Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  Baat knew from the ul udi that these magic rings emerged from the freezing and thawing of the silty ground, which churned the thick soil like slow boiling water, arranging the rocks in the precise patterns of the circling heat.

  Overhead, arrows of birds streamed south, stopping at the numerous lakes along the way. They filled the chill opal air with their calling.

  Baat, seeing the ice peaks drawing nearer each day, broke his prohibition against fire, and they cooked duck and geese. Standing on a shelf of stacked boulders, staring north across mirror lakes bright with the reflections of the snow range, they spotted the blue vault of the Serpent Glacier.

  Baat had dark memories of the People stoning smallheads here. He also had the joy of remembering his initiation in this sacred place, thirty-five summers ago.

  Here, the old ones had brought him and several other children to witness the Last Rites. Only then could they attend the ghost dancing. The whole summer long, during the journey north, the young boy Baat had been plump with pride, for not all the People could call down the cold fire.

  Many, like his parents and his brothers and sisters, feared the ul udi and wanted nothing to do with them. From his first awareness, he had yearned to hold the cold fire. He wanted to be empowered by the ul udi and to know the mysteries the old ones whispered among themselves.

  Under the webs of stars, with the cold fire returned to the night, Baat remembered back to his boy-days and his green heart, glowing with wonder.

  In his sixth summer, Baat had secretly followed the old ones when they left the camp with the older boys. The boys, who had trekked to the Serpent Glacier the summer before, were to be made men, and Baat had crept after them, to witness the mystery for himself.

  Glistening with spiced nut-oil the mothers rubbed over their young, he had been forced to crawl on hands and knees through the thorn scrub below the wind so the others would not smell him. The thorns had cut his back and pulled out tufts of his hair, yet he had pushed on. He would see for himself the living fire the adults spoke of in hushed awe when they thought the children were not listening.

  Baat had lain on his belly under clawing bramble after he reached the high ground where the men conducted ceremonies. Always before, he had been forced to peer through the wicker of his mother's hut when the ghost dancers came up here at night to worship, and he had seen little more than fireshadows against the dark sky wavering in rhythm to the drum-songs. But that night, while elder sister in the wicker hut thought the bundled straw beneath the buffalo skin his slumbering body, he lay in darkness outside the ritual grounds and witnessed the living fire.

  Sunshine climbed down the night sky. Baat hid the fear in him and lay still, trembling inside, as heat lightning stood atop the high rocks above the men. He beheld the fright in the faces of the older boys and observed the old ones looking up at the fire-tipped boulders with eyes as still as ice.

  Then, he no longer knew what he perceived. The fire, shapeless as brook-water, splashed over the gathered men. Radiance clung to them, went blue all over the skin of their bodies, and sparked green in their long hair, green and slithery as eels.

  And the men did not cry out but lifted their flaming faces to the black night and began to dance. Some beat drums tied to their hips, others beat their chests and thighs and sent sparks gusting.

  The older boys knelt before the burning, dancing men. The skin of the boys' bodies began to light up. The fire crawled green through their hair, flared white-gold in their eyes and filled their open, astonished mouths like fog. And soon, they stood, sheathed in flame and dancing.

  One of the boys shrieked with red rage, lurched about, and ripped off the ear of the boy next to him. Blood spat like venom. The fathers grabbed the wild boy and struck him between the eyes; and the fire flashed—like sunlight in a tree-crown—and went out of him, leaving him dark and slumped in the arms of the dancers. The cold fire continued to whirlpool above him.

  The Dark Traces had tried to take that boy, Baat would learn later. At the time, he did not know what he had seen. Another man took the torn ear and slapped it against the wounded boy's head where it stuck. The fire burned brighter there a moment, white-hot along the rip, and the boy became whole again.

  The child Baat trembled with terror. He crawled backward through the bramble. And his last glimpse of that ritual revealed the violent boy's fire spinning back into him, lifting him into the dance—red with ghostly fire and with eyes like giant snowflakes.

  Later, when Baat joined the men, he asked many questions, so many that they called him Hollow Bone, good for noise and little else. "Who are the ul udi?" he inquired many times before receiving an answer.

