The children , he thought, I must get back to them .
The sense came over him of being watched. Beyond the red-slick snow there were crows and the sun, always glaring. It had been glaring all along, a fact that only now he discerned as his vision shrank. He turned away from the carnage and looked toward that rise dotted with cottonwoods where he had seen the pink ribbons of cloth beckoning. A man was there, the quick silhouette of him fading into the trees. The footprints. He remembered the snowshoe prints alongside the traipsing cow. He was sick with rage and helplessness, a red shroud in his brain. This must be the one who had led his cow out here to suffer and die. Jakob drew in a deep breath. Here was something he could fight. Not a spirit, not the relentless wolves, but flesh and blood. As he walked he plucked a sturdy limb from the melting snow and stalked after the figure he’d seen at the top of the hill. Why was his vision shrinking, a circle of darkness closing in on his eyes? Needles of searing pain spiked from his eyes and into his mind. Sight became agony. He slipped several times before he gained the snow-lit rise, felt the chill of his clothes wet against his legs and feet. One of the wolves in the valley below had begun to howl, an echoing celebration.
Jakob stood in the circle of barren cottonwoods. He was alone. He saw that the pink ribbons flew from scaffolds and that nearly all the color had bled out of the cloth. His breath came and went in white clouds before him. In the trees there were scaffolds and in the scaffolds there were bodies. On the other side of the ridge the hill dropped down toward a river where he saw the remains of a village, four teepees. The only things stirring were his breath and the wind among the fluttering cloths. Then, like a shadow, he saw the form of the man moving away from him, running easily back across the snow in the direction in which Jakob guessed his own cabin and children lay. The shadow-form moved fluidly in the glare of snowmelt. The tunnel of Jakob’s vision shrank further. I have been led here on purpose , he thought. My God . All was radiant and glaring and then the tunnel of his vision closed and Jakob knelt, blinded, surrounded by the remains of a dead village.
The prairie night was immense and silent. The children huddled within their cabin and Caleb read to them from Pa’s book to keep their minds off his absence. “He’ll be back before dawn,” he promised.
“How do you know?” Asa said. “How do you know he isn’t gone forever, like my mother?” Daniel sobbed himself to sleep. Caleb drew Asa aside and voiced a threat only Asa heard. The youngest, Matthew, climbed beneath Hazel’s blanket, his body icy to the touch.
That night, the girl dreamed of her father. In the dream Jakob walked through a field of bones. They were all around him, along the roadsides, in a yard where a woman hoed her garden—skulls and bones gleaming among the tomato vines. Her pa’s head hung low as he stepped carefully to avoid treading on the dead. The skeletons were stripped of clothing and here or there a leather strap wound around an arm where someone had tried to staunch a gushing artery. He passed a skull with a stick clenched in its teeth, the jawbones sealed around the wood in a tight rictus of pain. Jakob was dressed in blue and carried a rifle mounted with a bayonet.
In the distance, lightning fissured in a blue-black sky. Turn back, turn back , she called to him in the dream. He was walking to a place at the edge of the world. The trees around him had been shredded into splinters and stumps by some earth-rending explosion. Fenceposts jutted from the road like javelins. He was alone in the dream.
Come back , she called to him, but the wind swallowed up her voice. He marched on.
Across the river from the children, the medicine man Hanyokeyah stayed late in the boy’s teepee and fed slivers of cedar to the fire, smoke to guard against evil. “You are sure?” the old man said to Wanikiya. “You are sure he is back?” Wanikiya could only nod. The burrowing owl he kept for a pet flitted from his shoulder and circled about the room as if conscious of his owner’s distress, his own thoughts in flight.
He had seen his brother when he went down to the river to bathe. Even after all these years, water terrified him and this morning ritual— breaking the ice, scattering droplets on his skin while he prayed to the Great Mystery as the old man had taught him—was fraught with devotion mixed with fear. He broke through the ice with his tomahawk and then dipped his fingers in the frigid water rushing beneath. He made the sign of the four directions and had just begun the old man’s prayer when he heard the soft tread of moccasins in the snow. His own breath was a ghost; the sound of the water eating away the ice loud in his ears. Who was watching him?
He turned and there, after all these winters, was Tatanyandowan wrapped in a buffalo blanket with the hair turned out. He looked lean and healthy, his leggings and moccasins beaded and glistening. Wanikiya glanced down at his own clothes, the tattered wool pants favored by the wasicun , his soiled white shirt. No, there was something different about Tatanyandowan, beyond what had happened that day he’d returned to camp drenched in blood. Now he wore three eagle feathers in his headdress, each painted with a red dot to symbolize that the kill had belonged to him.
He told Hanyokeyah about the morning encounter while sweet burning cedar filled the teepee. His face shrouded by smoke, the old man asked Wanikiya, “Do you remember the story of Eya the Devourer?”
“Of course, the lost child of the woods. The one some say comes among the people like a sickness.” Wanikiya kept quiet, waiting for Hanyokeyah to take up the tale. Though terrible, it had always been a story he liked.
