Death Chants (28 page)

Wild Horse Dancer
stared at the ridge above his lodge.

Sky Moon was there,
a spirit as old and as pale white as death

in the
snow.

Off in the
distance, a night being, some great dark bird, cawed once and then fell silent again, like a life
that dies just as it is

born. The great
beast's head turned slowly and its eyes, burning
with strange life, seemed to pierce Wild Horse Dancer, striking deeply to the
bone.

Wild Horse Dancer
started moving toward the Spirit Buffalo but with the first step the earth shook and opened at
his feet. He slid on the ice and went tumbling forward into an abyss.

He struck his head
on something. He must have, because a blackness descended on him, and a cold, unnatural sleep
pos­sessed him.

His eyes opened but
they were not his eyes. Now he saw the world through the eyes of Sky Moon. His being was wrapped
in the Spirit Buffalo's skin and he let himself be part of it.

In his youth,
through much suffering and pain, he had sought vision to gain power and strength. Now old, he
knew himself in the presence of a greater thing, a vision that now sought him. Wild Horse Dancer
felt the cold air of morning running through his nose. His eyes burned, not from the stinging
bite of the cold wind but from the eternal rhythm. The call of mating that blazed within him.
Wild Horse Dancer pawed the ground with his mighty hooves and sniffed the wind and
listened.

He smelled the end
of winter in the wind of a dying storm, a green smell of earth returning.

But no scent of
female buffalo danced on the wind.

Still, he sought
them on the wind. Drawing air into his huge shaggy chest, he opened his mouth and sounded the
mating call.

The thunder of it
crashed and echoed across the mountain­side.

His ears pricked
up, alert for an answering call that did not come.

Wild Horse Dancer
bellowed and then charged down the
mountain slope, covering the ground at great speed, cleft
hooves slashing against the thawing ground like lightning
bolts.

He was Wild Horse
Dancer and he was not. His blood and Sky
Moon's were one, head and heart joined in this strange vision.

A strange scent
came to them, man inside spirit animal. An
ancient smell that made the blood race and the heart thunder in
their mighty chest.

Sky Moon topped a
small hill, and stood in a stand of small
pine trees where the smell was strongest. He swung his head, seeking the source of the
scent.

Something moved,
something brown stirred in the under­brush. Sky Moon was alert, eyes wide, muscles taut. A
soft-skinned, sloe-eyed buffalo cow moved toward him through the trees.

She stopped moving
and both animals stood there for a mo­ment, heads stiff, eyeing each other cautiously.

Wild Horse Dancer
felt a great upwelling in the strong heart of Sky Moon. A great fire burned.

This was not a
buffalo cow like others of its kind. It had been touched or shaped by spirits. A great dark mark
on the buffalo's back stained its coat where some great ages-old creature had left its mark on
it.

The mark was in the
shape of a splayed hoof, perfectly formed, not twisted and bent like a demon's.

Sky Moon strutted
forward, circling the cow carefully.

She was the
offspring of the Ancient of Buffalos, proud daugh­ter of First Mother of All. She lowered her
head, accepting his proprietory motions with patient, expectant grace.

A fire burned also
in her.

Then, in one great
rush, Sky Moon was upon her. Wild Horse Dancer lived the ancient wild dance that Sky Moon and his
mate danced. It was a strange wine that sang strongly in the blood.

Wild Horse Dancer
felt as light as light. He danced upward, in exultation, and his mighty hooves kicked the blue
out of the sky.

And then all was
quiet. Peace spread across the hill and seemed to drown the slowly greening world around
them.

But the peace did
not last.

The pine trees
shook with the passing of another.

Something moved
down through the trees toward Sky Moon and the buffalo cow.

Something evil from
another world.

And the evil from
another world had guns and bullets and eager white eyes and hands. It had a heart of steel that
could never understand the brave heart of a Great Spirit Buffalo.

And most terrifying
of all, it had a desire for a white buffalo robe. And a lust for a head that it did not know was
sacred, a need to possess Sky Moon's silvery head, to butcher it and
preserve it from earth's loving decay and hang it on a wall, to
prove a white man's cold skill with a gun.