  "They are the fiery ones who live in the sky. They come down to us at night and wear our bodies as we wear the pelts of Elk and Bison. Hollow Bone, you must not think of the ul udi until you are a man. You must concentrate now on learning the hunt."

  Baat’s memories fell away. He stood goat-footed on a boulder before the dawn. In the years since, he had learned the hunt. He had also learned grief. He did not want to remember any more of that. Days without the cold fire in him, without the silent, penetrating music of the ul udi to entrance him, had allowed memories to congeal, and his body felt heavy with the weight of his past.

  Ahead, between purple mountains, the glacier shone under the last sliver of moon. As the sky brightened, blue lights came on within the ice. Clouds boiled over the snowcaps, and Baat woke Duru.

  Together, they wandered among mighty boulders of scree. With jaw set, Baat reviewed the glyphs the ghost dancers of former times had etched on the rock walls.

  Duru recognized the silver dazzle of an ul udi drifting among the weathered slabs, bright even in a slash of daylight. When the tall rocks opened to a pebbled clearing, a dozen of the Bright Ones came into view. They ruffled in the dense sunshine, translucent as jellyfish.

  "The upper air comes to earth here," Baat announced, and she understood him. "The Bright Ones will guide us now."

  "Welcome, Hollow Bone," a small voice said, and one of the Bright Ones dissolved to a swarm of golden insects, flashing octagonal sparks. "You have been away a long time. Welcome to the door of the mountain.

  The husks of golden light flitted ahead, across the clearing and through a crevice between joined granite monoliths. Baat and Duru followed over the ice-polished stones to the granite wall.

  Using fractures for toeholds, they climbed into the dark cleft, and the lights of the ul udi directed them through the blackness. A blue star gleamed at the end of the corridor and they could see that it opened to a sun-blinding mountain of ice boulders—the face of the glacier.

  Baat and Duru, breaths smoking, trailed the sparkles of the ul udi into a crevasse. Walled in by ice, the air quivered aqua.

  Baat held the girl's hand firmly to keep her from slipping into the gaping cracks in the tunnel floor. Duru hugged herself against the cold.

  In the jellied blue light of the frozen wall, faces gazed back—the corpse-stares of a dozen ghost dancers. They lay frozen in the ice, jumbled together where they had dropped their bodies to climb into the sky.

  )|(

  The wind, blind and invisible, carried winter. The clear, furiously bright sky promised another clement day, yet the geese flew south in clouds. The horses, too, sensed the deepening meaning of the wind and moved, not pausing, to browse among the green wetlands between the finger lakes.

  Yaqut lay flat on a rusty boulder. He espied men among the horse herds, riding atop their beasts. Storm Riders, he realized, a rival tribe of the Longtooth. Anger flashed through him. He hoped that Timov and the witch stayed out of sight. Though, of course, they would think of Hamr when they spotted the horsemen, and they might even leap and shout.

  The last of the horsemen trotted into the migratory ravines and out of sight. Yaqut sat up, thought of doubling back to warn the boy, but his weariness cancelled that intention.

  In the days since they had entered the tundra, he had begun to f
eel his age. Little as he liked the deceptions of the Forest, at least among the trees he enjoyed ample shelter and rest. Out here, exposure stole a man's power.

  He tightened the pelts he had strung to the leather straps girding his wiry body and squinted into the glare from the snow-crags and reflecting lakes. If he lost the boy, he could not track the bonesucker on his own. This close to the icefields, too many glacial erratics and boulder mazes abounded in which the ghost dancer could hide.

  Instead of going back for Timov, Yaqut used what strength he had to approach a band of antelope drinking at one of the waterholes. After he had lanced his antelope and skinned it, Yaqut carried the choice parts to the top of a clutter of boulders.

  There the hyenas, who had watched him from the far shore of the narrow lake, would have difficulty pilfering while he gathered tinder. As he stacked rocks atop the meat to fend off the birds circling overhead, he surveyed a long way out over the stony land, and his heart beat faster. He recognized the labyrinth of tilted boulders into which the ghost dancer had fled.

