Navajo Tradition, Modern Life Clash in Hillerman Territory

THE WAILING WIND

A Novel

By Tony Hillerman

HarperCollins

232 pages, $25.95

Fans of Tony Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries pick up his new novels knowing they will meet again his familiar and comfortable characters, Lt. Joe Leaphorn (now retired) and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police.

In his new novel, “The Wailing Wind,” Hillerman takes his readers again into the thin air and intense blue skies of the high country of the desert Southwest, the Four Corners area of the vast Navajo Nation, its borders anchored at the corners by the four sacred mountains.

Wind is present in all seasons, stinging faces with dust, turning up the green leaves of the cottonwood trees in the arroyos and canyons, setting the leaves of the aspens aquiver where they grow with the spruces at the higher elevations.

Lower down, below the mountains on the rolling hills and flat mesas, are the dark green pinyon pines and the lighter juniper, and below them the gray-brown and infrequently green grasslands where the sheep and cattle graze.

In winter there are squalls of snow. In summer, when the people who live there are lucky, the monsoon moist air from the Gulf of California and the Gulf of Mexico builds up into staggeringly tall cumulus clouds, the rain falls, lightning strikes and the thunder rolls and rolls and echoes.

In Hillerman’s novels this landscape, like his two Navajo policemen, is always the same. But in each novel lately he has been introducing some new element of Navajo culture to his readers. Hillerman has said that he never starts a Leaphorn and Chee book without hoping to give the reader some insight into the culture of the Navajo, who deserve to be better understood than they are.

In “The Wailing Wind,” Hillerman explores aspects of the chindi, the ghost or spirit or emanation a person leaves behind after death. In this novel the chindi is important because there are two deaths two years apart that turn out to be murders.

While Leaphorn and his younger friend Chee, with some help, are solving the murders, people who have encountered the corpses or are otherwise drawn into the murders seek a shaman, or hataalii, to sing the sacred chants, called “ways,” that will purify them and restore them to harmony with the natural, sacred world. Sometimes, as in “The Wailing Wind,” those needing a healing way are themselves policemen or policewomen, Navajos who respect the old ways but work in the modern world.

The tension between tradition and modernity is the hallmark of a Hillerman Navajo mystery. His account of the tensions is expressed perhaps more benignly than in actual life on the reservation. His chief characters are not driven by alcoholism or extreme poverty or despair. His Navajo figures are mostly stable. Chee’s conflicts arise, for instance, when he is thinking of marrying a woman he likes. He has already rejected two, one in particular because she was too “Ivy League.” It is probably significant for Hillerman fans that in “The Wailing Wind,” Chee has fallen in love with a Navajo policewoman, Bernadette Manuelito.

As in his other books, there is also a good dose of New Mexico history and lore in “The Wailing Wind.” Part of the story takes place in Fort Wingate, that huge Army installation (dating on its present site to 1862) that held bunkers containing most of the munitions assembled for use in the Vietnam War.

And, since the novel turns on a long-lost and much-coveted gold mine, Hillerman provides a nice description of how to build a placer mine for gold (a method that uses water to collect minerals lying on or near the surface of the ground) in the bottom of a canyon using natural rainfall.

Once again, Hillerman has come through with a pleasing portrait of a region and a culture presented through the sympathetic eyes of his agreeable chief characters, retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee.