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SKINWALKERS

Tony Hillerman

Leaphorn and Chee 08

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

v 1. 0 html proofed and formatted for #bookz by MollyKate November 11, 2002

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1986 by Anthony G. Hillerman

Cover illustration by Peter Thorpe

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to Katy Goodwin, Ursula Wilson, Faye Bia Knoki, Bill Gloyd, Annie Kahn, Robert Bergman, and George Bock, and all the Medicine People, Navajo and belagana, who care for The People—and about them. My thanks to Dr. Albert Rizzoli for his kindness and his help, and a tip of my hat to the good work of the too often unappreciated Indian Health Service.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Those who read these Navajo mysteries with a map of the Big Reservation beside them should be warned that Badwater Wash, its clinic, and its trading post are as fictional as the people who inhabit them. The same is true of Short Mountain. I also use an unorthodox form of the Navajo noun for shaman/medicine man/singer, which is commonly spelled "hataalii. " Finally my good friend Ernie Bulow correctly reminds me that more traditional shamans would disapprove of both the way Jim Chee was invited to do the Blessing Way mentioned in this book (such arrangements should be made face-to-face and not by letter) and of Chee practicing a sandpainting on the ground under the sky. Such sacred and powerful ritual should be done only in the hogan.

We Navajo understand Coyote is always waiting out there, just out of sight.

—ALEX ETCITTY, born to the Water Is Close People

Chapter 1

Contents - Next

when the cat came through the little trapdoor at the bottom of the screen it made a clack-clack sound. Slight, but enough to awaken Jim Chee. Chee had been moving in and out of the very edge of sleep, turning uneasily on the narrow bed, pressing himself uncomfortably against the metal tubes that braced the aluminum skin of his trailer. The sound brought him enough awake to be aware that his sheet was tangled uncomfortably around his chest.

He sorted out the bedclothing, still half immersed in an uneasy dream of being tangled in a rope that he needed to keep his mother's sheep from running over the edge of something vague and dangerous. Perhaps the uneasy dream provoked an uneasiness about the cat. What had chased it in? Something scary to a cat—or to this particular cat. Was it something threatening to Chee? But in a moment he was fully awake, and the uneasiness was replaced by happiness. Mary Landon would be coming. Blue-eyed, slender, fascinating Mary Landon would be coming back from Wisconsin. Just a couple of weeks more to wait.