And now Chee was stuck with a dependent.Chee's interest, originally, had been simple curiosity. The cat would have moved down the slope and found itself a den closer to the San Juan - which was never dry. If he hadn't started this meddling, nature would have taken its normal course. Chee felt slightly uneasy about the water. And the watering problem would be solved. If the cat did, it would gain access to a colony of field mice that seemed to have moved into Chee's trailer. He had done it on a whim, partly to see if the ultracautious cat could be taught to use it. And so, one afternoon when there was absolutely nothing else to do, Chee had removed the door, hacksawed out a cat-sized rectangle through its bottom frame, and then attached a plywood flap, using leather hinges and Miracle Glue. But easy water attracted other animals, and birds, and sometimes they turned it over. Then when the snow melt ended and the spring drought arrived, he began leaving out water in a coffee can. During the spring, Chee had formed a habit of leaving out table scraps to feed it after heavy snows. It had become a familiar, if suspicious, neighbor.
Or what? Obviously something the cat considered a threat.The cat had appeared last winter,finding itself a sort of den under a juniper east of Chee's trailer - a place where a lower limb, a boulder, and a rusted barrel formed a closed cul-de-sac. What had driven it in? The coyote, maybe. Not a complicated job, but unpleasant enough to cause Chee to change the subject of his thinking again. Today he and Jay Kennedy would go out and arrest Roosevelt Bistie so that Bistie could be charged with some degree of homicide - probably with murder. Today, actually, since it must be well after midnight.
Just a couple of weeks more to wait.Jim Chee's conditioning - traditional Navajo - caused him to put that thought aside. Blue-eyed, slender, fascinating Mary Landon would be coming back from Wisconsin. Was it something threatening to Chee? But in a moment he was fully awake, and the uneasiness was replaced by happiness. What had chased it in? Something scary to a cat - or to this particular cat. Perhaps the uneasy dream provoked an uneasiness about the cat. The sound brought him enough awake to be aware that his sheet was tangled uncomfortably around his chest.He sorted out the bedclothing, still half immersed in an uneasy dream of being tangled in 'a rope that he needed to keep his mother's sheep from running over the edge of something vague and dangerous. Chee had been moving in and out of the very edge of sleep, turning uneasily on the narrow bed, pressing himself uncomfortably against the metal tubes that braced the aluminum skin of his trailer. Chapter OneWhen the cat came through the little trapdoor at the bottom of the screen it made a "clack-clack sound.
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