R. GARCIA Y ROBERTSON

The Moon of Popping Trees

In the poignant and thoughtful story that follows, new writer R. Garcia y Robertson shows us that the most important journeys of discovery are often undertaken by those who have nothing left to lose.

R. Garcia y Robertson has sold several stories to Amazing and has recently completed his first novel, The Silk Mountain. He was born in Oakland, California, has a PhD. in the history of science and technology, and currently lives with his family in Mt. Vernon, Washington, in a little cabin just off the Sound, halfway between Seattle and Canada.

 

THE MOON OF POPPING TREES

R. Garcia y Robertson

“This is how the world will end.” Stays Behind showed neither fear nor regret. To her, the end of creation was merely a mathematical certainty. She watched through the leather lodge entrance as the storm shook white feathers of snow from a bitter black sky. The wind that drove the snow cut like blade steel, forcing cold fingers through the lacing holes in the tipi. She pulled the warm, woven trade blanket tighter, to completely cover her calico dress. The dress fabric was thin, but bright and red as summer.

Heat from the lodge fire stirred the air. Its living motion made her warm. Heat was motion—she knew it, and felt it. Stays Behind also knew that when all the heat motion in the world was spent, that was how the world would end.

This was not Stays Behind’s tipi, but a tiny twelve-skin lodge belonging to a womanless old Shyela named Yellow Legs. An old tipi, it was fashioned from thin, smoke-stained unpainted hides. All tipis were tattered now, and all hides were old and worn. There would be no new ones, now that the great herds were gone. Kiowas claimed that a Snake woman had seen the buffalo disappear into a mountainside. A tall peak in the Wichitas opened wide, inside was a world brimming with clear rivers and wild plum blossoms, the buffalo entered, and the mountain closed behind them. Neither Snakes nor Kiowas could be trusted to see things straight, nor to speak straight about what they had seen. Most Lakota said it was the Wasichu who had killed the buffalo. Either way, they were gone.

“You have seen the world’s end?” Yellow Legs was on the far side of the fire, facing the entrance flap and the dawn. He sat in this place of honor, amid hanging parfleches and skin bags pawed by beaded bear claws. Years had hardened his skin, like old leather left in the sun. In the days when buffalo were many, and in the Spirit World, Yellow Legs had seen many strange sights. He accepted that someone one year into womanhood might have seen the world’s end.

“No”—Stays Behind stirred the fire—“but the Wasichu say the world will end in snow and ice.”

“Hetchetu aloh, then it is so, if that is what the Wasichu say.” When this Shyela meant to tease her, he spoke like an Ogalala.

Stays Behind called the old Shyela uncle, though she was an Ogalala Lakota and no real relation to him. Long ago, before her parents left for the Spirit World in the Winter of Spotted Sickness, this Shyela had done her family some great service. Now he had no wives or daughters, so Stays Behind cooked his food, cut his wood, tended his fire, and mended those things that weren’t too sacred for a woman to touch. His needs were few, so the work was light. Since her sister, Antelope Woman, had married Handsome Dog, neither she nor Yellow Legs cared to stay in her family’s cabin. Instead, she slept just inside the entrance to his tipi, wrapped round a shaggy camp dog for warmth.

“No, it is so.” Stays Behind jabbed her stick into the ashes, raising sparks and smoke. “Heat is motion. See how the fire leaps towards the smoke hole. Each moon, each day, this motion spreads through the world, like water spreading over the prairie. When all the heat motion has run away, then the world will end.”

Yellow Legs looked into the leaping fire. Snow danced past the leather entrance flap, and the rush of warm air drew it into the fire pit. Red embers sputtered, the flakes vanished into rising vapor, and embers burned lower and cooler. “Yes, I see it. The world’s fire is always ebbing. Who would think the Wasichu were so wise? Is there anything they do not know?”

“Many things.” Stays Behind became excited and authoritative. At one year into womanhood, men never asked her opinion. “The Wasichu wonder about the nature of light, which is like heat, but not like heat.”

Leaning back against his buffalo-hide rest, the old Shyela closed his eyes. “Tell me more. I would like to dream of something that even the Wasichu do not understand.”

*   *   *

The Red Cloud Agency stood lonely on the prairie. A gray blanket of sky stretched from one end of the world to the other. The wood-frame Agency school was built to army specifications, weather-beaten, and old before its time. Since the Moon of Falling Leaves, none of the boys had come to class. That was the month, November 1890, that the Agent, Lakotas-Scare-This-Lad, had called many soldiers to the Agency. Half of the younger braves had left for the Badlands. The boys took this as a sure sign that school was out.

Teacher Miller could hear them outside, whooping with glee as the girls filed out. Once the boys had feared to defy him openly; now even their skulking was no longer silent. When a Lakota brave-in-training lets an enemy hear him, it isn’t clumsiness, but defiance.

Miller was a man of God and science, with sad thoughtful brows and nervous hands. His slender fingers fiddled with the cast iron stove and steel coffeepot. He pretended to ignore the lone girl who remained at her desk. She also looked down, neatly piling papers. Miller knew she could follow his movements without raising her eyes.

Long raven hair framed high earth-brown cheekbones. To Miller, her face was flat and foreign, serious and savage. He had trouble thinking of her as a thirteen-year-old girl. It was easier to picture her as a young animal, or even as a miniature warrior.

Miller banged the lid down on the balky stove, then nudged the coffeepot back over the fire. The stove seldom stayed lit, and the steel pot had a broken handle. Together, they conspired to produce cold coffee and burnt fingers. Today, the stove stayed warm and the coffee was hot. Already it was a special day.

The aroma of burning coffee filled the small schoolroom. The girl lifted her head. “May I have Black Medicine?”

He was already filling her cup, stirring in big crystals of rock sugar. Miller managed to pass the steaming cup, without spilling or touching her hand. She drank and let the hot dark fluid flow through her, feeling the strength of its medicine. The world was brighter, and she became braver.

“Tell me more about Professor Morley, and why the speed of light is…” She stumbled on the last word.

“Invariant?” Miller suggested, and she nodded.

The teacher smiled, for it had taken months to convince her that women’s questions weren’t rude, but now there was no stopping them. “As I said yesterday, Professors Michelson and Morley have done a number of exact experiments. These seem to show that no matter what our movement is, relative to the other, the speed of light appears constant in any given medium. This may imply that the speed of light is a constant which cannot be exceeded.”

“Why is that important?”

Miller stopped pacing and pointed to the door. “If you could exceed the speed of light, you could open that door, then race over here and see yourself coming in. Cause could precede effect. Time would appear to run backward. Past and future would both be visible.”

Stays Behind studied the dark depths of her cup. Ghost Dancers saw themselves during spirit journeys. Any of the boys outside could have told Miller that Black Elk and Sitting Bull looked into the future. In a Sun Dance on the Rosebud, Sitting Bull had seen “many soldiers falling into camp.” Ten days later, Long Hair, who the Crows called Son of the Morning Star, attacked the Lakota and Shyela camped on the Greasy Grass. Long Hair and many soldiers fell.

When a wise man pretends to be more ignorant than any camp child, he must have a reason, though it was often the way with Wasichu that they mixed deep wisdom with childish lies. Out of respect for Teacher Miller, Stays Behind also feigned ignorance.

Instead of speaking, she slid a thoughtfully folded scrap of paper across the unpainted desk top. The paper lay between them, amid the wood grains, till Miller picked it up. He read it, folded it, unfolded it, and reread it, as if the paper were somehow both familiar and out of place.

The paper itself was plain enough. It was torn from a notebook that he himself had handed out. It was the series of equations scrawled across its surface that presented a problem. Their meaning seemed clear. The first dealt with velocity, the second with time, and the third with mass. What Miller couldn’t understand was how they’d gotten onto this particular piece of paper.

He looked at the Lakota girl, who seemed to be searching for something in her coffee cup. “Did you write this?”

She shook her head. “Yellow Legs wrote it.”

“Yellow Legs? The Cheyenne medicine man that you live with?”

This time she nodded.

“How could he have written these formulas?” The question was not addressed to the girl—any answer she gave would only deepen the mystery.

Stays Behind strove to speak straight. “I told Yellow Legs what you said about light. He listened, and that night he had a vision. Next morning he took my notebook and pencil, and drew what he had seen.”

