People of the Fire (6 page)

 
          
 
Heart pounding, he crept around a lodge,
hearing old Two Elks snoring softly. On silent feet, he circled, drawing near
as Heavy Beaver reentered the lodge.

 
          
 
"Someone fast—or some thing. Tell me now
that this Wolf Bundle isn't evil." The words carried as Little Dancer
dropped on his belly to wiggle up next to a cottonwood bole. The flap hadn't
fallen back in place so he could see inside.

 
          
 
"It's not evil. It's the soul of—"
Two Smokes stopped lamely.

 
          
 
"The
Anit'ah
?"
Heavy Beaver probed, looming over the
berdache
.

 
          
 
"The Power works for all people,
Spirit
Man.
You, of all men, should know that .... Wait! What are you doing?"

 
          
 
Heavy Beaver ripped the Bundle from Two
Smokes' grasp, stepping back to avoid clawing fingers. He ducked out as Two
Smokes scrambled behind. With a vile curse, he threw the Bundle into the night.
In the half-light of the fire, Little Dancer caught the horror on Two Smokes'
stricken face. In that moment, he felt the
berdache's
soul cry. Two Smokes' face masked a mind-rending terror as he reached a futile
hand toward the night.

 
          
 
A soft plop sounded in the beaten grass beyond
the camp. At that moment, Little Dancer's soul twisted, a wretched sickness
welling in his gut. He vomited before he could fight the urge.

 
          
 
As if from a distance, he heard Two Smokes'
horrified shout.

 
          
 
Voices of people awakened by Heavy Beaver's
curse called back and forth, unsure of themselves. Some of the younger men
rushed out of their lodges, searching the darkness for
Anit'ah
,
seeking the cause of the disturbance. The babble rose on the night, men and
women grabbing robes before hurrying out.

 
          
 
Lifting his head, Little Dancer wiped at his
mouth, terror eating at his insides. Two Smokes stared up where he'd stopped on
all fours, disbelief in his eyes. People gaped, seeing Heavy Beaver's bulk
silhouetted in the birthing lodge's fire.

 
          
 
"The infant must be destroyed."
Heavy Beaver turned, looking into the lodge. "Do you hear, Dancing Doe?
This is your doing ... all of you. The People are already polluted by foulness.
They are polluted by women turning men's medicine against them. This . . . this
infant is polluted by
Anit'ah
witchcraft and whatever
vile spirit of the night lurked outside the lodge when it was born. I condemn
all of you as unclean!"

 
          
 
"No!" Dancing Doe cried from inside.
"Not my child. Not my baby!"

 
          
 
"Kill it!" Heavy Beaver roared.
"It's your pollution."

 
          
 
Sage Root ducked through the lodge entrance,
standing up before him. "I wonder just where the pollution lies? I don't
feel polluted at all . . . except in your presence!"

 
          
 
"Don't!" Chokecherry grabbed Sage
Root's arm, pulling her back. "He's a Spirit Dreamer. Apologize."

 
          
 
Little Dancer saw his mother start, anger
draining from her tensed body. "I . . . forgive me."

 
          
 
Heavy Beaver's face worked, a curious mix of
enjoyment and vindication. "The child must be destroyed." At that he
turned, lifting a foot and kicking Two Smokes down on his face in the dirt
before striding off into the night.

 
          
 
A hushed mumble of voices rose from the
spectators.

 
          
 
Stunned, Little Dancer shivered and blinked at
the scene. Two Smokes raised his head, firelight tracing the tears streaking his
face.

 
          
 
The wind had stopped, the air going heavy and
stifling. In the sudden silence, Dancing Doe's baby wailed.

 
          
 
In White Calf's rock shelter high in the
Buffalo
Mountains
, the Dream settled like morning dew lying
lightly on her sleep. Like frost patterns, the Dream wove into her mind,
tightening its hold on her soul. Beyond, the stars continued the circle of the
sky, oblivious to the silent shelter in the mountainside so far below. Coyotes
yipped and chorused as they harried the carcass of a freshly killed elk calf.
Unnoticed, owls drifted over the meadow on silent wings while mice rustled the
umbel-richening grasses for growing seed.

 
          
 
The night world lived as White Calf Dreamed. .
. .

 
          
 
In a land of glare, she walked, one tired step
after another—the ancient ritual of travel. A wind, hot as the draft radiating
from ember-cradled cooking stones, puffed at her face, desiccating her thin
flesh. About her, the slumbering anima of the land waited, restless, drying,
and dying.

 
          
 
"Didn't used to be like this." She
grimaced at the rasping of her voice. The old stories talk of water, of buffalo
so plentiful a strong man could cast his dart in any direction and kill. The
old stories talk of grass up to a man's waist. And now? Springs my grandfather's
grandfather drank from are no more than muddy seeps. Only the old ones know.
Only the keepers of the legends.

 
          
 
But the legends are changing. People are
changing. Even .place names are changing. Everything . . . changing . . .

 
          
 
The old familiar ache stitched and throbbed in
the joint of her right hip. Down deep inside the muscles of her age-worn legs,
cramps of fatigue gnawed like big black ants in the infested heart of a
deadfall pine. The hurt in her feet had grown, expanding, encompassing. Arches
flat and complaining, she padded across the hot clay, toes stinging as burning,
eburnating
joints swelled.

