“Napiw, old one, do you hear me?” The rush of the buffeting winds was the only reply. “In the dawn time, you taught us how to hunt. You taught us to drive the iinii here to die so that we could live. We had everything we needed.
“How do you want us to live now, Napiw? I ask you for my people. I ask you for the Lakota, Crow, the Flathead, too. I have forgotten how to live. Maybe I need to make a tea of bitterroot to restore my memory. Do you think so, Napiw? Maybe some milkweed for the arthritis.”
White Elk bent over and plucked a hollow blade of grass from the turf. He nibbled on it, bit a clean edge, and massaged his gums with the stiff plant.
“Where is our mother now, Napiw? Will you tell me? She is all around us, but we can no longer find her. She brings forth everything, but we forget how to nurse at her breast. We eat from cans and plastic. She sends the rains, the ice, and the snow, but we drink soda and beer. Liquor, too. Our mother calls down the thunder, but we listen only to that country music now. She commands the lightning and the rainbow and the full moon, but we watch, what, television day and night. Is that what you want of us, Napiw?”
A small tuft of grass and soil dislodged from under the weight of White Elk’s frame, and it tumbled over and over to the rocks below, disintegrating as it went. The elder watched passively, then continued his rant.
“A century ago now, we fell off this jump, just as the iinii did. We fell and were broken. It has taken a century to mend, old one, but the wounds haven’t healed well.”
White Elk clenched his teeth and strained his sore larynx to call above the wind. He raised his eyes and his hands toward the scudding skies and howled, “Why has it taken so long for our wounds to heal, Napiw? You tell me that, huh!”
Spinning away from the cliff ledge, White Elk ambled east. He wanted to make a complete circuit of the jump, as was his custom, before heading back to his truck. At the base of the escarpment, White Elk’s truck took on the appearance of a small locust-skin husk lost in the grass. The elder walked into the bully wind, the force of it slowing him down.
White Elk halved the distance between the jump and the truck and came upon a depression in the grass. In the hollow, the white calcium of bone glinted in the light. There wasn’t much of it, just a few large vertebrae, the projecting dorsal prominences gnawed rough by scavengers. The vertebrae ended at a large block, a skull. White Elk recognized it immediately. It was the skull of a buffalo, tipped upside down, its jaw missing. He slipped over to the bone, reached down and grasped it firmly, rolling it.
White Elk sat down in the grass, folding his legs next to the object. He stroked the skull. The tough horn sheaths had been chewed by small creatures, but the skull still had a look of considerable strength, thought the old man.
The empty orbits, once the domain of the beast’s black eyes, glowered at him. The thin ribbons of bone in the nasal cavity whistled now that the wind could tunnel into the skull. White Elk pulled at the huge grinding molars to see if he could pry one loose, but they were immobile. He tugged at the skull and rolled the heavy cranium onto his lap.
“Will you talk to me, iinii?” White Elk whispered, speaking the animal’s name in his native tongue. “Napiw isn’t talking today. Maybe you will do the talking for him.”
Cradling the bison skull, White Elk sat motionless in the rolling grass until he noticed the light of day departing. The clouds were thickening and drawing down close to the prairie expanse. The first scouts of an approaching snow squall swept by the elder. White Elk rose from his seat, yanked the skull from the ground, and hoisted the burden up onto his shoulders. Using both hands, each grasping a horn, he stooped, lifted the skull onto the bridge of his shoulders and made off for the truck.
As White Elk approached the vehicle, the squall overtook him with a dizzy dance of whirling flakes. The snow brought a smile to the old man’s face. The precipitation was lively and quick, adding a bright sheen to the dull prairie.
The truck was a welcome respite. White Elk carefully lowered the buffalo skull down from his shoulders into the bed of the old pickup and turned the bone face toward the tailgate. The man stood contemplating the chalky skull, crafting a plan in his head.
“You are my little secret, iinii,” whispered the elder to the bone. “You are the future of our people. We need you and you need us.” White Elk reached into his pocket and pulled out the spear point he had found. He placed it alongside the skull.
“If we raise you at Chief Mountain, like our North Piegan brothers do, I think you could grow strong in numbers like in the early days. We could grow together, you and me. We could learn to live as we once did. We could roam the plains together again and be free. What do you say, iinii, huh? Let me know.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The snow line on the mountain heights advanced steadily toward the huddled valleys along the Yellowstone River. Crystal precipitation arrived to stay on the 7,000-foot-elevation plateau at the close of the first week of November.
On rigid clear mornings, white steam cloudbanks swept the land, the ghostly spires of lodgepole pine appearing and disappearing as the thermal curtains drifted with the prevailing westerlies. Buffalo and elk, encrusted with delicate coats of ice precipitate, stood like stone, conserving every calorie of energy to keep the long months of cold at bay. The great bison, their internal engines idling and puffing thunderheads of lung exhaust into the sharp air, kept an eye on lean wolf apparitions loping through the ethereal thermal smoke.
With the approach of the winter solstice, Yellowstone Lake locked solid in an armor coat of rough ice. Liz was anxious to get out on it, bore through it, and set out newly arrived marine probes designed to drop into the depths and burrow into the lake bottom sediments.
Early morning light sliced sharply, slanted and welding torch white. Two snowmobile sleds skimmed upon the lake-ice plain in five-degree cold, towing technological cargo. Liz straddled one mechanical sled dog, racing along beside a craft piloted by Wesley Crouch. Nearing retirement, the veteran Yellowstone geologist rarely spent much time by himself out in the Wyoming winter. But this morning he decided he would slough off his bureaucratic skin, help the woman set out her instruments and enjoy a clean, bright, cold mid-December day in the sun.
A burly fellow and prone to put on pounds, Wesley struggled to stay active. His cardiovascular system was strong, but the recent onset of diabetes plagued him. He packed his insulin; he wasn’t going to let his personal malady get in the way of a fine winter day spent gliding through the park.
The sleds speeding eastward across the frozen expanse of Yellowstone Lake slowed as the two riders neared the eastern shore, several miles to the west of pulsating Brimstone Basin, lately shrouded in a sea of thermal fog. The shore terrain rattled with the bones of dead trees. Wesley switched off his engine. Liz followed suit. Instead of the grand silence of the lost places of the West stealing in, the air hissed, filled with the unscripted music of superheated steam. The ragged symphony played relentlessly, rising from a colossal subterranean orchestra pit lined with untold miles of rock fractures snaking through Brimstone strata.
“Sounds like the devil, doesn’t it, Ms. Embree?” Wesley remarked.
Liz nodded in agreement.
“It shouldn’t. This place should be graveyard quiet.”
“We’re running a fever, Wes.”
“That’s the Gods’ honest truth.”
Well to the north, a shimmering white vapor column, the sole remnant of the catastrophic hydrothermal explosion, drifted high over the lake expanse. Liz’s hunch that first night in September had played out in dramatic fashion. The two earth science veterans watched the steam tower dance in the hard light. The ruptured inflated plain far below the surface was still belching prodigious heat, feeding a column of water hot enough at the surface to keep the lake immediately above it free of ice. The hole in the lake’s frozen jacket was the dimension of a major league ballpark. No matter the temperature of the air, the hole refused to seal shut.