Miller watched heat rise from the stove and waver in the air. Ice was on the windows, beveled bits of frosted crystal that started next to the frames and grew out across the glass. Everything was quite normal, except for the paper in his hand. In a matter of minutes Miller invented and rejected a number of explanations. On his shelf he could see Henry James’s new Principles of Psychology and two older volumes by Spencer bearing the same name. They gave adequate explanations for dreams and visions, but not for the formulas he was holding.

“What do they mean?”

Miller looked back at the formulas. “The first is a mathematical expression of what I said before. The speed of light will remain the same no matter how fast the observer is moving. The second deals with time and offers a partial explanation for the Michelson-Morley results. It also implies that, if the speed of light were exceeded, time would be reversed. The last formula deals with mass. It says that objects having mass may never reach the speed of light, that objects without mass travel at the speed of light, and that objects with imaginary mass always exceed the speed of light.”

Looking up from his hand, he saw that he had lost his audience. “You don’t understand any of this, do you?”

She gave polite agreement.

“That’s too bad. If you had written this, it would have made me an excellent teacher, and you an even better pupil. Instead, I must deal with a medicine man whose visions make mathematical sense.”

The girl looked guilty. “Is that bad?”

Miller paused and lost his chance to answer. The rear door swung open, and a tall, blue-coated Wasichu entered the room.

Stays Behind put down the cup, as though it held poison, and began to back out of the room.

Captain Wallace tipped his hat to the retreating girl, revealing a long lowland Scots face, fair hair, pale eyes, and a sad, drooping moustache. His grin remained fixed on the girl till she was out the door, then he turned it on Miller. “Wasting your time.”

It took Miller a moment to harness his Quaker temper. “The government pays me to teach Indians. I was talking mathematics with a pupil. Anything else would have been a waste of time.”

Wallace warmed his hands by rubbing them gleefully over the stove. “And exceptional pupils deserve extra instruction? The government pays me to kill Indians, but I make my exceptions, like as not for the same reason you do.” His hand went for the coffee. “Since we’re almost in the same line of work, can I bum some government coffee off you?”

Miller shrugged and watched Wallace pour with a professional ease that left him envious and irritated.

Captain Wallace added whiskey to the cup from a field canteen. “Take a word from a fellow who’s been at his job longer—don’t lift her skirt, you’ll end up short an arm.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Quaker, if you don’t, then you’re the only one.” Wallace swished his coffee and whiskey together. “Savages ain’t got our sense of shame. Every kid on the Agency knows she stays after class. Don’t they call her Stays Behind?”

Miller hid behind his own cup. “Children will always—”

“Don’t let it shame you. Doesn’t shame her. But remember she’s spoken for. Like as not she’ll marry her brother-in-law, Handsome Dog.”

“Brother-in-law?”

“Sure, he’s Indian Police, getting enough government money for two women. If taking two sisters at the same time shocks you, then you still got a lot to learn about the Sioux. They figure what’s good for one sister is good for the other. Just ain’t got our sense of shame.”

Wallace sipped from his cup and cocked his head towards the door through which Stays Behind had left. “You probably think of her as some little girl, but she thinks of herself as a Lakota woman.”

Miller’s hand closed around the paper. “That child is modest to a fault.”

“Sure,” Wallace said, nodding, “like any Sioux woman should be, but that’s a pose. Underneath that modesty, she’s a right proper little savage, without a lick of restraint. Decent parents would have taken a stick to her, and done her some good. Instead, her folks let her run wild when they were alive, and now they’re gone. You can bet she’s played tipi with a bunch of little bucks. She’s always had what she wanted, when she wanted it, and she thinks we’re the ones who’re shameful.”

Miller focused on the crumpled paper. “Here, you know savages so well, explain this.”

Wallace was an army engineer, so the form was familiar; but the meaning escaped him. “What do they mean?”

“Yellow Legs, the old Cheyenne she lives with, saw these formulas in a vision. Problem is they make mathematical sense, and they represent a plausible solution to an important problem in physics.” Miller paused. “But perhaps the Cheyenne are noted for their knowledge of higher mathematics.”

“Hell, no proper Cheyenne thinks it’s decent to count higher than a thousand.” Wallace passed the paper back. “You’re making too much of this. The old fellow probably got those figures from some whiskey sutler, then drank enough to get them into his dreams.”

The teacher shook his head. “Chances of a whiskey drummer being so deeply involved in theoretical physics are only somewhat less remote than those formulas coming from a Cheyenne medicine man. I’m afraid I’ll have to see this old man myself. Do you think Handsome Dog could take me to him?”

Wallace’s smile faded. “Perhaps he would, but God knows if he’d get you back. That Cheyenne lives among the worst of the Ghost Dancers, with Burnt Thighs and Ogalalas who’d take a slow and painful interest in your insides. Yellow Legs talks like a medicine man, but in his younger days he was a Dog Soldier who killed more whites than the cholera. Only mathematics he knew then was counting coup.”

The Seventh Cavalry tabs on Wallace’s uniform caught Miller’s eye. “Most people have forgotten those days.”

“Not me. I was with Custer, attached to Reno’s battalion. When Reno ran for the river, the gunfire was so heavy that half of my troop never heard the recall. My troop commander and most of the men with him didn’t make it back across the Little Big Horn. Yellow Legs can tell you all about it when you see him. He was there. Know how he got his name?”

“A certain discoloration of the lower limbs?”

Wallace reached down and ran his thumb up the yellow cavalry stripe on his uniform pants. “It comes from going into battle wearing the breeches of an officer that he’d killed and scalped. While you’re looking into higher mathematics, I’d hate for you to find out why there’s more hair than heads in Sioux tipis.”

The stove had gone out, and Miller felt chilled.

Wallace watched frost gather on a window pane. “Some nights, Quaker, I close my eyes, and I’m right back in that race for the river, with Sioux and Cheyenne riding in among us, yelling, laughing, and knocking men from the saddle.”

*   *   *

In winter, the black road between the Agency and the Ghost Dance camps on White Clay Creek became a twisted icy track. When there was school, Stays Behind walked the many miles twice a day, without thinking to complain. This day she rode home in Handsome Dog’s buckboard, feeling every frozen rut. Had he not been her brother-in-law, she would have walked.

A red sun crawled towards its grave, bleeding over the land and leaving long shadows behind. Yellow Legs had told her how the Badlands were made from Uncegila, the great mother of water monsters. Her bones had been pressed to stone by the weight of ages. Miller had even shown her smaller creatures trapped in rocks from times gone by, then had told her of huge monsters that had swum in these parts, in the days when the prairies were warm seas. She could hardly imagine how long it took to turn flesh and bone to stone, or seawater into solid land. But today Uncegila seemed freshly slain: the dying light lay in bloody rags upon her bones. This was an omen for sure, but one with no obvious meaning.

She felt something moving under her calico dress, and the Spirit World faded. Stays Behind brought her quirt down hard on Handsome Dog’s hand. He jerked it back, sticking it into his mouth and sucking blood off the knuckles.

“Counting coup, little warrior?”

Handsome Dog had a proud feather rising from his wide-brimmed hat. His breast bore a blue coat and an Indian Police badge, but below the belt he wore buckskin breeches, fringed long to drag in the dust. From the waist down, he was all Ogalala.

Stays Behind stayed silent, striving to keep in the spell of the Spirit World.

“You act like Crazy Horse come again, not like a silly girl with rope between her legs. A spirit like that must find the old Shyela cold company.”

“I already have a camp dog to keep me warm at night.” It made her mad to hear Handsome Dog name the dead so freely, for that was bound to bring bad luck.

Laughing at her answer, he returned to keeping the road between the horse’s ears.

The blood on the bones was drying. Red light darkened into purple patches of shadow. Stays Behind cast about for some sign that would give voice to her vision. Growing shadows and stone-strewn snowfields said nothing. Rows of gaunt cottonwoods lined the draws, pointing bare gray fingers at the sky. Stays Behind looked up.

High overhead, a single goose winged its way north and west. Geese seldom go alone, and this deep into winter such birds should be flocking southward. For a time she watched the lone bird, fixing it in her mind, making sure there was no mistaking the sign. Then she asked Handsome Dog, “Do you see that goose headed north and west?”

