Rose Eagle (10 page)

H
ave you ever had the feeling that nothing can go wrong? It was stupid, I know, but that was how Phil and I felt as we set out walking along Highway 34 that next day. We were not far now from Bear Butte. It was no longer unbearably hot as we walked along. A cool breeze was blowing, making the leaves of the cottonwoods clatter together like the sound of dance rattles. We were holding hands.

Well before noon, it came into sight. It's not a big mountain. Bear Butte only rises about twelve hundred feet above the plain. But it stands out from the flat land around it, a great being formed long ago by a lava flow from deep beneath the earth.

It took my breath away. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Red Cloud all made pilgrimages here. Prayer cloths and tobacco bundles were once tied into the branches of the trees on its flanks. Other offerings were taken to the mountaintop where our people cried for visions. No one knows how long our ancestors came to this sacred place before it was fenced off and forbidden by our formerly omnipotent masters.

Phil gently squeezed my hand. “I never thought I'd see this,” he said.

I just nodded. Things had gone so well for us that day that it seemed almost too good to be true. My crow friends had flown back to me, telling me they saw nothing to endanger us. I had fasted that morning and would not eat or drink again until after I received my vision. I had made the tobacco ties to hang in the trees; the prayer cloths were in my pack.

So why was I feeling worried?

We started walking again. As the mountain drew closer, Phil noticed something.

“Looks as if the fence across the path is down,” he said.

And he was right. The fifteen-foot-tall wire-mesh fence, the same one Uncle Leonard had climbed over to reach Bear Butte when it was still guarded and forbidden, was missing just in front of us. It still stretched unbroken to either side in a great circle around the butte. But where it had crossed the main pilgrim path, it was gone. The heavy metal uprights had either been uprooted or pulled out from their bases, and that segment of the thick mesh fence had been dragged off to the side. It would now be easy to reach Bear Butte this way.

“Maybe other Indians have been here lately,” Phil guessed.

I nodded again. The Ridge wasn't the only Lakota community. Though we'd not yet been in contact since the Cloud, we knew there were other former rez communities all over what had been the Dakota District. It was likely that some of them, despite the dangers of our new postapocalyptic world, had made pilgrimages to this place of meditation and prayer.

We were no more than a mile in when I saw something, a flash of white in the grass where the sun reflected off something. It lay next to the trail, which crossed the level part of the plain straight ahead, between us and the mountain.

“What's that?” Phil asked at the moment I realized just what it was. They weren't supposed to be here, according to Uncle Lenard's map — but they were!

I tried reaching out with my mind. Maybe if I could communicate with them, it would turn out that they weren't so bad, like with the firewolves.

And I made contact, not just with one nonhuman mind, but with many. But, as many as they were, their thoughts were all the same, and there was nothing uncertain at all about them. In fact, the single-mindedness of their minds was so powerful, so dark, so voracious that it shocked me.

Grab! Kill! Strip Sweet Flesh From Bones!

Grab! Kill! Strip Sweet Flesh From Bones!

Grab! Kill! Strip Sweet Flesh From Bones!

“Run!” I yelled. I turned and pushed him ahead of me. “Back up onto the road!”

What I'd seen, picked clean of flesh, was a human skull.

As we ran, our feet thudded on earth that sounded hollow beneath us. Something thrust up from a small mound by the trail — a brown, skinny arm with sharp, taloned fingers that grasped at my boot. Then another thrust up, and another. Dozens of them were clawing out of the soil all around us from the tunnels that had honeycombed this section of the plain. They weren't long arms, none of them more than a foot or two long. But there were so many of them!

Phil stumbled as one caught the toe of his boot, but he kept his balance and pulled free. He was pulling something out of his pack as he ran. I saw what it was as he half turned my way, still running.

“Get ahead of me,” he shouted, kicking free of one long-clawed arm and stomping on another. He pulled free the safety strip, slapped the charge down on the ground and almost fell as he did so where a clawed paw grasped at his wrist. But I grabbed his arm, jerked him free of the grasping paws that seemed to be everywhere.

“Big one,” he gasped as we both started running again, leaping over grasping talons, kicking free of others. “Twenty seconds.”

Big one was an understatement. The charge went off just as we reached the road.

WHA-BOOOM!

It did more than shake the earth. It sent a shock wave rolling out in every direction from its epicenter and knocked us off our feet. A great cloud of dust enveloped us for a moment. My ears were ringing from the force of the incredible blast. I reached out and found Phil's shoulder. He was flat on his face, not moving.

