The first reports to go viral on social media were grainy, and honestly looked pretty doctored: a giant unconscious man half in, half out of the Bering Sea. The half of him out of the water was washed up on Siberia.

By the time he turned up on higher-resolution satellite photos, still just lying there, his face buried in the crook of his right arm as if sleeping one off, a team of Navy SEALs was looping a thick cable around one of his submerged ankles. The other end of that cable was hooked into the American submarine breaking a stack of accords and agreements by being this far out of its own waters. It was a gamble. Soldiers’ lives hung in the balance, careers back in D.C. were in jeopardy, and scapegoats were already lined up to be fed headfirst to the media.

Still, once that submarine’s propeller fired up, after a tense moment where the water just churned and bubbled and frothed, the giant unconscious man broke free of the frozen gravel shore and scraped down the long incline into waters where salvage laws could be said to apply. Once out into those more neutral depths, he jerked awake all at once and flung his head up for air, and that was when the circling helicopters captured the first high-resolution video footage of his long black hair, flinging around to clear his face.

He bellowed, his massive hand coming up to protect his nose from all this burning seawater, and, in doing so, his right arm tangled in the tow cable. The submarine still attached to that cable sloshed back against his hip, knocking him sideways in the water, and he was still looking back at what could have hit him when he slipped under the surface, the ocean floor dropping sharply off right where he was trying to stand.

The submarine bobbed for a moment, then was yanked down by the cable still looped around the giant man’s ankle.

The surface of the Bering Sea smoothed back out as if no international incident had almost happened. In the minutes before the ripples from that dunking amplified into the waves that would wash up into five o’clock traffic in Nome, every phone in every government office in America lit up, each of them demanding explanation. Had this giant man been a normal-sized person who had somehow grown into this behemoth? Had he fallen from somewhere? Had he swum up from the depths? Weren’t leviathans supposed to have tentacles, though? Was he a decoy of some sort? If so, to what purpose? Could this be an art installation? A Trojan horse situation? But what technology could make him seem so alive?

Was he even human? How could he be?

And what was with all that hair?

The video footage was zapped back to the mainland, slowed down enough to capture the geometry of his face, the set of his eyes, those cheekbones, and—and the color of his skin. He wasn’t simply burned or tanned from lying in the winter sun without clothes, which had been the initial supposition at the Pentagon. That was his natural complexion.

Was he… Indian? If so, American or Asian? But why not Polynesian, or Saudi Arabian, or Mexican, or Mayan, or Hawaiian, or African? And, taking the region into account, shouldn’t he be Yu’pik or Inupiat, Aleut or Samoyed? But none of them are that tall, are they?

All this speculation in approximately twelve minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

It was stopped by the giant man surfacing again with a desperate gasp, the water surging around him. He was sitting astride the submarine, which was rocking back and forth, finding its level.

This was important because now his waist and pelvis and smooth upper thighs were heaving into view between the waves: he wasn’t wearing a thobe or board shorts or muslin pants or any kind of brightly colored wrap or grass skirt—he was in what looked to be a… a loincloth?

“So he is Indian,” a conn officer said, rocking with the submarine like he’d just inserted a quarter for this ride.

“Is that okay to say?” a petty officer listening in asked all around.

“Never mind that,” the three-star vice admiral behind her said, clicking the DEFCON dial over two whole notches at once. “What century is this so-called Indian supposed to be from?”

More important, his staff was already asking, what animal could that loincloth have been made from? There was no apparent stitching or seams—this was a small strip of an even larger piece of leather. But what animal even approached that size?

None. It would take multiple moose for a garment of that length and breadth, and you can’t really make leather from the skin of a blue whale.

The Indian didn’t care.

He was just sitting astride the submarine, hands wrapped around the conning tower like the saddle horn of a stolen horse. His long black hair was plastered to his chest, and those cheekbones, that nose, that grim slash of a mouth—he wasn’t just Indian, according to the experts the government was able to hustle in and swear to secrecy, he was probably, judging by dress pattern and hairstyle, Plains.

“Nineteenth century?” those experts were asked.

The experts said sure, nineteenth century. Or eighteenth. Seventeenth. On back for thousands of years, there was no way of knowing. Maybe just from now, too.