Her brother-in-law didn’t bother to look up. “Silly girl, no goose goes north in the Moon of Popping Trees.”

She wished that she had walked the long way alone, then only the Spirit World would have spoken to her.

*   *   *

It was not Handsome Dog, but Stays Behind who took Miller to Yellow Leg’s lodge. She explained on the trip out what was proper in the tipi, and what was not. Sucking on rock sugar, she gave her instructions gravely.

Miller knew to turn to his right, and to sit on Yellow Legs’s left. He knew not to look directly at his host, not to cross between his host and the fire, and not to speak directly to Stays Behind within the lodge. She entered after Miller, turning the opposite way. The south side of the lodge was for men, the north side for women.

She couldn’t prepare him for the sights and smells. Light came only from a dim half-moon fire pit. Miller was lost in a smoky sea of dog smells, human sweat, old leather, and a pleasant aroma rising from a dark carpet of leaves. Snow and cold covered over the camp garbage and animal droppings that lay outside.

As his sight returned, Miller noted that the lodge looked larger on the inside than it had seemed on the outside, a curious illusion. Trade blankets hanging from the lodge poles divided and darkened the tipi. Yellow Legs sat in the darkest recess, wrapped in a buffalo robe. There was a doeskin bundle across his knees. It was tanned white and soft with the hair off; painted blue diamonds chased red triangles across its surface.

From the corner of Miller’s eye, Yellow Legs looked older than his sixty winters. Lines lay on his face like dark streaks in old oxblood. His eyes were hidden by a hawk nose, high cheekbones, and sad, heavy lids. Graying hair was held back by a beaded headband.

Miller had manners enough not to speak, since his host’s mouth was shut tight as a turtle. Instead, he allowed Stays Behind to serve him a miserable mush made from dried meat and chokecherries. The meal was hard to stomach, but each bite Miller forced down encouraged Yellow Legs. Had Miller meant him harm, he would not have eaten inside the tipi.

“Greetings, Teacher Miller.” Yellow Legs stressed teacher because Miller was a dead word with no special meaning. Miller had been warned that Yellow Legs spoke English, though no one knew where he had learned it.

The teacher returned the greeting, and there was an awkward pause. Yellow Legs looked past where Stays Behind knelt, speaking to no one in particular. “I knew the teacher would come when she took the paper.”

Miller took the words as meant for him, forgot his manners, and began to question as quickly as any Wasichu would. “Yes, I came. Do you know what these formulas mean?”

Yellow Legs drew a red clay pipe from the bundle. He filled it with tobacco and red willow bark. After offering the pipe to the four directions and smoking some himself, he passed the pipe to Miller. It was dangerous to tell power stories in daylight, but smoking together would make it better.

As Miller puffed on the pipe, Yellow Legs observed, “It is often the way with visions that their meaning is not clear. What I wrote was like the words of the Wasichu. Perhaps you can give them meaning.”

Miller decided not to attempt an explanation of mass, velocity, and acceleration in the middle of this murky tipi. “They represent a possible solution to a particular problem that interests me.”

“Good, then my vision has been of use to you.”

“Yes, but what I really want to know is where the vision came from?” Miller was off on another question, without thanking Yellow Legs for the vision gift, but that was often the way with Wasichu.

Yellow Legs drew smoke and power from his pipe. “I have had visions for many winters, and that question has also interested me.”

“But, do you always dream in mathematical symbols?”

“My other visions had shown me many strange things, but never such symbols. Perhaps they were meant for you, not for me.” He was hinting again that Miller might thank him.

Miller weighed the paper in his hand. “Have your visions always turned out to be true?”

“Truth is not easy to know. I was at the Sun Dance on the Rosebud when Sitting Bull saw many soldiers falling into camp. The world knows what followed. Was it a true vision or not?”

As clear as if Captain Wallace were in the lodge, Miller could see the Seventh Cavalry insignia. He pushed the memory from his mind. “Do you also believe in the Ghost Dance?”

“The Ghost Dance is a thing beyond belief or disbelief.” The clay pipe was cold, so Yellow Legs began to repack it. “Wovoka, who gave us the Ghost Dance, once made a vision. He asked each person present to look inside his hat. Many looked inside and saw blue water and a green land where the dead lived again and the buffalo had returned. All saw this except one, who saw only the inside of a hat. Which would one not believe? Would one tell the many that they did not see the Spirit World? Would one tell the one man that he did not see a hat? Visions are real—their meanings remain hidden.”

Miller stared straight at the medicine man. “What did you see in the hat?”

“I saw the green land, with the Wasichu gone and the buffalo come back, but I did not see the loved ones I have lost. What that means, I do not know.”

He paused, balancing truth and trust against possible betrayal. “Sitting Bull is coming to the Agency. Perhaps he will have an answer. His visions have always been strong.”

Letting go of the doeskin bundle, Yellow Legs warmed gnarled fingers over the fire, which had sunk to embers glowing like cracks into the earth’s core. “I will tell you my oldest and strongest vision so you may judge its worth.” He waited till Miller nodded, then went on. “When I was young, I feared to be brave in battle. I feared to meet a Wasichu’s bullet, or to be tortured by the Crows. A medicine man told me that I must seek my own death in a vision, then I could know it and prepare for it in life.”

Miller saw the firelight in Yellow Legs’s eyes, burning brighter and stronger than his body. “I had a most powerful vision. In this dream I saw my own death. I saw my body laid out for burial—a worn husk, wrapped in wrinkled skins. Overhead, six stars shown down, four were white and two red, yet it was full daylight.”

Miller shifted closer to the fire also.

“This dream gave me courage, for I felt that I might never meet death till I saw these six stars shine in daylight. From that day forward I counted many coups, feeling neither fear nor pain in battle. In the Winter of the Hundred Slain, we rode against the Wasichu. When others held back for fear of the bullet storm, I rode right in among them, seizing a Wasichu’s many-firing rifle, though he aimed and fired at me as I came up. Every dawn as I saw the stars fade, I knew this was not my day to die.”

“Do you expect this charm to always protect you?”

“Protect me?” Yellow Legs stood up, letting slip the buffalo robe. His body was bare to the waist, glowing red in the firelight and filling the rear of the tipi. “Look, I am without a wound. This is not a kill talk, so I won’t recount my many battles. Almost all were losing battles. I lost my family, I lost my friends. My people are gone, the buffalo are gone. Even as we speak, Wasichu make ready to cut the tall grass and plow up the prairie. The world I was born with will be no more. Yet still the stars will not shine in daylight. Each dawn I watch them, hoping that this will be the day when they do not fade.”

Despite the cold December air, sweat pooled along Miller’s spine. Yellow Legs would say no more.

Later, over cards and whiskey, Wallace dragged the story out of him. “So, the old Cheyenne charlatan got to you. I guess that’s what makes him a medicine man.”

Miller refused to be drawn. “Are we playing straights?”

“Not if you got one.” Wallace thumbed broken nails over thick cards. “Dance back the buffalo, and dance us all away. Miller, your head’s so full of formulas, you no longer hear plain speech when it’s spoken at you.”

Cards rose and fell, and money changed hands.

Wallace tapped the bottle before him. “If you drank some, you’d understand Indians better. When my troop was pinned to the wrong bank of the Little Big Horn, with Sioux and Cheyenne crawling up on three sides, what’s the first thing Frank Girard and Lonesome Charlie Reynolds did?”

“Begged forgiveness from their maker?”

“Opened a bottle, Quaker. Who’d want to be sober in that spot? A white man drinks to forget his fear and then buckles down to business, but an Indian drinks to get rip-roaring drunk. Wants to start seeing things, visions and whatnot. Which is why they call it ‘Holy Water.’ We won’t give ’em whiskey, so instead they starve and dance themselves into a trance.”

Miller combed through his cards. “Where’s the harm in that?”

“It’ll be more harm to them than us. Those Ghost Dancers are getting ready for one last war party. Don’t blame ’em either. I’d want to go down fighting. They figure with visions to guide ’em and ghost shirts to stop our bullets, they just might make it.”

“Come, the only weapon I saw was a thirty-year-old rifle, done up with feathers. Looked more like an objet d’art.”

