Them Bones Page 6

  Took and Sunflower hugged each other as Took dropped something into the pipe bag. Then Sunflower turned and put her hand on my shoulder for a moment.

  For some reason I was blushing as we left the hut. The four of us started off at a trot. Looking at snow is one thing. Running through it in moccasins is another.

  *

  I was winded before we’d gone three kilometers. Took hadn’t said anything since we left the hut. He had nothing but his knife and pipe bag with him. I had my bayonet and the short spear and club. Moe and Dreaming Killer looked like they were ready for a short war.

  We headed northwest, away from the river. The snow squeaked and crunched under our feet. Moe, in the lead, was following some path I couldn’t see. I just put my feet in Took’s footprints, one after the other. I pulled my blanket tighter around my shoulders.

  The land around us was totally different under the snow cover. Like something out of a Breughel painting – the sky was a green-gray, the far distance lost in a green smudge of darkness. Pools were slicks of green-gray ice. Snow hung on the tree limbs. Occasional flakes hit me between the eyes.

  Another kilometer on we slowed, coming to one of the five-family hamlets surrounded by fields that were worked only in the summer. Ten or twenty people stood around surveying the devastation.

  Two of the summer huts had been flattened. The place looked like a bulldozer had been through it. The snow and the ground under it had been plowed and churned. A compost heap was scattered, giving ripe steaming odors into the cold air. One of the deep seed-corn burial pits had been torn up. Half the seed was gone, the rest scattered over the village yard. A set of gigantic smudged tracks led into the village from the north and out of the devastation to the west.

  Moe and Dreaming Killer talked with the villagers quietly, then we started off after the big footprints.

  ‘About six bowshots more,’ Took said under his breath. ‘Be very quiet.’

  I was as quiet as I could be, rasping my lungs out in the cold air. The snow was falling a little harder, the sky turning a milky white.

  A man stood in the pathway ahead, pointing to a slight rise, moving his spear slowly to warn us.

  We slowed to a walk, then Moe began a crouching shuffle, and waved Took up the rise beside him. We spread out, Took dropped to the ground, and we crawled the last few meters to the small rise. I started to look up over it, but Moe put a warning hand on my arm.

  There was the sound of breaking and shuffling close by. To me it sounded like a car sliding off an icy road into a ditch.

  Took reached in his bag, pulled out some shaped thing, slowly came to his knees, then stood.

  ‘Oh, old one!’ he said quietly and slowly, so even I could follow each word, ‘I have your spirit, I have your strength in this rock.’ He held up the pipestone. ‘Go your way in peace this time. We will not harm you. But do not come again to our fields, or we will have you.’

  Then he held the pipestone up again and opened his hands toward the far side of the rise. He put the stone back in his bag.

  Moe and Dreaming Killer stood up then. So did I.

  I shouldn’t have. I almost sat back down again.

  Imagine a mountain that has wandered away from its range. A mountain made of brown hair, immense against the sky and the pond. Its hair was red-brown and black, shaggy, and hung all the way down to the ground.

  Its head was four meters from the earth. From its front two long crisscrossing white tusks pointed out and up. Humps of fat rode on its head and the tops of its shoulders. The long snakelike trunk moved from the cracked ice of the pond to its mouth and back again in a slow graceful curve.

  The mouth and ears were hidden in the hair. Only the eyes, black like two pools of tar, showed clearly through.

  It dwarfed everything. The frozen pool and the landscape looked too small to contain it. Nothing that big was alive.

  We stood for a moment before it noticed us. It turned to face us, its tree-trunk legs crunching ice, and stood stock still. So did we.

  It was forty meters away. It raised its trunk and blew out a clot of water in a snorting spray, then made a noise I’ll never forget, half tuba, half diesel, which turned into a bass note that hung on the wind.

  I felt some of the frozen mist from its trunk on my face. I really wanted to run then but couldn’t, any more than you can run in a dream.

