Coyote Waits Read Online Free PDF Page B

old-time stories.” Leaphorn wasn’t sure what she meant. He waited for an explanation. None came.
    “Was Hosteen Pinto someone the anthropologists came to see to learn the old stories? Like Professor Bourebonette?”
    “Yes. Many times in the old days. Not so much now. He learned most of them from Narbona Begay I think. The brother of his mother.”
    “You think it was this white man looking for stories who came for him the day before the shooting?”
    Mrs. Keeyani shook her head. “I don’t know who it was. Maybe.”
    Or maybe not, Leaphorn thought. And how does it help anyway? His mind kept returning to Dr. Bourebonette’s reason for being here. She knew the man, obviously. She said she liked him, had worked with him. But being here involved a lot of time and effort if you worked in Flagstaff. And she also seemed ready to pay for the expense of a private investigator.
    “Are you still working with Hosteen Pinto?” he asked her. “I mean something current? Going on right now?”
    She nodded. “We have been collaborating on a book,” she said.
    “About mythology?”
    “About the evolution of witchcraft beliefs,” she said. “Ashie Pinto had noticed it himself. How the stories had changed since his boyhood. He went to Albuquerque with me and we listened to the tapes. . . .” She paused. Decided this needed explanation. “The oral history tapes in the University of New Mexico collection. Interviews with elderly Navajos. And not just Navajos. With the other Native American cultures and the Spanish-American old people. Tapes that were made back in the thirties and forties that were recording memories that go way back into the 1880s. And if you allow secondhand, second-person memories — what we call grandfather stories — some of the memories went back before the Long Walk. We’d listen to these and look at the transcripts and that would refresh Hosteen Pinto’s memories of the tales he had been told.”
    Dr. Bourebonette had an austere face. The only expressions Leaphorn had identified in it were skepticism, anger, and determination — the face of a woman used to getting her way who doubted she would get it from him. Now Bourebonette’s face had changed. As she talked of this book there was animation and enthusiasm.
    Leaphorn decided he might know what motivated Dr. Bourebonette.
    “. . . It’s remarkable,” she was saying. “What Hosteen Pinto can remember. How well he commands the little nuances of those old stories. The differences in attitudes of the teller toward the witch, for example. The shift in importance if the variation came from outside the Navajo culture. For example, from the Zuni sorcery tradition. Or the Hopi ‘two-heart’ legends, or—” Dr. Bourebonette stopped, midphrase. She looked embarrassed.
    “You were still working with Hosteen Pinto? You hadn’t finished?”
    “More or less. I was to pick him up later that week. The week it happened. In fact that’s how I found out he was arrested. I had read about the crime, but they hadn’t released Hosteen Pinto’s name. So I went out to his place and Mrs. Keeyani told me he was in jail.”
    In jail, Leaphorn thought. Unavailable to answer professorial questions. A book put on hold. Perhaps never to be finished. Professor Bourebonette’s motivations seemed much less mysterious.
    “Can the book be finished without him?” Leaphorn asked. His voice was as neutral as he could make it. But Professor Bourebonette read him exactly. Her sharp blue eyes stared into his. “Of course,” she said. But she nodded, conceding his point and accepting the accusation. “But it might not be as solid a work.”
    Leaphorn looked away from her, back at the report, impressed with her astuteness and feeling slightly guilty. If he told Emma of this exchange, as he would have, she would have clucked her tongue, disapproving of his conduct. He turned the page, looking for the answer to the obvious question these women had posed. How had the old