More important, tactically speaking: Was he the only one?

Satellites were retasked, soundings were taken, tabloids were scoured, urban legends and ancient religions were consulted.

Meanwhile, moving slowly so as not to spook him, the captain ordered his submarine east, to the safety of American shores. The Indian leaned back when the submarine pulled forward, but he held on, and sort of smiled.

The Navy of course tried to clear the waters ahead of this Indian, but that didn’t stop the sky from filling with gawkers.

This was the story of the century, of the millennium. This was a legend in the making.

“What will he eat?” the newspapers cried.

“Where will he sleep?” the anchorpeople read from cue cards.

“What will the toilet situation be?” the radio DJs whispered into their mics.

More like whose side will he be on, the government officials didn’t say in any press releases.

What they meant, of course, was: Did he remember?

If he was from anywhere after 1492, then his estimation of America probably wouldn’t be too rosy.

So, of course, they shot him. In the thigh. With a tranquilizer.

He was just coming in to Puget Sound. There was heavy fog that morning. The Indian reached down to the him-sized dart sticking up from his leg. He breathed in deep to extract it then held it before his face, studied this strange arrow.

He looked up to the Seattle skyline as if just seeing it, as if trying to take it with him, and then he slumped off the submarine into Elliott Bay, his hair instantly tangling in the propeller, the captain diving for the shutoff button.

The Indian fell onto the rising flotilla of webbed-together tractor-tire inner tubes that had been secreted underwater, only inflated at the last minute with canisters of CO₂. His face never went underwater—that was important, as the fear was that a sense of drowning might override the wave of narcotics sloshing through his system.

And so he was floated into America on a bier of sorts, cargo choppers thumping in from all corners of the sky to lift him across the suburbs, his long hair dripping water that people in their backyards were running to catch in cups, to have a little piece of history. On the eleven o’clock news were eyewitness accounts of there having been two moons in the sky that night, one brown and one yellow, and so that became his name: Two Moons.

That didn’t stop him from waking in under one moon, though.

He was in a hangar of sorts, and shackled of course, a more tailored cocktail of narcotics slowing his reaction time.

The loincloth he was still wearing was cut from a single animal, it had turned out. According to DNA analysis, Bison bison—the American buffalo. “But not this America” was the disgruntled joke in the snarl of hallways branching out from his massive cell.

Down some of those hallways were the language experts called in from the Plains nations and more besides, because who hadn’t worn loincloths? All these Native speakers were laying claim to the giant Indian, along with three professional sports teams, each maintaining that Two Moons was their mascot come to life, and so they should control all subsequent licensing. T-shirts and caps were already hitting the street, their decals still warm, and the memesphere was swirling with Two Moons’s visage.

His blood, however, was still under lock and key. Since his corpuscles were in keeping with his size, drawing the necessary sample had been more “cut and catch” than “inject and draw,” and, since that sample couldn’t be processed in the usual manner, the necessary equipment for scrying into his genetics was being scaled up on-site.

He wasn’t supposed to have woken before that work could be completed, either.

The first thing he did was attempt to stand.

The whole facility shook when the chain hitched to the shackle around his neck pulled against its anchor at his feet.

It held.

Two Moons sat back down Indian style, which nobody in the windows observing him knew if they should feel guilty for thinking or not.

“Does he want a pipe?” a museum curator on-hand asked, with all proper hesitating.

“He needs nature,” a wildlife biologist said apologetically.

“He’s not a turtle in an aquarium,” the Kiowa translator said, suddenly standing in the hall.

“Turtles go in terrariums,” the Lakota translator corrected.

The Kiowa bristled, said, “The only difference between a terrarium and an aquarium is—” but didn’t get to finish, since now the Blackfeet among them was explaining how some stupid Indians can’t even tell between turtles and tortoises, which resulted in a wrestling match sort of insult-driven fistfight, complete with biting and hair-pulling, which is why none of them got to put the headset on, have their voice amplified up to Two Moons, see what nation he was.

It was the only chance they would have had.

When Two Moons stood up for the second time, he had the chain doubled around his right hand. He wrapped his left hand deliberately over it and set his feet one ahead, one back, giving the deep anchor, and himself, a real test.

