Cast your gaze down here, if you will, and see the lone figure whose trail leads him through forested hillsides. He remembers the smell of this damp earth. He’s been in this country before, at least two lifetimes ago. His name, if such matters to you, is Jonas. Who he once was matters less now than who he is becoming in the slipstream of events and perceptions far beyond anything he could have dreamed in his previous life, before the star people came and changed everything.

.    .    .

A single, staccato note, cut short, like a bubble of sound popping in air, punctuates the quiet. A lone crow glides overhead toward the northwest. It sounds again, an almost musical tone, too brief to be so, pitched to carry across the rolling, forested hillsides. Three more times, into the distance, the beacon reaches out, “Here I am. Where are you?” The farther away, the more plaintive it seems. A damp stillness answers.

His feet are on the path. It’s a well-traveled animal trail bounded by lush greenery, ferns and groundcovers, trailing blackberry, salal, and poison oak. Sunlight, bright and friendly, beams through the canopy in a hundred slanting rays. The way bends up and around great splintered stone outcroppings, broken teeth sprouting from mossy gums. Wind soughs in evergreen crowns. Ancient timber complains in slow, creaking rhythms. Small flickering motions at the edges of vision trill and chatter across verdant glens. Downfall litters the forest floor. A carpet of fir needles and duff flows underfoot with a silent, liquid quality. His way is clear and his progress swift and light. What’s bothering him, though, is not so much what’s beneath his feet, but what’s on them. For one thing, these’re not his boots and it would cause him some concern were he not surely dreaming.

There’s a few things a man knows for sure and one of them’s his own footwear. His are waxed, black Spanish leather, scuffed by stirrup and obstinate vegetation, dingy with trail dirt caulked into the permanent creases and a lash across the left toe from an errant strand of barbed wire. A little on the high side of three years old, they’re a finely-crafted pair of grafted, mid-calf wellingtons with a Cuban heel, made for him custom in the shop of Thomas C. McInerney of Abilene, Kansas, in the fall of eighteen and seventy-five. It took nigh-on a month and more than a couple hurtful blisters to break them in proper. Thing is, these ain’t them. Instead, they’re calf-high moccasins with leather thong laces lashed up Apache-style. There’s a braided leather cord bound around his right ankle, too. Although that bit of his history’s been right there with him for many years, somehow now it seems oddly out of place. Perhaps because the other end of it’s tethered around the left ankle of a figure beside him, matching his pace.

Tasnaheca, full grown and scarred, but alive and whole, shows Jonas a familiar crooked smile. Jonas breaks stride. The fetter between them contradicts their divided momentum, and both men blunder headlong, sprawling across the path.

“You were always the clumsy one,” Otter chides, brushing mulch from his face.

Jonas laughs aloud. “Is that how you remember it?”

“One must only see you to know it.”

Jonas reaches to whisk debris from the dude shirt he bought in Dodge, only to discover he’s wearing little more than those odd moccasins and a simple loincloth. An unfamiliar knife with an antler handle wrapped in red leather hangs from a fringed sheath at his hip. His old medicine bag lays against his chest. A pair of raven feathers are caught up with strands of sinew in his unbound hair.

Otter stands nearly eye to eye with him, hair braided and banded around with red cloth, three eagle feathers splay forward over his crown. His hairpipe breastplate is cool against Jonas’s bare chest in an embrace of lost friends found. He claps Jonas on the shoulders.

“We must hurry. Do you remember how to keep up with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he sets off at a run with Jonas at his shoulder. The trail seems barely wide enough to accommodate progress single file, yet they pass through, their footfalls a single muted drumbeat on the forest carpet.

The way turns upward. Bright sunlight through the trees defines a ridge and cool mist on the breeze weaves itself into the rumble and rush of turbulent waters. The path jogs toward the churning sound. A fallen log thick as an iron horse’s wheel has blocked the path. A hawk cries above. Jonas and Otter hurdle the obstruction as one. The cord between them drags on a projecting knot and Jonas plants his face on the forest floor. By the time he spits out a mouthful of duff and finds his feet, Otter, unfettered somehow, has perched himself a good stone’s throw away on a rocky prominence, laughing at him.

Water boils around the outcrop where Otter stands, an islet jutting from a cascading current, dividing it. Otter has to shout to be heard over the roar of the cataract breaking on its stony prow.

“You are the only one who can save her, brother.”

“Save who?”

