The counter presented a uniform coating. Nothing had disturbed the dust, not a fingerprint, not a smudge, a smear or a drop of something. No one had tended to a patron for many weeks, the gray talc-like substance told Harland as much.
A revolving stool took Harland’s poundage, the counter his elbows. The weight of his head seemed suddenly too great to support; he lowered his forehead into his hands to seek relief from the burden.
Chapter One Hundred-Fifteen
Thrusting its massive head side to side, a heavy bull bison shoved away a foot of snow so that it could get at the prairie grasses on the Alberta plains east of Stand-off Creek. When it had cleared a swath, it cropped the plants and chewed slowly in a bid to keep full its huge four-chambered stomach.
Benjamin White Elk advanced on the buffalo, one of hundreds in the fine North Piegan tribal herd taking up winter residence low in the river drainage. The great creature kept its wooly head and shoulders into the blustery wind, an ancient strategy that saved the animal precious energy during long winter months. White Elk approached from upwind, and the animal soon caught the scent of the human and raised its head to see what possessed such a strange odor. A two-legged creature had managed to close within twenty feet. The burley bison blinked.
“Don’t you worry yourself, iinii,” White Elk called out to the animal. “I have come to talk, just to talk.” The bull stood perfectly still, its barrel chest rising and falling and clouds of white vapor exhausting from its nose. “We are old friends, you and I. We have known each other forever. So you are in good company.”
The bull snorted loudly and turned its head to focus one eye on White Elk and to see if others of its kind were still near. It began to chew its cud, a good sign. It did not seem to be troubled.
“My people, buffalo, they used to be tied to you, like a mother is tied to her child by the cord at birth. Where you went, we went. When you rested, we rested. When you drank at the river, we drank. It was like that, once. We were inseparable.
“What happened to us, huh? We were both lost, you and I. The Europeans separated us. We have been wandering ever since. They changed the world long ago. But no more, iinii. No more.”
White Elk’s clothing chattered loudly in the icy wind, but he was comfortable in the teeth of the weather. It was a clean cold, free of the gray dust. The bison was immune to the sharp wind-chill.
“There is something you should know, my old friend. The world has changed again. There is a place many days from here. Yellowstone, it is called. It spits fire and rock dust over the earth and hides the sun. This early cold, it comes from that place. The whitefaces who stepped between you and me long ago, they are leaving this country now. They cannot live here without their cheeseburgers, their soda, the gasoline, and the foolish television. Yellowstone is driving them away.
“But we can live here, you and me. We can return to the life of the old ones, to the old ways. We have a chance to live as we always did, when there were ten thousand of you for every one of us.”
The bull pawed the ground and rammed its head into the snow. When it brought its head up, it was heavily coated with white fluff.
“I know this will come to be, iinii. The ponoká, the one for which I am named, he came to me and told me. He told me that you and I will live side by side again.”
The massive ungulate shook its great hump. Snow cascaded from its hide. When it finished freeing itself of its white mantle, the bison resumed its vigil of the two-legged creature.
“What do you think of that, iinii? You let me know when you can, huh? I’ll be here. I’ll wait for your answer. I am very patient.”
Chapter One Hundred-Sixteen
Nose pressed against a plate glass window, the logo Ester’s Cafe stenciled across it, Winnie discovered a lone figure in the interior seated at a counter. The foodstuffs unloaded and stored in the brewery, she and Abel sought to find the farmer and other Sweetly residents. They followed a single line of fresh boot-heel prints in the ash into town and up to a storefront.
The sound of muffled footsteps at the threshold of the restaurant roused the slender character at the counter. Harland freed his skull from his hands, wiped his eyes with a sleeve of his jacket, but stared ahead, his emaciated reflection returning to him by way of the backboard mirror behind the coffee percolators and frappe glasses.
“Karen works here,” the farmer whispered to his newfound audience, relieved that that he had been discovered and there was someone to actually talk to. “She makes lousy coffee, always did, but I didn’t care. Did you ever have a cup of her coffee?
“No, Mr. Sven,” said Winnie.
“Known Karen all my life. I wish she was behind the counter. I’d order my two eggs over easy, a side of ham—real slab of ham off the bone, not that pressed-pig cardboard—three slices of wheat toast, dark, butter heavy. That’s what I’d have. And she’d know. If I said, ‘Karen, I want the big spread this morning,’ she’d know exactly what I meant. She never screwed it up, never.
“Before this Yellowstone thing hit, she told me she’d won big on a scratch ticket. She’d been buying those damn things every week for as long as they’ve been printing them, and she finally hits it, a hundred bucks. Probably cost her fifty times that over the years just to make that little wad.”
Abruptly, Harland rotated on the stool, sweeping dust off the counter with his trailing arms. “I want things back that way.” He dribbled the words out. “We had a town here, a good place, a damn good one. Where’d everybody go, eh? You see anybody?”
“We haven’t, no, Harland,” Abel admitted as he joined Winnie.
“Well, ain’t that ironic as hell. You come to my town, you move my corn out of the silos, and now, Christ, there’s no one here to eat it.”
The farmer topped off his lungs with air and blew a cough across the counter, sending a wave of fine dust toward the mirror, enough to blot out his own image.
“My people been here seven generations. You? You’ve been here just a few years. Why is your godforsaken place getting on fine on the bluffs, eh? Why has this town of mine fallen to hell?
“I can’t answer you, Harland.”
“It don’t make no sense. It’s like God is smiling down on you people.”
Harland rotated from the counter stool, straightened his legs and strode for the door. Abel held up a hand in front of the man to slow his exit. “Harland, you’re welcome to come back to the bluffs.”
Harland shook his head. “I’m staying put right here.”
Abel let the farmer pass to the street. “We’ll be back for more loads of grain over the next few days. We need to move what we can before the lake freezes tight. See if you can rally some of your people so we can be of some help to them. We packed the food in the brewery, okay, like we said we would. You need to get townspeople in there. Get them something to eat. Will you do that? Will you?”
The man licked dust from his lips. “I’ll get them what they need.”
“That’s good, Harland.”
The farmer left Ester’s, pacing eastward toward LaPerle’s supermarket, hollow and shuttered against the cold.
Chapter One Hundred-Seventeen
From a helicopter pilot’s perspective, Liz appeared as a miniscule animated dot balanced on the rim of the underworld. The geophysicist frowned as the tiny blue and white USGS aircraft approached from the south; she did not want it to touch down. Liz and others in the research party would have to board the thing and be whisked away. She didn’t want to leave the rim of the new Yellowstone crater yet, the caldera stretching so far away to the dark smoking east that she could not see the horizon.