“He can’t,” the head of security said, looking up and up.

“He won’t,” the vice president said, backing into the folds of his bodyguard detail.

“He’s fucking Cheyenne,” the Cheyenne translator at the edge of the fight said in wonder, right before getting belted across the cheek, knocked silly.

Two Moons leaned back, grunting at first then finally screaming, giant globs of spittle flying from his mouth, veins standing out on his arms and calves and forehead, and then he pulled and screamed even harder, his voice shattering every window in the facility.

The concrete mooring which was never supposed to give, gave.

Two Moons fell back and back, crashing through the side of the hangar, taking enough structural support with him to cave the roof in moments after his big exit. The hangar fell down in stages and wings, like controlled demolition. Two Moons, on one knee to recuperate from his escape, raised his right arm to try to not breathe the billowing dust in, but it got into his lungs anyway, set him to coughing from so deep that he was gagging, waving his left arm as if to tell everyone he was all right, he was going to be all right.

He was wrong about that.

A squadron of fighter jets was screaming in. The arrows they shot trailed smoke, and had minds of their own.

The first caught him in the left shoulder, blew a red crater into his skin and muscle, and the second was a few feet more to center, catching him in what looked to be the throat.

Two Moons spun around, sucked his belly in so the next smoking arrow could whiz past, explode on the ground behind him.

The fighters banked around for another pass.

Two Moons stumbled forward, the great chain falling away—the second missile had blasted his neck shackle, not his throat. But there was still blood, and blood, and more blood.

“Not exactly a full-blood anymore, is he?” the chain and shackle’s engineering team each said with their secret grins.

But Two Moons had had enough.

Holding his shoulder together with his right hand, he tore an I-beam up from the rubble of the hanger with his left. Still unsteady, he swatted at the bothersome fighters, catching two of them hard enough that they crashed over into the other three, the whole squadron spiraling off into the foothills.

Two Moons looked down to his shoulder now, and to the blood on his palm, and his breath deepened. As if just realizing this was a possibility, he stood to his full height and scanned as far as he could see, for more of these fighters.

There were none for the moment, but there were small dirt plumes coming at him from all directions: jeeps and armored vehicles, whatever the military could rally and scrounge—they’d all been at the perimeter, to turn news vans and conspiracy theorists and the bride brigade around. Two Moons was supposed to have been sleeping for a week yet.

He was all the way awake now, though.

Where had he come from? That didn’t matter anymore. What mattered was where he was going.

His first step was to the east, his eyes scouring, lips turned down at the corners in what looked like disgust.

“Oh shit,” a quarterback who wasn’t even supposed to be in the room said. “Can he see Rushmore from there?”

“He’s going for the White House…” a movie critic tweeted out, illustrating it with a GIF.

“Not the White House, you idiots,” a former Texas Ranger, current congressman, said, slamming his fist down on a control board. “Can’t you see he’s going for the white women?”

“You mean you keep them all in one place?” the Crow translator asked, half buried under concrete and rebar, his right arm either hugging or sleeper-holding a Comanche translator, neither of them really knew anymore.

Either way, they weren’t stopping.

Neither was the military.

Another squadron of fighters boiled up over the horizon, the lead pilot authorized to, at this remote location, take the nuclear option—sacrifice this whole facility, and its future, to neutralize the threat Two Moons obviously was.

Seeing this second wave of fighters screaming in at him, Two Moons did what any giant would do: he turned around, ran away. His great strides and his zigzag path took him out of range of the fighters and ground vehicles in a matter of seconds, the lead pilot thumbing the cover back over his Fire button with a sigh of relief, the Cherokee princess grandmother in his head thanking him with a tragic nod, his self-assigned spirit animal giving him a brotherly thumbs-up from its litter box.

“We winged the shit out of him, though,” a talk show host said into his live feed, a rabid glitter to his eyes.

“How’s that for a drumming, Tonto?” a cowboy in a bar said into his mug, using what he considered his gunfighter voice then looking around, hoping someone not fifty feel tall had heard this perfect comeback.