  It looked at us with those tar-drop eyes, then turned slowly, oh so slowly, and moved across the shallow end of the pond toward a dark tangle of woods to the west.

  It stopped once, behemoth, leviathan, monster, and raised its trunk and called again, tusks out. It had a red fringe of beard around its mouth, streaked with black and gray. The tusks hung straight out while it trumpeted, three meters from the ground.

  Its call echoed through the woods and the white countryside. There was a crashing of tree limbs and thump of heavy footfalls and it was gone.

  The only sign that it had been there was the broken surface of the pond where chunks of ice washed slowly back and forth.

  It called again, far away, then we heard no more.

  Snow began to hit us in the face, a few flakes at first, then more. The wind picked up. We turned and walked back toward home.

  My heart was as loud as a drum. I wondered why the others couldn’t hear it.

  ‘Not many of those left,’ said Dreaming Killer.

  ‘Damn good thing,’ said Moe.

  Bessie V

  The director showed up a few hours later with the office staff. They came in four trucks and two sedans. The top of the bluff was beginning to look like a Ford dealership.

  The storm threatened. The trench had reached four feet deep on the northwest side of the big mound. Kincaid was poking around in the test cut.

  The director was a small man named Dr Perch. He was nattily dressed in a suit and a floppy-brimmed hat. He wore thick glasses. He had been chairman of the anthropology department since there had been one. (There was a joke that he had held the measuring tape for Squier and Davis when they were researching their Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, which had come out in 1848. That wasn’t true, but he had helped Cyrus Thomas with the Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology, which took up 730 pages of the Twelfth Annual Report of 1890–91. And he had not been in the field since then.)

  Bessie led Dr Perch to the sorting tent. She showed him the equine skulls, the cartridges, the potsherds and the mound profiles. Perch studied them without saying a word.

  Wind whipped through the campsite, the tents shaking like sails on a ship. Across the bayou the storm gathered, like a nightfall in reverse.

  Dr Perch said, ‘Looks like a real blow coming. We’ll go back to the hotel. Make sure everything’s battened down so we can start photographing tomorrow. I’m going to get on the phone to the governor’s office, although he’s on some damn speech-making tour over in Mississippi somewhere. You’d think he’d have more sense than to leave the state after they tried to impeach him five times this spring. He must have all the legislators locked up in the parish jail.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Bessie.

  ‘Keep those damn floodgates closed above and open below, if I can. That’s a start.’

  ‘People are going to be upset if this thing goes wrong,’ she said.

  Perch looked at her over his thick glasses. ‘If this thing goes wrong, and we both know what we mean by that, you, Kincaid, and I are all looking for jobs. I don’t believe this stuff’ – he pointed around the sorting tent – ‘for one minute. But if you and Kincaid and Jameson are putting your jobs on the line, so am I. And I’m too old to look for honest work.’

  Perch and his staff took two of the cars and one truck with them back to town.

  Kincaid called from the mound.

  ‘Bessie, come get me the minute Perch gets here.’

  ‘He’s already gone,’ she yelled to him, then walked down the bluff.

  *

  Kincaid t
ried to light his pipe with one of the big kitchen matches he always carried. Grit flew into Bessie’s eyes; the wind picked up again.

  ‘What did he think?’ asked Kincaid, giving up on the pipe.

  ‘He’s calling the governor about the floodgates.’

  Kincaid laughed. ‘I can see the governor letting farmers drown because of what Perch says. I doubt the governor knew there were Indians in this state once.’

  ‘Where’s Jameson?’ asked Bessie.

  ‘Under the tarp on Mound 2B. He wanted another look before the rain. Who’s that?’

  Bessie looked around where Kincaid stared. Up on the bluff, amid all the activity, one person stood still. Bessie didn’t recognize him as from the staff. He was gazing down at the mounds. He wore a tall-crowned western hat, a dark vest and khaki shirt. His pants were patched. He held a knapsack under one arm.

