Close to midday, they turned due south, and in an hour’s time, the ponies were standing at the top of a long slope which fell away for a mile until it reached the river.
They could see the color and shape of the water far to the east and west. But in front of them, the river had disappeared.
It was screened by a mammoth forest.
Dances With Wolves blinked several times, as if trying to solve a mirage. From this distance, it was hard to judge exact heights, but he knew that the trees were high. Some of them must be sixty or seventy feet.
The grove extended downriver for the better part of a mile, the hugeness of it contrasting wildly with the flat, empty country on all sides. It was like the fanciful creation of some mysterious spirit.
“Is this place real?” he said, half joking.
Kicking Bird smiled.
“Perhaps not. It is a sacred place to us . . . even to some of our enemies. It is said that from here the game renews itself. The trees shelter every animal the Great Spirit has made. It is said they hatched here when life began and constantly return to the place of their birth. I have not been here for a long time. We will water the horses and have a look.”
As they came closer, the specter of the woods became more powerful, and on starting into the forest, Dances With Wolves felt small. He thought of the Garden of Eden.
But as the trees closed around them, both men sensed that something was wrong.
There was no sound.
“It’s quiet,” Dances With Wolves observed.
Kicking Bird didn’t reply. He was listening and watching with the single-mindedness of a cat.
The silence was suffocating as they pressed deeper into the woods, and Dances With Wolves realized with a shiver that only one thing could make this vacuum of sound. He was smelling its aroma. The taste of it was on the tip of his tongue.
Death was in the air.
Kicking Bird pulled up suddenly. The path had widened, and as Dances With Wolves looked over his mentor’s shoulder, he was staggered by the beauty of what he saw.
There was open ground ahead of them. The trees were spaced at intervals, allowing enough room between to house all the lodges and people and horses of Ten Bears’s camp. Sunlight poured onto the forest’s floor in great, warming splotches.
He could envision a fantastic utopia, peopled with a holy race leading tranquil lives in concert with all living things.
The hand of man could make nothing to rival the scope and beauty of this open-air cathedral.
The hand of man, however, could destroy it. The proof was already here.
The place had been horribly desecrated.
Trees of all sizes lay where they had been felled, some of them lying one over the other, like toothpicks scattered upon a tabletop. Most of them had not been shorn of their branches, and he could not imagine for what purpose they had been cut.
They started their ponies forward, and as they did, Dances With Wolves was aware of an eerie buzzing sound.
At first, thinking that bees or wasps were swarming, he scanned the branches overhead, trying to locate the insects’ nest.
But as they moved toward the center of the cathedral, he realized the noise was not coming from above. It was coming from below. And it was being made by the wing beats of uncounted thousands of feasting flies.
Everywhere he looked the ground held bodies, or pieces of bodies. There were small animals, badgers and skunks and squirrels. Most of these were intact. Some were missing their tails. They lay rotting where they had been shot, for no apparent reason other than target practice.
The primary objects of the genocide were deer that sprawled all around him. A few of the bodies were whole, minus only the prime cuts. Most were mutilated.
Dull, dead eyes stared up at him from the exquisite heads that had been chopped off raggedly at the neck. Some of them sat singly on the floor of the forest. Others had been tossed together haphazardly in piles as big as half a dozen.
In one spot, the severed heads had been arranged nose to nose, as if they were having a conversation. It was supposed to be humorous.
The legs were even more grotesque. They, too, had been chopped clear of the bodies they once transported. Slow to decay, they looked bright and beautiful, as if they were still in good working order.
But it was sad: the delicate, cloven hooves and the graceful, fur-coated legs . . . leading to nowhere. The limbs were stacked in little bunches, like firewood, and if he had bothered, the count would have exceeded one hundred.
The men were tired from the long ride, but neither made any move to get off his horse. They continued to ride.
A low spot in the great clearing revealed four decrepit shanties sitting side by side, four ugly sores festering on the forest floor.
The men who had cut down so many trees had apparently seen their ambition as builders run out. But even if they had applied themselves, the result would likely have been the same. The dwellings they’d managed to put up were squalid even in their conception.
By any standard, it was not a fit place to live.
Whiskey bottles, dropped as they were drained, lay in profusion around the awful huts. There was a multitude of other useless items, a broken cup, a half-repaired belt, the shattered stock of a rifle, all left where they were dropped.
A brace of wild turkeys, tied together at the feet but otherwise untouched, were discovered on the ground between two huts.
Behind the buildings, they found a wide pit, filled to overflowing with the putrid torsos of slaughtered deer, skinless, legless, and headless.
The buzzing of flies was so loud that Dances With Wolves had to shout to be heard.
“We wait for these men?”
Kicking Bird didn’t want to shout. He sidled his pony next to Dances With Wolves.
“They have been gone a week, maybe more. We will water the horses and go home.”
For the first hour of the return trip, neither man uttered a word. Kicking Bird stared ahead sorrowfully while Dances With Wolves watched the ground, shamed for the white race to which he belonged and thinking hard about the dream he’d had in the ancient canyon.
He’d told no one about it, but now he felt he had to. Now it didn’t seem so much a dream after all. It might be a vision.
When they stopped to give the horses a blow, he told Kicking Bird of the dream that was still fresh in his mind, sparing none of the details.
The medicine man listened to Dances With Wolves’s long recounting without interruption. When it was finished he stared somberly at his feet.
“All of us were dead?”
“Everyone that was present,” Dances With Wolves said, “but I didn’t see everyone. I didn’t see you.”
“Ten Bears should hear the dream,” Kicking Bird said.
They jumped back on the horses and made quick time across the prairie, arriving back in camp shortly after sunset.
The two men made their report on the desecration of the sacred grove, a deed that could only have been the work of a large, white hunting party. The dead animals in the forest were undoubtedly a sideline. The hunters were probably after buffalo and would be decimating them on a much bigger scale.
Ten Bears nodded a few times as the report was made. But he asked no questions.
Then Dances With Wolves recited his grisly dream a second time.
The old man still said nothing, his expression inscrutable as ever. When Dances With Wolves had finished, he made no comment. Instead, he picked up his pipe and said, “Let us have a smoke on this.”
Dances With Wolves had the notion that Ten Bears was thinking all of it through, but as they passed the pipe around, he became impatient, anxious to get something off his chest.