And from that time
on, Wild Horse Dancer found something he had lost.

He could not have
put a name to it, but perhaps it was a reason to live. Something worth fighting for and
against.

He was Wild Horse
Dancer and he was not. He was that and something else. Something more than himself. He and the
White Spirit Buffalo now shared the same wild heart.

And as a group of
white hunters moved into the mountain to stalk the sacred white buffalo, so did Wild Horse Dancer
come at them, like a vengeful ghost under a stalking moon.

The lines of battle
were clearly drawn.

They had
high-powered rifles with long-vision hunting scopes, hunting dogs and enough men to beat the
slopes. They were good at hunting, seasoned and methodical and ines­capable.

Wild Horse Dancer
was old, with only an eyeless hawk as an ally and a shared buffalo-heart dream.

Ten white men went
into the mountains to kill a sacred buf­falo.

One old man went
into the mountains to find his name. To be in a world where the child Horse Dancer had moved
toward light, had danced with untamed horses in the sanctity of youth and now age. And now once
again, he rode the path of his own manhood and he was Wild Horse Dancer again, not an old man,
weak with age, but a comet with fiery intent and a reason to live or to die.

What happened to
those white men, who went to kill Sky Moon, the great buffalo with the eyes of Looks For Death,
no­body knows.

If somebody knows,
nobody is telling. None of the people who live on the lower slopes of the mountains have ever
even talked about it, at least not to the strangers who came to look for the lost white
men.

Those white men who
went up the mountain, never came back down.

A shaman who knew
an old man who walked the mountain night after night, searching for a Spirit Buffalo, said those
white
men froze to death and that
someday their bodies would be found, when the snow melts.

Maybe that's
true.

But sometimes, when
the wild mountain wind howls outside their cabins and men move closer to the fire to keep the
warmth from melting from their bones, a whisper begins, and there is, in very quiet, hushed
voices, a tale told of an old man and a White Buffalo Spirit.

If you have never
heard the tale, it goes something like this.

They say that on
stormy nights near the top of the mountain, the sound of gunfire seems to come from the center of
the wind. And that anyone brave enough to travel in the direction the wind comes, a man bold
enough to drive on into the face of the storm, can see something he'll remember for all the days
of his life.

They say a group of
men is up there on the mountain, on a stony ledge, right in the path of the fiercest wind. And
they are all crouched down there, with guns at their shoulder, firing at something off in the
distance.

They say you can
see it as plain as day.

And then the thing
in the distance seems to come closer. There is a sound like the earth splitting in half and all
the demons of sky and air, are screaming and then the men rise up in terror and try to
run.

But the thing that
had been far away, is upon them now, and where they are on the ledge, there is just no place to
run to.

And then they swear
this is what happens next.

The bullet-riddled
corpse of an old man, with an eyeless hawk on his shoulder, sits astraddle a snow-white buffalo
with eyes of fire and ice.

The hawk screams
like something from the thirteenth hell, and dead man, blind hawk and white buffalo, like three
dark things of the storm, thunder together across the ledge and tram­ple the men to
death.

And they say the
red blood flows like a river and spills the life of everyone in its path down the side of the
mountain like an evil rain.

And the sound is
terrible, of hooves striking flesh, tearing and rending, and life sickening, as it destroys the
courage of the
listener with the final
futile thud of bullets driving home in the Sacred White Buffalo's flesh.

And they say death
takes them all, bird, sacred buffalo, dead man and trampled men.

And they vanish.
Perhaps to the place where storms come from.

But they always
return, when the storms on the mountain are at their worst.

It is a horror that
few men want to see. So the tale is not told often.

But if you've heard
it, perhaps they've told you the thing that scares people most.

When the blood
flows thickest, and the men are twisted with death and screaming, and the White Buffalo staggers
with the mortal weight of the bullets in its body, when the eyeless head of the bird is blown off
by a bullet and the chest of the dead man astride the White Buffalo, has been torn away by shot
and shell, then when death has touched everyone, they say, the corpse on the buffalo's back,
turns his head and looks in the direction of anyone there to see it.

And then he smiles
as if he knew a secret.

And the real horror
would be, that you might understand it.