  ‘The curious are here already,’ said Kincaid. ‘May be one of the LaTouche’s. Better go find out. I’ll take another quick run through the trench before we get the tarps down.’ He sighted toward the storm. A lightning bolt silhouetted the woods on the other side of the water.

  Bessie hurried up toward the tents. She met Washington on the way down.

  ‘Know who that is?’ she asked, pointing at the stranger.

  ‘No, ma’am, but William was talkin’ to him a few minutes ago.’

  William was coming out of the sorting tent.

  ‘Oh, him? He said his name was Bob Basket. He looks just like an Indian to me, Miss Bessie. He said he heard we were tearing up them mounds and wanted to take one last look at them. I told him he could stand right on the edge of the bluff there, but don’t get in anybody’s way, and don’t go down to the mounds. He’s been standing there for an hour or so.’

  There was a frying noise from across the bayou. A gray slab of rain stretched both ways as far as the eye could see. The woods disappeared, and the faraway tin roof of the Crimstead house faded from sight. Then the waters of the Suckatoncha buckled and seethed with rain on the far side.

  ‘Get everything covered up,’ yelled Bessie to the crews on the bluff.

  She ran to check the windows on the office staff trucks. She put one windshield up and snapped the canvas cover in place. A few raindrops the size of fists beat the ground around her, sending up little crowns of dust.

  Thunder screamed close by.

  The wind and rain hit her in level sheets.

  Bessie dove for the nearest tent.

  THE BOX V

  Smith’s Diary

  *

  October 17

  They call us the Music People.

  I never thought about it. In any kind of primitive society, you don’t have music unless you have people making it right then and there. Without music, there’s nothing but natural noises; people talking, birdsongs, squawks, all that.

  That must have been the first thing they noticed about us.

  What we noticed about them first is that they don’t look like movie Indians.

  They’re tattooed, a lot of the ones we’ve seen. They have feathers, but not many birds. A lot of them have shaved heads, the men, that is; the few women we’ve seen have their hair up in a sort of bun or French twist on the top or sides of their heads, keeping it out of the way.

  Their tattoos are weird – circles, lightning bolts, strange designs with hands and tears, skulls, birds, snakes, a sort of three-sided swastika, like a bent Y.

  Their skins range from a dark brown to a very light copper colour. Some of them wear these big ear spools, like those lip things you always used to see Ubangis wear in cartoons, only these stretch their earlobes all out of shape.

  A couple of them have pointy heads, though they seem to be intelligent, not microcephalic at all. From rumor I hear they are from much farther north, people who have married into the tribe we’re dealing with.

  Splevins gave us all a briefing on what we know so far. These people represent one or two villages which belong to a sort of loose-knit bigger tribe, on both sides of the Mississippi. They are pretty advanced in the arts (I’ve seen some of their handiwork; it’s beautiful in a strange kind of way) and minor sciences (they work metal cold, they have flood-irrigation agriculture, mainly corn, beans, and squash) and are at peace with everyone for fifty kilometers in all directions.

  From best guesses, they speak a sort of pronto-Muskeogan language among themselves, and have a well-developed sign language with which to communicate with others (and us). They worship various totem animals (this tribe is part of the larger Turtle clan) and they have a matriarchially descended chief system. (They call their chiefs Sun Men, because they worship the sun; these Sun Men are both spiritual and active leaders of the villages. Their most important Sun Man, who lives some thirty kilometers away, they call the Sun King, which conjures up visions of Louis the XIVth with tattoos and feathers.) They have great reverence for their dead, whom they place in mounds of earth, raised around the cremated (in the case of nobles) or buried remains of the dead.

  (There seems to be another religious movement within the larger one having to do with the actual worship of death itself – hence all the tattoos with the tears, hands, eyes and snakes. We learned that about half of each of the villages belongs to this death cult.)

  Some of their mounds are twenty meters high, great ceremonial places with temples atop them, for the big sun worships each year. Mostly the mounds are within their villages or just outside them. The ones outside they bury the dead in; those inside are for the temples.

  Splevins and Putnam have actually seen the Indians’ village – they went yesterday. Then they came back and gave us the briefing.