Hanyokeyah began in the traditional way. “This happened when the people lived close to the big waters. One day a girl hunting berries heard a baby’s cries echoing through the woodlands. Birds took wing. Squirrels and rabbits skittered past her as though fleeing a fire. Even a big shaggy bear crashed through brush and bramble until she was alone with the sound.
“The child’s cries pierced the girl where she stood. It awoke something motherly within her and she went toward the sound. She found the baby lying naked beneath a cottonwood tree. Its skin looked touched with moonlight. Its eyes were as empty as the snow. So cold and helpless was this squalling baby that she took it in her arms and carried it back to camp.
“Inside her teepee, she studied the baby more closely. It did not look like any baby she had ever seen. Its belly was grotesque and swollen and it had long yellow fingernails like an owl. She fed it strips of pemmican, softening the meat in her own mouth first. She fed and fed the baby and still it hungered. Each the time its mouth opened wide she saw it had fully developed teeth, and once, looking deep down into the mouth, down into the baby’s very stomach, she thought she saw human beings trapped there. She drew her hand back in fear. Still ravenous, the baby opened its mouth again and began to cry, ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo.’ The cries made the girl’s skin crawl. It was not a baby she was hearing but the screams of those down in the stomach.
“She fled the sound and ran for her father. When she told him, he understood immediately. ‘This is Eya the Devourer come to us in a new shape,’ her father explained to her. ‘And now you have taken it into our home and Eya will not be satisfied until it devours us all.’ So saying he took his daughter’s hand and gathered as many from the village as possible and they fled deep into the woods. And Eya came after them, lurching along with surprising quickness on its strange stumpy legs. There were elderly and small children with the people who were slow to escape. ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo,’ Eya cried as he came for them. When they could run no more, they hid themselves in the trees, shuddering as Eya approached.”
Hanyokeyah paused and stared into the fire. He used a stick to prod at the embers and after a long moment of silence, Wanikiya urged him on. “Iktomi,” he reminded the old man. “Iktomi, the spider, finds the people hiding and asks why they are afraid.”
“Yes,” the old man said. “That is how the story goes.” He yawned. “I am tired tonight. You finish.”
Thinking he was being tested, Wanikiya picked up where the old man had left off. “Iktomi made a great pile of mussel shells and when Eya appe
ared he called him ‘Younger brother.’ This infuriated Eya, who claimed to be among the first creations, older than the moon and stars. Iktomi shrugged and told Eya he knew what he searched for. ‘They are very close now.’ Hearing this, the people shuffled in the woods, thinking they were betrayed. Iktomi picked up one of the mussel shells and pretended to swallow it whole, smacking his lips. ‘If you share your meal, then you I will let you have some of these shells.’
“Eya huffed. ‘I will take what I want.’ He grabbed handfuls of shells and inhaled them like berries. When he was stuffed, his empty eyes rolled back in his head and he swooned on his stumpy legs. His skin went green and then black. He had been tricked into eating poison. He collapsed and the villagers came forth from their hiding places and with bone knives sliced open the distended belly and released the trapped people inside. And they were singing in their joy, because the Devourer was dead, and they had been spared.”
The boy shifted and watched the old man, wondering why he had chosen this story for this night. Did Hanyokeyah mean for him to trick his brother, the way Iktomi had in the story?
After a time, Hanyokeyah spoke. “There are some who say the wasi-cun are like Eya. They came to our villages helpless as children and we gave them what we had. But they only want more and more and soon there will be none of us left.”
Wanikiya swallowed and looked away. He had not thought of the story in this fashion. The old man continued. “It is hard to know the way. Your brother believes such things, maybe even believes that the white people can be cut open and that afterwards things will be as they were before. The wasicun are not foolish like Eya. We may trick them for a time, but they will come back again. I do not think your brother’s way is right. And now there is this new family living on the other side of the river. They are very strange to me, like all the wasicun. I knew them when I was a boy and lived among the black robes. It is true that they are greedy. But the Maker also gave them strange magic and I would like to understand them better.”
The boy covered his mouth so the old man would not see him yawning. He shifted on the buffalo robes. When it came to the wasi-cun the old man’s thinking became clouded. The boy sensed that he was both afraid and captivated by them. He sensed that Hanyokeyah would not want his older brother to kill them all.
Wanikiya watched the cedar smoke rise to the starlit opening above. In the distance a few wolves sang out to their brothers. He was thinking of the family on the other side, afraid of what Tatanyandowan had done. Jakob wasn’t sure how long he had been unconscious. The pain flaring behind his eyelids had grown to such an intensity that he had knelt in the cottonwoods and vomited until his throat burned and his mind went dark. When he came to, he was still blind. In the distance he heard the sound of the wolves feeding, the faint tick of the wind in the cottonwoods around him. Bodies, he had seen them, before the cloud came down over his eyes. There were still faint needles of pain prodding behind his eyes, but it had lessened. He could see enough to make out the rough bark of the trees and the scaffolds nearby. It was like looking on the world through smoked glass, and the strain of it caused the pain to come back. He could see enough to know he had woken while it was still dark.