“But what can Two Moons hide behind, right?” the internet asked, supplying a flood of doctored images in response: Two Moons peeking around the Great Pyramid of Giza; Two Moons holding his breath to slink into the Mariana Trench; Two Moons standing wooden-Indian-still over the entrance to the Wisconsin State Fair, hand raised in greeting, eyes looking nowhere.

The government didn’t contribute any images to this trending question, but they agreed with the sentiment: Where could he hide?

Assured they could triangulate Two Moons with seismography data, the military sat back and waited for those printouts to coalesce into a bull’s-eye. Indians walk softly when they need to, though. Next were various stealth planes making high-altitude passes with thermometric and infrared scanners built into their sleek bellies, but one old Indian trick is using cool river mud as body plaster. Spotters in helicopters were next, and had to work, but the social media outcry about the irony of using helicopters named “Apache” and “Lakota” and “Black Hawk” generated enough public outcry that these spotters were all reluctantly grounded. Now that the public was involved, though, the military could call to them for sightings, but, first, the tip-line boards melted in under thirty minutes, and, second, by the time those tip lines were restored, a grassroots campaign to protect Two Moons’s location had swelled up. The result was that he was in Florida and Texas, in Maine and Baja California. He was Frankensteining from ice floe to ice floe, disappearing into the Great North. He was swimming freestyle along the coast of Chile.

The government isn’t completely stupid, however.

They zeroed in on where the tip line was careful to never mention: Washington State. Specifically, the Puget Sound region.

Along the way, videos were surfacing of Two Moons from low angles, walking a determined line west, the high-tension power lines electric fences to him, herding him again and again to the highways and interstates, which were probably easier walking anyway. He was moving mostly at night, and drinking from rivers and streams, the giardia protozoa too small to be of consequence to his massive immune system, and evidently what he was subsisting on was rage and recrimination.

When interviewed on whether that was a sustainable traditional diet, a Shoshone elder looked into the camera and shrugged, said it had kept him going for eighty-eight years so far, hadn’t it?

The snapshot of Two Moons that went the widest was of course the one showing the war paint he had dragged across his face. Because it was plundered from a highway crew’s supplies, half his face was bright yellow, half of it tar black, and there were reflective bursts of white all over his torso and arms and thighs—probably, the ethnographers opined, in keeping with a hard-earned vision that had great personal meaning to him.

“Either that or it looks cool,” the world said back, sloping out the door to the skate park, the mall, the malt shop.

By this point every Indian nation in America was painting themselves like Two Moons and piling into cars of every make and model to caravan to the Northwest. Gas stations replaced their hot dog carousels with fry bread displays, and quietly moved their pouches of Red Man to under the counter, and taped up signs about having to pay before you pump, please.

Not many Indians did. They were in too much of a rush—the story was that Two Moons was going to force his great fingers down into the base of a certain holy mountain, grab on hard, and flip the whole thing over, releasing all the salmon or all the buffalo or all the maize and squash and beans, and it would wash across America from sea to shining sea, re-Indianing it up once and for all, the way it always should have been.

The non-Indians wore the same paint, though they drove nicer cars usually. The real Indians waved them into the convoy.

This was for everyone.

The big clock hand of history was about to dial back, wasn’t it?

Not if the government had its say.

The first tactic they tried to stop Two Moons in his tracks was to commandeer the sound system of a sports arena miles ahead of him, and, when he lumbered into its blast radius, playing a low and steady moan through it.

It was a buffalo’s bellow, amplified by about five hundred. It went for miles, made salt jump in its shaker two counties away.

Two Moons was carefully stepping over a bridge at the moment, but this sound, it did stop him. His fingers opened as if he were using his hands to aid his hearing, his loincloth and his hair the only things on him moving.

“His traditional food source,” the anthropologist on call assured the generals standing in the sports arena, their shooting-range ear protection on tight.

Nobody heard him.

“What if he comes here and there’s no giant buffalo to hunt?” the custodian at the sports arena said, to the same deaf ears.

It didn’t matter.

Two Moons was intrigued by this long, deep moan for sure, maybe even captivated for a moment, but then the second bellow came, exactly like the first in tone, timbre, and volume, and Two Moons shrugged this oddly robotic buffalo out of consideration, stepped the rest of the way over the bridge, continued on his way.

