Death Chants (27 page)

Horse Dancer ran
and ran but he could not catch up to the Spirit Buffalo. He knew it was a Spirit Buffalo because
the tracks of it were like no buffalo tracks he had ever seen.

He knew he would be
able to tell those tracks from a thou­sand. They were larger than they should be, slightly
pointed at the front of the print, as if a spear point had been pressed to the ground at the
start of each footprint.

The fire in Horse
Dancer's lodge slowly went out with tiny cracking sounds but his mind was on the dream and he was
unaware.

Outside the lodge a
hungry fox stopped to smell the fire smoke lingering in the air.

Somewhere up the
mountain, in this dream of long ago, the white men laid down their guns and slept beside Spirit
Lake,
whose waters were restless at
night with the near presence of the strange white men. Only Horse Dancer, hiding in the trees
be­side their camp, was awake.

He was the only
witness.

Beside the troubled
water of Spirit Lake, a half-grown white buffalo calf licked the dark brown skin of its mother,
which hung on a pole fastened to two trees.

The calf kept
caressing it with his muzzle but no life called to his life. The skin was no longer his warm,
loving mother.

The young buffalo,
with the tortured eyes of Looks For Death, raised to the sky and cried hoarsely and
brokenly.

The lodge was as
quiet as a good woman's grave. The cold grew bold at the death of the fire, and began to fill the
lodge. But in that silence slowly grew the voices, ever present, that had walked with Horse
Dancer most of his days.

Looks For Death's
voice. The Spirit Buffalo's voice. These voices sounded as one.

It was as if
spirits were singing to him in the wind and the song was of the dead coming back, of the dead
coming back, as Great Spirit Creatures.

Sometimes Wild
Horse Dancer traveled down the mountain­side, toward the places where other people
lived.

On the lower
slopes, Indians and some whites lived a precari­ous existence, wresting what living they could
from the moun­tain's bounty.

Their houses were
clustered together. The people who lived there dreamed of quiet death, seemed only to be waiting
for the mountain to call them back to earth.

Wild Horse Dancer's
lodge was on the windy top of a ridge, jutting out over a river. If the snows of winter were too
heavy, the floods of spring would wash it away.

Sky Speaker, an old
shaman, lived on the lower slopes. He was one of Wild Horse Dancer's few friends among the people
who lived on the lower reaches of the mountain. He was a man born old and now he was deeper into
the long-seeing night of mystery. His whole life had been visions. Women, love, children, the
things that tie a man to earth, these had been as nothing to him. Sky Speaker had felt himself
drawn to the old man because of Wild Horse Dancer's strange ways and even stranger
dreams.

Wild Horse Dancer
slept during the day and roamed and prowled the night, like a nocturnal hunting beast.

When his kinsmen
shut their lodges tight against the chill winds of night, and let their fires burn low, Wild
Horse Dancer's fire was just beginning.

Before the moon
climbed its highest in the sky, Wild Horse Dancer escaped into the woods, only to return to his
lodge at dawn. Then he would creep in, curl up like an animal in its den and sleep.

Sky Speaker could
see the wind and hear time and swallow day and night and he was always called to sing the evil
spirits out of the newly dead at funerals. And so it was to him, that the people turned for an
explanation of Wild Horse Dancer's strangeness.

"There are two
kinds of human beings," Sky Speaker said. "Those born by day and those born by night. Those born
by night have a strange longing for darkness. Such a being is Wild Horse Dancer."

The old shaman was
right about Wild Horse Dancer.

To Wild Horse
Dancer in the last days of life, the sunshine was not warm but cold, while the moon was quite
different.

In the light of the
burning moon, the forest shadows were the dancing, leaping spirits of dead animals, immense,
spinning, smoke-colored shapes, almost invisible and yet unmistakable. Then, as he moved among
them, Wild Horse Dancer felt as if he were some great stalking fire-warmed god of death
himself.

It was only then
that he felt alive.

Watched by unseen
eyes from the dark forest, where clawed feet ran, hungry-formed beasts of prey crouched, the
whole forest felt like the very center of the one great mystery.

There was a voice
in the air, always speaking to him, and at times he even felt he could hear the stars burning in
the sky.

And somewhere, out
there in that place of gathering mystery, the Spirit Buffalo waited for him. Someday he would
find it, when the signs were favorable and his time had come.

Wild Horse Dancer
was not to spend the rest of his days alone.

A blind, eyeless
hawk found its way to his door one dark and stormy night. It had been struck down by something,
its face was claw-marked, two empty eye sockets glaring out.

By all rights, it
should have been dead, but it seemed to defy death's sting.

Wild Horse Dancer
did not know what to make of this sullen feathered stranger rasping at the door of his lodge.
Kill it and put it out of its misery, that was his first thought, for wounded as it was, it could
not survive.

But the more Wild
Horse Dancer watched how the hawk han­dled itself—not fearing him as the old man picked it up and
carried it inside, just waiting patiently in his hands until he set it gently on the floor—the
more he became convinced that the bird had some special reason for being there.

Perhaps this bird
was a messenger.

Wild Horse Dancer
cut a small slab of deer meat and put it on the dirt floor of the lodge. The hawk attacked the
meat immedi­ately, falling upon it ravenously.

Wild Horse Dancer
was not so sure that he had not been visited by some spirit.

Not knowing what
else to do, he sewed a small hood, made of a spare piece of buckskin, and fitted it to the hawk's
head, so that the gaping eye sockets would not be exposed to the air.

The bird bore the
donning of the hood with good grace.

