2001 Annual Grant Issue
Pat Dawe: Kast Grant Report
Fact in Fiction: Exploring the Novels of Tony Hillerman

As a child I fell in love with a variety of literary characters and I became involved emotionally and spiritually with their exploits and antics. There were times that I so loved a book, that I experienced real pain when I came to the end, and could no longer live within its pages. Sometimes a novel would seem so real to me that I became the character myself. I pretended that I could go straight up holding on to my umbrella as Mary Poppins, or that I had red ballet shoes, or owned a horse named "Black Beauty."

It was not merely the plot and characters that piqued my interest. As my ability to read grew stronger, I noted that what made a really good story was often the setting. Life on the prairie in My Antonia, the background of the French Revolution in A Tale of Two Cities, the smell of the pickle factory in The God of Small Things, these realities honed the novel, giving it a verisimilitude that made the book larger than life, yet grounding it in life itself. Facts, the flesh that filled in around the bones to make a meaty tale, gave me wonder. Where might Sherwood Forest be? Was there really a Sheriff of Nottingham? How much was Louisa May Alcott's own life a part of Little Women; and were I to visit her actual home in Concord, would I see a place that might have also been home to Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy?

For me, fiction is often the beginning of a factual search. When I read Thornton Burgess' nature books as a child, where I met Sammy Jay and Jimmy Skunk, I wanted to know if blue jays really were bossy and territorial and if skunks were shy and mild-mannered. When I read The Good Earth I wanted to know if China was so poor that parents really sold their daughters. I read Sinclair Lewis's Main Street and wondered if there were Midwestern towns as stifling as Gopher Prairie. I have read fiction all my life, and strange as it may seem, it is that fiction that has kept me learning about the real world around me. It is fiction that has made me a life-long learner.

It was only natural then, when I saw that Elderhostel offered a program to explore the American Southwest from facts gathered from Tony Hillerman's novels, that I was eager and interested. I had always admired Hillerman's detectives Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. As a reader, I had often been caught up in the whodunit aspects of Hillerman's mysteries. But now here was a chance to see if the author "got it right" as he wrote about the history, the culture and the place that is the American Southwest. I had never been there. When Germantown Academy honored me with a Kast Grant to go, I was ready. Fiction steeped in fact and we would filter from it an inner truth; I felt like a '49er about to pan for gold.

This Elderhostel program was centered in Arizona under the auspices of Grand Canyon University and so in March we all flew into Phoenix. Disembarking I chuckled to find myself in the Barry Goldwater airport. Was this Hillerman's southwest? Once outside I gazed out across a low, roof-tiled city encircled by unusual, black hills and I remembered Hillerman writing, "Ahead, just to the left of the setting moon, Low Mountain rose to 6,700 feet and beyond that Little Black Spot Mesa was even higher. Southward, blocking radar from Phoenix, the high mass of Black Mesa extended for a hundred miles or more." (The Dark Wind, p.9). Yes, the hills and mountains in the distance were truly black and instantly I knew that I was about to explore a place previously unknown to me.

"On the maps drawn by geographers it's labeled the Colorado Plateau with its eighty-five million acres sprawling across Arizona, Colorado, new Mexico and Utah." (Hunting Badger p 157)

In Hillerman's first novel, The Blessing Way, the author introduces a college educated, Navajo detective named Joe Leaphorn. He is a member of the Navajo Tribal Police stationed in Crownpoint, New Mexico who, while solving a host of local crimes, presents the deep divide between the majority and minority cultures of the Southwest. After writing three Leaphorn mysteries, Hillerman sold the movie rights to his character Joe Leaphorn. Having second thoughts, he decided to create a younger detective who would remain in his control. In People of Darkness we meet Sgt. Jim Chee, studying to be a yataalii, a tribal ceremonial singer, while at the same time wondering if he should leave the "Rez" to work for the FBI. Here is a Navajo who struggles to make a commitment to both the belacani (white) world and his heritage. In later books Hillerman will send Chee to work with Leaphorn in Arizona.

More than a mystery writer, Hillerman is interested in presenting the juxtaposition of white man's logic and the nature-oriented, metaphysical world of the Navajo. In Dance Hall of the Dead Joe Leaphorn investigates Zuni tribal rites, and he gets it right. Throughout his novels, themes are drawn from the conflict between modern society and traditional Native American values and customs. As a student of southwestern culture, mores and history, Hillerman's knowledge of Native American customs, coupled with an amazing ability to recreate in words the "Four Corners" and the way of life on the "Rez," have made his novels popular with both readers and critics.