Fifteen miles closer to Seattle, a shiny fleet of tanker trucks was parked in his path.

The top of each tanker was cracked open, the beer within fizzing with invitation, its yeasty scent already intoxicating. But Two Moons just stared at all the trucks as if he were standing in a bed of snakes, and picked his way through them.

“I knew we should have used actual firewater,” the governor of Washington hissed behind her hand to her aide.

“I quit,” the aide said, and walked away, his fingers dragging yellow paint across half his face, the other half of his face already black.

Because there were too many cameras trained on Two Moons now to blast any more craters into him, and because a nuclear reaction on home soil would for sure be an international incident now, with the whole world watching, the military pulled out its truly big gun: a hastily made blow-up doll fifty feet tall, and blond. When Two Moons crested the last hill into Seattle, she was there waiting, standing kind of hipshot into the wind, her painted-on eyes very come-hither.

If the military could just get Two Moons to stand still long enough, the helicopters circling far above could drop their weighted cargo nets. Once he was tangled and on his knees, they could dart him again—tranquilizing him now, while he was standing, his fall would flatten civilians on national television, and already the French president had held a press conference in yellow and black war paint, and the rest of the world leaders were scheduling their own press conferences, offering safe harbor, asylum, all-you-can-eat ribs, whatever it would take to keep Two Moons safe from the American government.

“We should have made her Indian like him,” the dating expert the generals had sequestered whispered to himself, gnawing at his fingernails.

“What if he starts, actually… you know,” the televangelist on all the channels right then said.

“This is going to be epic,” the DJs assured their audiences.

Two Moons was just standing there, stopped in his tracks by the tall blond woman staring at him from a quarter mile ahead, his loincloth neither tenting out nor teepee’ing out. She was backlit by the setting sun—a vision.

They’d dressed her in a suggestive petticoat, of course. Nothing modern, just what could be in loose keeping with “loincloth.”

Two Moons breathed in, held it, held it, waiting for an explanation, but there was none, not until a bronze Peterbilt ran the barricade behind the giant doll, the driver’s stacks belching black smoke when the truck geared up, the trucker’s left hand tight on the wheel even when the soldiers were shooting the windshield into the cab, their shots turning the trucker into a puppet in the driver’s seat.

Their bullets couldn’t stop the big rig’s last dive ahead, though. The nose of the Peterbilt smushed into the fifty-foot woman’s right heel and she folded forward under the tires, and this trucker’s name was Mary Spotted Tail, and everybody knows this name now, and forever.

Two Moons moved forward hesitantly, skirting the deflating woman and then walking sideways to keep her in sight until he could turn, run for Seattle.

All the seismographs could hear his footfalls now. Every glass on every counter for miles was trembling, every window rattling in its pane.

In less than two minutes, Two Moons was to the shore, was back to Elliott Bay, but…

Arrayed there in formation just past the blue ball of the old newspaper building was the line of battleships that had been scrambled, and between each of them a submarine glared up out of the water, daring Two Moons to try to swim under, out to open sea.

Two Moons dug his heels in, stopped just short of tipping over into the water, close enough he had to wave his arms for balance, and then he was turning around, already running hard. Not to any place specific, it didn’t look like. Just away. That’s one of the main things history’s taught all Indians big or small.

There were people on his side this time, though.

In an effort to distract any spotting or targeting sensors on the ships and subs, the homeless Indians of Seattle had, instead of being part of the parade welcoming Two Moons to town, stationed themselves in all the deserted high-rises, at every light switch.

Each to his or her own beat, they started flipping their assigned switch up and down, turning downtown into a blinking beacon, a wall of random distraction.

Two Moons, perhaps reading a Native code from the blinking, ran directly for it, and that’s one of the most iconic of the postcards: his crisp silhouette against all those blurry yellow and white squares. You can’t even tell he’s giant in the photograph. He’s just another Indian running from the cavalry, and running for all he’s worth, because he’s going to be the one from his whole tribe who gets away, he’s going to be the one to make it to the future.

Still, the battleships fired, and the lights blinking on and off didn’t matter at all to their targeting sensors.

But Two Moons knew about these arrows now.

