The Story: Navajo Tribal Police Officer Jim Chee investigates the murder of a dying man and a bizarre burglary at a white man’s house—the theft of a box of rocks and trinkets. The trail leads to more deaths, each connected by a mole talisman. In solving the mystery, Chee uncovers a thirty-year-old crime that endangers his life and the life of Mary Landon, a young schoolteacher he’s fond of. Settings include Crownpoint, New Mexico, and the Mount Taylor/Grants/Malpais/Ambrosia Lakes landscape.
Of Interest: This is the first of three books to feature Jim Chee as the sole protagonist. Hillerman noted that his idea for the villain came from an interview he did as a newsman, a conversation with a condemned murderer facing death in New Mexico’s gas chamber. The inmate hoped the article might catch the attention of his long-lost mother who would come to claim his body. Hillerman said the incident “implanted in my brain.” It re-emerged years later to help create Colton Wolf, one of his most complex antagonists.
The inspiration for another central character, B. J. Vines, grew from a biographical sketch Hillerman wrote to augment his salary as a faculty member at the University of New Mexico during a time when income from his novels was negligible. In his research on the life of the featured banker, he learned that an oil-drilling explosion had left the man blind. A similar accident found a place in the novel.
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “Older, wiser, urbane Leaphorn refused to fit into my plan to set a plot on the Checkerboard Reservation, in which the government gave alternate square miles of land to the railroads and in which Navajo was intermixed with a plethora of whites, Zunis, Jemez, Lagunas, etc., and a dozen or so missionary outposts of different religions. Since Joe wouldn’t be surprised by any of this I created younger, less culturally assimilated, Jim Chee.”
Buyers and weavers assembled for the Crownpoint auction
CROWNPOINT RUG AUCTION
It was after sundown when Chee drove past the Tribal Police office. It was dark. On the other side of the village, perhaps two hundred assorted vehicles were parked at the Crownpoint elementary school, suggesting a good turnout for the November rug auction…
Inside the school, the air was rich with a mélange of aromas. Chee identified the smells of cooking fry bread, floor wax, blackboard chalk, stewing mutton and red chile, of raw wool, of horses and of humans. In the auditorium perhaps a hundred potential buyers were wandering among the stacks of rugs on the display tables, inspecting the offerings and noting item numbers.
[CHAPTER 12]
Volunteer Valtina Perry helps display a rug.
Alica Bahe Begay, 89, with her rug
ABOUT THE CROWNPOINT RUG AUCTION
The Crownpoint rug auction brings Navajo weavers from all over the vast Navajo Nation to Crownpoint, New Mexico. The Crownpoint Rug Weavers Association runs the sale, the largest auction of contemporary Navajo rugs in the world, in the gymnasium of Crownpoint Elementary School. Usually held on the third Friday of the month, the auction features all styles and sizes of rugs and draws buyers and the curious from all over the country and the world. Prices range from around fifty dollars to several thousand. Just as the Navajo landscape surrounds visitors with inspiring beauty, so does the outpouring of creativity found here.
In addition to its role in People of Darkness, the auction appears again in Dad’s final book, The Shape Shifter, and he refers to Crownpoint in seven other Chee/Leaphorn novels. In People of Darkness, the auction sets the stage for Chee to arrange a date with Mary Landon and to catch a glimpse of the killer.
A rug by Alica Bahe Begay, from Pinon, Arizona on the auction block
Dad and Mom went to the auction several times, coming home with a rug or two each trip. Dad also collected stories about the challenges of raising and shearing sheep, spinning yarn, and weaving; information that made its way into his books as interesting trivia or, in The Shape Shifter, an integral part of the plot.
Don and I have (so far) resisted buying a rug but at a food trailer outside the auction hall we discovered Rez Dogs, a pair of hotdogs covered with chili and served on fry bread. Tasty, but not for the faint of heart!
MOUNT TAYLOR
[Chee] sat smoking, looking at Mount Taylor thirty miles to the east. The sun had dropped behind the horizon but the top of the mountain, rising a mile above the valley floor, still caught the direct light. Tsoodzil, the Navajos called it, the Turquoise Mountain. It was one of the four sacred peaks which First Man had built to guard Dinetah. He had built it on a blue blanket of earth carried from the underworld and decorated it with turquoise and blue flint.
[CHAPTER 5]
Summer rain over Mount Taylor
ABOUT MOUNT TAYLOR
The highest peak in New Mexico’s San Mateo Mountains, Mount Taylor gets its English name from Zachary Taylor, the twelfth president of the United States. It is the Navajo sacred mountain of the south. Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, and other Native people also consider it a holy place.
An extinct volcano, Mount Taylor began to form about four million years ago, growing from repeated eruptions that created lava domes and rivers of molten rock. Its huge hot clouds of volcanic ash covered the earth for miles. The last eruption occurred more than two million years ago. Snowcapped much of the year, Mount Taylor rises as a landmark visible from many points in Navajo Country and from Tesuque Peak above Santa Fe, some 110 miles northeast. It appears in a dozen of Dad’s books as a signpost of Indian country.