"Leaphorn groaned 'Window Rock got the great idea of inviting Boy Scouts of America to have some sort of regional encampment at Canyon de Chelly.'" (Listening Woman p 333)

As participants in the seminar, we had all been asked to preread Hillerman's "southwestern novels." There were twenty-three of us in the group, coming together in Carefree, Arizona with a delightful hostess as guide. "Mr. Hillerman's novels serve as a kind of cultural Baedeker in a way that scarcely any other mystery novels do," observed Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times Book Review. We would attend lectures and explore, letting the written word act as our initial guide.

Our first presenter provided background on Mr. Hillerman himself. The author grew up among the Pottawotamie, Blackfoot and Seminole tribes of Oklahoma, where he was so poor that he was allowed to attend the mission school run by nuns for the Pottawotamie Indians. He was drafted and sent to France, where he received both Silver and Bronze stars, as well as a Purple Heart. He wrote long and detailed letters home to his mother, and after the war decided to make writing his profession. He studied journalism with the support of the GI Bill of Rights, and was for many years a political reporter for United Press International. He became a professor of journalism at the University of New Mexico where he wrote The Blessing Way.

Although one critic wrote upon its publication "the work was a pretty good novel if you'd leave out that Indian stuff," readers bought thousands of copies, soaking up all the cultural and regional information. Hillerman had managed to capture both a place and a people, and although he twined into this described world intriguing fictional plots and characters, readers knew that he was writing it, as it really was. Yes, when Hillerman writes of the "Four Corners," he is most definitely describing what is. In his second book, The Dance Hall of the Dead he intentionally moved one wash several hundred miles out of its actual, geographical location to enable his plot line. He received thousands of letters from his fans correcting him. Since then he has been careful to stay true to geographic reality. As for his knowledge and use of Native American customs and rituals, Hillerman prides himself on his accuracy. In fact, a later presenter would use Hillerman's discussion of the differences between the world of the Hopi and the Navajo nation as depicted in Dark Wind and other novels as a jumping off place for a discussion of the Indians of the Southwest.

"He swung himself down off the boulders and squatted beside the carcass." (Dance Hall of the Dead p283)

In order to establish a sense of place, Karen Cook, a curator of education for the Arizona Historical Society lectured on the history of the Southwest. Anthropologists believe that the Anasazi, whose earliest clearings, storage pits and sites for making baskets date back to 100 B.C., came to the American southwest crossing the Bering Straits. They constructed great pueblos, communities with a central ceremonial building and adjacent rock housing. They were agrarians who built roads and canals and have left a legacy of petroglyps on the local rock formations. One of the Pueblo Peoples is the Hopi.

"The landscape became a roadbuilder's nighmare and a geologist's dream. Here, eons ago, the earth's crust had writhed and twisted, Nothing was level. Limestone sediments, great masses of gaudy sandstone. granite outcroppings, and even thick veins of marble had been churned together by some unimaginable paroxysm - then cut and carved and washed away by ten million years of wind, rain, freeze and thaw. (The Joe Leaphorn Mysteries p375)

The Navajos descended from the Athabascan people of the arctic north. An adaptable people, they migrated to the Southwest where they borrowed from those they encountered sheep herding from the Spanish, silversmithing from the Mexicans, desert agriculture and weaving from the Pueblos. They embraced their new land and used it in their mythological explanations as the setting for their religious beliefs.

Conflict developed between the Navajos and Spanish. In the 1770's a brutal period of slave trading and territorial encroachment began. In 1804 the Navajos declared war against the Spaniards, but were severely defeated in a bloody battle in Canyon de Chelly. When whites began arriving in the Southwest in the 1840's the Navajos were brutalized yet again. A series of treaties, ostensibly to make peace, drove the Indians from their land, and in 1863 Kit Carson swept through the territory slashing, burning and shooting all Navajos in his path. This campaign culminated in a battle, again in the Canyon de Chelly, which destroyed all but a handful of Navajos, who escaped to Monument Valley under the leadership of the great chief Manuelito.

