The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  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, p
ulling 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 t
he 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.