The soldier shook his head. “That gun is gonna get Yellow Legs into trouble. Handsome Dog told me about it, an original Henry repeater. Two of Fetterman’s men were carrying brand new Henrys.”

“Fetterman?”

“Captain, assigned to Fort Phil Kearny, the fort Red Cloud burned down. Fetterman claimed he could ride through the whole Sioux nation with eighty men. He went off without orders to prove it, rode over Lodge Trail Ridge, and ran into a mess of Ogalalas, and into Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, and his Bad Faces, all backed by Cheyenne and Arapaho. They found Fetterman and his command, stripped, scalped, and stuck full of arrows, but they never recovered the rifles.”

The sputtering oil lamp cast swaying shadows. “That must have been a long time ago,” muttered Miller.

“Too long.” Wallace frowned into his cards. “We’ve gotten lax. Letting them have weapons. Letting hostiles like Yellow Legs stray off their proper reservation. It’s gonna stop right here. Ghost Dancers that don’t find proper work won’t get government rations. Soon it’ll be work or starve at this Agency.”

A north wind whipped round the cabin, pressing night against the windows. Miller didn’t bother to ask where the Ghost Dancers would find work, out on the frozen prairie, in the dead of winter.

*   *   *

The Tachyon rode behind the eyes of a circling hawk, watching the world whirl backwards. The snowbird lost its hunger as it hunted through the frigid air. It remembered a missed kill. When that moment returned, the Tachyon was gone, faster than the hawk’s keen eyes could follow.

Then the Tachyon listened with the ears of the hunted, a shaggy mouse scurrying backwards across the snow. Wind whispered, dragging tinkling snow crystals up into the sky. Footfalls froze the mouse in midstep. The Tachyon was gone again, into the lynx that had stalked the mouse, then into the bird the lynx had missed, catching the world in quick wary glances.

Crow, mouse, rabbit, owl—the Tachyon flew from one to the other. From bird to beast and back again, faster than thought, faster than sight. Finally, the Tachyon rested in a lone wolf, loping out of the hills towards the flats. Fresh in the wolf’s memory was the creature that the Tachyon sought. Together, they ran towards that remembered rendezvous. Looking down through the wolf’s eyes, the Tachyon saw four fresh legs flashing backwards over the frosted ground.

Behind them, stretching south and east, was a great chain of beings. Many minds that the Tachyon had made use of. Each for a moment had been in the grip of an unseen traveler; now each went its separate and opposite way.

*   *   *

In the half-light of dawn, hunters returned to the lodges empty-handed. The Agent, Lakotas-Scare-This-Lad, had decreed that Ghost Dancers must work six days a week, then cut the rations for those who remained in the dance encampments. Some straggled back to eat at the Agency, but most Ghost Dancers took up guns or bows and went looking for food. The Black Hills still held game, but this sacred hunting ground was gone, pinned behind the iron-fenced flatlands. Hunters scoured the Badlands instead, and found that Uncegila’s frozen bones had been picked clean.

Hungry men dispersed through the encampments, finding women to beg food from. Yellow Legs smelled simmering meat as he neared his lodge, the aroma making him think he was dreaming on his feet. Kneeling at the entrance, avoiding the place of honor, he laid his feathered Henry down.

“I have brought nothing for the pot.”

“Then you shall feast on what we have here.”

Stays Behind had started the cooking fire, then called the camp dog which had warmed her for half of the winter. The cur came wagging its tail, hoping to eat its fill. Stays Behind scratched the beast behind the ears, then bent down and cut its throat. The hound was now cooking in the hide pot from which it had hoped to feed, its paws peeping over the edge.

Dog was a delicacy among the Shyela. A failed hunt would not keep Yellow Legs from eating his fill. Greedy hands scooped dog meat from bowl to mouth. The aroma ate at Yellow Legs’s stomach, while biting at his conscience. He noted that Stays Behind had only boiled army beans and bits of rabbit in her bowl. When the buffalo were many, only Snakes and Desert Utes ate rabbit, stealing their meat from the mouths of coyotes. Now nothing with four legs and a tail was safe from Lakota cooking pots. Yellow Legs invited her to have some dog. She declined. He sensed that this meal would have to be paid for later.

The first tasty hunk of dog rolled round his tongue. Yellow Legs closed his eyes, and the smells and sounds from lodge and fire faded. He felt himself in a still dark cabin, smelling cold damp corners and rough-hewn wood. Yellow Legs swallowed slowly and relaxed his lids, and light brought the lodge and fire rushing back.

He took another bite. Voices rang in his head. His brain became clouded, as if just dragged from sleep.

More bites brought chills that prickled like winter wind on naked skin, a wind that wailed with the voices of women.

The last bite made his own voice ring out, though the words were foreign. Rifle fire exploded in his head. Pain passed through his body, back to front, followed by sharp reports, like two pistol shots close at hand. The vision sank into blackness.

Yellow Legs found himself staring into an empty bowl. “What did I say? What speech did I use?”

Stays Behind looked up from her beans. “You spoke like a Hunkpapa Lakota, and you said that you weren’t going.”

“Like a Hunkpapa?” Yellow Legs sighed, looking back into his bowl. “This was a very small dog.”

She laughed. “You brought back no meat; by rights I could have returned to my sister, but I fed you instead.”

Her words were straight and strong. “I have had a vision, and you must help me complete it.” This soft strength reminded him of Crazy Horse, though Stays Behind could never have heard that voice. Crazy Horse had been murdered in the Moon When Calves Grow Hair, during the Year the Wasichu Chased the Nez Perce. She had been born that next spring, in the Moon of Grass Appearing.

The dog had put him in her debt. He could not say, “Impossible,” so he said nothing.

She described the way the day had faded over Uncegila’s bones, and how she must follow the lone goose that had gone north and west, follow it into the Black Hills. As she spoke, Stays Behind became bolder, pulling bundles and anything-possible-bags from behind her buffalo-hide rest. She produced a white doeskin dress and several wolfskins. Then she sprinkled sacred sweet grass onto the fire, saying, “We must become wolves and scout into the Spirit World.”

“It is not lucky nor lawful for a woman to say that.”

She stamped her beaded moccasins and snorted. “Where is your luck old man? Is it waiting here to die, to see stars in the day sky? Is it coming with Sitting Bull? We must make our own luck now, or it will never come.”

Yellow Legs fingered the soft, silver wolf fur. “I have been waiting for the Hunkpapa, but now he will never come here.”

When Yellow Legs didn’t say Sitting Bull’s name, Stays Behind knew the Hunkpapa medicine man was dead.

“I felt his death. It was the Hunkpapa you heard, not me, speaking his final words.”

Stays Behind lowered her head, hiding sadness behind determination. With Sitting Bull gone, there was even less reason to stay. She heaped more sweet grass on the fire till the tipi steamed like a sweat lodge. Behind this screen of smoke and magic, she stripped off the calico dress, rubbing white clay over limbs and face, donning the white doeskin.

Taking up the white clay, Yellow Legs slowly began to smear it on himself, thinking that the whole time she had shared his tipi, he had never before seen her body. The limbs she whitened were long, almost a woman’s. There were young breasts beneath her shirt. Such thoughts were shameful, and he set them aside.

He brought out his ghost shirt, with Moon, Morning Star, and Magpie painted in black on white. “Hetchetu aloh, whatever waits to the north and west, it cannot be worse than waiting to see six stars in daylight.”

Grinning to hear him talk like an Ogalala again, she painted her hair parting white as well. Taking ashes from the fire, she added black streaks over her nose and eyes. White and black were wolf colors—white for the north, where snow and winter dwell, and black for the west, the direction of death and sunset. She hung a wolfskin over her shoulders, letting the head come up to cover her scalp. She was now more wolf than woman.

The wolf that was Yellow Legs knelt and filled a weaselskin pouch with flint, steel, tobacco, and his most powerful pipe. Then he hefted the Henry rifle. The oiled wood and polished steel felt cold and heavy. Finally, he set the feathered gun aside. The rifle had been in his hands half of his life, but it still bore the power of the people who had fashioned it. On a vision quest, he could not weigh himself down with too much taken from the Wasichu. He selected a bow and several arrows instead.