  Surprise and hard-edged grief sat Yaqut down heavily. He locked his gaze on the rough terrain to the northwest. All his life, he had followed the Ways of Wandering across the tundra, but he had not come here—not since his child days, when the bonesuckers had ambushed his clan among those tumbled stones. Yaqut's breath ended in a sob. When Timov and Kirchi found him later in the day, he still sat there, rigid with impacted grief and anger.

  From the time of the full moon, they had lingered behind the old hunter. They saw him only when he sought them out to confirm, by Timov's inner sight, what he already instinctively knew.

  Days alone together, Timov had come to know the witch better. She had ever wanted only simplicity and the blessings and comforts of the tribe. She had not wanted to be a witch any more than he had wanted to be a wanderer. Where he lived perpetually scared, thrumming with dread, she endured inviolable isolation, a solitude that had begun in her childhood.

  Her seeress mother had set her apart from the other children by insisting her daughter be treated with the deference due the divine. Her isolation deepened after she matured into a rangy, thin-hipped woman—of no interest to the men or the Mothers. In her desolation, she had prayed to the Great Mother for help—and was given to Neoll Nant Caw. She thought her prayers had been mocked until Hamr came for her. And now with his death, her desolation had become harder to bear than ever.

  Timov felt her forlornness as keenly, and when he noticed the horsemen riding south he stood up in amazement and hope leaped in him that they had arrived as an answer to Kirchi's prayers.

  When he jumped and waved, Kirchi tackled him. "They're Storm Riders," she cautioned. "Enemies of my people. They'll make a game of our deaths."

  The two lay still against each other as the horse-thunder dimmed in the distance. The comfort of their embrace surprised both of them. Is he the one the Great Mother has sent for me? Kirchi wondered, looking with amazement into the deep black of Timov's eyes.

  Timov stared back, all the wished-for joy of his life rising into his heart. And he thought suddenly, this strange woman with the apricot hair might be his destiny. Yaqut's threat had joined their lives. They lived as one with only their gentleness to counter a harsh fate.

  Kirchi pressed her lips to Timov's, smiling. "The Great Mother has thrown us together."

  Timov sat up, his insides throbbing, face pale. "Will we stay together?"

  Kirchi's smile slid away, sadly. "I don't know."

  "Do you want to stay with me?"

  "Oh, yes." Kirchi hugged him, breathed deeply the fern-scent of his hair. "If we can escape Yaqut—if we can find your sister—"

  Timov held her tightly, the fear of her departure clogging his breathing. He would not lose her as he had lost everything else. Yaqut could kill him, but Timov would not lose her to the Mudman.

  After the Storm Riders passed, Kirchi and Timov hurried north, afraid their previous night's camp would be found and the horsemen would circle back for them. They discovered the butchered remains of an antelope and Yaqut sitting among buzzing flies. He looked at them with a blank stare, then shooed off the insects with a bloody hand and ordered them to build a fire.

  "We saw Storm Riders," Kirchi said. "They'll spot our smoke and come back for us."

  "They are not coming back," Yaqut mumbled. "Smell the wind."

  The wind had the familiar heathery scent of the tundra, and the boy and the witch glanced at each other, not comprehending.

  "Look at the geese," Yaqut added, wearily rising to his feet. He pointed to the flocks that peppered the blue distance. "They are not lighting on the lakes. The small fish and the insects they savor are still there."

  "A storm is coming," Kirchi realized. "How soon?"

  "Soon."

  "There are no squall clouds anywhere," Timov said, wheeling around the open horizon.

  Yaqut ignored him. He pointed northwest toward black mountains and their gleaming ice peaks. "The hunt ends there, less than a day's walk from here."

  "How do you know?" Timov asked.

  "Get the firewood," Yaqut said. "We need to eat well. Tomorrow, we walk hard."

  Lightfall in the Stone

  Baat knelt before the dead ghost dancers, listening for their voices. With the Bright Ones sparkling in the chill air, he had thought to hear again the songs of the People. Only silence touched him. He shrugged and stood up.

