Before she could think, a column of water exploded from the earth next to them, bursting high into the sky, raining boiling water on them and blasting them with nauseating steam. Bull shrieked and reared so sharply it seemed he would crash down on her. Falling, the wet reins sliding out of her hands, she grasped at something hard that broke off in her fist, and she landed on her shoulder, crashing through the crust into burning water. She scrambled on all fours through blinding, reeking, hot spray, suffocating in the steam.
Finally she broke through to fresh air. She kept stumbling forward, not stopping until she collapsed on brown earth on the hilltop. Pain seared her skin as she lay gulping air. Water thundered into the sky, towering above the pines. A shift in the wind gusted more boiling rain on top of her, and in terror she scrambled into the trees. The edge of the thicket was all she could manage. She slumped dizzily against a tree trunk.
“Bull! Bull!” she croaked, looking frantically about for him, but he was nowhere to be seen, and her cry was like a drop in a thunderstorm.
9
She had seen people die, and she knew it was happening to her. She felt weak and chilled, her heart beat in trembles, she could not catch her breath. She needed warmth, but her buffalo robe was strapped across Bull’s back, and Bull was gone. Gone with her robe, her food, her bow—everything.
She huddled against the tree trunk, struggling not to panic. She needed some kind of covering, quickly.
She tried to focus her thoughts and blot the pain from her scalded arm and shoulder. Her eyes searched the thicket and the hilltop for anything of use.
Water was still blasting from the spring, but only as high as her head. There was a rumbling underground.
An idea came to her. She struggled to her feet and slowly walked across the hilltop. The feathered ends of her arrows, which had broken off in her hand as she fell from the horse, lay scattered across her path. With every step her buckskin shirt, heavy with water, chafed her burns. Holding her upper body as rigid as she could, she staggered to a hot spring. She crouched down and dipped her uninjured hand into the water washing over the rim. Too hot.
But one of these pools might be cool enough to warm herself in. She stumbled down the hill through the pines. She tested pools quickly as she went. All were far too hot.
Though her burns seared her, the rest of her skin was cold and clammy and she had to pause every few steps.
The streamlets running down the sides of the hill were just warm, but they were tiny and shallow. She remembered the deeper gullies she had seen branching out from the angry spring. Water from the spring must be running in them now, and they would be deep enough for her to lie in.
She hurried to the other side of the hill and began climbing up. One of the gullies cut a path through the trees and branched into smaller, steaming streams on the open hillside.
Where the gully forked into streams she squatted and touched the rushing water. Hot, but not burning. She eased her body into the gully, wincing. After a moment the heat became tolerable. She leaned back and let the hot water run over her.
* * *
At first, she did not remember where she was or what had happened, but as soon as she tried to sit up, the pain in her arm and shoulder reminded her.
She did not know how long she had been lying in the ditch. It was dry. Her skin, her hair, her clothes were coated with white scum. The sky was pale pink, but from sunset or sunrise, and on what day, she did not know. Her throat ached with thirst. Water gurgled in pools and rivulets all over the hillside, but she did not trust that it was good to drink.
Her head felt as light as breath when she stood up. She crouched down for a moment to let the dizziness fade.
There had been a river, she remembered. With effort she walked up the hill and down its other side through the pines, trying to retrace her steps. It would have been easier to skirt around the hill, but she thought the trees knew best where it was safe to stand, so she stayed in the thickets.
She called to Bull as she went, hoping he might have circled back, but he did not appear.
Her shirt was dry and had plastered itself to her burned back, shoulder, and arm. She moved carefully to keep it from tearing at her wounds. The sky grew rosy and then blue as she made her way down the white hill, around the edge of the ashen flat, and over the rise to the river. So, it was morning.
Like an old woman with pain in her bones, she knelt stiffly on the lip of the riverbank and scooped water into her mouth, again and again. The water was fresh and cold. She stepped into the river and sucked in her breath as she let herself sink up to her chin, in the hope that wetting her shirt would loosen it from her skin.
The icy water felt good washing over her scalded skin and her bruised shoulder. As the cold numbed the pain, she began to notice the ache in her stomach.
Again it came to her that Bull had taken everything with him. She thought of the broken arrow ends strewn across the white hill. She could use the feathers from these for new arrows. There seemed to be no stone nearby for the heads, but perhaps sharpening the wooden shafts would be enough. What of a bow? She had no sinew, but she could make a fiber cord, and a green branch or a shoot would hold its spring for a day or two—then she could cut another.
If she had her knife. She fumbled underwater and felt the antler handle jutting from her belt.
But there was the problem of her shoulder. Even when it was healthy she needed all her strength to draw a bowstring. Now she had no strength. She thought of Grasshopper and his small, bent arm, and for the first time knew what it was like for him. Were he ever left alone, he would starve to death.
She must find shelter and food. She could make a shelter from pine boughs, if only leaned one against another. But what would she eat? Perhaps she could catch small game. She had always scoffed at the village boys, setting snares for rabbits while she stalked deer and buffalo and bighorn sheep, but even a stringy hare would taste good now.
