Them Bones Read online

  To the north there was a slope down to where the bayou should be. But the water wasn’t there. I could see it through the trees, about a kilometer away.

  The bluff extended behind me to east and west.

  The sun was bright. A light wind blew through the grass. There was a sound in the air like a waterfall, very far away. The elevation of this whole part of the state isn’t more than twenty-five meters. The sound couldn’t be a waterfall.

  My first job was to secure the area and get out of the way. I threw down the panel marker, pointing northeast, and unlimbered the thirty-cal carbine. A lot of stuff was going to come through the portal in a minute – one hundred forty people, horses, wagons, domestic animals, generators, supplies.

  I pulled the horse forward. There were no signs of habitation around. If there were, it would be up to somebody to make excuses. So I don’t have to scoop out a foxhole. Or start explaining to CCC people who I was and where I came from, or what the other hundred and forty people were doing coming out of midair.

  The waterfall sound became louder and changed from a quiet roar to a different sound, a drumming whir. I looked to the south, where it seemed to be coming from.

  At first I thought it was a tornado and that I was a dead man. A cloud was coming toward me out of the bright sky, and coming fast. But it was thin, and it wasn’t a cloud. It was a wave of birds, a tsunami. I stood transfixed. I had never seen as many birds as this. The column must be a kilometer wide, twenty meters tall. It stretched back out of sight to the southern horizon.

  Then the first of them shot overhead, sleek winged shapes – doves? Then more and more, and the flapping became a roar again.

  The horse skittered.

  The flapping birds were so thick they blotted out the sun. A moving dark shadow covered the clearing and the woods. Thousands of them flew over each second, a couple of hundred meters up. The column stretched southward as far as I could see. Over they went, tiny feathered rockets, moving a hundred kilometers an hour. They never thinned out enough for the sun to show through.

  It started to snow. It looked like snow at first, white flakes that swirled down. Then they hit me and the horse, whose flanks twitched with each tiny impact. It wasn’t snow, it was feces. Little warm lumps that came down in a blizzard. The smell was overpowering. I grabbed the reins and pulled the horse toward the shelter of the nearest tree.

  What a reception this was going to be for Spaulding and the others. They would step through the portal into semi-darkness and a shit storm. Jesus, the guys who planned this operation never took that into account.

  I pulled the horse under the tree. Good thing I hadn’t taken the blinders off it. The birds moved overhead, a rippling of dark and lightness against the sky. Their tapered wings pumped and moved, and still the flock stretched north and south without end. The roar was deafening.

  I watched them, and patted the horse to reassure it, and kept an eye on the time portal. The others should have already come through. I waited.

  *

  And waited and waited.

  I couldn’t believe it. I’d been there two hours by the watch and no one else had made it. Something was wrong, up there in the future.

  The birds were still flying overhead. I’d almost gotten used to the smell and the noise. The ground, the trees, looked like the first flurries of winter had come. Everything was covered with little mottled white and gray lumps.

  The birds looked like doves, but they were bluish-brown and had reddish breasts. When I saw that, I realized how very wrong things had gone up there in the future.

  I knew there weren’t this many birds in the world. A column a kilometer across, twenty meters deep, moving overhead at 100 kph, for two hours. I’m not good at maths, but that should be at least a billion.

  There aren’t that many birds in the world, but there used to be.

  I had seen the last passenger pigeon when I was in Washington eight years ago (when there used to be a Washington). Her name was Martha and she was stuffed. She died on September 1, 1914, when so many things were dying, like the Victorian era.

  I also remembered something from my Mississippi childhood. On the Natchez Trace Parkway there was a place we sometimes picnicked. It was called Pigeon Roost Creek. A huge area with a shattered forest. Large trees with branches all broken off. A flock of passenger pigeons had roosted there more than a century before. There were so many of them they broke down the trees in a thirty-square-kilometer area.

  Those were passenger pigeons overhead. Billions of them. There hadn’t been any big flocks for twenty years when Martha, last of her species, died. I remember something about a big hailstorm killing most of the last large flock (after the birds had been hunted and trapped by the millions for a century and a half) in the 1880s.