They cut two horses from the pony herd: a black mare for Stays Behind, and an appaloosa who knew his rider so well that Yellow Legs never bothered with bit or bridle. Silent as a war party, they slipped out of camp, whispering their purpose to their ponies. For food they took the beans and dog meat in their bellies.

Tipi ears poked into the gray sky, between fading stars. Dawn broke as they topped the bluffs above White Clay Creek. A morning wind from off the flats swept snow into drifts and piles, baring patches of dead and dry prairie grass. Above the grassroots, the world was lifeless. An infant sun rested on the horizon, driving back the night, but bringing with it only a bleak half-day.

Keeping White Clay Creek on their right, they went downstream till it ran into the Smoky Earth River. Swinging south, they crossed the frozen Smoky, then they turned north and west again, skirting the edge of the Badlands. By dusk Uncegila’s bones were behind them, and the banks of the Good River were before them. They had done a hard day’s ride on little water and less food.

An old Minneconjou Lakota, Crooked Corn Woman, had planted herself by the waters of the Good. She farmed the east bank as close as the Wasichu would allow to Pa Sapa, the sacred Black Hills. She fed them, rested them, and agreed to care for their horses.

At dawn the next day, they walked dry-shod over the frozen Good, entering the forbidden lands. The west bank was strung with the spiked wire that circled the Wasichu’s world. Crossing these fences was a crime, for which some had died, but the Black Hills lay beyond them. After helping each other through the wire, they walked without speaking: white ghosts in a gray world, their breath puffing before them. Stillness was everywhere, the water in the draws was frozen, and sap was sluggish inside the leafless trees. Bird tracks on fresh snow were the only sign of life. Stays Behind was sorry to have shamed Yellow Legs’s hunting, but she said nothing. Words were not needed on a vision quest.

As the wane winter sun went to bed, Stays Behind dragged brush into a gully. Yellow Legs lit first the brushwood, then his pipe. He offered the pipe to all four directions, then to Stays Behind. It was the first time she had touched a man’s pipe. The black clay and antelope bone felt light and alive with power. Smoke from tobacco, red willow bark, and sumac leaves stung her lungs.

The bushwood burned low. Darkness covered over the Ironlands.

They slept sheltered by this cleft in their Mother’s breast, warmed by the wolfskins. Four times they rose in the night, to smoke beneath the dancing blue lights of winter and stars spread like frozen sparks overhead.

A warm young sun climbed over the east edge of the world. They smoked and prayed with it, then set out again. Now the Black Hills stood up before them, bristling with black pines. The land itself rose up under their moccasins. In a day they were through the foothills, and the next morning they turned north towards Vision Peak, where Black Elk’s great vision had come. A warm wet wind blew into their white wolf faces. Mist mixed with sweat, cutting channels in the white clay paint.

Though his eyes were older, Yellow Legs was the first to see the thin black fog boiling through the passes ahead. Light lay like water on the slopes around them, but the fog billowed up into a cloud that blotted out Vision Peak. The wet wind grew, turned gray, then began to hurl sleet at them. Sleet became snow, so thick that it whitened the sky. By noon the sun was gone, and they were no longer walking. A white world whirled round them, clinging to their furs, climbing up their high winter moccasins.

“Which way should we go?”

Yellow Legs made no answer. She was the one with the vision.

“I don’t want to stand here. I want to keep going.” The words left her mouth high-pitched and urgent, but were softened and muffled by the snow.

He studied the white wall around them. To wander blindly in the storm would turn the spirit quest into a death march. Suddenly, Stays Behind was tugging at his buckskins. Standing patiently beside them, with snow clinging to its shaggy hump and long, soft eyelashes, was a full-grown buffalo cow. The beast might have sprung from the soil, for neither of them had seen it emerge from the storm. She was simply there, perfectly still and impossibly solid.

Once their attention was seized, the buffalo turned and started to shuffle off, without bothering to look back. They followed for an almost endless time.

When evening returned, gray was winning over white, and the buffalo became a dark patch in the singing snow. The land turned farther upward, and the snow deepened round their feet. The great beast broke a path for them, beating down the waist-deep drifts with sheer bulk. The two humans floundered forward in her wake.

Suddenly, the buffalo was gone as quickly as she had come. Cold and fear closed round them. At the spot where the beast had been, they came to the edge of a deep canyon. The buffalo had turned down a narrow trail. They followed, descending between canyon walls that curtained off the wind. Small flurries replaced the heavy flakes that had cut like gray flint knives.

Halfway down, the buffalo halted under an overhang, where the trail widened into a spacious sheltered ledge. The buffalo laid herself down on the edge of the ledge. Stays Behind and Yellow Legs wedged themselves between beast and rock. There, they were warm and dry, the buffalo’s heavy breathing filling the space around them. This breathing grew rhythmic, and the silky lids shut. As the rhythm lulled them, words formed in their minds, Sleep, children of my sisters. Tachyon was talking through the buffalo.

They slept curled against the warm bulk of the buffalo.

When they awoke, the world was new, and wind and storm were gone. Snow lay on the ledges and filled the canyon floor, each twig of brushwood bending under its white weight. Shining and cruel day flooded down the canyon, forcing back the shadows. Vision Peak reared above them. Lights and colors burned even brighter on empty bellies.

The buffalo rose, shaking snow from her back. As if this were a signal, sharp staccato barks came from farther up the canyon, followed by a howl that shivered over the snow. A coyote was calling. Turning its broad back to the world, the buffalo fixed soft brown eyes on the hungry humans. If my sisters’ children need meat, they may eat of me. Tachyon turned the buffalo away from the morning sun, into the direction of death.

Yellow Legs packed his pipe, then offered it to the four directions. He prayed to the first buffalo, Slim Walking Woman, and to Yellow-Headed Woman who brought the buffalo, and to Sweet Medicine who taught the People to hunt buffalo with bow and arrow. Then he placed his pipe aside and picked up his bow. He aimed the arrow between the ribs, just behind the hump, where it would go straight to the heart. The buffalo didn’t flinch, but as her knees buckled, dimming eyes seemed to reproach him.

Sitting down beside the dead beast, Yellow Legs smoked and studied the zigzag pattern of snow-covered ledges on the far canyon wall. Stays Behind bent over the carcass and was soon elbow-deep in the work of skinning and butchering. The work was new to her, but when she was younger, Stays Behind had spent days watching older women at work. Her keen knife slid through the layers of skin. She peeled these layers back till the skin covered the ground on both sides of the carcass. Blood climbed up the knife’s bone handle. Clay-whitened arms were veined with red, but the butchering itself was neat, and no meat touched the ground. When the warm insides were bared, sweet smells steamed up into the canyon air.

Padding footfalls came across the snow, and Yellow Legs looked up. Coyote seated himself boldly at the edge of the ledge. Since he made no move to steal the meat, Yellow Legs was polite. “Greetings, brother coyote.”

Coyote ignored him, sniffed the meat, then said to Stays Behind, Farewell, sister. Like the buffalo, Coyote didn’t say these words aloud, for Tachyon was speaking through him. To Stays Behind, the words were Ogalala; to Yellow Legs, Shyela.

Yellow Legs knew coyotes were lechers and tricksters, but this one was being utterly mannerless. If coyotes could be rude, so could he. “Why do you speak to this woman instead of to me? And are you a Contrary, to greet us with good-byes?”

Coyote cocked his head. Your world is contrary. First for you is last for me. This is the last I will see of Stays Behind. Yellow Legs and I have met and will meet many times.

Stays Behind set down her knife, though she had just gotten to the liver. “Coyote, your speech is very confusing.”

To me, I am talking backwards, which is even more confusing.

Yellow Legs puffed hard on his pipe; neither women nor coyotes seemed to know their places anymore. “I can’t recall meeting such a mannerless coyote before.”

Your memories are in my future, so I can’t be exact. Perhaps I will learn manners, but we will keep meeting till you dwindle down to a baby and vanish inside your mother.

Animals had spoken in his visions, even coyotes, though none had looked like this one. Yellow Legs decided to smoke some more on this.

Coyote scratched, then eyed the buffalo meat. In your past, my future, I will and did bring that buffalo to you. Now is the time to offer me some meat, for this body I inhabit is a hungry one.