“The piebald woman. She is wiya wakan. Your life and the lives of others depend on her.”

“Piebald woman…? I don’t understand.”

“Living among the wasicu has dulled your senses, Sunka Nunpa. Perhaps she will have to save you.”

There seems so much more to say, yet time is short. Jonas can sense it. “What of the People?” he asks.

“You do not yet know how far down this path you have come, brother, and I do not know whether to cry for you or laugh at you.”

“I miss yer laughter most, kola.”

“If I could walk this trail with you, Tanglefoot, I would.”

“I know.”

Again, a hawk pipes overhead. Otter raises an open hand to it. Jonas looks to see a red-tail sailing in the deep blue slice of sky above the river. By the time he turns back, of course, Otter is gone.

As is often the case in dreams, inexplicable changes manifest and improbabilities are greeted as natural occurrence. The crash of water hammering stone has become wind in the trees. The river is a narrow wagon road, hard-packed and lightly rutted by infrequent use. Bordered by deep timbers and heavy undergrowth, the track is easy going, winding in a slow curve around and down a gentle incline into a wide, grassy meadow. At the far end of this field stands the dilapidated remains of a barn, not quite yet a shambles, rather a forlorn shell fallen into disrepair. Its rusty tin roof looks buckled, one corner stove in. The big double doors hang askew and the hay loft has none, gaping open and empty. Even at a distance the interior appears vacant except for shadows. Jonas doesn’t like the look of it.

Heavy clouds have closed over the sun, great dreary shutters ushering in premature twilight. The stiff breeze rustling treetops earlier has become harsh, bending low the tall grass, and pressing him forward. When he resists, a gale hurls frigid rain at his back like bullets. Drenched, shivering with more than cold, Jonas plants his feet against the unflagging pressure behind him and waits just short of the barn’s lopsided doors for the low thing within to show itself.

It steps out of the darkness wearing Rubin Strawn’s face and a body far too large and muscular to fit it. What was once Rubin’s youthful, cock-sure countenance is beaten to a fare-thee-well, lips pulped, jaw and one cheek smashed in. The eye socket is shattered, the eyeball poorly attached, shot with blood, useless. Stretched taught across that powerful body, the front of what might at one time have been a white shirt is scored on a diagonal from hip to neck, drenched in blood. Its left arm is shredded from the elbow like strands of gruesome pasta. The thing’s one good eye is fixed on Jonas and a voice issues from its pulverized mouth, but it’s not Rubin’s high, fractured quaver. It rumbles, brimming with contempt.

“Surprised to see me, aren’t you, Two Dogs Fucking? That’s the name the children gave you all those years ago, isn’t it?”

Jonas’s scalp bristles. Ice sluices down his spine to his puckered asshole. The terrible, wild creature he thought had met its own appropriately violent death is before him, speaking to him as if in this moment, this meeting was somehow real. The now-crystalizing certainty the thing still exists beyond this dream realm and into the waking world is a stone in his chest.

“That ain’t ‘zac’ly a good look fer you, Squirrel,” he says.

It scowls. “I’m not particularly fond of it myself. I just wanted to make sure you recognized me, that’s all.”

“Well, okay then. I recognize ya, nagi. Why don’tcha go ahead ‘n’ skedaddle now before I hafta kill ya all over again?”

An explosion of laughter and spittle from that ruined face causes Jonas to flinch. Loud, long, and dripping with an uncontained hilarity, the patchwork brute’s feral amusement leaves it gasping for breath.

“OH… ! Oh, that’s rich! You kill me, Jonas!” This prompts another bout of uproarious laughter. It winds down to a chuckle, a snort, a sigh, and an abrupt solemnity.

“I knew you were out there. I could feel it. Just like I can feel you now… beyond my reach and I don’t know why. I don’t know how you survived, either, and I don’t know where you are, but you can trust me when I say that I will find you. And when I do…” An impassioned moan escapes the thing’s mangled lips. “Oh, half-blood, I have such exquisite plans for you. Before I’m done, you’re going to beg me to let you die.” It laughs again, a humorless sound. “I’m going to shred your mind and spirit beyond hope of salvation of any kind and when I take you, you hapless meatsack, I’m going to allow just enough of YOU to peer out from behind your eyes to see everyone and everything you care about destroyed … by your own hand. And you know me, don’t you?” Rubin’s one good eye winks at him. “I have nothing but time.”

Stillness pours into the space between them. The monster’s hatred boils off it like steam. Jonas lifts his eyes to it and says, “You still talk too much.”