The meat gone, the
bird walked slowly to one corner of Wild Horse Dancer's lodge. It scratched the dirt floor as if
checking the firmness of the ground. It squawked once; what that meant, Wild Horse Dancer did not
know. Then it put its head under one wing and went to sleep.

Wild Horse Dancer
sat in the firelight, staring with mingled wonder and fear at his visitor. The bird seemed to
have made this its home, for whatever reason. Wisely, Wild Horse Dancer sensed that what had
happened had no explanation a mere human being could understand.

He called the hawk
by no name. If it was a spirit, it would already have a name of its own and would need no name of
Wild Horse Dancer's choosing.

The next day, the
bird was still there and hungry. The old man fed him more meat, which seemed to suit the bird
very well.

The old man had
gathered his gear to go hunting late one night. With a squawk, the bird hopped toward him as he
started to go out the door of the lodge. Wild Horse Dancer turned to see what was disturbing the
bird. The bird flapped its wings, gained the air and landed heavily on his shoulder.

The old man winced
as the bird's claws found purchase on his shoulder.

"You are a strange
one, bird," said the old man. "Perhaps you lived once with men before. Perhaps your secret heart
name is known to another man who once walked this earth? Or are you just a spirit, come to me for
I know not what reason?"

The bird said
nothing in reply.

Wild Horse Dancer
tried to take the bird off his shoulder, but the hawk screeched and stabbed at the old man with
his beak, trying to bite him.

Wild Horse Dancer
let him stay there. The bird rode quietly on his shoulder all through the long night of hunting.
It was a strange thing to see, an old man traveling the mountain at night with a blind hawk on
his shoulder.

Strange it seemed
to Wild Horse Dancer himself, but there was a Tightness about the hawk sitting there on his
shoulder, just a feeling that Wild Horse Dancer felt washing over him, but it made him oddly
content.

So together, they
searched the night for a great spirit creature.

As they traveled,
in the houses of those they did not visit, beside the social fires of white and Indian alike, the
legend of the beast, the White Spirit Buffalo, that Wild Horse Dancer and the hawk sought was
told and retold, until, like a dark seed planted in the minds of men, it grew.

Unknown to Wild
Horse Dancer, a tale was being told about a great white buffalo, a spirit being, that no bullet
could touch, half body and half spirit, that no hunter could conquer.

A year passed. Wild
Horse Dancer still walked the nights on the mountain and so, too, walked the White Spirit
Buffalo.

The people on the
mountain called the great buffalo, Sky Moon. Why they called him that, no one could say. Such
names float on the winds of winter and have no source known to man.

Sky Moon wandered
the mountain like a being half of body and half of spirit. Hunters coming upon him suddenly could
not seem to get off a shot at him, or if they did, the bullets just could not reach
him.

During the mating
season, the world of the mountain shook at dawn at Sky Moon's mating call. It was a cry from the
ancient heart of the old ones, this mating challenge that thundered from his throat.

Men on the mountain
who heard it, were never quite the same afterward, or so it was said.

But Sky Moon was
only rarely seen, and then only as a blind­ing flash of white. His tracks they found aplenty, but
few of those who lived on the mountain could claim to have actually seen him.

There was from time
to time a determined hunter who tried to chase down Sky Moon, but the tracks seemed to stretch
into infinity itself and no hunter lasted more than three days on the Night Creature's
track.

But there was one
man who tracked him tirelessly, day in and day out. An old man with an eyeless hawk on his
shoulder.

Once, as dawn was
beginning to break on the tops of the mountain, Wild Horse Dancer thought he saw the great Spirit
Buffalo, just for the briefest instant, but when he had run to the spot where he sighted him,
there was no trace, none.

And even the tracks
had disappeared.

To chase a spirit
is to chase a shadow. And so it was, that the first year passed.

The wind howled
down from the black secret heart of the North. Great trees bent in the fury of the wind. On a
ridge, immovable, stood Sky Moon, defiantly facing into the wind.

It was the time of
day when wild animals, unable to withstand wind's fury, go softly to their hidden lairs, crouch
down in fear
and close their eyes and
wait for the Thunder Shaker to pass away from them.

In the storm, all
creatures become one, finding in the icy embrace of wind and night the tiniest of respites in
their endless battles of death and life, of those who cry to be fed and those fed

upon.

Here and there,
blood stained the snow like a moist red flower, where a combat had been won or lost, but now was
forgotten in the newer, more dangerous battle of a great storm.

The wind rose in
fury but still Sky Moon did not move. His wild fierce head stood out clearly against the sky. His
eyes were like stars gleaming in silvered paleness.

No animal born of
other animals, could face the wind like that. Great trees from the days of the Ancients that
stood like silent Gods on the ridge, loosened at their roots, leaned and bent and began to fall,
destroyed in the thunderous wintry blast of the

North.

Sky Moon raised his
head and, full-throated, issued his chal­lenge to the world. It drove into the face of the wind,
met it and conquered it, and the wind died and was no more.

Wild Horse Dancer,
stirring in his sleep, heard Sky Moon's cry and bolted upright. The voice seemed to be calling
him.

He shook off the
blankets as easily as he had shaken off sleep. The eyeless hawk found his shoulder somehow in the
darkness

of the
lodge.

The wind seemed to
howl like a singed wildcat outside the lodge. The frail dwelling rocked and shook in the wind,
threat­ening to take flight.

Wild Horse Dancer
threw his heaviest blanket over his shoul­ders and stumbled outside the lodge to face the wind.
But at the moment he had stepped outside, the wind died, not subsiding, just simply ceasing to
be.