"Many of the Elderly, too weak to make the long walk, were left behind to die. Only a few Navajos are known to have made it into the rugged canyon country around Monument Valley." (The Hillerman Companion p77)

As white demand for land increased, Indians were swept into reservations. Although the Hopi had located on high mesas, they used the surrounding territory for grazing their sheep, hunting and gathering. Navajos were forced into close proximity, where differing culture, religious belief and life style exacerbated hostilities. United States Government Policy, basically founded in the concept that an Indian is an Indian, did little to assuage the conflicts. In the late 1880's, the federal government legislated land use, establishing separate reservations and joint-use areas for each tribe; however, disputes were constant. In The Dark Wind Hillerman highlights elements of Hopi/Navajo discord, centering his plot on a water dispute. Chee's "business was the vandalism of Windmill Subunit 6, the steel frame of which loomed awkward and ugly against the stars about one hundred yards west of him...the windmill was only about a year old having been installed by the Office of Hopi Partitioned Land to provide water for Hopi families being resettled along Wepo Wash to replace evicted Navajo families" (p.15). With the introduction of Coconino County, Arizona Deputy Sheriff Albert Dashee, Jr., a Hopi known as "Cowboy," Hillerman establishes a mechanism for presenting Navajo and Hopi differences.

The Navajos and Hopi's are not the only tribes dealt with by Hillerman. In Sacred Clowns, his character Harold Blizzard is a Cheyenne. "Even with the Yankees cap, he looked like a Cheyenne. He had that hard, bony face. Profile like a hatchet. Chee had grown up seeing the Cheyennes and the Sioux with their war bonnets and lances, fighting the cavalry at the drive-in movie in Shiprock." (p.35). Ms Cook explained differences between the various southwestern tribes...the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Apaches, the Hohokum who were the original inhabitants of Phoenix. She explained how accurate Hillerman is when he has Jim Chee say, "I am a Navajo.."We don't have a word in our language for 'Indians.' Just specific words. For Utes, and Hopis, and Apaches." (p.73).

"Delmar had arrived at the pueblo the afternoon of the ceremony and gone to the house of Sayesa." (Sacred Clowns p47)

Ms. Cook discussed various historical figures like Louisa Wade Weatherhill who was the first white person to learn fluent Navajo and who recorded the Navajo myths and cataloged their herbal remedies. Charlotte Powell who arrived in Arizona in 1881, riding a pony from Kansas, who became the territorial custodian and editor of the magazine "Out West." Ms. Cook displayed photographs of the Native American people taken by the photographer Edward Curtis. She explained that there was a dispute when it came to a question of statehood as to whether Arizona and New Mexico would enter the Union as one state or two. She talked about the town of Bisbee, Arizona where 400 miners were shot during WWI during a labor dispute between the Wobblies and Phelps Dodge over copper production. She mentioned the Roosevelt Dam, the Japanese Internment Camps, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Elderhostel is a combination of lectures and field trips. After listening to Ms. Cook we boarded a bus and headed out to see what we could see. Our first foray was in the Phoenix area itself.

At the Heard museum we wandered around the rotunda where artifacts of Southwestern Native American tribes are displayed, along with a collection of tribal artifacts. I had just finished reading Hillerman's book Sacred Clowns, which begins with Chee and two friends sitting on a rooftop viewing a Hopi ceremony. "The double line of Kachinas had completed the circle of the plaza now and moved almost directly below the housetop." (p.12) There is an amazing display of kachinas at the Heard museum, accompanied by information on their ceremonial use. Hopi kachinas represent the spirit forces of nature, plants, animals and other tribes as well as geographic places. When the kachina mask is worn during a ceremony, the wearer is believed to receive the spirit of the kachina itself.

"She planned to spend a day ot two checking the trading posts around Mormon Ridge and the Kaibab Plateau...and then she would drive over to Shoemaker's trading post." (The Blessing Way p 43)

I was also intrigued by a display of Zuni fetishes. In People of Darkness, Hillerman's villain has destroyed group of Indian workers by presenting them with mole fetishes made of radioactive ore. In addition to the fetishes, the Museum's collection of pottery is extensive. There were examples of the Anasazi artifacts that Hillerman's character the anthropologist Eleanor Friedman-Bernal, was seeking in A Thief of Time. "Someone had been digging. Someone had been looting. A pot hunter. A Thief of Time." I stood in front of the cases, and could visualize Eleanor digging them out of the desert sands.

Upstairs in the museum there is a very interesting room filled with cloth quilts. I had expected to see all of the traditional weavings...rugs and blankets...but here were cotton quilts stitched with needle and thread. Some dated back to the 1800's, but one recent one was made by a tribe to commemorate winning a sports tournament. As a quilter myself, I felt a strong sense of kinship.