  They are an industrious clean people, who should be able to help us in many ways, and we them.

  The bad news is that we are the only black or white people they have ever seen. No Nordics, no one who could be thought of as Spanish or French, no Irish, no Chinese. The only other peoples they know about (aside from their large confederation) are some hunting tribes who live far to the northwest, who they trade with once a year in the summer, and a couple of emissaries (who sound a lot like Mexican Amerindians to Splevins) who drop by every three years or so to tell them what a good thing they have going way down south.

  They have never seen horses before.

  They have never seen iron or steel, though they do work with copper and gold.

  Splevins is of the inescapable conclusion that we are in some time before the European discovery of America.

  (It would take a CIA man that long to realize it.)

  We have missed the mark by 400 years, maybe more. We are stuck in this past, unless they figure out something Up There in 2002.

  Well, now we have a 400year head start on the future, rather than only seventy. Time for SDO duty.

  PS: The Indians seem to like In the Mood best when they visit.

  Leake VI

  ‘To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia.’

  –Browne, The Guardian of Cyrus, 1658

  Sun Man woke up the world like he always did.

  ‘Yee-Yeee-Yee!’ he yelled from his housemound, just as the edge of the sun peeked over the woods from the far side of the River.

  I had been awake a few minutes; something in my body always woke me up before the old man screamed bloody murder every day. Took-His-Time and sunflower stirred in their skins. It was late winter, almost spring. The trees were beginning to bud, though this far south they’d only lost the last of their leaves two months before.

  The sap was rising in everything, including me.

  ‘Has he ever missed a morning?’ I asked Sunflower as she got up. Her figure was back after the pregnancy that had ended the night of the tornado.

  ‘Not yet,’ she said. She went out to perform her matutinal ablutions.

  ‘Once,’ said Took from his skins, ‘we thought he was going to meet the Woodpecker. He had them prop h
im up in a doorway. He didn’t make much of a noise when he yelled, but he did wake up the people next to the plaza. Then he got well again. That was ten years ago.’

  ‘What happens if Sun Man doesn’t yell?’

  ‘The sun doesn’t come up,’ said Took. ‘Is all your stuff ready?’

  Two weeks before, Took had been rummaging in his pile, then looked at me and said, ‘Time to go to the Hill.’

  ‘Shit Hill?’ I asked. Took didn’t usually make a big deal of things like that.

  ‘No. Pipe Hill. Five days up the River. If you’re going to be a pipemaker you’ll have to learn sometime. See some country, lug some big rocks around, break your fingers, stuff like that.’

  ‘Well, things have been pretty dull since the Old One came around. When do we go?’

  ‘Winter’s usually dull,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘Spring’s coming; lots to do then. Flower Wars. The traders come back. Planning. The Black Drink Ceremony, the Woodpecker Dance, then harvest. The year’ll fairly fly. This will be the last chance to get new pipestone for seven, eight months. I’m running out of effigy stuff.’

  ‘Like you used for the Old One’s spirit?’

  ‘Just the stuff. Hell, there can’t be more than four or five of those things left. But sometimes we get bears, sometimes buffalo come so thick and we kill so many you yarp when you smell bison meat, that I have to drive them away. The paroquets and the pigeons. There’s nothing better than a couple of dozen paroquets for supper, but after a week or so they’ve eaten your fields up. So I have to make a paroquet pipe so they’ll leave.’

  ‘Can’t you just use what you’ve got here?’ One whole corner of the hut was filled with fist-sized stones.

  ‘Uh, no,’ he said. ‘For pipes, I could use sumac root if I wanted to, burn a guy’s lips right off. But for the effigy stuff, I need certain kinds of stone. Don’t ask. Trade secret. I’ll have to show you when we get there.

  That was two weeks ago. This morning we were leaving, which is why Took asked about my gear.

  I started to ask him about getting the rocks back down the river, when Sunflower came back in. She kicked us on the bottoms of our feet.