When he heard them whistling in, he dove forward into the lower floor of a parking garage, such that, when the missiles hit, they crashed into the levels above him.

The parking garage fell down all around him, entombing him.

The world held its collective breath. All the homeless Indians high up in the downtown buildings let their lights go dark, their already broken hearts breaking again, into even smaller pieces.

“That’ll teach them,” a war hero said, stubbing his cigar out on a subordinate’s mouse pad, the subordinate watching that ash crumble and thinking of his lung-cancer father.

“End of the trail, bub,” a senator said, accidentally-on-purpose into the mic he was standing at, hoping he could use a recording of this timely utterance for his next campaign.

“Bam,” the president said, blowing smoke from his fingergun, then reaching forward to click the feed off but stopping with his hand on that switch.

One of the concrete slabs of the fallen-down parking garage was tilting, was lifting, was sloughing off.

Two Moons rolled over, was on his back, bleeding all over, breathing heavy and deep.

“His war paint protected him…” a Seattle baseball announcer said to his ex-wife, the edges of their hands finding each other.

“You can’t kill him…” a ten-year-old Flathead boy said, inches from his television, pouring as much of himself across to Two Moons as he could.

“Go, man,” that conn officer in one the submarines said, right before his crewmates began trying to pummel the Anishinaabe out of him.

Above Two Moons, six hundred feet straight up, one rounded square of yellow light glowed on, started to flicker down, then held. It was a homeless man stepping into the elevator on the Space Needle to come back down, but he was holding the door for his friend, who was standing on the clear floor of the platform, looking down between her feet to Two Moons, still pushing huge slabs of concrete off himself.

“Wait, wait, don’t—” the homeless woman said to the homeless man halfway into the elevator, “I think he—”

She never got to finish.

I think he sees us, she’d been going to say.

She was right.

Two Moons fixed on that rounded square of light that seemed to have come on specially for him, and he followed that light up, and up, his great hands crashing into the Space Needle’s laddery sides, pulling him higher and higher, and the battleship captains were awaiting permission to fire—Do we take down a monument? Can we lose Seattle and still win the day?—and one of the submarines was drifting out of formation, and all over the world people were screaming and stomping in their living rooms.

It was only because Two Moons was as tall as he was that he was just able to reach around the head of the Space Needle, pull himself up onto the round disc, stand unsteadily on it, his left hand clamped onto the spire.

“Yeah, where can you go now?” the secret, actual president said, scowling in the privacy of his bunker, a wall of monitors arrayed before him.

Two Moons was on all of them.

He stood unsteadily, concrete crumbling and tumbling from the Needle, the firing ports on the battleships ratcheting up to get him in their sights, and then, when he looked over to the west, across the water, just cresting over Olympus—

Something was coming.

The battleships tried to swing around but they were too close.

It was… what was it? It didn’t make any sense.

A cigar? A blimp?

No, it was made of wood, wasn’t it?

When one of the battleships was able to crank its rear guns back enough to get a shot off, which burst just beside the approaching mass, the thing’s true shape was revealed for a flash.

A canoe, nearly twice as long as Two Moons was tall.

Two Moons raised his right hand in greeting and stood on his tiptoes to be seen, the Space Needle trembling and creaking under his great weight.

From above, a paddle dipped down into the sky and the canoe surged ahead of the next volley, crossing the Sound in a single deep pull, coasting in a line that would nearly hit the Space Needle.

The battleships still angled toward downtown fired with or without permission, their bombs bursting all around Two Moons and the Space Needle, and it was thanks to those flashes that everyone could see Two Moons reaching up, up even higher, and a great hand—a hand that matched his own—reaching down for him, grasping onto his forearm the same as he was now grasped onto a forearm.

Like that he was hauled in, catching the side of the canoe with his belly, his brown ass to America for a second time, the paddles dipping in immediately, the canoe threatening to tip over, but Indians have been doing this for centuries, since forever.

In three more pulls of those great paddles, the canoe lifted deeper into the sky, into mystery, into legend, and in the iron belly of one of those submarines, a conn officer smiled through bloody lips, and his hands formed into fists, even though his arms were currently being held down.

“Go, brother,” the best part of him said.

And so Two Moons did.