“No! Phil!” I shouted. Or I thought I did — I couldn't hear my own voice. The explosion had deafened me.

I shook him . . . and he pushed himself up on his hands. There was a smile on his face. His lips were moving, and though I couldn't hear anything, I thought I knew what he was saying through the dirt on his face.

“Told you it was a big one.”

As the dust settled in front of us, we saw what that charge had done. Its force must have blown through the maze of tunnels under the surface of the plain, collapsing them and killing or burying all of those Little Ones that had been lying in wait. All that was left was a smoking crater fifty yards wide and twenty feet deep. The only sign of the creatures that had tried to turn us into skeletons like that hapless pilgrim was a single severed long-clawed arm resting at the crater's edge.

I
t was getting dark and I was cold. But I stayed where I was, huddled down in a pit just below the summit of Bear Butte. I had fastened my prayer flags to the branches of the trees below, hung the tobacco ties of red, black, yellow, and white cloth as Aunt Mary had told me they should be placed.

Phil was waiting for me down the mountain. About three hours ago, we'd climbed together to the saddle, looked out across the plain.

“You'll do fine, Rose Eagle,” he said. Then he had turned without another word and walked down the trail.

I closed my eyes and it seemed as if I could see him, sitting with his back against a tall stone on the eastern side of the butte, faithfully waiting. He would come up and check on me at dawn and then, if my vision had not come, walk back down to take up his post again. And even though it was not required of him, he would be fasting just as I was.

I heard a growling sound. I sat up straighter and then realized it was just my stomach. And now the night had settled in around me like a dark, cold blanket. And I waited, trying to keep my mind free of everything but my prayers.

Great Mystery, take pity on me.

Hear this prayer;

I want to help my people.

Somehow, though I felt as if I was freezing, and I was beginning to feel the cramps of hunger in my stomach, I made it through that night. I actually dozed off briefly, waking when I heard Phil's voice.

“Rose?”

I looked up at him.

“Not yet,” I said.

He nodded and turned away.

* * *

The day passed slowly. A cloud that looked like the shape of a running horse drifted over, paused above me, and then was pushed away to the north by the high winds. A swirl of wind appeared over the top of the pit, carrying a handful of dry red leaves bright as prayer flags. It spun there for a time and then was gone. And still no vision came to me.

I closed my eyes and it was late afternoon. The slant of sun that had touched inside the pit was gone. Suddenly a noise like thunder filled my ears. A long rumble that kept going. I turned my head to look and saw a bluebottle fly had landed on my shoulder. That rumbling sound was nothing more than the buzzing of its wings, a sound that had seemed so loud because of the silence and because my senses had been so sharpened by the wait. The fly moved its eyes about, every facet in those eyes reflecting my face. It turned its body toward the north, bobbed up and down on its legs. Then it leaped up and dived into the sky like a diver into deep water.

And still my vision had not come.

Now the second night settled in. I was beginning to worry. And doubt. Was I not worthy of a vision? Was Aunt Mary's dream right? I shook my head, feeling a little dizzy as I did so. I had to trust that I was doing the right thing. I began to pray again as I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, I was confused. For a moment it seemed as if I were somewhere else. I was in a deep canyon and I could hear someone or something coming my way. Running my way. Many feet striking the earth. Voices calling my name, calling for help.

“Rose?”

I opened my eyes, this time for real and not just in a dream that seemed to have no clear meaning.

Phil was squatting above me on the lip of the pit. His face looked drawn, and I knew he had probably not been sleeping — while I had been. The doubts about my worthiness flooded back into me.

I looked up at him. “Nothing,” I said, my voice a harsh croak like that of a raven.

He nodded. “Don't worry,” he whispered, his own voice hoarse. “It will come.”

Then he was gone again.

Two days and two nights had passed and the uncertainty was like a rain cloud hovering over me. And that thought of a rain cloud made my mouth and throat feel even drier. I was thirsty and I wanted to eat. But I had to wait, I couldn't stop.

The third day passed and the third night. Nothing came to me other than that same friendly fly and not one but two little dust devils that swirled down into the pit and then out again over the eastern edge.

A third time Phil came to check on me. And all I did was shake my head. I didn't even look up at him.

And now it was the fourth day. I sat with my hair hanging over my face like a curtain. I was almost too weak of spirit to pray. But I did pray.

I am weak and pitiful.

Take pity on me, Creator.

Let my people live.

“Little Eagle,” a voice said from behind me, “You are so stubborn!”

I almost fell over as I turned around, whipping my hair back from my face, raising a hand in front of me. A naked man was sitting cross-legged there in the pit with me. He was slender, but radiated strength. Though his hair was very light colored — almost blond — he looked like a Lakota.