  So this was at most the year 1894.

  The Project Scientists had been trying for the 1930s. Off by fifty years, perhaps. But the maps we’d studied said the road, as poor as it was, was built in the 1870s.

  Was I as far back as the Civil War era?

  And where was everybody? Why hadn’t anyone come through the portal? What was wrong?

  *

  A moment of existential fear, then it passed.

  I’m Madison Yazoo Leake. I was not new at this sort of thing. I was in the Cyprus War ten years ago, in ’92. (If you want to call what I did being in war – interrogating Cypriots in internment camps. I never pulled a trigger, thank god, except on the firing range.)

  I was from a bombed-out time in which everybody would eventually die from radiation, from disease, from chemicals. I, we, the Special Group, were on a last-chance attempt to keep the human species of the Earth from dying out completely. We were transported through the magic of unperfected, barely tested, one-way time travel, ostensibly to the past, where we hoped to stop World War III before it started. I was, in effect, a point man. (I was a draftee in the Cyprus War, and everybody was a draftee in WW III.)

  I still think coming to the past to stop the war involves a time paradox. I mentioned this the other day to one of the Project Scientists.

  ‘What if we do change everything?’ I’d asked. ‘What if there is no war? What if we make it so you were never born?’

  ‘What’ll you care?’ she said. ‘You’ll still be alive.’

  Which, as far as I understood it, was true.

  So here I was, covered with passenger pigeon excrement (it brushes off after it dries, but I still needed a bath, fairly soon), waiting for the rest of the Special Group to come through.

  The flock overhead was thinning. The sun shone more and more through the whirring pigeon overcast. Then it came out in its glory, and only a few stragglers jetted across its face.

  The horse and I were left in a stinking winter wonderland.

  I waited for the others to appear in the time gate.

  *

  For four days.

  Something had gone very, very, very wrong. I was alone here. I had enough food for two weeks, but after that I was going to have to go the roots and berries and local wildlife route. And it looked like summer was going here.

  I began to view this as a survival exercise which might last the rest of my life.

  I was scared.

  I’d been as far as a kilometer from the panel marker, to the bayou on the north. Where, on the second day, I had bathed, but washing here is like bathing in Comet cleanser. I had come out wet but gritty.

  I’d hobbled the horse and let it graze along the side of the woods, where the sun-hardened pigeon dung hadn’t covered everything.

  I had never seen so many birds and animals as I had in the last few days. Rabbits, squirrels, quail, deer, field mice. I’d heard something that squealed, and something that coughed, but nothing vaguely human. Birds hopped through the branches of the trees in riotous profusion: bluebirds, cardinals, thrushes, red-winged blackbirds, meadowlarks. Going the nuts and berries and local wildlife route wouldn’t be as bad as I had figured.

  That left
me with a couple of tough questions. Did I stay here and wait for the others, who might never come? Did I try to find other people, find out when I was, and get to Baton Rouge? I couldn’t change history by myself.

  Had the machine malfunctioned and put me down years before the others? Worse yet, years after they had come through? We had an alternate rendezvous point in Baton Rouge. What if there wasn’t a Baton Rouge yet?

  In the last two cases I’d be on my own, anyway. This whole operation had been carefully planned for everything except this. My first job had been to go through and wave off anything coming toward the time portal. I would have had other jobs in the days that followed, but they hadn’t figured on me disappearing, or no one else making it across.

  I really didn’t need this grief. I’d seen enough the last six weeks, up there in 2002, to last me a long, long time.

  Find people, that’s what I wanted to do.

  So I made the decision. I wrote a note and left it on the panel marker. I remembered my pathfinder training, so I would notch all the trees, in case other stragglers like me showed up. The note said I was going to follow Suckatoncha Bayou downstream to the Mississippi River, and then onward to Baton Rouge.

  For that was my plan.