No berries or seeds or nuts were yet ripe, but there were always roots. She wished she knew more about what roots to dig and where they like to grow. But that was women’s work, much beneath a great warrior like herself, she thought ruefully.
Even an abundance of small game and roots would not keep her alive for long, however. They did not contain enough fat.
The river was growing too cold. It had unpasted her shirt from her skin, and she drew her knife to cut away the leather. The tip of the blade had broken off. Nevertheless, she could cut with it. She was not clever with her left hand, but she managed to slice off the right sleeve and free her shoulder blade.
Her flesh stung when the air touched it. Most of her right hand and arm was red and raw. This must be how her shoulder and right side of her back looked as well, because the air also burned her there. With one hand, she wrung out the sleeve remnant and took it with her out of the water. She dared not throw anything away.
There were tracks by the river telling of buffalo, elk, and other animals that had passed this way. The Land of Boiling Waters was a land of plentiful game, but there would be none for her now. She tried to forget the tracks as she searched along the riverbank for plants to eat. The plants were young, making it difficult to tell one type from another, and it seemed that most of the food plants she knew from her valley did not grow in this strange country.
She was beginning to despair when she discovered some stalks that looked like a plant she knew. But they also looked like another, poisonous plant. She dug out one of the clustered roots and rinsed it in the river, but still she was not sure.
She had little choice. She tore off part of the root and chewed it a long time before she could swallow. It was tough and woody, but the flavor was not unpleasant. Her stomach began to snarl for more, but she must eat only a little at first, in case the plant was poisonous. She dug up all the plants in her path that she recognized as edible, and a few she was uncertain of. She left them in a heap on the riverbank while she wandered off in search of other food.
&n
bsp; In the pines along patches of snow she came upon a kind of mushroom she knew. She recognized them easily because they often followed snowbanks and had oddly wrinkled bodies. She popped one into her mouth, but as she bit down she thought again, and spat it out. They must be cooked, she seemed to remember. She made a pouch of her severed sleeve by knotting the bottom, and stuffed it with mushrooms.
She dropped her roots into the sleeve as well and drank again from the river. Drink as much water as you can, the wise ones often said; it keeps your blood thin. She drank some more, thinking that in her situation she should be especially careful to keep her blood thin.
The sun was slanting across the sky, and she had never felt so tired. She must prepare a fire and cook her food. She must also find shelter before the sun dipped behind the mountains and left the valley dark.
For her fire she cut a willow shoot that she hoped was dry enough for a spindle, and found a fragment of aspen to use as a hearth board. She knelt down, setting aside some dry grasses and bark for tinder, and a few buffalo chips she had gathered.
But even as she placed her hands on the drill she knew she would not have fire tonight, or any night soon. With her wounded arm and shoulder she could not drill with enough power to kindle a fire.
She lowered the sleeveful of roots and mushrooms into one of the boiling pools, hoping this would do. She left them weighted to the edge with a rock while she searched for a place to build her shelter.
She chose a site close by, in a small opening in the woods halfway up a hill near the river. It was difficult to find pine branches, for most were up high on the trunks, where she could not hope to reach with only one good arm. She turned to cutting up the tiny new pines that grew on the fringes of the forest. With her injuries, it was slow, hard work. She dragged the little trees with pitch-sticky hands up to the site of her new camp and tossed them in a stack. The sun set and the valley darkened. She worked as quickly as she could to strip some of the trees and build a crude frame of them. While she struggled to lash the pieces together with baby branches, she thought again of Grasshopper. It was amazing that he managed so well with only one arm.
The dead, steaming flat glowed in the moonlight, and the veins of water running across it shined and murmured all around as she picked her way toward the sleeve of roots and mushrooms.
She was trying to guess how long it had been since her last meal when, looking up from the ground, she saw a bear dipping a paw into the pool. It was the reddish-gold grizzly she had seen driven out of the meadow that first morning. She was close enough to see the muscles in his shoulders rippling as he dragged the sleeve from the water. Suddenly he reared up on his hind legs and circled with his muzzle, seemingly confused by her scent.
She dared not move. No one could outrun a grizzly, and the only trees in the valley were skeletons, dead and nearly limbless. She could not climb them, and there was nowhere to hide.
With a grunt the bear dropped to all fours and, ripping the leather open with a nibble, began to chomp uncertainly at the contents.
“That’s mine! Get away from there!” she shouted desperately.
The bear stopped, startled.
The girl was startled, too. Tentatively, she raised her good arm and tried to look menacing. The grizzly weaved uncertainly but did not approach any closer. She roared at him. The bear shook his head like a wet dog, turned, and sauntered away. He splashed through the river and meandered along the other side into the distance.
She stood still until he disappeared over the shoulder of a hill.
There was little left of her meal. The shredded sleeve told of the danger of the bear’s teeth. She scraped up the dripping remains.
The scraps of mushroom and roots were soggy and bland, and they bloated her stomach. Exhausted, she crawled under her shelter and, twisting to the left, eased onto her side on the pine-bough bed. The familiar, spicy scent comforted her a little as she lay watching her breath and listening.