In People of Darkness, Dad introduces Jim Chee as he waits in the sleet outside a mining mogul’s luxury home, a white man’s palace constructed on the slopes of Mount Taylor. Chee is moved, not by the structure itself, but by the glorious view across the Malpais toward the Zuni Mountains.
A train near Grants, on its way to Gallup, New Mexico, passing through the Malpais lava flow
THE MALPAIS
The ceiling rose in a soaring curve toward a great wall of glass. Beyond the wall, the mountain slope fell away. Now the view was obscured by clouds and gusts of sleet, but on the usual day Chee knew the glass overlooked immense space—across the Laguna and Acoma Indian reservations to the south and east, southward across the forty-mile sea of cooled lava called the Malpais toward the Zuni Mountains, and eastward across the Cañoncito Reservation to the great blue hump of the Sandia Mountains behind Albuquerque.
[CHAPTER 2]
The new lava was at least a thousand years old. It looked as if it had hardened yesterday. It was as black as coal, raw and rough, still marked with the froth of its white-hot bubbling as it boiled across the landscape. They climbed from the ancient lava onto the final wave of the new and stood looking across ten miles of tumbled, ragged blackness at the blue shape of Cebolleta Mesa.
“I’m impressed,” Mary said finally. “It’s like looking backward a hundred million years.”
[CHAPTER 13]
ABOUT THE MALPAIS
El Malpais, “the badlands,” is an eerie landscape complete with cinder cones, pressure ridges, rock hardened into ropelike strands, extensive caves and delicate tubes. The dramatic formations come from three million years of eruptions from volcanoes in the Mount Taylor area and elsewhere.
Although the area seems desolate, the lava supports a variety of plants including cane cholla cactus, which blooms in early summer.
Managed as a national monument and a national conservation area, the lava flow is more than sixty miles wide and thirty-five miles long. Interstate 40 crosses its northern margin. Several hiking paths, including the seven-mile Zuni–Acoma Trail, traverse the lava. Although the landscape looks foreboding, archaeologists have discovered signs of human occupation. Ancestral Pueblo Indians lived here in the greatest numbers between 950 and 1350 A.D. People from Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and the Ramah Navajo community come to the Malpais to gather plants for ceremonial uses as they have for generations. Anglo homesteaders moved in beginning around 1920.
The Navajo name for the area translates to “Where Big God’s Blood Coagulated,” a reference to the blood of a monster the Twin War Gods killed on Mount Taylor.
In People of Darkness, Chee and Mary Landon hike over the hardened lava as Chee tells stories of the way the Twin War Gods made the world safer for the Diné. In the course of their hike, they discover a freshly killed corpse.
FETISHES
The amulet he extracted was black, and dull, and shaped into the eyeless, sharp-nosed form of a mole. He held it up for Mary’s inspection. It was heavy, formed from a soft stone. Some sort of shale, Chee guessed. “Here we have Dine’etsetle,” Chee said. “The predator of the nadir. The hunting spirit of the underworld. One of the People of Darkness.”
He stared at it, heavy on his palm, hoping for some information. It was well formed—better than most amulets…. He slipped the mole back into the pouch.
“Did it tell you anything?”
Chee recited two lines of Navajo. “That’s from one of the blessing chants,” he said.
The mole, his hunting place is darkness.
The mole, his hunting song is silence.
[CHAPTER 25]
ANIMAL FETISH CARVINGS
The mole, the traditional Native American animal of the underground, is one of many fetish animals. Because Mole lives in darkness, his purpose, according to some interpretations, is to remind humans to trust what we feel, not what we see. The Zuni people, famous for their beautifully carved fetishes, honor Mole as the guardian of Mother Earth. In Navajo tradition, fetishes form part of the sacred bundles of Navajo medicine people. Individuals also may carry them for added protection.
Anthropologists believe ancient fetishes began as rocks that naturally resembled an animal and, according to tradition, conveyed some of that animal’s wisdom and power. Contemporary Native American fetishes range from highly abstracted representations to detailed, lifelike forms. The artists use a variety of materials including marble, shell, coral, jet, antler, bone, turquoise, and even fossilized ivory. In addition to wolves, bears, and mountain lions, artists carve parrots, owls, snakes, bats, buffalo, and a range of other animals—including those from Africa.
A mole fetish by Zuni artist Lena Boone (courtesy Keshi, the Zuni Connection Gallery, Santa Fe)
When Don and I began working on this book, a friend from Zuni gave us a beautifully carved mole, not knowing that Dad featured the mole in People of Darkness. On a trip to Zuni during our research for Dance Hall of the Dead, a diminutive, weathered-looking Zuni man approached me with fetishes in a handmade wooden box. He didn’t have a mole but I bought a badger with a medicine bundle on its back and an eagle with bright turquoise eyes. Over the years, Navajo and Zuni acquaintances gave Dad several fetishes. He remained skeptical about the power of animal spirits to influence his life, but he believed strongly in the power of friendship that inspired the gifts.