We left the museum and drove down Mission School Road. Our guide pointed out the place where the mission school used to be. The building is no longer there; the place now marked with a statue of the Navajo Code Talkers, those who served the United States counter espionage forces during World War II. Our guide pointed out that the Hopi's are annoyed that there is a statue of the Navajos, and that books about their contributions have been written, but no mention is made of the fact that Hopi's also served.

While at the Heard Museum, I purchased a copy of the book Away from Home: American Boarding School Experiences. The United States Government from 1810 to 1917 subsidized mission schools. Well-intentioned people established these schools to provide an education for Native American children; however, although some were eager to go, many more were forcibly removed from their families, their tribal affiliations, and their very culture. I was interested to read that the first off-reservation boarding school was established in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As part of a display at the Heard Museum, there is a quote from Ruthie Blalock Jones, a Shawnee Indian, "[These schools] were started to stamp out the Indian from the Indian, you know, make us all into white people, and you know, it didn't work...it was the exact opposite. It made us stronger as Indian people. It made us more aware of and more proud of who we were." In the beginning of Sacred Clowns, Jim Chee is sitting up on a rooftop because he has been sent to find Delmar Kanitewa, a young boy who is AWOL from a Mission School. I was pleased that the GA Library would now have a thorough book, which could provide background on these schools for future readers.

From Mission schools to Frank Lloyd Wright, Hillerman novels incorporate bits of information that can lead the astute and interested readers on new quests. In People of Darkness Jim Chee is summoned to the home of the villain Benjamin J. Vines. As he approaches, he is eager to satisfy "his curiosity about this house. It had been designed, so he'd heard, by Frank Lloyd Wright, ...Chee's curiosity about it, as about all things in the white man's world, was intense." Our curiosity led us to Taliesen West, where we toured both the house and grounds. As Chee describes the Vines house, so sits Wright's winter home, "the house itself ...was built of native granite, linked...by a low curving wall of the same material." (p.5) Inside Taliesen West, the massive fireplace, the large expanse of glass that overlooks extending Southwestern views, and the intimate stone-walled dining room could easily have been a stage set for the Vines house. Since Hillerman's character, Vines, is a hunter, his walls are covered with animal trophies, not actually to be found at Taliesen West, but one could easily envisage them hung on the massive stone and timbered walls.

Taliesen West: "the house itself...was built of native granite, linked...by a low curving wall of the same material." (People of Darkness p5)

We visited the red velvet theater and the movie room equipped, so that guests could dine while watching films, with the special tables that folded out into extra-wide aisles between the seats. Many of Frank Lloyd Wright's favorite evenings were spent inviting friends to dinner and a movie. We toured the sculpture garden. During an anecdotal tour, we heard the tale of Wright's fight with the local government. Originally Taliesen faced east over a virgin valley. Town fathers decided to run overhead power lines through the valley, forever ruining the pristine views. Wright was horrified and offered to raise the money to have them buried; however, while he was away trying to do so, the locals went ahead. He was utterly disgusted. He literally turned his back on them, renovating the house with solid walls toward the valley, and reorienting his view westward.

We headed back for our own night of movies. I have always wondered why Hillerman's mysteries have not had commercial success as movies; now I suspect the problem is that belacani producers and directors still don't know how to retell honest stories concerning Native Americans. Hillerman pens a scene in Sacred Clowns where Jim Chee, his girlfriend, Janet Pete and a Cheyenne watch Hollywood's Cheyenne Autumn. The audience is Native American. Hillerman writes, "The scene was solemn. Three Navajos playing the role of three Cheyenne shamans were about to pray to God that the U.S. government would keep its treaty promises-a naïve concept, which had drawn derisive hoots and horn honkings from the rows of pickup trucks and cars." (p.121) Hillerman claims that the somber-sounding Navajo phrases translated into English in the film "produced more happy bedlam among the audience" What was really said had "something to do with the size of the colonel's penis, or some other earthy and humorous irrelevancy."

"Leaphorn had walked from Sayesva's house, across the plaza and around a corner and down a narrow street lined with adobe houses. (Sacred Clowns p 185)

Watching the movie, myself, the first thing that hit me was the conversation between Richard Widmark, commander of the cavalry detachment, and a young Quaker schoolteacher. She is pleading with Widmark to understand the plight of the young Indian children; however, as she addresses him she consistently uses the word "you." I suspect that if the creators of the film lacked the sense to realize that a Quaker woman of the late 1800's would still be using "thee" instead of you, their inclusion of genuine Navajo probably does miss the mark.