“Who?” I croaked.

The man smiled and cocked his head. “Sister,” he said. “You know me.”

And I did. I spoke his name in Lakota, one of the few names I could speak in our language, and he nodded. As he did so, I realized that I could not only see him, I could see through him to the rock walls of the pit. I swallowed hard, trying to moisten my throat enough to speak through my cracked lips.

“You are my vision?” I asked.

He shook his head and looked as if he was trying not to laugh.

“Little Sister,” he said, “your vision came to you the first day you were here. Then it came again the second day. And the third day after that. And in your dream. But you were too stubborn to accept it, to accept that you were worthy. So, here I am, sent to knock a little sense into that stubborn head of yours.” He reached out his left arm and rapped me on the forehead with his knuckles. “Now wake up!”

I opened my eyes, understanding. The cloud shaped like a horse, the little whirlwinds, the bluebottle fly, the dream of voices asking for my help. I'd been too stubborn to see them for what they were. It took no one less than the spirit of Crazy Horse himself to wake me up to what I had to do and where I had to go.

My legs were shaky as I climbed out of the pit, but I had never felt stronger as I made my way down the mountain.

I
t was a two-day walk north, just as the bluebottle fly had tried to tell me. Hidden among the high buttes near Castle Rock was a box canyon. There was only one way in, and that way had been blocked by a great rock slide, though a small trickle of water still made its way out through the piled stones from the creek flowing within the canyon's walls.

I could hear their almost-human voices in my mind. Calling to me, calling for help. And I could see them in my mind as well.

I have heard you,
I thought to them.
I'm here. Now move back into the canyon.

Phil set the charges carefully.

BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

When the echoes died, there was a way opened into that long canyon.

Is it safe?

It's safe. The way is clear. Come out.

And they came out — a small herd led by a stallion as white as the north wind. He walked up to Phil and me and bowed his head to us. His eyes were different, unlike those of any horse I had ever seen.

Gemods, but not monsters.

Our people will help each other,
the stallion thought to me.

Yes,
I said in my mind, as I put my arms around its neck and Phil stroked its back.
We've missed you.

Rose Eagle
takes place in the same future dystopian world as that in my novel
Killer of Enemies
. It takes place a few years before that story, just after the appearance of a silver cloud cuts off all the electricity in the world and causes the downfall of that future time's highly unequal civilization and its rulers. This precipitates the release upon the world of monsters.

In some ways, my main character Rose is similar to the lethal and wise-cracking Lozen of my first story. She is a strong young Native American woman who is confronted by an array of life-threatening situations that must be overcome for her and those she cares about to survive.

However, this main character is also quite different from Lozen. She's less certain of herself and of her mission. Rose's journey in this story is one in which she finds a kind of courage that she doubted and her solution to problems — including a new range of genetically modified monsters — is not always as drastic as my first heroine's.

The setting of the book is also a different part of Indian Country. Not the Southwest, but the part of the current (former, in the story) state of South Dakota where the Pine Ridge Reservation and some of modern America's favorite tourist destinations can be (used to be) found.

My hope is that, like
Killer of Enemies
, this story will take you on the kind of wild ride that our people experienced when they heard our old monster stories, and that like those traditional tales, you may find not just entertainment, but also a lesson or two worth learning.

Before going further I need to acknowledge my very real debt to and my great admiration for the Lakota people. For more than fifty years I've been learning about their history and cultures — not just from books, but from such good friends as Kevin Locke and Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve and S.D. Nelson; the late, truly great Vine Deloria, Jr.; and Elizabeth Cooke Lynn, whose integrity is always unbending. My knowledge of the sweat lodge owes a great deal to the medicine man Leonard Crow Dog, who gifted me with the sweat lodge we built and shared in the woods behind my house some three decades ago. To them and countless other Lakota folks who've been kind and generous to me, I say thank you. Pilamaya yelo!

I've been given more than I can give back. But I am a long-time supporter of the twentieth and twenty-first century issues of sovereignty and land claims (especially the sacred Black Hills) that are deeply important to the Lakotas. I am among the countless thousands from all around the world who worked for the release from prison of Lakota activist Leonard Peltier. And every year I give financial support to such important organizations as the Native American Rights Fund.

At present this novella is only being offered as a digital download — a bridge between the first novel and another one I am working on now which brings Lozen and Rose together. Its working title is
Trail of the Dead
. Look for it in a year or so.

In the meantime, here is
Rose Eagle
.

May your journey with it be good.