It was not a pure blindness. The moon was out and Jakob knew only that he wanted to get away from this village and these trees freighted with ghosts. Jakob made a wide circle around the pond where the wolves continued their feast and headed in the direction he thought was home. He could not see to pick his way through the deeper drifts and he sank into these like a drowning man and had to pull himself along. Keep moving , a voice said inside him. If you stay still you will die . He was walking inside of a fever dream, the air moist and warm in his chest. He thought of the children and found the will to keep his muscles in motion. Somewhere out on the prairies he had the sense of the footsteps again, something walking behind him. “Who’s there?” he called, but there was no answer.
He walked on through the night. Through the dark gauze of his vision he saw the sun rise. Jakob no longer knew the direction he was headed, but in the distance he smelled a wood fire and his stomach grumbled.
Ahead there must have been the bend of a river, a dark clutch of trees. Jakob moved toward this place, thinking, I am home. Oh thank God, I have made it back to my children.
He slipped while crossing the icy river, cried out as his sore hip crunched into the old ice with a splintering sound that at first he mistook for his own bones. But the sound spread in concentric ripples, a brittle crackling, and then the ice broke and Jakob fell through.
The shock of the frigid water revived him. He went under and windmilled his arms until he climbed back toward air and brightness. The current flowed quick beneath him, pulled at him like a hundred hands. He fought his way to the churning surface, choking out the bitter water. The surging river carried him into a shelf of ice and Jakob grabbed at it and held on to keep from being carried under, felt slick stones beneath his boots and the rip of the ice shredding his fingertips. And then within him he had a vision of the slave girl, Ruth, and saw her body draped over the mule, the mud beneath her shredded fingertips. This was the terror she had known when she jumped in the river to escape the slave catcher’s hounds. This was how he had failed her. He was shouting, half-blinded and desperate, and the river had him in its grasp.
Wanikiya came to the sacred place as his father had come before him. This was part of knowing the Great Mystery. Hanyokeyah had told him he must make a sacrifice here if he was to become a warrior like his father.
Over centuries the stone had been hewn down from a pinnacle to an orb with channels and hewn features like the face of an old man. Now he saw that it was gone from its place in the center of the meadow. A circle of dead grass framed where it once stood. There was a sense of absence here, of violation.
All around the absent stone were the scattered gifts and offerings that Wanikiya’s people had left here: a binding of tobacco, a grandmother’s awl, an amber hunk of maple sugar. For generations they had passed the stone going from their winter camps out to hunt muskrat and turtles and ducks in spring, north to fight their enemies, the Ojibwe. Always, the warriors stopped here and prayed, for the stone was sacred, among the first things the Mystery created. And now the stone was gone.
Wanikiya’s owl, Hinyan, perched on the boy’s shoulder, made a chirping sound as if he shared his dismay. The old man had spoken of stones moving in the dark and carving furrows in the earth. Of stones that went among the stars and knew all things, and men like his father who learned their language. But this stone had not flown. Someone or something had taken it.
Wanikiya set the owl on his finger and huddled it against his chest, feeling the downy feathers close to his skin. This bird had been with him for three years, his lone companion with his brother gone. He had long preferred Hinyan’s company to that of the other children, the boys racing through these woods, heedless, hunting squirrels and blackbirds with their small bows. He had never been the same as them, though he wanted to be. A quietness inhabited him. And the bird was his connection to the night he’d escaped, the night in which he heard his mother inside him.
Wanikiya took out the leather cord he had brought for this purpose. He felt Hinyan rustle against his chest, a muffled chirp, as the boy studied the place around him. The river was a subdued roar in the distance. Had a cottonwood tree not fallen along a narrow channel and formed a natural bridge, then he wouldn’t be here. As it was, he had sat on the log and inched his way across, chill brown water and debris raging below him, the bird circling his head as if calling encouragement, shaking him out of his terror. He heard the river even from this distant high spot, the river loud with snowmelt as hunks of ice carried along the current battered trees on the tree line. He smelled a wood fire from the white family’s cabin. Softer, he smelled the maple woods that surrounded the meadow and its stone god where the maidens did their dance in the summer.
Would there be any dance this year? Winona was of the age when she
would dance and touch her palm to the stone, asking aloud to be crushed by it if she were not pure. Wanikiya looked at the blank spot in the grass. The stone would not be coming back. It had not gone among the stars. He glanced off toward the wasicun’s cabin with its thin thread of smoke rising above the trees and hoped they had not been the ones who stole it.
Again Hinyan chirped close against his chest, asking to be let free. The bird shuddered and made a small squawking sound. Wanikiya knelt in the dead grass before the spot where the stone god had been. Now there was no chance to learn its language, to discover if he had his father’s gift. Wanikiya was free to return to the village with his beloved bird still alive. He stood and prepared to head home, but in his mind’s eye he saw the old man smoking his red stone pipe patiently waiting for him. He saw Hanyokeyah’s eyes darken with disappointment that he had lacked courage and was not becoming like his father. They were in danger, all of them, and the boy had to learn to choose well.
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