“A single volcanic event is the agent that triggered all those horrors?” Wesley crowed. “Can you imagine that?”
“That’s the position Keys stakes out,” Womack replied.
Yardley snapped off his computer. He looked like he’d had enough for one night. All were haggard, faces hangdog after a long day consulting and crunching numbers.
“Yellowstone could inflict that sort of trauma, and then some,” the CVO director offered.
“Oh, so that’s why Yellowstone’s nickname is ‘the beast?’” Liz muttered.
The fellow with the graphic Midas touch shoved his chair away from his computer and glanced at Liz. “Oh, Yellowstone is the beast, all right,” noted Yardley.
“We all call it by that moniker,” Womack explained, “and have for quite some time.”
“Sounds fitting,” Liz opined.
“That it is. The beast. Huh.” Yardley paused for a second, massaged his eyeballs, and turned to Liz. “One fine day, Ms. Embree, old man Yellowstone is going to kick, ah, beaucoup derrieres. Please, pardon my French.”
Chapter Twenty
Scraping lichen from rock at the foot of Head Smashed-In cliff, Benjamin White Elk stuffed a wad into his mouth. He moistened the coarse growth with saliva and let the mixture bathe his inflamed throat. The old remedy concocted millennia ago and handed down by generations lost in time was all the curative White Elk would accept.
Before the snows came to lock down the country for the winter, the Blackfoot elder crossed the border into Alberta, Canada, and motored north a few miles, entering the territory of the North Piegan tribe, one of the four major branches of the Blackfoot Federation. Through a whistling wind he drove, bumping about on the prairie, heading toward a sixty-foot escarpment chiseled out of the landscape by relentless prairie zephyrs and line storms uncounted.
White Elk returned to Head Smashed-In each year to restore himself to spiritual wholeness. He pulled off the dirt lane and brought the old truck to a halt. On legs stinging with arthritis, the Blackfoot elder walked to the base of a sandstone drop. The tribe’s ancestors had relied on this sacred spot, this buffalo jump, for their existence long before the horse was introduced to the North American plains.
White Elk collected more lichen and ran his hands over and under the rocks, feeling for relics of old. He touched something sharp and paused to unearth the object. It was an obsidian spear point, buried under rocks tumbled in a soil slide sometime in the deep past but now eroded out of its burial chamber by recent rains. He held it to his face and examined it at length. The edges were as keen as the day it was fashioned.
The spear point conjured images of what the cliff floor must have been like during the autumn buffalo drives. Panicked by the native peoples, and funneled through a corridor of stone cairns and men and women waving flaps of buffalo hide, the burly buffalo stampeded, many animals breaking rank along the fringe of a vast herd carpeting the plains to the horizon. Each creature, blindly following the one in front, ran up the gentle sloping incline to the edge of the jump, tearing up the tough prairie sod as it went. One stride too many and the earth dropped away completely. The great animals hurtled into space and fell to the killing floor far below. Many died on impact, their armored skulls crushed, their neck vertebrae separated. A few survived the tumble, landing on the bodies of the first bison to fall.
Men, women and children ran into the pile with lances and knives. Every animal that was injured had to be dispatched quickly. The people feared that if even one buffalo was able to get to its feet and run, it would tell the members of the great herds about the secret of the jump and the bison would no longer come to area to graze for fear of being stampeded and killed by the two-legged ones.
White Elk had only the vivid words of oral history to sketch out the details of the ritual work that followed the buffalo jump. All day people gathered among the dead and dying buffalo. They hefted knives to lance an artery in the throat of each beast to drain the blood. Great pools of scarlet stained the earth and the feet of the Blackfoot. They hurriedly slit the skin along the belly and down the inside of each leg, then laboriously peeled the hides from the carcasses, pulling the heavy robes clear and out to the grass so they could be flensed, cleaned of flesh residue and fat.
The meat from the dead beasts was jerked, pulled in thin sliced strips from the carcasses and draped over long drying racks of branch wood. Other strips were placed on racks built over cool smoky fires kept going for many days. The clouds of smoke dried and cured the meat to ensure a steady supply of protein in late winter and spring. Bones had to be cracked, shattered and pulled apart and the marrow inside scooped out and processed. It was much prized, being full of rich fat energy and divine in flavor.
The work was strenuous. The Blackfoot labored deep into the evening each day and arose early each morning to begin anew. No work that they could take on during the year was more important. Their lives were inexorably linked to the beasts. The meat had to be dried down. The hides had to be scraped and worked so they would be supple. Sinew and gut had to be carefully cut, stretched and dried. It could be used for every purpose imaginable, from sewing leggings and footwear to stringing bows and stitching teepee coverings tightly together to keep out cold and damp weather.
Within a week, the great task was complete and the food removed to the temporary village, hauled in to the buffalo jump just for this purpose. Now the meat could be stored for winter and the fall and grasslands near the village exploited for tubers, roots, late-year greens, seeds and herbs.
The buffalo jump had served the Blackfoot well, White Elk knew. His people, little beings standing erect but only on two feet, had been masters of the great buffalo herds, of animals ten times heavier and infinitely more powerful. It seemed unimaginable to him that for over 100 years now the skills his people had once possessed had evaporated as if campfire smoke. The buffalo had vanished, killed to feed an insatiable fur trade, killed for sport, and killed to rid the native peoples of their critical food source. Without the buffalo and facing starvation, the indigenous ones could be moved off their ancestral lands so that the whites could establish farms and towns.
White Elk was too far removed from the native holocaust to feel the full pain of his ancestors. He was of the modern world; he understood that well. He could take delight in driving a vehicle wherever he wanted to go. There was no need to heat a home with dried buffalo dung. He and his children learned of cultures from the other side of the world.
White Elk pocketed the spear point and shuffled away from under the cliff. He worked his way along the escarpment to where the plains smoothed away the raw cut in the earth. Intent on climbing to the top of the ridge, he slowly, deliberately threaded his way along the edge of the drop, rising higher and higher still until he reached the upper edge of the jump. Exposed at the top of the bluff, his clothing chattered in the teeth of the wind. His leathery skin had weathered many thousands of days exposed to the cold, so he paid the chill no mind.
From his perch, White Elk surveyed the limitless grasslands, undulating as if waves at sea caught in a lusty gale. In all directions, prairie and sky bonded at the horizon in an inseparable embrace. Only in the southwest was there a smudge of tone. White Elk recognized the distant cube-like apparition as Chief Mountain, his old friend.
The sixty-foot drop of the buffalo jump at his feet, and the sacred mountain on the periphery of his vision, White Elk was overcome with the desire to speak his mind into the wind.