 
          
 
"Too damn old for this," she
muttered. "Ought to have a fancy lodge . . . strong sons and daughters to
bring me meat. Ought to be free to sit around and talk and make jokes. Tell the
old stories so they're remembered. Watch the young men and women act foolish
trying to impress each other. That's what."

 
          
 
Except the vision had come. While she prayed
and fasted on the high peaks of the
Buffalo
Mountains
, something had happened to her. Four days
she'd been without food or water, chilled by the cool night air, desiccated by
the rays of the spring sun; she'd shivered and purged her soul.

 
          
 
Naked, she'd sat on the
high point
, seeking the source of the call that had
driven her all her life. Each time she had retreated, tried living like a
human, the call had returned, imperative, driving her to abandon each of her
husbands and the children they'd sired off her. Each time she'd returned to the
high places to seek the source of Power.

 
          
 
So she had gone again, until, on the fourth
day, a man's image had formed in the clouds, his features lit by the blinding
rays of the sun. A handsome man, tall, his Power had sung in silence, dwarfing
the clouds, a presence of warmth and sunlight.

 
          
 
She'd watched in awe as he smiled at her, an
arm rising to point southeast toward the plains where her native peoples had
lived since the time of the First Man. As quickly as it had come, the image
faded to be replaced by that of Wolf, eyes glowing yellow as sunbeams pierced
the clouds.

 
          
 
She'd blinked then, heart racing in her chest,
staring up in wonder at the puffy white formations of a giant thunderhead.
Weakened and shaken, she'd climbed down, found her clothes, and eaten before
setting off on the journey.

 
          
 
"Wolf Dreamer," she mumbled.
"He brought me here."

 
          
 
She took a deep breath, shaking her head and
slowing to a stop. Her tongue smacked, sticky in her dry mouth as she squinted
into the white glare of the beating sun.

 
          
 
An old woman alone in the vastness and heat,
she stood, back stooped from the tumpline holding a bulky pack on the fulcrum
of her hips. She peered around in all directions, catching her breath. The
distant bluffs shimmered like a Spirit Dream—jagged outlines wavering. Even the
blue vault of sky above had dulled, faded and parched. Outside of the restless
whisper of the bone-drying breeze, only a grasshopper clicked to the emptiness.
Even the birdsong had stilled during the heat of the day.

 
          
 
The spirit of the land smelled of heat, of
prostration. The odor of dust tingled pungently in her nostrils.

 
          
 
Years of sun had seared her face into a
shriveled husk of burnt sienna. Each pain, hunger, sorrow, and triumph of her
long life lay etched, mapped in the maze-work of wrinkles that draped from her
broad-cheeked skull. Eyes, knowing and powerful, burned from behind the sagging
folds of brown skin. An undershot jaw betrayed the loss of all but a few of her
wear-polished yellow incisors. Gray wisps of hair strayed from her short
braids.

 
          
 
Her chest rose and fell as she hawked the
thirst-spit from her throat and spat onto the gray-white clay. Fingers of hot
breeze pulled at her, tugging at the few fringes remaining on the
grease-stained dress, fluttering the tatters, rumpling the seat worn so shiny
thin under her gaunt buttocks. Around her shoulders, a section of buffalo gut
looped, the curve hanging over her hip, taut with tepid water. She found the
end, lifting the gut until she could trickle a stream of moisture between thin
brown lips.

 
          
 
She made a smacking sound, eyes always on the
irregular horizon where it danced and wavered in silvery patterns.

 
          
 
"But then I made my choice years ago,
didn't I?" She chuckled: the sound of sagebrush on leather. She shifted
the pack on her back, easing the tumpline where it pulled at her forehead.
Wearily she took up the march again. Beneath her tattered moccasins, bristly
grass crunched—autumn brown even though the season had barely passed late
spring.

 
          
 
To her right, a jagged arroyo cut the valley
floor—a cracked wound in the dry breast of earth. The scaly sides of the
vertical walls had patterned in desiccating fractures where the buried soils
split, furred with exposed red roots. An impassable barrier, the gash dropped
the height of two tall men to the gravel-traced channel bottom hidden in the
noonday shadows. Across the dry flood plain to her left, rose a series of
gray-white and buff buttes, sucked dry by the power of Father Sun.

 
          
 
“Maggot crawling luck," she grunted,
coming to a stop. Before her, a confluence yawned, another sheer-walled
tributary meeting the main channel. She walked nearer to stare down into the
gash. Once, in a time long past, she would have slung her pack across, taken a
run and vaulted the narrow chasm. Now she could only sigh, and go the long way
around on her ancient, rickety bones.

 
          
 
The hard white earth reflected, rolling heat
over her as Father Sun burned balefully down. The more she sweated, the quicker
the wind drank her moisture away.

 
          
 
"Ah!" She blinked in the glare,
staring at the headland forming out of the shimmering air. A line of sandstone
slabs jutted from the ridge top like awkward vertebrae to cast fragile shadows
down the sagebrush-dotted slope. 44 I know where I am. Monster Bone Springs is up
there. Ought to make it by evening. Used to be good water there."