  On his journeys here as a child, he had been too young for the significance of this chamber, and he had not been shown the tumbled figures in the ice. By the time he had become old enough to participate in the rituals, the clan had thinned so greatly that only ghost dancers came here, to die or to help their companions die.

  Slots in the rock wall behind them admitted daylight, and by that radiance Duru examined the blurred faces of the corpses—thickbrowed men and women with worn-down chins, broad cheeks, and astonished hair standing out in red spikes. The people looked like Baat, and seeing them Duru realized sadly that she viewed his fate—to shuck off his body like a husk.

  Baat read the consternation on her face and said gently, "These are just hides. After the Bright Ones took their souls into the upper air, the People carried these bodies atop the glacier, to a sacred hole deep in the mountains and dropped them in. I saw that myself as a child. A stream under the glacier must have carried some of them here."

  He placed his fingertips against ice. The strength he projected into the wall did not come back, and by that he knew no souls had been trapped in there. "Even though their faces have not lost their features after all these years, they're just garments, Duru. Nothing more."

  Duru reached up and put her fingers to Baat's lips, feeling the guttural sounds that he made yet comprehending him in her own language. Each time she had experienced this, she felt a frightful wonder, more so here in the death chamber of Baat's clan. And she grasped that this would be very nearly the last time she could talk with him and his powerful spirits.

  Baat touched a thick finger to her forehead. "It's here that you hear me. This is where the soft lightnings of the ul udi touch us."

  "I will miss you, Hollow Bone." Duru's eyes filled with tears.

  Baat nodded affectionately at this child, who, with her dust-gray face and mud-stiffened furs looked like a playful rock given life. "I could never have come even this far without you."

  "What's going to happen now, Baat?"

  Anxiety for this child's well-being tightened the ghost dancer's stomach. He looked away, at the snowy daylight shining at the far end of the tunnel. Whatever good he could do for her would be done there. "Come. We must find the cairn."

  Duru glanced again at the tumbled bodies in the solid freeze and followed Baat into the corridor of rock. At the far end, a blue light gleamed. It became the mountainous face of the glacier as they approached, a blue-white cliff crumbling into chunks and sheared wedges big as crags. Before it, the silt-black ground, strewn with smaller rocks, lay perfectly flat. U
l udi glinted before the blue wall, a sprinkling of stardust in the sunny air.

  Not as many Bright Ones appeared as Baat had hoped. During his childhood, he had squinted against their glare. That had been at night and earlier in the year, when the wise spirits waxed strongest. This late in the season of life, the air glowed darkly in the long rays of dim heat.

  Baat pointed to a heap of orange stones at the foot of the glacier, many of the rocks half-buried in ice. Above it, several ul udi glinted in the air, tiny as stars. "The altar of the Last Rite," he said with hushed breath.

  Duru cocked her head, looking for some semblance of structure in the rocks.

  "The ice has toppled it since I saw it last," he said and stepped out from the escarpment.

  "Will it still work?"

  Baat nodded. "The power is in the rocks, not in their arrangement. The power called iron."

  "What's that?"

  "Another of the ul udi's stories." Baat's hackles rose as he neared the fallen altar, and he signed for Duru to stop. The sky came down to earth here. He could feel the luminous music of the Bright Ones growing with power in him the closer he got. Another step and he would plunge into trance.

  He stopped and regarded the rusty rocks poking out from under pearly mounds of packed ice. Gloom of nostalgia claimed him, and he discerned again the original structure: a dolmen slab of red iron braced by black granite monoliths, a doorway to the sky through which generations of ghost dancers had passed.

  These orange stones constituted the shattered pieces of the slab. The vertical river still flowed through them. He felt its splendor lifting the small hairs at the back of his neck, ready to hoist his spirit into the heavens.

  Build a fire.

  The Bright One's voice had come from far away. They sounded weakly here in daylight—which meant that at nightfall the Dark Traces would thrive.

  He had to clear away some of the ice so that he could lay his entire body down inside the vertical river. He looked back toward the colossal boulders the glacier had shoved ahead of itself, searching the lichen-splotched scree for wood.