The tall, limber pines creaked and groaned with the wind in their crowns. They grunted like bears and bleated like terrified buffalo calves.
She found herself longing to hear the real voice of another living creature. She listened hard for a long time for the howl of a wolf or coyote, but heard nothing.
The spirit who had led her to this place must have been Born-great’s ghost. How foolish she had been to hope that any gods would take pity on her. She lay shivering on her side. She had always felt alone in the world, but never so alone as on this night.
10
Back home with Grasshopper she used to play at bringing down birds with rocks, but within a few days her burned skin had turned to rawhide, making it nearly impossible to bend her arm, and, using her other arm, she made wild throws.
Although she spent her days gathering and eating roots and mushrooms and anything else she could find, as one moon melted into the next, her bones rose to the surface and grew heavy. At first she chose her foods carefully. She followed the grizzly’s example. When she came across plants from which he had nipped off the tender tips, she tried them. Wherever he had left a few roots behind, she dug them up. She cooked everything she was uncertain of in the hot springs in the hope that this would make it safe to eat. But she did not have the grizzly’s acute sense of smell or his powerful shoulders and claws for digging, and as her stomach screamed more sharply to be filled, she no longer concerned herself with boiling, or even sorting poisonous from edible. She ate constantly while she foraged, and her gut was racked with cramps and diarrhea.
Wherever she came upon willows she peeled off the inner bark and ate it. She scraped the pith out of weed stalks, and before long she was eating the leaves and stalks, too. She rolled rocks and logs over in search of ants and grubs. She even welcomed the mosquitoes that attacked her in larger swarms every day, for she slapped at them and ate them, too. She tried to trap squirrels and mice, but she was grateful if she could find their caches of seeds and pine nuts.
For the grizzly often arrived before her. Though she seldom saw him, she often came upon a gaping pit where he had raided some small animal’s burrow, or ripped-apart logs emptied of insects, or torn-up earth where great quantities of roots had been devoured.
As if in mockery of her, elk and moose and even deer often passed nearby, and sometimes stopped to graze, grown used to her presence and unafraid. She tried to creep close enough to one of the newborns to attack it with her knife, but each time, the animal seemed to sense her intent and would skip out of reach just before she sprang.
This is what she had come to: a starving wretch unfeared even by infants. She might as well be back at the village fighting the dogs for the camp’s leavings. But she would rather starve to death than face the humiliation of going back to her people empty-handed.
One evening she was lying on a slope above the riverbank, unable to force herself to keep foraging, when she heard a great tramping and snapping of branches. With an effort she lifted her head to see the grizzly emerging from the pines a hundred paces down the river.
She was downwind and the bear had not noticed her. She lay still. His reddish-gold coat rippled in the early evening sun as he ambled across the grass and into the river. He slapped at the water for a moment, then dipped his snout in and came up with a flopping brown fish in his jaws. He gobbled it down and splashed about for more.
The girl watched hungrily. Fish! That was the one thing she had not tried. She had never eaten fish, but it took all her strength to keep from plunging into the river after them this instant. She dared not move until the grizzly left.
Although he was not having much success, he was patient. Sometimes he seemed to have trapped a fish under his great paws, and would dunk his head under, but seized only a mouthful of water. His head dipped down again and again and nearly every time came up empty. She saw him catch two more fish, and fought the urge to rush out and rip them away from him.
Finally, as the sun was setting, the bear tired of his efforts and climbed out of the riv
er, shook himself, and lumbered into the brush.
The girl stumbled down the hill and into the icy water. The fish were not easy to see; now and then a gleam caught her eye and she lunged at it. Once, by waiting endlessly with her hands motionless in the water, she touched one, but the slippery creature wriggled out of her grasp.
The sky faded and began to darken, and still she had not caught a single fish. Winded, and shivering with cold, she lay back on the bank to rest, but was so flooded with panic that after only an instant she returned to the hunt with renewed urgency.
She stood peering into the water until the moon rose, and its reflection on the water blotted out the secret world of the fish.
She heaved her body out of the bitter water into the night air. I am starving to death, she thought, and was startled to hear her voice. Gasping and shivering, she scrambled on hands and knees over the ground, trying to find something, anything, that had not already been dug out and eaten. She stuffed a fistful of grass into her mouth, but had to spit it out again to breathe. Thoughts, sensations, images spun through her mind: the elk meat she had left behind … Bull’s snorting … Grasshopper’s blood-brown moccasins … Chews-the-bear’s pipe smoke … his story of a winter that was so hard the villagers had to eat their dogs, and finally their tepee covers and clothes.
Her clothes—she could eat her clothes! She bit into the remaining sleeve of her buckskin shirt, but could not tear it.
An owl’s call interrupted her frenzy.
She crouched as if in fear of an attack. Her eyes darted about the treetops. Born-great’s ghost. He was watching her from somewhere high in the pines.
His eerie call floated down to her again.
“Why must you destroy me?” she cried.
The Sacrifice Page 5