Not-Rubin leans closer to sneer in Jonas’s face.

“I’ve worn thousands like you. I’ll wear thousands more after you’re worm food. But before I end you, I will fill your ears with the screams of those you love most.”

“Yer too late fer that, skinbag. Everyone I love is gone. Your screams will do in their stead.”

A wave of white-hot fury crackles in the air between them and the creature lunges. One hand a claw with talons, the other a bundle of thrashing tatters. One of them snaps like a whip inches from Jonas’s left eye.

A storm cloud of screaming, twisting fury descends upon the horror in borrowed skin. Crows, a whirling mass of them, batter it from every side, shredding with beak and talon. Its screams of rage beat against the frenzy of their cries and the clamor is deafening. Perhaps unwilling to be torn to pieces, even in dream-time, the thing falls back into the shadows with a withering howl.

The maelstrom shifts, beating the air around Jonas. He holds fast and the storm settles beside him, pooling into a single, silent shape. The blue-black of their feathers is her hair. It falls to her waist in waves. She smells of sweet grass and wild mint.

“Ina!” Jonas breathes, his voice and heart cracking open in the same instant.

She appears in every detail as he remembers her on that day, the last day of his life among the People. There was no tearful farewell. Not even a yearning last embrace, although he wanted nothing but to hold her and be held. The People do not wear their emotions for all to see like the wasicu do. Instead, she had pressed her elk tooth earrings into his hand and smiled her mother’s love into his heart. She wears that smile now and touches his cheek, a tender warmth.

Beneath their low, rocky perch, a gently rolling surf washes a beach of smooth pebbles. Sea birds wheel in the air above a stony outcrop and squabble over morsels out on the exposed strand. Diamond-bright in sunlight, the ocean surges against low, rocky masses capped with stunted, wind-sculpted trees and stalwart shrubbery. A ghost of land rises in the misty distance, a suggestion only.

“I know this place,” Jonas says. “I was here once, years back.”

“Our ancestors, yours and mine, lived here long, long ago,” she says.

“I remember your stories of the Sneheeshniquah,” he says. “Many of them Father wrote down so they wouldn’t be lost; only now, I have no one ta pass ’em on to.”

Her expression is remote, staring out across the water, as though she’s seeing something he does not.

“This land was much different when the First Ones lived here. The sea had not found its way so far in and it was much colder then,” she says. “Still, Grandmother was abundant.”

She shows him a beast, in a manner he doesn’t think to question, larger by twice than a buffalo and every bit as wooly. It turns to examine him with curiosity. Instead of horns atop its boulder of a head, grand sweeping tusks bracket a long and articulate snout. Jonas saw elephants at a traveling circus in St. Joe when he was thirteen winters. This thing his early ancestors had hunted in this place were like elephants covered in a heavy coat of shaggy hair.

“They were easy to find,” his mother says and gives him a gentle smile, “but very hard to kill.”

Given their great size, obvious strength, and the primitive weapons of those early hunters, Jonas allows as how that doesn’t tax his imagination much.

“In time, Grandmother warmed the land, the sea closed in to take the low places and the people thrived. They fished in the rivers. Some came here to the sea and they lived in peace in Grandmother’s arms … until the Others came.”

Jonas knows this part of the story too. It’s not a comforting one. It seems, however, Crows Come Around is not intent on that demoralizing chapter.

“When you and your father left us,” she says, “I knew your path would be a hard one.”

“I dunno. Just took one day at a time ‘n’ strung a bunch of ’em together. Nothin’ hard about it. Hard part was not knowin’ what came of our people. My family.” The word catches in his throat. “You.”

“Changes come, my son.”

She extends her hand. The sun-drenched beach has been swept away, as if by her gesture alone, replaced by a land drop both perilously sheer and too near for comfort. Beyond that precipitous edge, a turbulent dark sea churns under a pallid and unfamiliar moon. An expanse of restless waters reaches away into indistinct distance in every direction but behind. It seethes beneath a feeble illumination insufficient to suggest its extent.

Above, the single, sickly lamp hangs alone in a deep, starless emptiness. There are no clouds overhead, nothing at all to obscure its strange, dead light.

A very different kind of chill has enfolded Jonas and he stares into the nothingness above them. If he could slow the pitch and plunge of questions racing behind his astonishment to find words in any language to frame them, he would, but the void is a ponderous weight. He’s forced at last to look away before that trackless dark snuffs his reason.

