeless.

"Anyway, I told her maybe in the Chuska Range, or the Lukachukais if he liked the mountains, or the Kam Bimghi Valley if he liked the desert, or up there north of the Hopi Villages, or a couple of other places. I marked a map for her and showed her where the trading posts were where he'd be likely to buy his supplies."

"Maybe they're married," McKee said. He was interested, which surprised him.

"Her name's Ellen Leon," Canfield said with emphatic patience. "His is Jimmie W. Hall, Ph.D. Besides, no wedding ring. From which I deduce they're not married."

"O.K., Sherlock," McKee said. "I deduce from your attitude that this woman was about five feet five, slim, with long blackish hair and wearing…" McKee paused for thought, "… a sort of fu

"I deduce from that that you saw her in the hall," Canfield said. "Anyway, I told her we'd keep our eyes open for this bird and let her know where we'd be camping so she could check." He looked at McKee. "Where do you want to start hunting your witches?"

McKee started to mention Leaphorn's letter and say he hadn't decided yet whether to go. Instead he thought of the girl at the front entrance of the Anthropology Building, who had looked tired and disappointed and somehow very sad.

"I don't know," McKee said. "Maybe down around No Agua, or way over west of the Colorado gorge, or on the west slope of the Lukies." He thought a moment. Canfield's current project involved poking into the burial sites of the Anasazis, the pre-Navajo cliff dwellers. There were no known sites around No Agua and only a few in the Colorado River country. "How about starting over in those west slope canyons in the Lukachukais?"

"That's good for me," Canfield said. "If you've got some witches in there to scrutinize, there's plenty of ruins to keep me busy. And I'll take my guitar and try to teach you how to sing harmony."

At the door, Canfield paused, his face suddenly serious.

"I'm glad you decided to go, Bergen. I think you need…" He stopped, catching himself on the verge of invading a zone of private grief. "I think maybe I should ask a guarantee that your witches won't get me." It came out a little lamely, not hiding the embarrassment.