  *

  On my maps, the Suckatoncha Bayou went north, then eastsoutheast. Flowed is not the proper word. Most people think bayous are stagnant swamps. They are swampy, but they do flow, slowly. We didn’t have a name for them when I was growing up in Mississippi, for they are found nowhere but Louisiana and southern Arkansas. Great flat stretches of water, full of stumps and snags; the confluence of many small creeks and channels, but the land is so flat they spread out for miles.

  The Suckatoncha was not where it was supposed to be. The horse and I went to its margin. Then I mounted up, and we plodded along.

  I never liked horses. I still don’t. When I was a kid, everybody wanted one. Except me. This one didn’t like me, and was too skittish.

  When the Special Group decided to go into the past, it chose horsepower over vehicles. (Same reason we were all armed with .30 caliber weapons rather than the standard 7.62 mm rifles. If we’d landed where we should have, the 1930s or ’40s, .30-cal ammunition would be much easier to find.) This was backwoods Louisiana, which had barely entered the Bronze Age by 1930. Horses would not have attracted much attention. They could also reproduce themselves and needed no spare parts.

  For a few hours we clopped along the mushy ground of the bayou’s edge. The bayou tended almost due east. It would empty into the Mississippi, but some kilometers north of where it should, according to the map.

  Either my compass was broken, or I was in much worse trouble than I had ever conceived. We’d seen maps all the way back to the French occupation of this area in the late 1600s. The Bayou always flowed eastsoutheast and emptied into the Mississippi within a couple of kilometers of its (2002 A.D.) site.

  For the last 320 years.

  It took a long time for a waterway to change its course by that many kilometers. I must be stranded far, far into the past of this country.

  If the group is back here, they’re going to have to get ready for a long haul. It won’t be just the work of a lifetime changing history. It will be the work of generations. They’ll never see to completion what they set in motion. They’ll never know.

  If they’re here somewhere with me.

  At sundown, I stopped for the night on a point of high ground (about a meter high). There was a little breeze there, but I knew the mosquitoes (some the size of damsel flies) would come soon. As frogs and other unnamed denizens started an ungodly chorus, I rummaged through my lurp bags for chow.

  *

  On the morning of the fifth day I came across a game trail in the pine needles. Since it skirted the margin of the swamp, I followed it.

  Out on the waters, alligators the size of culvert pipes were basking in the sun along rotted logs. This morning as I pissed in the water an eight-foot cottonmouth swam by searching for frogs. Last night the noises the frogs made were unbelievable. Most of the animals seemed unafraid, only mildly wary. I thought of having frog legs for supper tonight.

  A little while ago I had come upon a huge heron wading near the shore. It began to run, unfolding its wings, and began to lift itself from the water. I thought it would take forever. Then it tucked in its neck, lifted its huge legs, and spread its blue wings on the air. And was gone.

  Near noon I came across a footprint on the game path. I stopped the horse. There are people here, at least. I’m not in some dim Holocene past. The print is light and has only the single outline of the sole. So we are dealing with Amerindians, or Cajuns, or a guy in his house slippers.

  Now it is my turn to be wary. I speak no Amerindian dialects. (My grandfather was a Choctaw and my great-grandmother a Chickasaw. But they were the Choctaws and Chickasaws who weren’t removed in the 1800s, but the ones who owned slaves and voted and lived in brick houses. I doubted anyone in my family had spoken a native dialect for a century or more. I look Indian, high cheekbones, small hint of epicanthic folds, but I paid little attention to that while growing up. Besides, I doubt Choctaw or Chickasaw would do me any good on this side of the big river.) French? This is, after all, Louisiana, I can’t even find a bathroom in French. Some Spanish. If I’m lucky, this is after De Soto’s trip through here, and maybe they’ll speak some Spanish. My Greek will do me about as much good as tits on a boar shoat. English. There’s always English. Gestures? I never studied either Amerindian or American Sign Language.

  Maybe this is just a guy in his house shoes. Maybe I’m not stranded in some unthinkable past. Maybe when I go to the river there’ll be steamboats and riverboat gamblers and telephones and cars.

  Not a chance, with the bayou running straight east as an arrow into the Mississippi River.