We watched the film version of Dark Wind, but alas it, too, was dreadful. Although Pueblo and Navajo Indians have tremendous respect for Hillerman's novels, they think little of the movie. One insurmountable problem is the casting. Instead of giving the role of Jim Chee to a Navajo, or at least a Native American, the lead is played by a young, unknown Filipino. Aside from the fact that he cannot act, he does not look or carry himself like a Navajo. In the discussion that followed our viewing, someone asked about the movie Dancing with Wolves. Did Native Americans like that film? Was it a more accurate description of White/Indian relationships? Agreement followed that it tended to be fair and honest. However, our presenter, Sandy Oglesby, explained that the Native American extras used in the making of the movie had been aggrieved by their treatment. They were asked to remain on horseback out in the hot sun for many retakes. After one extended period, they finally saw someone bringing out buckets of water. Unfortunately the water was delivered to dogs, also on the set. Contractually they must receive a drink after certain passages of time. No one offered the Indians water.

Following a night at the movies, we were all eager to head north into the Arizona Desert. The winter had been unusually wet. Runoff from the rains had encouraged bands of wildflowers to bloom riotously along the highways. We stopped for a tour at the Desert Botanical Museum, where examples of native flora toppled about among crags and crannies of rock outcroppings. There were also displays of Native American sustenance gardens, along side recreated hogans. "From his place on the talus slope, Chee could see, across Begay's empty homestead, a hundred miles to the southeast ...Old Man Begay had taken time to clean out his hogan and pack his stuff on his horses." (The Ghostway p.55)

"All around him was the empty wind-shaped plateau, its dunes held by great growth of Mormon tea, snake weed, yucca and durable sage." Abrubtly Chee again smelled the perfume that showers leave behind." (The First Eagle p17)

From where we stood we could look down on a stand of cottonwoods beside running water. I have read about these trees in so many western novels, and now here they were. In my mind's eye I could see Jim Chee living there, "here in the cottonwoods beside the river Chee's trailer had been in shadow for long enough to be cold." (p.172) A chill breeze fluttered up from the water and the juxtaposition with the novel was complete.

"But Lucy Sam's pickup was resting in front of her double-wide mobile home and Lucy was peering out of the front door at them." (The Fallen Man p 108)

As one drives north along Arizona's Rt. 87, one is surrounded by brilliant sunlight and the sky floats in cloudless blue overhead. The mountains are blue-black in the distance as rock formations turn into crags and buttes. Huge slabs of limestone topple about in a strange helter skelter. Suddenly mesas, canyons and high plateaus appear, giving the entire landscape an otherworldly look.

At Ganado we stopped at the Hubbell Trading Post, which has been in operation for more than a century. Inside, it is a jumble of Navajo rugs, jewelry, canned goods, saddles, harnesses and baskets. I was reminded of the trading post robbery that is featured in Dark Wind. Jake West had accused his employee Joseph Musket of stealing jewelry, and Chee of course had come to investigate. Joe "said that after he worked for the trading post a little while he didn't want to have anything else to do with the white men after that." (p.139).

I purchased Crossing Between Worlds: the Navajos of Canyon de Chelly, since that was to be our next stop. We drove along the south rim of the canyon and my mind washed back to Fallen Man, "About a month after the guy vanished, we caught a kid from Many Farms breaking into a tourist's car parked at one of the Canyon de Chelly overlooks..." (p.23) At White House Overlook there is a path bordered by pinion pines and junipers that winds down past sandstone walls. At the bottom of the canyon are hogans and working Navajo farms. The Indians themselves are illusive, but even as an archaeological and scenic site, it is a wonder.

