Hillerman’s Best Yet

“Hunting Badger” is the 13th of Tony Hillerman’s mystery novels featuring Navajo Tribal Police officers Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, and it is one of his most successful. Hillerman combines evocative descriptions of the rugged landscape and people of the Four Corners area of the Southwest, a sensitive appreciation of Navajo culture torn between tradition and modernism and a lively contemporary plot to make a jaunty and satisfying tale of intrigue, deception and surprise.

This fictional story recalls--and refers to--a real one in the same area. On May 4, 1998, three men shot and killed a Colorado police officer. An immense search, led by an incompetently bureaucratic FBI team, failed to find the killers. (The body of one of them was found recently in the Four Corners area and labeled a suicide.)

“Hunting Badger” opens at the casino on the Ute Indian reservation. It is a fine summer night, after 3 a.m. The lightning on the distant hills signifies that the summer monsoon season is about to begin. Designed to bring money to the reservation from the outside, the casino has, as always on payday on the reservation, been exceptionally busy. The cash from the tables and slots is bundled and tied, waiting for the armored truck. Two pickups pull into the parking lot. From one a man swings out a ladder and climbs to the casino roof. Two other men head for the “Employees Only” door. A security guard outside challenges them. They shoot him before he can get his pistol out and also gravely wound another guard.

Meanwhile Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police is back home in his trailer under the cottonwood trees along the San Juan River just off the Shiprock-Cortez highway. Chee is happy. He has a few days of vacation left. And he has finally ended his relationship with Janet Pete, the bright part-Navajo woman who would never have been happy on the reservation, just as he never could be off it. Joe Leaphorn is not so happy. After three years, he still misses his dead, much loved wife. And he doesn’t have enough to do after his retirement as lieutenant in the tribal police. But the murders at the casino draw Leaphorn and Chee back into partnership again as the manhunt for the murderers widens.

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Hillerman weaves into his tale several strands of the contemporary Southwest, including militiamen and stubborn ranchers who think that grazing on public land is a God-given right. These, like many other proud and ornery people who inhabit that austere, unforgiving land, harbor a deep distrust of the federal government and all its agents.

Hillerman embellishes this attitude with his unflattering portrait of the barely competent FBI agents, instantly detectable by lawman and crook alike as they appear at crime scenes in their shiny black Ford Taurus sedans.

By contrast his depiction of the Navajo and their ancient ways is affectionate. Here are the words of a dying yataalii, a famous shaman who sang the Blessing Way, the Mountain Top Chant, the Night Way and other ceremonials, who is desperately unhappy that he is trapped in a Farmington, N.M., hospital when he should be dying under the stars in his camp in the Chuska Mountains: “The bilagaana [white people] do not understand death,” he said. “It is the other end of the circle, not something that should be fought and struggled against. Have you noticed that people die at the end of night, when the stars are still shining in the west and you can sense the brightness of Dawn Boy on the eastern mountains? That’s so Holy Wind within them can go to bless the new day.”

The Navajo nation has given Hillerman its Special Friend Award, and the Mystery Writers of America, of which he is a past president, has named him a recipient of its Edgar and Grand Master awards. Why he well deserves both, and why he deserves his readers’ thanks for fast-paced mysteries set in an authentic, unusual background, is well illustrated by his skillful and convincing “Hunting Badger.”