  Madison Yazoo Leake, you are on your own.

  *

  It was later and I was bathing in a creek which came out of the pines and emptied into the bayou. I had been following the footprints for a couple of hours and they looked no fresher to me. It was warm and muggy.

  I had no liking for the snakes and alligators, or the silty waters of the bayou. So when I found this clear water, I was ready to clean up. The water was only half a meter deep and a meter across where I bathed. The water was cool, refreshing. I had cleaned every orifice twice. I had soaped and rinsed and now I was soaking, watching my belly hairs float.

  The horse whinnied.

  I turned.

  They stood watching me: Larry, Curly, and Moe.

  Except that these three were nearly naked. They wore breechcloths. They had bows, arrows, spears and clubs. They had feathers in their hair and pearls around their necks.

  My heart stopped.

  ‘Nah Sue Day Ho,’ said Moe.

  He didn’t really look much like Moe, except that his hair hung in bangs on the front and he had a small pot belly and bandy legs. Larry didn’t look much like Larry, except that his hair was pulled up into two knots, one over each ear, his nose was large and he was the skinniest of the three.

  Curly looked just like Curly. He was stout, built like a gorilla, and his head was shaved. He was tattooed all over – round circles, bands of blue and green. A swastika curved over his navel.

  All three wore ornaments the size of teacups in their earlobes.

  ‘Nah Sue Day Ho,’ Moe repeated.

  My first impression was going away. There were three Amerinds here, and they were armed. Each had a couple of rabbits and some squirrels tied to their loincloths with rawhide thongs.

  ‘Nah Sue Day Ho,’ Moe said. I didn’t know if it were a question, a greeting, a warning. Their faces were impassive. A very unfunny Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr Howard.

  ‘Hello,’ I said and held up my right hand in greeting, palm out. That was supposed to be universal. As I did so I slid up out of the water and stood, my left hand finding the buttplate of the carbine.

  As I stood, their eyes widened a littl
e and they looked at my crotch. I resisted the temptation to look down. It was probably an old trick.

  ‘Hello,’ I said again, then ‘Friend.’ I didn’t know whether I wanted to be friends with them or not. I just didn’t want a fight. I was ashamed of myself for letting them walk right up on me.

  ‘Cue Way No Hay?’ asked Moe. His eyes went to my crotch again, then back to my face. ‘Ho Gway din Now.’

  ‘Amigos!’ I said. ‘Como se llama?’

  ‘Cue Way Ho Nay?’ Moe asked, his face twisting. Curly held a big war club with a ball and a single big spike on the end of it. I’d seen clubs like that in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton.

  The horse made another rude noise. The three jumped, then looked over at it. I felt better about myself then. It must have been behind the bushes when they came up, and they hadn’t seen it. Their eyes really got wide then. They turned to face it. They made noises among themselves.

  I pulled the carbine up with my left hand (I’m a lefty) while keeping my right hand up and open.

  ‘Bu Show Mo Toy?’ asked Moe.

  ‘Condo Ku Moy no-hat?’ asked Curly.

  ‘Moy Doe!’ said Larry, hefting his spear and looking toward the horse.

  The horse stamped turf into the air. It was upset.

  ‘Cue Way No Hay?’ asked Moe again. ‘Cue-Way-No-Hay?’ he asked slowly, as if repeating it for a child.

  Larry was the one I was worried about. He was going to do something to the horse soon. I was afraid he was going to spear it.

  ‘Amigos,’ I said. ‘Friends. Hello.’ My mind wasn’t working at all.

  Curly moved back from the horse. He said something to Moe.

  I had to do something.

  I fired the carbine once, into the air.

  I don’t know what reaction I expected: fear, wonderment, anger. It wasn’t what I got.

  ‘Ah Muy nu-ho,’ said Moe, shrugging his shoulders. He made a deprecatory gesture with his hands, as if giving up on me.

  The horse tried to pull away from the tree I’d tied it to. The eyes of the three rolled a little. Who was afraid of a horse but not a gun?

  I looked toward the horse.