Jonas finds his voice. “Is this the vision Grandfather saw? The world broken?”

“My father did not see this,” Crows Come Around says. “I did. This is the center upon which life and death will turn. Not only for you, my son, but for all.”

“All who, Mother?”

In this feeble half-light, his mother’s eyes mimic the emptiness above.

“All.”

Below them, the sea is liquid thunder. Breakers explode against the foundation of their rampart and perhaps it’s only imagination that makes the ground beneath Jonas’s moccasins seem to tremble with each impact.

“What am I s’posed ta do?”

“Like any of us, you can only do what you do.”

Crows reaches out to him. The fingertips of her left hand tap once upon Jonas’s forehead, her right over his heart. Slowly, deliberately, she reverses them and thumps an old, near-forgotten memory into him.

She lays her hand upon his chest. “Follow your heart, Wakiela. You cannot do it wrong.”

His arms enfold her. She lays her head against his chest and he breathes in her fragrance. How long has he dreamed of such a moment as this since he and Burns Red rode away from the band for the last time?

Crows Come Around raises on her toes and lays a tender kiss on her son’s cheek. “You have to go.”

His throat closes on words crying to be spoken. Like stepping through a doorway that closes behind and finding oneself in unfamiliar surroundings, the moment has passed. Whatever he might have said to her is released in a bitter sigh. The timbers supporting the kiva’s roof offer only mute strength and no empathy.

Still trembling from the power of visitations and revelations, Jonas swings his legs off his stony bed and rises, stretching his frame until back and neck crackle in a promising way. Smooth stone beneath his bare feet is neither cold nor warm. The air is tepid and heavy. Fading is the sense of elation and wonder and dread and the warmth of her affection. Renewed is the memory of loss and the grief that always follows it, an old companion.

“That was a deep message, Jo’nas.”

Narregan is seated across the chamber from him on the stone ledge encircling the sacred space. His head is down, hair spilling over his face. In the faint illumination provided by the glowb beneath Jonas’s duster, he’s cradling his weapon in his lap. It looks smaller than Jonas remembers it, much less a cannon than it once seemed when trained in his direction.

“You … you saw that?”

“No. But I felt it.”

“Well, yer English’s improved.”

Narregan reaches up, taps once into the hollow at the back of his neck. Jonas feels a single, painless start at the base of his skull.

“We slept,” the warrior says without looking up. “Takt-ot-sutoc did not.”

Jonas brushes fingers beneath his hair, encounters the small bud nestled in the hollow of his neck. Its petals are tough and seem to press back against the intrusion of his hand.

“Are you… all right, Jo’nas?”

Jonas shrugs away a familiar stiffness that’s settled between his shoulders. “Right as rain. The skinwalker’s alive, though. He’s mad enough ta chew barbwire, lookin’ for me in particular. Seems proper to mention it to ya. How ‘bout you?”

Narregan flexes his damaged fingers in front of his face. Jonas watches him make a fist, unfurl it with a scowl, and lift his weapon into its open palm. His wrist turns something this way. The business end alters by some arcane science Jonas is unwilling to explore until the whole is as Jonas recalls it, a segmented blunderbuss with a muzzle he could fit his hat into. A spark paints the floor near Narregan’s boot with incandescence, fierce in the semi-darkness and ripples of heat waver in the air around the smokestack opening. A twist that way extinguishes the tiny inferno. The barrel retracts onto itself with a whisper and Narregan lays the handful against his armored right thigh. The surface molds itself to the weapon. He works the slit in his makeshift poncho over his head. It drapes over his habiliment almost to his knees.

Jonas observes these things in the full light of the glowb as he lifts off his duster to pack it away. He knocks his boots against the rock shelf to shake loose the random scorpion. None appear and he leans up against a pilaster to pull them on. The last of his kit stowed in the square saddlebags, Jonas tests the lashings of his carbine scabbard and the demon blade bundled into his bedroll. He hoists the load over a shoulder. It seems weightier than he recollects it.

Narregan drags fingers through his mane, pulling it back with one hand, conjuring with the other a featureless mask from beneath his impromptu cloak. It seals over his face from jaw to hairline.

Jonas regards him with a sober stare. “Why the blank look, Festus?”

“Prudence.”

At Jonas’s recommendation to leave nothing behind, Narregan causes the glowb to dissipate, its substance dispersing into empty air.

◄      ~      ►