"On the way up, it was the launching point for the final hard climb to the summit, a slightly-tilted but flat surface of basalt." (The Fallen Man c2)

We went west to Tuba City, a place depicted in The Dark Wind. "He could see the expanse of bunch grass, bare earth, rocks, scattered cactus, which separated the police building from the straggling row of old buildings, called Tuba City." (p.102). This is the capital of the western Navajo and is the site of several tribal services. There is a busy community center, a hospital, several cafes and grocery stores. A friend of mine has been corresponding with an assistant librarian at the Tuba City Library; a Navajo woman named Pearl Yazzie. Pearl lives outside Tuba City in a ranch house given to her by her mother. Like the grandmother in Sacred Clowns, Pearl's house has no electricity or running water. The grandmother says, "There is the bilagaana from the mission at Thoreau... He comes in his truck and keeps our water barrel filled." (p.114) It is humbling to realize that modern day Navajos continue to live under such conditions. Pearl explained that the meager funds that the government provided for the library were used to erect the building itself, but left nothing extra to purchase books or materials. Tourists, who Pearl has befriended over the years, continue to send her books and the library flourishes.

"We're coming down on Navajo Route 1 west of Tsegi," Leaphorn said, "be in Tuba City in maybe an hour." (Listening Woman p 333)

We drove north through Kayenta and stopped for a quick picnic lunch at the Navajo Tribal Park in Monument Valley. This is area is still inhabited by "sheep camp" Navajos; these are the "traditional Navajos" as Hillerman writes of them. It is an area of crags and buttes: places like Sentinel Mesa, Castle Butte and Brigham's Tomb. In the valley there are ancient Anasazi petroglyphs. Alas, it was time to head back south and we really did not have time to explore the valley. I made a mental note that this was a place that required a trip of its own.

"The wall of mesa rose. It was mostly cluiff, but breaks made it easy enough to climb. (Listening Woman p 439)

We arrived late back at our motel, but the day was not yet over. Don Wrigley, a local astronomer, gathered us all together for a lecture on the southwestern night sky. First he presented an historical overview taking us through time with Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Keppler. He brought with him a set of telescopes and explained their developmental improvements. He mentioned that Galileo, with the use of a telescope, was the first to be able to see the individual stars of the Milky Way. We helped to carry the telescopes out into the desert beyond the parking lot and we spent two hours viewing the stars. In People of Darkness, Chee and Mary Landon are searching for the followers of Lord Peyote. "Chee parked the truck beside the newest of the pickups, flicked off the headlights, and stepped out into the darkness. The moon was down and the black sky was brilliant with a billion stars. He stood with face raised, drinking it in-the great fluorescent sweep of the Milky Way, the pattern of the winter constellations, the incredible silent brightness of the universe." (p.157)

"In fact, no sign of any headlights, just the remains of what had been a blazing sunset." (Coyote Waits p4)

It was dark in the desert, in a way that has long vanished in more populated areas of the country. We looked at the rings of Saturn, and then Don pointed out the constellations in the night sky. In The First Eagle Jim Chee returns for advice to his Uncle Hosteen Frank Nakai. He finds his ailing uncle in a bed out under the stars. "Chee looked at them, remembered how the impatient Coyote spirit had scattered them across the darkness. He hunted out the summer constellations Nakai had taught him to find, and as he found them, tried to match them with the stories they carried in their medicine bundles." (p.218). We plopped down with our backs against the still warm, desert sand. A twinkling coverlet spread above us, we relaxed as Don related the mythology of the stars. Unlike the programs that I heard as a child at the Hayden Planetarium which were steeped in Greek and Roman Mythology, now the explanations become Native American. Instead of Ursa Minor the great bear with four stars in his tail, the four stars are now braves Moosebird, Robin and Chicadee. Moosebird has a pot, Chicadee firewood and Robin has an arrow to hunt the bear. As autumn approaches, the bear is lower in the sky and the braves draw nearer. Robin shoots the bear with the arrow and his blood spills down staining the autumn leaves red and spattering on Robin's breast. But as spring returns, the wounded bear heals, moves ahead and the cycle begins again.

"Slanting sunlight illuminated the ragged clack form of Barber Peak, a volcanic throat to geologists, a meeting place for witches in local lore." (Listening Waits p84)

Thus ended our foray into Tony Hillerman'Southwest. For clarification and enlightenment, Jim Chee, the Navajo traditionalist, often returns to the mythology of his people. "From Phoenix, from almost anywhere, that meant a hell of a long drive. But Chee was a man of faith. He did his damnedest to maintain within himself the ultimate value of his people, the sense of peace, harmony and beauty Navajos call hozho." (First Eagle, p.213) We had gathered from all over the United States to get a sense of Hillerman's Southwest. We had driven for miles, we were tired, but we all felt initiated into "the blessing way." We had learned much, but the best thing was that we knew we had had just a glimpse, and there was still more to explore on another trip.