Death Chants (26 page)

The boy dug
silently, keeping his eyes on the old man, not looking at him directly but keeping him in sight
nevertheless. Looks For Death seemed like a shadow himself, like a being from some forgotten
grave. Even his clothes seemed to reek of the grave. The old man was dressed in old buckskin,
cracked and stiff with dirt.

"I will never leave
this mountain," said Looks For Death. "When I have found the bones, I will build my lodge here
and will sit among them and gaze upon the great mystery stretched out before me."

The sharpened end
of the digging stick raked the ground.

Looks For Death
smiled then, and his eyes stared at something far away. His eyes dulled, touched some sorrow and
became troubled. "But when death overtakes me with the long-sought bones, I will come back to
this place in the shape of a great spirit creature! Then you shall meet me again. I will come
back to this place in the shape of a great spirit creature!"

Looks For Death
started, his ears straining to hear something Horse Dancer could not hear. The old man rose to
his feet, his face contorted, shadows thrown across it by the fire. A strange­ness possessed
him.

He stepped forward,
tried to raise his arms up to the sky. He fell forward, his face almost in the fire.

Horse Dancer flung
the digging stick aside, leaping out of the hole.

The old man was in
the grip of some madness, his eyes rolled up, his legs pulled up under his body like leaves
shriveling in a fire.

A savage groan
escaped from the depths of Looks For Death's throat. His body arched spasmodically on the ground
like a snake with a broken back.

Horse Dancer
dragged him away from the fire.

The body thrashed,
writhed and then, slowly, relaxed and twitched no more, like a body tired to death.

Horse Dancer bent
over the body and noticed that the sound of Looks For Death's breathing was growing weaker. He
had to bend over close to the body to even sense it.

He put his hand on
the old one's chest and felt the last few heartbeats dance in Looks For Death's body and then
they were gone, as Looks For Death was gone.

The old man lay
dead across the final triumph of his life. For the last stroke of the digging stick had turned
over the bones of she, Looks For Death had so long sought.

Now the old man was
dead on a hill of the dead. Only Horse Dancer and the fire burned with life beside
him.

What were the last
words the old man spoke?

Horse Dancer buried
Looks For Death with the lost and now found bones of his wife. He wished to leave everything he
knew of the strange old man, here on the burial mound, in the kind, hiding earth that knows how
to forget.

But after that
night, Horse Dancer had to carry within him the last words of Looks For Death.

"I will come back
in the shape of a great spirit creature."

When night spread
her robe of sleep over the sky, Horse Dancer saw spirit creatures moving like hungry shadows in
the forest. It was then he heard the words again.

"In the shape of a
great spirit creature."

And however much he
tried to still the sound of it, it made his heart beat like the crash of animals meeting in
secret combat.

When night fled,
and dawn eased the tyranny of what lives in
the dark, Horse Dancer listened for other voices: The courtship songs of birds, the
whisper of the trees as they talked to the wind. He heard these voices that had been his to hear
since the first days he walked the earth. These were the wordless lan­guages of the world but yet
he thought he heard another voice, far away.

It made him think
of the Sky People the old people talked about, even though it was not something in which his
heart strongly believed.

But with the
passing of Looks For Death, the words of wind in the forest seemed to whisper, "Spirit
Creature."

In the next years
of his life, Horse Dancer was in constant dread of something he sensed must happen.

The waiting for it
was like a knife blade scraped across the edge of his soul.

Now night and the
forest became a fascination for him.

Horse Dancer had
never known fear in his world of mountain and forest, not even when the animals he hunted turned
on him at the end of the chase, murderous black bear with death in one swipe of its great claws,
wolf, mountain lion, all deadly in their own way.

If it was not fear,
it was a sense of strangeness that overtook Horse Dancer. It seemed to spring equally from the
last promise of Looks For Death and Horse Dancer's memory of the magic of a Spirit Buffalo, long
ago.

Now when Horse
Dancer killed an animal, he looked first into its eyes.

Why and for what
did he look?

Horse Dancer
knew.

Once, long ago, so
the story went among his people, Kahtanis, the greatest of the chiefs of old, had a daughter as
good to look upon as the soft honey moon. But like a honey moon, the black bear of disease
gobbled her up, and though she tried to stay in the sky in her boy husband's arms, the black bear
was too strong for her.

As she fell from
the sky, she promised to come back to he whom she loved in the shape of a bird.

She died and the
earth grew over her bones.

That next summer, a
partridge appeared on the still-grieving
husband's house. At first the bird was shy and vanished in full flight when spoken to but
the female bird came back again and again. And she came back only to him.

Soon the bird was
eating out of the young man's hands.

When winter came
the partridge changed her feathers, be­came snowy white and flew straight up toward the sun,
never to be seen again.

The girl had kept
her word.

How could Horse
Dancer not expect Looks For Death to keep his?

It happened that
next spring.

Horse Dancer was
hunting on the western slopes of the moun­tain, not far from where the bones of Looks For Death
were buried. It was late in the day.

The snow, was still
hard enough to bear his weight. He moved silently through a world still white with winter's last
gift.

The sun flamed red
in the sky, promising the end of winter. Water, as cold as the snow it had just been, cascaded
down the mountain.

He was walking bent
over, his eyes intent on the tracks of a deer that had passed before him.