Stays Behind sliced the still warm liver, squeezed gall on it, then offered bits to both man and beast. Yellow Legs refused, but Coyote snapped his down.

Much better. It’s hard to hold a body that is both scared and hungry.

“Why have you come?” Stays Behind cut more liver for the scruffy beast.

To bid you good-bye, and to offer you passage to another Earth, which you call the Spirit World, where we spent much time together, where you opened your precious memories many times to me.

“I don’t remember this.”

For you, it hasn’t happened yet.

Yellow Legs set his pipe aside. “You come from the Spirit World?”

The beast licked his lips, begging with its eyes for more. What you call the Spirit World is merely another Earth, not even far away in this shrinking Universe. It lies beyond the Moon and Morning Star, beside one of the Twin Stars in the winter sky. We offer your people passage there, to thank you for the memories that foretell our future, for the future frightens and fascinates us.

“Why fear the future?” Stays Behind cut Coyote more liver.

The Universe shrinks smaller and burns brighter. Entropy decreases, stars burn hotter and burst into gas, and planets melt and break apart. We are all shrinking towards a single fiery implosion. Who wouldn’t fear that?

Stays Behind looked bewildered, but interested. Yellow Legs snorted. “Speak this way to the Wasichu; they would love to argue about such things.”

I have had wonderful conversations with them, and no doubt will again. To them, I am Tachyon because I travel so fast. But at this moment in space-time, speaking to animals or other worldly beings is out of style among them. Those that I approach act very alarmed, weeping and praying, pretending not to hear.

Yellow Legs agreed. “Not many of my people will wish to leave this world on the word of a rude coyote.”

Yes, yes, Coyote yawned, it is very boring to know what will be. I will let you look again at the Spirit World. When you like what you see, bring as many people as you can into the Badlands, in the Moon of Frost in the Tipis.

Coyote rose, shaking snow from his haunches. Remember, what you see is only a vision. To move your bodies will be much harder. To move metals is hardest of all. As you measure distance, the Spirit World is far away. Moving only as fast as light, the trip would take almost a lifetime, though it seemed only an instant. Your bodies may never return to this point in space-time. You may take with you only the metal that is in skin and hide, wood and bone.

Stays Behind looked down at the dissected buffalo. The only metal she saw was the knife in her hand. “I don’t understand.”

Never mind, I will send formulas outlining the principles. Take them to Teacher Miller, and he may translate them.

The contrary coyote turned to Yellow Legs. When you see the other Earth, you will give up anything to be there. We have seen that it holds everything. Greetings. Coyote became a coyote, and the Tachyon was gone.

As the beast backed away, Vision Peak seemed to grow. It became a great ghost mountain splitting through the layers of creation. Its roots ran down into the Deep Earth, its slopes thrust through the Air and Near Sky Space, and its peak stretched into the Blue Sky Space that holds the sun and stars. When the mountain reached its full height, a crack opened in the base, and rock and stone peeled apart like a leather lodge entrance. Yellow Legs and Stays Behind saw a brightly lit world within the mountain. They stepped towards it.

Instantly, there was no earth beneath their feet. Their hands reached out to stop them from falling, but instead their arms bit into the air, becoming wings. Feathers sprouted from their bodies, and they became a pair of hawks circling over the vast earth inside Vision Peak.

The land inside the mountain lay like a blanket tossed into a tipi. Much of it was flat, with little folds for hills; other parts were bunched into high mountains that ran in all directions. The plains between were filled to overflowing with herds of wild horses, red deer, antelope, and giant antlered elk. Shaggy brown carpets of buffalo covered the prairie. Even the air felt new.

They flew over many camp circles of tipis. One such circle looked familiar. The hawk that was Yellow Legs glided towards it. The women in the camp circle worked the old way, with stone and bone tools. The men smoked, ate, and danced, taking time to greet the two hawks that settled on a tipi top. They spoke a Shyela tongue, and gray-haired children ran among them. This was the Flexed Leg band of Yellow Legs’s people. Everyone had thought them long dead, killed by a stomach sickness when the Wasichu had first poured over the plains.

Yellow Legs wanted to stay, to watch them at work and play, but the hawk that was Stays Behind was eager to fly. He followed her into regions where the air grew chill. Cold breezes blew off white sheets of ice that reared more than a mile into the sky, crushing continents with their weight. Dimly remembered monsters roamed the bases of these white cliffs. Woolly beasts with long horns and ivory tusks, such as stalked through power tales told round fires in the dark of winter.

Green forests, mighty rivers, meat on the hoof—it was a world holding everything that one might want; all things but one. It had no sun. Light rained down from six stars, four white and two red, that shone in full daylight.

The vision ended, and they were back on the cold ledge, beside the still-warm and half-butchered buffalo. Though they had flown as hawks for days, no time had passed at all. Yellow Legs said nothing. He loaded his pipe and smoked, staring again at the far wall of the canyon. Stays Behind went back to her work, cutting meat into strips and setting the strips out to dry. She cleaned and scraped the paunch, filled it with snow, and hung it over a fire.

By evening, the meat that wasn’t drying was cooked. The hide had been scraped clean, rubbed with brains and liver, and left to soak overnight. Stays Behind invited Yellow Legs to eat. He barely picked at the roasted flesh, though nothing was sweeter than fresh-killed buffalo meat.

Finally, she broke the silence. “So you have seen stars in daylight.”

He nodded. “The land was bountiful; it gives me reason for living. Yet when the coyote said that I would give anything to go there, I did not think he meant the power that has protected me for so many winters.”

“In the Spirit World, we would die as we were meant to live.”

“You are young, your body is new, and your death is far off. After coming through so many fights, after seeing the world of my dreams, it is hard to say like the Kiowas, Rocks and mountains, you alone remain.”

She stood up, standing taller in the waning winter moonlight than he had ever seen her. Slipping the white doeskin off, Stays Behind twined arms washed clean with snow round his neck. She rested her young breasts on his chest. “Forget death, and share this young body.”

It shocked him, but he did as she said, untying the braided rope that ran between her thighs, the rope that no man should even touch. He did it because it was what Stays Behind had wanted from the start, and because the hawks in whose bodies they had flown were birds mated for life. Coyote had seen to that.

It would have been bad to waste the buffalo, so they camped on the ledge till the robe had time to tan and dry in the weak winter sun. Stays Behind pounded the dried meat and worked the hide into leather. Even after that, they lingered, for the Black Hills dragged at their moccasins, and when they left, it would be forever. Rested and fed, it still took them longer to follow French Creek down into the flats, longer than it had taken them to climb up on empty bellies. Besides, they now had much buffalo meat to carry.

In the iron-wired flatlands they moved faster, anxious to avoid Wasichu and get across the Good. They crossed the Good River at Crooked Corn Woman’s camp. There they feasted well, for Crooked Corn Woman was a Christian and the day before had been Christmas. She listened to their vision of the Spirit World, and in return gave them the news among the Minneconjou.

The news they got was bad. Sitting Bull was indeed dead, murdered by Metal Breasts. Fighting had spread to the Good. Hump and his Minneconjou had surrendered to the Wasichu. The last of Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas had come south from Standing Rock. They had joined Big Foot’s band on the Good River, then fled into the Badlands. Many Wasichu soldiers were out hunting Big Foot, armed with wagon guns that fired faster than a talkative person could speak.

Stays Behind and Yellow Legs offered to take Crooked Corn Woman with them into the Spirit World, but she said she would rather die where she’d been born. When Jesus raised her, then she promised she would join them.

At dawn they took their horses and rode off across the south face of the Badlands. They rode beneath a great blue bowl of sky. Here, there were no iron fences, and the prairie rose and fell like a living thing, free for as far as eyes could see. Strands of pale grass, slippery with frost, clung to the brown earth.

Late in the day, they came upon a Burnt Thigh. Climbing off their horses, they sat on the frozen prairie, sharing their food with him.

By their wolf faces and the ghost shirt, the Burnt Thigh knew they had been scouting in the Spirit World. Politely, he warned them that the Wasichu were hunting Ghost Dancers. Soldiers said that Bear Coat Miles himself had ordered Sitting Bull and Big Foot arrested.

