The Story: Mountain climbers discover a human skull in a climbing helmet on a ledge beneath the peak of the Navajo’s sacred Ship Rock on Halloween. As Joe Leaphorn works on the case as private investigator for the widow, Jim Chee, recently promoted to acting lieutenant, investigates a fresh murder 300 miles away. Could the death of a seasoned Canyon de Chelly Navajo guide by a sniper’s bullet have anything to do with the aged bones? Of course! Cattle rustling and lawyer Janet Pete add complications on many levels.
Of Interest: Hillerman took a hiatus from Chee and Leaphorn in the early 1990s, turning to other projects including The Mysterious West, an anthology of mystery short stories, and Finding Moon, a 1995 novel set in Vietnam. He returned with a new character, Officer Bernadette Manuelito, and with Leaphorn in retirement from the Navajo police force working occasionally as a private detective. Hillerman dedicated the book to “members of the Dick Pfaff philosophical society,” a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the group he played poker with each week for some thirty-five years.
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “Several notions in my collection of potential story ideas collided for this one. Idea one was to leave a mountain climber trapped atop Ship Rock, as was Monster Slayer in the Navajo origin story. Two was having a custom-made competition rifle firing custom-made ammo used by a sniper on the rim of Canyon de Chelly to assassinate a witness far below. Three was to involve cattle rustling and the anti-rustler tactics of working with ‘watchers.’ Some of these worked but a half dozen others misfired, forcing me to learn a lot more about serious mountain climbing than I wished.”
SHIP ROCK
They turned onto U.S. 666 to make the forty-mile run almost due south to Shiprock. With the icy wind pursuing them, the highway emptied of traffic by storm warnings, and speed limit ignored, Bernie outran the Canadian contribution to the storm. The sky lightened now. Far ahead, they could see where the Pacific half of the blizzard had reached the Chuska range. Its cold wet air met the dry, warmer air on the New Mexico side of the ridgeline. The collision produced a towering wall of white fog, which poured down the slopes like a silent, slow-motion Niagara.
“Wow,” Bernie said. “I never saw anything like that before…”
They crossed the western corner of the Ute reservation, then roared into New Mexico…They looked down into the vast San Juan River basin—dark with storm to the right, dappled with sunlight to the left. Ship Rock stood just at the edge of the shadow line, a grotesque sunlit thumb thrust into the sky, but through some quirk of wind and air pressure, the long bulge of the Hogback formation was already mostly dark with cloud shadow.
[CHAPTER 26]
ABOUT SHIP ROCK
Geologists describe Ship Rock as the most spectacular volcanic neck in the Four Corners region—the area where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado share a border. A stunning landmark, it soars to an elevation of more than 7,000 feet, thirteen miles southwest of the town of Shiprock, New Mexico. Ship Rock is one of many volcanic monoliths populating the Colorado plateau. Other beautiful examples include Agathla Peak near Monument Valley and Church Rock at Kayenta.
In Diné tradition, Ship Rock is sacred, known as Tse Bitai. According to one Navajo story, the rock was the great swan that flew here with the Diné on its back. Another story recalls the giant birdlike monsters that once nested on Ship Rock, feeding people they captured to their chicks. The American name dates to U.S. Geological Survey Maps of the 1870, inspired by the resemblance non-Natives saw to nineteenth-century clipper ships.
We spent many evenings watching the light change on Ship Rock, waiting for the perfect photo. The only other people we saw buzzed by in cars, trucks, and SUVs. On one of our expeditions, a motley pair of reservation dogs, a scrawny black mutt and his brown-and-black buddy, joined us for the sunset vigil. They sat quietly, a respectful distance from the tripod, observing us with the ever-present optimism of dogs. They scarfed down our cold French fries and rewarded us with wagging tails.
Ship Rock from the north. The Navajo name for it translates as “rock with wings.”
In one Navajo story, Ship Rock rose to carry the Navajo away from their enemies.
Dad mentioned Ship Rock in so many books that Don and I had a hard time deciding where to place the photos of this landmark. We put Ship Rock here because, in addition to providing a scenic backdrop to the story, the discovery of a skeleton in a cave on Ship Rock’s slopes plays a crucial role in the plot of The Fallen Man.
MOUNT HESPERUS
“I think I should go to Shiprock,” Elisa said. She looked away from Chee and out the window. “To take care of things. Hal would have wanted to be cremated, I think. And his ashes scattered in the San Juan Mountains.”
“Yeah,” Demott said. “Over in the La Plata range. On Mount Hesperus. That was his very favorite.”