Then he heard the
scream of a crow above him.

He raised his face
to the sky.

When a crow
screamed like that, some evil was loose in the world.

Horse Dancer saw
bad medicine in many things, but the scream of a crow augured the worst.

He remembered one
other time when he had heard a crow scream. He had been hunting on the north slope of the
moun­tain when crystal clear, he had heard a crow scream as it flew up out of a stand of young
pine trees.

Horse Dancer
followed it into the trees.

There he found the
skeleton of a man hanging from the trees. How it got there he could not guess and did not want to
know.

Horse Dancer fled
and the crow flew over him, screaming, as if mocking him.

So it was that
Horse Dancer was convinced that the crow, the eater of the dead, was an ill omen.

Horse Dancer marked
the flight of the crow. The black eater
of the dead was sure to have seen something strange down there in the forest.

"Raaaaaaaaateee
Taaaateee!" cried the crow.

Horse Dancer moved
west, away from the crow, deeper into the fall of night. He had not slept for two days and would
gladly have stayed awake another night and all the coming nights of the world, for he loved
night, but dawn was approaching.

A wintry, cold dawn
and with it, a growing sleepiness.

He intended to
climb only one more ridge, then find shelter and sleep, but as he reached the top of the ridge
above Spirit Lake, something happened that murdered all thought of sleep.

In the mist, in the
first burst of sun through the trees, he saw a great dark buffalo cow standing over a newborn
white buffalo calf.

No such calf had
even been born on this world before. Only a few minutes old, steamy with the warmth of the
afterbirth, it stood calmly in the snow as its mother licked its wet white coat.

Horse Dancer had
never heard of a buffalo calf being born in winter. Spring was only beginning. Here in the
mountains, win­ter still held the world in its icy grip. There was a season for birth but this
was not its time. Such a thing could not happen but it had.

This white buffalo
calf then was a spirit being, white as the winter spirit that must be its buffalo
father.

Horse Dancer stood
there, unable to move, drawn to the sight, yet wanting to flee because this was a thing beyond
his understanding.

The wind changed
direction and Horse Dancer's smell reached the buffalo cow. Her head came up and she regarded him
without fear.

Horse Dancer
shivered in the presence of mystery.

The mother buffalo
turned and fled, not in alarm, not in fear, but as if there were some reason for her to be
gone.

The newborn calf
spun around on wobbly legs, looking in the boy's direction. The white calf bellowed at him and
Horse Dancer found himself walking toward the little white one.

He came quite close
and the calf did not run. He bent down to the animal. It seemed to move toward his embrace, the
warm coat steaming in the cool dawn.

The white one
looked up into Horse Dancer's eyes and that great knife waiting in his soul, moved and turned and
went inward. And he knelt there like a healer in prayer.

The white buffalo's
eyes were not the soulless eyes of the newborn. They were old human eyes. Full of pain and wonder
and remembrance.

Above Horse Dancer,
the crow circled round and round, screaming, until suddenly the black one darted to the west and
its ominous cry died away.

As Horse Dancer
hugged the white calf to him, he felt its brave heart beating and he saw that it was a bull
calf.

He felt a sudden
need to look up at the sky and as he did, he had a vision. He saw Looks For Death again standing
on the bones of his loved one. And he saw the great snake of his own life unfold itself, and as
it went by in the darkness he saw the scar made in his snake skin by the passing of Looks For
Death.

As he had been
marked in life, so too must he mark the Spirit Buffalo's life so that there would be one great
shared life be­tween them.

He took out his
hunting knife and laid the blade against the right ear of the white buffalo calf.

Gently, asking the
buffalo's spirit for forgiveness, he cut the ear of the buffalo calf.

Then he threw the
knife away.

He stood up and the
spirit calf bawled for its mother.

Horse Dancer went
away and did not look back.

He just ran back up
the ridge, not alarmed, not in fear, but as if he, too, now had a reason to be gone.

Wild Horse Dancer
surprised himself by surviving the first win­ter.

He had been afraid
his old bones would not carry him through the whole winter, but they had found new, unknown
strength. Perhaps it was the wind of the mountain at his back, driving him on into another
year.

Already spring was
touching the wind. He lay awake in the
warmth of the lodge he had built for himself. He lived now in his memories and in dreams
of a white buffalo calf.

A dream seemed to
come to him again and again. He lay awake remembering it.

It was always the
same dream, it always happened the same way.

White men were on
the mountain, hunting buffalo. It seemed to be happening a long time ago when Wild Horse Dancer
was young and Wild was not yet added to his name.

A tall man led
them, long rifle glinting in the sun. They had killed many buffalo, more than any tribe could eat
in a season, and yet they still hunted.

A great buffalo
cow, hiding its half-grown calf with its own body, broke from cover in front of them.

The long rifle came
up, spoke once and the great buffalo cow fell to the ground, dead with one shot.

As the mother cow
fell, only then did Horse Dancer see the calf clearly.

It was snow white
with a slit in its right ear.

It was the winter
spirit calf with human eyes.

Shots rang out, but
the white calf ran into the trees, eluding them.

Horse Dancer ran
after the winter spirit calf. He heard it cry out like a human in pain, a sound echoing through
the mountain like no sound ever uttered by an animal before.