“We were camped with Black Elk and his Ogalalas on Wounded Knee Creek. A Black Robe Wasichu found us and tried to bring us back to the Agency. This Wasichu was good, so we listened, but only a few Ogalalas went back with him.” The Burnt Thigh pointed his chin towards the Badlands. “We went and hid near Top of the Badlands. The next Wasichu might not be as respectful as this Black Robe. It is not so easy to hide from the Lakota. Two chiefs, American Horse and Fast Thunder, found us and ordered Black Elk’s people back to the Agency. They went, though we beat them and told them not to go. Some Burnt Thighs went with them.”

There were tears in the Burnt Thigh’s eyes, but he said it was from eating buffalo again. “There is no game in the Badlands, so everyone is hungry. Big Foot is so sick his people must carry him. Fasting is fine for visions, but it wastes the body.”

As they rode off, Stays Behind asked Yellow Legs, “Will things be as bad as that Burnt Thigh says?”

He kept his face fixed on the line where earth and sky become one. “All Lakota talk like noisy birds, and Burnt Thighs are bossier than blue jays.” He was thinking that things had gotten worse since he had taken comfort in this girl’s body, and that he should have faced his death alone.

At the Smoky Earth River, they found signs that Ogalalas and Burnt Thighs were a half-day ahead of them, probably Black Elk’s people. Atop the pony tracks were ironshod prints, showing that Wasichu were trailing Black Elk, too. Many people were passing like cloud shadows over the prairie. Yellow Legs and Stays Behind waited, letting the Wasichu get well ahead of them, then they camped farther up the Smoky. This would be their last camp alone, under the winter stars.

The new day’s sun was high in the sky when they saw the banks of White Clay Creek dip down toward the Ghost Dance camps. Like gathering storm winds, Ogalala Bad Faces were riding up from Red Cloud Agency, bringing with them more bad news. Big Foot’s band had been captured by Wasichu soldiers and moved under guard to Wounded Knee. Two Strikes, Kicking Bear, and Short Bull began to gather together Ghost Dancers from among the Burnt Thighs.

*   *   *

The morning after soldiers brought in Big Foot’s band, Miller was aboard Handsome Dog’s buckboard, headed towards the White Clay Ghost Dance camps. It had been an uneasy evening at the Agency, with Lakota riding in and soldiers marching out. In his mind, Miller went over his last argument with Wallace, putting in every word he should have said. He had let Wallace lord over him, like a High Church Scot preaching to a poor, blind Quaker. The Ghost Dance was going to be broken. Yellow Legs was marked for arrest, just as Sitting Bull and Big Foot had been. Miller couldn’t sway Wallace or the army, but he was going to warn Yellow Legs.

The buckboard bounced beneath a bright young winter sun, but even Miller could smell snow in the air. When the first booming came from the east, Miller thought it might be thunder and said as much to Handsome Dog.

The Metal Breast kept his face fixed on the road ahead. “It is wagon guns.”

Miller made no reply. He wasn’t ready for another argument, though he knew it couldn’t be cannon.

As they topped a rise, they saw riders and ponies streaming out of the White Clay camps. Some were headed south, toward the Agency; others were moving east, over the hills. All of them were armed, carrying more guns than Miller thought the Indians owned.

Spinning wheels rolled them right into camp. To Miller, it seemed he was sitting in an open-air theater, watching some strange show. Barren hills appeared ahead and disappeared behind. Armed riders in feathered buckskins flicked past. The camp grew into a tapestry of bare tree limbs, dirty brown tipis, and pine-bough shelters. Blue camp smoke rose from the lodges, where blanketed women worked and talked. Children, skinny dogs, and surly brown faces looked up at him. As long as the buckboard was moving, Miller felt removed and immune. When the buckboard stopped before Yellow Legs’s lodge, hard hands seized him and Handsome Dog, pulling them both down to solid ground.

Burnt Thighs pinned their arms. An angry Bad Face began yelling at them in Lakota, waving a razor-edged skinning knife.

The knife flicked out, slicing the metal badge off Handsome Dog’s blue uniform jacket. “Metal Breast, you killed Sitting Bull. Your Wasichu friends are killing Big Foot’s people.”

The Burnt Thighs pulled the jacket back; the next flick of the knife drew blood.

Handsome Dog laughed. “Was that supposed to hurt? Bad Faces and Burnt Thighs are women.”

The Bad Face lashed out with his knife, leaving a long strip of flesh hanging from Handsome Dog’s chest. “That’s for serving the Wasichu so well.” He thrust his chin towards Miller. “We’re going to skin you and give you a Wasichu skin to wear.”

The Burnt Thighs began to strip Miller’s clothes off, and Handsome Dog laughed again. “Do it, and you will still be women. I serve the Wasichu, but have the Bad Faces done better? Where was Red Cloud when we rubbed out Long Hair on the Greasy Grass?”

Twisting round, he sneered at the Burnt Thighs who were holding him. “Where was Spotted Tail when we rubbed out Long Hair? Your chiefs were cowering on the agencies, hiding among their women and eating Wasichu cattle.”

The Bad Face held his blade in Handsome Dog’s face. “You hope to make me mad, make me kill you quickly.” He jabbed the blade at Miller. “Your words will be different when you wear this Wasichu’s skin.”

The tipi entrance opened behind the Bad Face, and Miller barely recognized the man who emerged. It was Yellow Legs, his face covered with paint and half-hidden beneath a war bonnet of black-tipped eagle feathers. He wore his white ghost shirt, with the Moon, Morning Star, and Magpie. Like Wallace had said, his leggings were made from cavalry pants, seat and crotch cut out, a yellow stripe running down each blue leg. His paint repeated those colors—yellow from chin to forehead, a blue band across his eyes. His arms craddled the Henry rifle, hung with still more black-tipped feathers.

He shook this feathered rifle in their faces. “Bad Faces and Burnt Thighs, why are you here? Black Elk has gone to face the Wasichu wagon guns with only his Medicine Bow. Can you be as brave with rifles?”

Silence fell like a heavy snow. They could plainly hear the dull roll of gunfire from Wounded Knee, like far-off pounding on buffalo-hide drums.

He pointed the rifle at Handsome Dog and Miller. “Must you have guns and knives to face one unarmed Metal Breast and the teacher who came only to bring us the wisdom of the Wasichu?”

The Burnt Thighs let go their grip. Handsome Dog’s grin turned smug.

“These are my guests.” Yellow Legs spoke straight at the Bad Face. “Go count coup at Wounded Knee, and we will all come listen to your kill talk.”

Miller hadn’t made out a single word, but when Yellow Legs stepped aside, he was delighted to have Handsome Dog hustle him into the gloomy tipi. Stays Behind emerged from the shadows, setting bowls of buffalo meat and chokecherry mush before them. Her calico dress shone like sunset in the firelight, and her hair part was painted to match it. She ignored her brother-in-law and greeted Miller with a shy grin. Both men ate quickly, anxious to make themselves guests in deed as well as word.

Yellow Legs entered and ambled over to the place of honor. Folding his feet beneath him, he sat facing the sunrise. Handsome Dog looked up from his food. “It will be hard for me to return this honor, if you still shun my cabin.”

“My sister’s cabin,” Stays Behind corrected him. “If you wish to do your host a service, honor him as your new brother-in-law.”

Handsome Dog rocked back on his heels, laughing. “Such a meal would choke a man. How could my host want a silly girl who jabbers out of turn?”

Yellow Legs packed the red clay pipe and passed it to Handsome Dog. “Things have gone too far. I may no longer refuse her and keep my honor.”

Handsome Dog’s gaze flicked from host to sister-in-law. “Hetchetu aloh, there is something here that needs smoking on.”

“If you are insulted, we will not keep you.” Stays Behind sat herself at the entrance, untying the tipi flap.

Burnt Thighs stormed back and forth outside, their anger audible through the thin hides. “Look, I’m smoking,” Handsome Dog said, putting the pipe to his lips. “May men not smoke without having to hear women?”

When the pipe came back to him, Yellow Legs passed it to Teacher Miller. “I thought badly because you didn’t thank me for my vision, but I was wrong. The vision with the Wasichu signs was not meant for you. It was meant for Stays Behind.”

Miller was bemused. “How do you know?”

“A coyote told us.”

“Coyote?”

