Them Bones

Leake V

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.

The mouth and ears were hidden in the hair. Only the eyes, black like two pools of tar, showed clearly through.

It dwarfed everything. The frozen pool and the landscape looked too small to contain it. Nothing that big was alive.

We stood for a moment before it noticed us. It turned to face us, its tree-trunk legs crunching ice, and stood stock still. So did we.

It was forty meters away. It raised its trunk and blew out a clot of water in a snorting spray, then made a noise I’ll never forget, half tuba, half diesel, which turned into a bass note that hung on the wind.

I felt some of the frozen mist from its trunk on my face. I really wanted to run then but couldn’t, any more than you can run in a dream.

It looked at us with those tar-drop eyes, then turned slowly, oh so slowly, and moved across the shallow end of the pond toward a dark tangle of woods to the west.

It stopped once, behemoth, leviathan, monster, and raised its trunk and called again, tusks out. It had a red fringe of beard around its mouth, streaked with black and gray. The tusks hung straight out while it trumpeted, three meters from the ground.

Its call echoed through the woods and the white countryside. There was a crashing of tree limbs and thump of heavy footfalls and it was gone.

The only sign that it had been there was the broken surface of the pond where chunks of ice washed slowly back and forth.

It called again, far away, then we heard no more.

Snow began to hit us in the face, a few flakes at first, then more. The wind picked up. We turned and walked back toward home.

My heart was as loud as a drum. I wondered why the others couldn’t hear it.

‘Not many of those left,’ said Dreaming Killer.

‘Damn good thing,’ said Moe.