“We call it Dibé Ntsaa,” Chee said. He thought of a dead man’s ashes drifting down on serene slopes that the spirit called First Man had built to protect the Navajo from evil. First Man had decorated the mountain with jet-black jewelry to fend off all bad things. But what could protect it from the invincible ignorance of this white culture?
[CHAPTER 5]
Mount Hesperus, Colorado
ABOUT MOUNT HESPERUS
Mount Hesperus, also known as Hesperus Peak, marks the northern boundary of the Dinetah, the Navajo’s traditional homeland. The Sacred Mountain of the North, Dibé Ntsaa or Dibentsaa, it rises in the La Plata Mountains near the southern edge of the San Juan Mountain range, eleven miles north of Mancos, Colorado. The La Platas are the most southwesterly of all the Colorado mountains and Hesperus Mountain, at 13,232 feet, is one of the highest peaks. The English name was inspired by the poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. As Chee implies in The Fallen Man, the sprinkling of human ashes on a Navajo sacred site would be deeply offensive.
Of all the sacred places Don and I saw, Mount Hesperus sticks in my memory as one of the most spectacular. We came upon it at sunset, having driven all day from Utah. The pink light of February’s fading sunset gave a warm glow to the snowy fields around us and to the mountain itself. The air temperature stood at barely above zero and nothing moved anywhere except the light itself.
Spider Rock at Canyon de Chelly
CANYON DE CHELLY
Leaphorn’s next stop was seven-tenths of a mile up the rim road from the White House Ruins overlook—the point from which the sniper had shot Nez…. Here the layer of tough igneous rock had broken into a jumble of room-sized boulders…. He looked down and directly across the canyon floor. Nez would have been riding his horse along the track across the sandy bottom of the wash….
They sat awhile (at the bottom of Canyon de Chelly), engulfed by sunlight, cool air, and silence. A raven planed down from the rim, circled around a cottonwood, landed on a Russian Olive across the canyon floor, and perched, waiting for them to die.
[CHAPTER 7]
ABOUT CANYON DE CHELLY
Canyon de Chelly, surrounded by the Navajo reservation, reaches toward the New Mexico border just east of Chinle, Arizona. The red cliffs, rock art, and ruins are protected as a National Monument through joint administration of the Navajo Nation and the National Park Service. The power of windblown sand, streams flowing from the Chuska Mountains, and the steady work of time created this monumental landscape of stunningly eroded sandstone.
For centuries, people also have left their mark. Canyon de Chelly is one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes in North America, home to ancestral Pueblo people, to the Hopi, and to Navajo families who now farm and raise their animals here. Well-preserved stone kivas, cliff-side storerooms, living quarters, and an amazing array of petroglyphs and pictographs testify to the canyon’s abiding appeal to humans.
Visitors can reach the White House Ruins, one of the most spectacular, from a self-guided hiking trail that winds into the canyon from the rim, about three miles round trip. Instead of hiking, Don and I and his backpack filled with photo equipment took a trip along the canyon floor in a little bus with other visitors and a Navajo tour guide. In addition to an up-close view of the canyon, we heard thrilling stories about the Navajo families who used it as a stronghold against Kit Carson in the days of Bosque Redondo. On one stop, we talked to Navajo jewelers and a musician who played handmade native flutes.
White House Ruins, Canyon de Chelly
Among the canyon’s most impressive geologic features is the sandstone monolith of Spider Rock at the junction of Canyon de Chelly and Monument Canyon. In the Navajo creation story, Spider Woman, the benefactor who taught the Navajo the great art of weaving, lives here surrounded by white bleached bones of the naughty youngsters she punished.
In The Fallen Man, Dad used a Navajo guide at Canyon de Chelly as one of the central characters. When my family first visited, probably back in the late 1960s, we were allowed to drive into the canyon on our own. At Thunderbird Lodge, the park headquarters, the staff warned us to look out for quicksand. We kids were delighted when Dad found some, but disappointed that we didn’t sink in up to our chins like we’d seen in the movies. In the final pages of The Fallen Man, Leaphorn confronts a murderer on the west rim of Canyon del Muerto, a branch of Canyon de Chelly. The scene includes a heartfelt conversation about the difference between justice and the law and ends with a dramatic suicide.
The Navajos took refuge in Canyon de Chelly—a natural fortress—from the conflict and violence that came as first the Spaniards, then the Mexicans, then the Americans pushed westward into the Diné’s traditional homeland. On January 6, 1864, as part of the U.S. government’s plan to evict the Navajo from their sacred land, Kit Carson led almost four hundred soldiers into Canyon de Chelly. The soldiers burned the hogans, destroyed food supplies, and damaged water sources to force the Navajo on the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo internment camp.