ability to handle demanding characters from the white world around him. He is still learning the ways of the white men, as he cannot understand the choices made by graduate student Ted Isaacs, who leaves the love of his life on her own when she needs a place to live, in favor of his career, in Dance Hall of the Dead. In Talking God, the year following the death of his wife, Leaphorn has a Blessing Way ceremony done for him by Jim Chee, an event that both find beneficial. The belief in skinwalkers, common among so many Navajos, is the one that bothers him most and for good reason. The skinwalker, who is a human being, has many attributes that are not human, such as the ability to turn into a bird or animal, to fly, and to put a bit of bone into a person, thus marking the person for death. In times of troubles, when people seek a scapegoat, the notion of a skinwalker being the cause gives a person reason to kill the skinwalker. He encountered a triple murder by one man who then killed himself early in his police career, we learn in The Blessing Way (the first book in the series), the one man believing the others to be skinwalkers; and Leaphorn did not act on that knowledge as quickly as he later thought he might have. As a police officer, he arrests murderers, along with the FBI, who are formally responsible for prosecuting homicides on the reservation. Times of troubles may mean fatal medical problems for the one seeking a scapegoat when there is no cure. This to Leaphorn is superstition that would be helped greatly by seeking treatment and by accepting current knowledge of health and disease, then accepting fate in the Navajo way. Leaphorn is called the "Legendary Lieutenant" by other police officers in later novels, and especially by Chee, who holds him in awe. Leaphorn lives in the Navajo capital of Window Rock, Arizona. In his career he worked in a number of locations, including a brief stint training at the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. His longest assignment appears to have been in Tuba City, Arizona, where he was a traffic cop, before the story told in The Blessing Way, as described in the Listening Woman. Leaphorn is connected to many on the reservation. One example is his encounter