“Yes.” Yellow Legs sighed. “I know coyotes are hardly to be trusted. But this one sent us past the Moon and Morning Star, to a Spirit World that lies alongside the Twin Stars in the winter sky. Soon, we will all go there for good.”

Miller gave polite agreement. Like Handsome Dog, he found it politic to humor his host. They smoked, talked, and ate while snow began to blow down from the sky. As night won out over day, word rode up White Clay Creek that Black Elk’s Ogalalas had been driven from the Agency without food or tipis. Few had meat to share, but Stays Behind packed the last of the buffalo meat into anything-possible-bags and lashed them to their ponies.

She also painted Miller’s face black and wrapped blankets round his Wasichu suit. Stepping back, she laughed. “You don’t look like a Lakota, but neither do you look like a Wasichu. No one will shoot you without asking first what you are.”

They set off through the snow, with Yellow Legs leading and Handsome Dog coming along behind, wearing wolfskins over his uniform jacket. It was a good night to be all Ogalala. On the east bank of White Clay Creek, they found red fires on the prairie, flickering through the gray snowfall like broken bits of the setting sun. The dark wind carried a woman’s voice, wailing out a death song. As they drew nearer, they could hear that it was Black Elk’s mother, singing for her son. He had gone to face the Wasichu with the Sacred Bow of the West, and had not returned. Stays Behind offered her meat, but she wouldn’t eat and went on wailing into the wind.

Suddenly, the singing ceased, replaced by the slow beat of tired horses’ hooves and by babies crying. Black Elk came riding out of the snow on a weary buckskin, still carrying the Sacred Bow of the West and cradling a crying baby girl. Red Crow was right behind him, with another crying child. Eager hands helped them dismount, and women with milk took the babies. Soon, the only crying round that campfire came from Black Elk’s mother, sobbing now that her son was safe.

Black Elk was not the venerable medicine man Miller had expected. Instead, he was a serious young man, with a flaming rainbow and red streaks of lightning on his ghost shirt. When he wasn’t having visions, he worked as a clerk in a Wasichu store. His face was red with paint, and eagle feathers hung from his shoulders, wrists, and elbows. These feathers fluttered in the wind, and the red lightning flashed in the firelight. “Big Foot’s people have been butchered near Wounded Knee, in the twisted creek that has no name. We scattered the soldiers, saving some women and children. My Medicine Bow protected me, but for many it was too late. These babies have no mothers, and there are many babies lying frozen on the prairie.”

Wind and snow whipped between the fires. Everyone talked till dawn. The story of Wounded Knee was told again and again by those who had been there. Yellow Legs and Stays Behind told about their vision. At first light a war party was forming. Men began to rub dirt on themselves, showing that they were nothing without the Earth Mother’s help. Black Elk’s mother had ceased crying and brought him his rifle. Black Elk set aside his Medicine Bow, mounting his buckskin again. He was still wearing the red war paint. “Yellow Legs, your visions are strong and your buffalo meat good, but I must answer yesterday with bullets. If I do not see you again, seek me in the Spirit World.”

The war party crossed White Clay Creek and was gone. Everyone else began the long march into the Badlands. By nightfall they were camped on a high platform in the Badlands, called Sheltering Place. Sheer cliffs fell away at every side. The campsite could only be approached across a narrow neck of land, which was easily swept with rifle fire.

No Wasichu soldiers came to get them, but a Lakota named Little Soldier brought Black Elk back to camp. His rainbow shirt was ripped and bloody, a bullet had torn open his stomach, and his intestines were held in by strips of torn blanket. Old Hollow Horn, a Bear medicine man, was called to heal him. Stays Behind felt strange, for she was no longer able to help Old Hollow Horn with his healing. That was work for virgins. Instead, she sat on the edge of the precipice, watching the cliff fall away beneath her feet cascading into deep shadow.

Miller came and sat beside her, warmed by a blanket, but without his black paint. Everyone here knew he was a Wasichu. During that day’s fighting, Black Robes and Sisters from the Mission had worked among the Lakota, helping the wounded and praying for the dead. The Lakota’s war was against soldiers. “What will you do?”

Stays Behind looked down, smoothing the creases in her calico dress. “What can I do, besides follow my vision?”

“Medicine visions won’t stop machine guns. Look what happened to Black Elk.”

She looked towards the Twin Stars, marking where the sun and Morning Star would rise. “Do you still have the paper I gave you?”

Miller fished into his pocket and pulled out the wrinkled scrap of notebook paper. The formulas were smudged and faded. He could no longer read them under the winter stars.

She smoothed the paper against her knee. “Coyote said you could explain them to me.”

“These formulas might mean a lot, a new approach to the physics of light, a new way of looking at the world. But first science has to test them. That will take time. No one can say what they really mean. Not right now.”

For the first time ever, she looked him straight in the face, her dark eyes deep wells of starlight. “We don’t have time. Your science is crushing us with wagon guns and iron wire. Last year, we lost most of the land between the Smoky River and the Good. Now, we are losing the Ghost Dance. By the time you decide what everything means, my people will be gone, gone like the buffalo and the long grass.”

Miller nodded. “I told you that everything passes and that one day the whole universe will die the heat death. All science can do is make the best of what is. Study, learn more mathematics, and you can be the one to test these formulas.”

Stays Behind folded the paper and fit it into her medicine bag. “There’s another way.” She pointed away from Sheltering Place, towards the Twin Stars. “Out there is another world, and Coyote is going to take us there. He has collected people and animals from our past and has brought them to a great world, larger than this one. He says that he has already been with me there, talked to me, helped me explore the universe.”

She no longer seemed a girl, but a grave and distant young woman. Miller measured the space between them and found it was only a matter of inches. Wind stirred the stars overhead, and he would have liked to touch her, but the gulf between them was too great. Instead, he pulled the blanket round his knees. “Maybe you can mix mathematics with talking coyotes, but I can’t.”

When morning came, Yellow Legs led all who would follow away from Sheltering Place, deeper into the Badlands.

*   *   *

The man who finally rescued Miller was a Wasichu, though he wasn’t a white man. He was a corporal from the Ninth Cavalry—“colored” as the Wasichu would say. This Black Wasichu had been scouting for hostiles beyond the Smoky, but he found only Miller, resting in a pine-bough lean-to near Top of the Badlands. The Moon of Popping Trees had given way to the Moon of Frost in the Tipis. Miller was exhausted and hungry, but no worse off for his stay among the Lakota.

The corporal explained that the Ninth was searching for Yellow Legs’s band. Miller said only that they’d better be ready to go some distance.

The Black Wasichu shook his head. “Don’t matter how far, we’ll get ’em sure enough. We’ve got a way with Indians, comes from not being white. No offense meant.”

The Quaker said that no offense had been taken.

After helping Miller onto his own mount, the corporal began to lead the lone horse and rider back toward his troop. “Hell, if the old Negro Ninth hadn’t shown up, the Seventh would have had another Little Big Horn on White Clay Creek. The Lakota chased them all the way back there from Wounded Knee.”

They topped a dun-colored fold in the earth, and the corporal’s narrative was cut short. Metal flashed in the frigid morning sun. The corporal pushed back his cap for a better view. “God Almighty, this piece of prairie looks more fit for a church sale than a fight.”

From his seat on the horse’s back, Miller scanned the litter of abandoned guns, knives, cooking tins, cups, pots, wash buckets, belt buckles, and tent pegs.

The corporal rested his weary arm on the saddle. “Looks like these poor Indians just tried to get rid of everything the white man gave ’em.”

He turned a sage eye to the teacher. “You know a lot of them are just crazy with grief, going around seeing things. Back by the Agency, when Red Cloud told his Bad Faces to lay down their guns, a bunch of them ran wild, shooting their own dogs and ponies, just ’cause Red Cloud wouldn’t let ’em shoot us no more.”

It shook the corporal to see such suffering. He led his horse and Miller through the mess, searching for tracks and stooping to pick up anything that might prove useful. There was a fair amount of silver trinkets to be found, and even a few coins.

Miller watched the cold wind play on a single patch of color—torn, red, and flapping in their path. Even before they reached it, Miller knew what it would be. A crimson calico dress, wrapped round an old Henry rifle from the Fetterman fight.