The Sacrifice

 

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To my mother and father,

who raised me to believe in dreams

 

 

For what is a man profited,
if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul?
or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

—
MATTHEW 16:26

1

The girl clawed the wind-whipped hair out of her eyes with bloody hands, and listened.

She had heard a foreign voice, but the sound was difficult to find again over the wind. She leaned forward on one knee and scanned the wide, flat valley and the gentle mountains that encircled it, searching for sign of an enemy.

The setting sun was painting the sky a brilliant orange, streaked with violet clouds. Such colors made her feel like singing. Usually, if no one was looking, she would sit back for a moment and allow herself this one pleasure. But now she kept her eyes on the ground.

The sun had dipped behind the peaks, leaving their valley dim, and her eyesight was not as sharp as that of some in her village. Still, she had learned to discern distant things by their motion. She could tell a buffalo or a deer or a horse or a pronghorn by the way the animal moved. People were easy to identify; they did not lift their heads when they sensed danger, but turned them. They ran more slowly than other large animals, and they looked as if they had legs running on top of their bodies, too, because of the pumping of their arms. When they did not want to be discovered, people walked carefully, like long-legged birds.

There was nothing to be seen in the valley now but the brown river and occasional patches of snow. The ice was just beginning to go out of the rivers, and the wind was cold and relentless across the open valley, but the girl bore discomfort easily.

Reluctantly she turned her eyes back to the buffalo carcass. If only she had heard an enemy raiding party. She would give anything for a chance to prove herself as a warrior.

She shifted to her other knee and pushed her hair back again. It snarled in a grimy black nest down her back. She was a starved-looking, long-limbed girl of fifteen winters, with eyes that smoldered from deep within, like a wildcat's eyes at night from within its den. The high cheekbones and fine, straight nose so common among her Apsaalooka people would have been beautiful on another girl, but her face was a hard mask, with a taut, thin line for a mouth. She wore crudely sewn boy's clothing: a plain buckskin shirt and leggings, gray with dirt from long wear, and a breechcloth that was now soaked with blood.

She wiped her hands on the breechcloth again, trying to stop their trembling. It gave her a dizzying sense of power to have risked joining the buffalo hunt—she still could feel the pounding of deadly hooves all around her. She did not even care that her father would be angry. Surely three buffalo felled by her hand proved she was ready for battle; how could he tell her again that she was not?

She should have defied him long ago, for then the day she had dreamed of might already have arrived. It was a day she had imagined for so many winters that the very thought of it was nearly real.

She would return to the village just after the sun had set, when the sky was green-blue. She could almost feel the charcoal that blackened her face in the sign of victory, and smell the smoke drifting from the tepees. The dogs would begin barking as she approached, and the villagers would scramble from their lodges, shouting. One and all would stare in awe at her fine war shirt, at the pretty-faced white mare she would be riding, and at the scalps snaking in the wind from her coup lance. With all eyes upon her she would thrust the lance overhead and shout, “I am the Great One!”

Then the people would rush around her to touch her finery, and beg her forgiveness—especially her friend Grasshopper—and her father would come running, to pull her from her horse and throw his arms around her. The singers would make praise songs about her, and all the people who now looked past her as though she were not there, or called her bad in the head, would beg her to feast with them and tell the story of her adventure.

At last she would be someone—the Great One—with a real name, instead of Weak-one-who-does-not-last. She would take a mighty name, reflecting her mighty deeds.

Not a single sun set without her imagining that day and that name. Of course, the real name, the right name, would not present itself until she had earned it. When that came to pass, she felt, her brother Born-great's curse would be broken.

She smiled grimly. Born-great had thought that tearing away her friend would defeat her, but he was wrong. It only made the desire in her burn stronger. She thrust her stone blade into the buffalo's chest with a vengeance.

“It is not over yet,” she told her brother's ghost. Her big dirty-gold gelding, grazing a few paces away, snorted and ambled toward her. “I was not talking to you, Bull,” she said, patting his broad, black face and evading his attempts to nip her. Bull was a homely beast with a lazy gait and a habit of biting, and he was too big to mount without a step up. But he was solid, and the only creature she trusted.

She buried her knife in the carcass again, pretending not to hear her father shouting at her through the wind as he came striding across the dead grass.

“I asked you a question,” Chews-the-bear said. His talk was stubby-sounding and full of whistles, because all but one of his front teeth were snapped off jagged or gone completely.

“We needed the meat, and the hides,” she said, continuing to gut the carcass as though nothing were wrong.

“You know only hunters are permitted on buffalo hunts.” The wrinkles carved into his brown face made his scowl seem even more severe. “You might have stampeded the herd. Then the tribal guard would have
your
hide!”

She tensed at the mention of a whipping from the guard—one man had never recovered from it. But she
was
a hunter, a good hunter, and would never have startled the herd. Her father knew this, too; that was not his real fear.

“But,” she said, “I did not stampede the herd. I brought down three buffalo.”

Chews-the-bear worked his tongue around the stumps of his front teeth, gathering his thoughts, as he always did when angry. “Did you thank that animal for giving up its life?”

“Yes,” she lied, wrenching the intestines free and heaving them onto the billowing grass. She had no intention of thanking any animal she killed. It was
she
who had killed it, with her sweat and her skill. She picked up the knife again.

Chews-the-bear seized her wrist, and she dropped the knife in surprise and pain. “Have some respect,” he hissed, “and stop hacking at the beast.”

He threw her hand down. She rubbed her wrist, seething.

“A true warrior hates to kill,” said Chews-the-bear. “Not so you. Sometimes you make my skin cold.”

Sometimes she made her own skin cold, too, the girl realized with alarm, but suddenly she heard a sound that pressed the thought down.

She held up her hand in warning. “Voices.”

Chews-the-bear squinted, listening. A strand of greasy gray hair caught on his lips. He heard only the wind humming through the matted buffalo grass, but this did not mean his daughter had not heard something.

Presently Chews-the-bear broke the silence. “You hear one of the boys. A group of them ran off into the hills earlier.”

She wished he had not reminded her of them. A tight feeling gripped her chest.

Chews-the-bear narrowed his eyes. “You disobeyed me because Grasshopper has joined with Laughing Crow and his friends, and you are jealous, is it not true?”

She felt slapped in the face. She and Grasshopper had become friends because both were outsiders, but now that Grasshopper had become a Crazy-dog-wishing-to-die, even Laughing Crow looked up to him, and he had no more use for a crazy girl with a crazy father. Her chest tightened further as she remembered last night's humiliation. She had walked past Laughing Crow and his friends, and they began mocking and insulting her, as always. But this time Grasshopper was with them, and just to better the others, he had called her an orphan—the vilest insult in the Apsaalooka tongue. To be called an orphan was to be called less than a dog.

“Grasshopper is not worth your jealousy,” Chews-the-bear said as though he were spitting out something sickening. It enraged her, although only hours ago she had found comfort in the same thought.

“He is my only friend,” she burst out. Then she added, “Except for you.”