Говард Уолдроп - Them Bones

Jameson nodded. They gave the instructions to William.

The camp shifted gears again, becoming not faster, but slower, smoother, as though it had more traction. Bessie could feel it. People moved more slowly but wasted no time. Things were put in order for the long haul, watercans appeared, a wheelbarrow line started, up to the sifting screens, where miniature mounds were starting.

Bessie sketched the left profile of the two-foot cut. There were the usual rounded forms where baskets of earth had been dumped and tamped, but Jameson and Kincaid were right – no intrusions. Only the differences in individual earthloads showed, and that one kind had been used for the lower and another for the upper, conical mound. Either the smaller mound had been built at a different, later time than the platform, or they had been built specifically of two kinds of earth – not unknown, but rare.

Everything about these mounds is uncommon, she thought. The location – below the bluff rather than on it – the shape, two connected mounds, and the strange platform and cone shape of the larger one – and their composition: aside from the horse bones, and the fact that only horse bones were in the smaller mound, there were also the two kinds of earth making up the larger one.

The labourers were in the test trench now. They were careful, but their shovels bit deep, carving into the mystery, throwing the layers of the past out into the waiting wheelbarrows.

Thunder rumbled.

A wind of relief blew across the digs, making the tents on the bluff crackle and flap.

Smith’s Diary

I came out of my tent to go on Officer of the Guard duty just after sundown.

The bluff was already dark behind us. Somebody had been fishing and was coming back with some catfish from the bayou.

We had all turned into pretty decent fishermen in the last two weeks. The smell of cooking meat came from the cook shack. Tomorrow’s breakfast and lunch. We weren’t tired of venison yet.

The loudspeaker was on. A lull was settling over the camp. People were sitting around talking. The sentries were in their bunkers toward the bayou and up on the bluff. There was a light on in Spaulding’s tent, the only light not made by fires. There was laughter and low talk from the soldiers. I went up on the bluff and said hello to the guards.

The moon was coming up like a pumpkin over the water. The camp was settling toward a night of sleep. The bayou turned into a flat tree-lined sheet of glass with an orange strip of moonlight in it. Bats flew across the face of the moon.

Moonlight Serenade came on the loudspeaker.

It was real neat.

It had snowed during the night. It was cold when I’d gone to sleep under my deerskin the night before. I woke sometimes during the early morning with the tick-tick of ice pellets on the sides of the mud and wattle hut.

Outside, the village lay under ten centimeters of white. Took-His-Time stood in the doorway. Sunflower had stirred up the fire and sweet pinewood smoke filled the house.

‘Winter’s here,’ said Took.

‘I didn’t think it would snow here,’ I said.

‘Usually doesn’t.’

We sat down to eat jerky and hominy but never got that far. There was a yell outside the doorflap.

‘What now?’ asked Sunflower.

‘Come!’ said Took-His-Time.

Hamboon Bokulla, the Dreaming Killer, stepped inside, followed by Moe. They began talking with Took so fast that I only caught every fifth word. Sunflower listened a minute, then picked up two pemmican bags and put jerky in them.

Moe and Dreaming Killer went outside. Took said something to Sunflower. She handed him the pemmican bags.

‘Yaz,’ he said to me while rummaging in the pipestone pile, ‘there’s something I have to do, and something you need to see.’

‘Sounds good, Took,’ I said. I didn’t like Dreaming Killer at all and didn’t think he was bringing any good news.

Took and Sunflower hugged each other as Took dropped something into the pipe bag. Then Sunflower turned and put her hand on my shoulder for a moment.

For some reason I was blushing as we left the hut. The four of us started off at a trot. Looking at snow is one thing. Running through it in moccasins is another.

I was winded before we’d gone three kilometers. Took hadn’t said anything since we left the hut. He had nothing but his knife and pipe bag with him. I had my bayonet and the short spear and club. Moe and Dreaming Killer looked like they were ready for a short war.

We headed northwest, away from the river. The snow squeaked and crunched under our feet. Moe, in the lead, was following some path I couldn’t see. I just put my feet in Took’s footprints, one after the other. I pulled my blanket tighter around my shoulders.

The land around us was totally different under the snow cover. Like something out of a Breughel painting – the sky was a green-gray, the far distance lost in a green smudge of darkness. Pools were slicks of green-gray ice. Snow hung on the tree limbs. Occasional flakes hit me between the eyes.

Another kilometer on we slowed, coming to one of the five-family hamlets surrounded by fields that were worked only in the summer. Ten or twenty people stood around surveying the devastation.

Two of the summer huts had been flattened. The place looked like a bulldozer had been through it. The snow and the ground under it had been plowed and churned. A compost heap was scattered, giving ripe steaming odors into the cold air. One of the deep seed-corn burial pits had been torn up. Half the seed was gone, the rest scattered over the village yard. A set of gigantic smudged tracks led into the village from the north and out of the devastation to the west.

Moe and Dreaming Killer talked with the villagers quietly, then we started off after the big footprints.

‘About six bowshots more,’ Took said under his breath. ‘Be very quiet.’

I was as quiet as I could be, rasping my lungs out in the cold air. The snow was falling a little harder, the sky turning a milky white.

A man stood in the pathway ahead, pointing to a slight rise, moving his spear slowly to warn us.

We slowed to a walk, then Moe began a crouching shuffle, and waved Took up the rise beside him. We spread out, Took dropped to the ground, and we crawled the last few meters to the small rise. I started to look up over it, but Moe put a warning hand on my arm.

There was the sound of breaking and shuffling close by. To me it sounded like a car sliding off an icy road into a ditch.

Took reached in his bag, pulled out some shaped thing, slowly came to his knees, then stood.

‘Oh, old one!’ he said quietly and slowly, so even I could follow each word, ‘I have your spirit, I have your strength in this rock.’ He held up the pipestone. ‘Go your way in peace this time. We will not harm you. But do not come again to our fields, or we will have you.’

Then he held the pipestone up again and opened his hands toward the far side of the rise. He put the stone back in his bag.

Moe and Dreaming Killer stood up then. So did I.

I shouldn’t have. I almost sat back down again.

Imagine a mountain that has wandered away from its range. A mountain made of brown hair, immense against the sky and the pond. Its hair was red-brown and black, shaggy, and hung all the way down to the ground.

Its head was four meters from the earth. From its front two long crisscrossing white tusks pointed out and up. Humps of fat rode on its head and the tops of its shoulders. The long snakelike trunk moved from the cracked ice of the pond to its mouth and back again in a slow graceful curve.