Slowly the hall began to glow gently, as White Elk hoped it would. The hard lines of tribulation on the brows, etched deep by the hard light of the kerosene lamps, melted like the wax in the candles’ aura. When the last person regained his seat, solemn quiet returned.
White Elk pushed his chair back from the table and stood up, rising above the other elders stretched along the simple furnishing. He waited. Silent. Waited a full minute.
“I would like to open this meeting with a prayer. Then we will get down to the difficult business ahead. But a prayer now, please. This is what I have to say: We are here at the end of days. And what are we doing now that we are here? My ancestors, your ancestors, all of our people who went before—before the white settlers came to this land and before we became like them—they knew what they would do at this time. And we must do as they would have done had they been alive on this land as we are now.
“Like this candle, one cannot hold back the darkness of an entire world. But many can light the darkness, as your candles are doing in this hall now. One alone, each one of us alone, cannot live through this time in isolation. We cannot shut ourselves away in the long night and weep with pity. The light in the soul will burn out, like the one candle.
“So this is my prayer. Seek the love of your family members. Seek to comfort and caress all our children. Seek to pray together with your elders. Seek to hold hands with all our brothers and sisters in our community so that we shall not be afraid when the days end.
“Like the candles, the sun will return and drive out the darkness. The ash will sweeten the earth and the grasses and trees will grow well again. The elk, buffalo and the bear, the fish, the eagle, they will return. When they do, we, too, will return.
“Until that time, we shall be remembered by our sacred paintings on the stones. We shall be remembered by our sacred drumming on the wind; remembered by our sacred chanting in the echo’s ring from the lakes. By our love of the sky, our one father and by our love of the earth, our one mother, we shall be remembered.”
White Elk let his words drift away in the candle smoke. He looked down at the waxy cylinder on the table. He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and wet the tips. Then he reached down to the candlewick and pinched it tight between his fingers, killing the flame. He let another minute creep along the floorboards without a word.
“I had hoped our doctor, Sinopa, could be here to speak to you of a plan to save us," White Elk called in a tone of authority. Instantly the room filled with voices, a dam breach of words flooding out onto the seat backs and reaching the tops of the windows. The wave of noise swelled, when White Elk batted it down.
“Listen, you must listen. You must quiet yourselves.” He raised both arms over his head, spread them out to his sides and brought them down. The words drowning the hall were swept away by the gesture.
White Elk needed someone to deliver a stark message about the deteriorating health of the people, someone with medical knowledge that the people would not question. He needed an absolute. He needed Sinopa, but she had not returned from the northern villages across the border in Alberta, Canada. He took the task upon himself.
“You are starving. We all are starving,” White Elk called to the corners of the hall. “We need food. We need protein so that we may have clear minds to think about how we can survive these terrible months, and then thrive once things improve. We need fats so that we have calories to burn to keep our bodies warm. And we need lots of it. There are still many of us, thankfully. So we need a lot of food. Our stocks have run out, or nearly so. We have consumed our animals. Local game is gone from the forests, fish from the streams.”
“What will we eat?” broke a brittle shout from the left.
“We will do two things,” the elder continued, keeping on message. “We will do one thing now, so we may eat. And once we eat, we will move away from the ash. When the Yellowstone disaster hit us, it killed everything around us. With the mountains to shield us, we survived. Even now, much ash from the Yellowstone country moves east of us here. We are in a pocket of relative safety for now, but we must leave to find our way out of the ash. There is too much for us to live with.
“No one can get to us and we cannot get out on the roads. There are no supplies coming. Railroads and roads elsewhere are buried under mountains of ash or have been destroyed. We know this. What you do not know, but what we have just learned from the foragers just returning, is that the Kootenai elk herd is holed-up at the foot of Chief Mountain, just twelve miles away. Like us, the herd survived the scalding clouds. They were to the north, ahead of the worst of it. The herd tried to leave the area, but the animals suffered in the ash fall. They could not breathe in the ash and before long they began to get sick. They are dying now. Just by chance, in our protective valley, in our houses, we have not suffered quite as much as the elk.
“When the darkness descended with the ash and the weather turned cold, the ponoká had to yard up and seek protection among the trees. Now they are buried to their withers in ash. Many have died, but some are holding on. There are many hundreds of animals and they are still there. There are no predators to take the meat. They have died.
“We must go and harvest the meat, as much as we can. We must cut it up. We must dry the meat, smoke it, freeze it and protect it all, at all costs, so that we may eat for a few months.”
“How can we do this? We are in bad shape,” rang out a shout from among the seated.
“I will tell you how.”
Slowly, the elder raised his hands above his head, brought the forefinger of each hand together into a point. He spoke to his hands.
“My mother told me before the darkness came that we should return to the old ways to survive this tribulation. The old ways would provide for us and see us through to a new day. So, we will do as my mother said. We will begin right away.
“The first thing we will do is harvest hundreds of narrow poles from the forest and bring them here. We will lash them together to make travois, many of them, in the shape of my hands above my head. The travois we will pull ourselves. There are no dogs or horses to pull them. We will pull travois and carry with us what few supplies we can, and we will walk one whole day onto the mountain to the herd. When we are among them, we will take the weak, the sick and the dying and end their lives so that we may live. We will say prayers so their souls may be liberated. Then we will prepare the bodies, lash them to the travois and move on to Canada where they say the ash is not so bad. If we do our job well, we may complete the task in two or three days. Once we have eaten and are strong again, we will be able to walk to safety.”
“I will go with you,” sang out a voice from the back of the room. The words touched off a storm of shouts and hoots, many joining in to pledge their effort and support. The calling soon coalesced into a sustained, joyful cheer. It had been a month since anyone could recall a display of happiness.
White Elk glanced about the hall. A smile etched his lips, the yellow teeth of age shining, reflecting the warm light of many candles.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Standing in knee-high rubber boots on the peeling paint of his porch and shouldering a winter coat against a hard white frost, Harland surveyed his farmland to the horizon. Rather than moist late spring air and the smell of sweet tilled soil, the environment was fragile with cold and smelled of nothing at all. The earth appeared armor-plated everywhere, as if made of battleship steel.
What planet was this? Harland did not know. The familiar world of sweet black earth was buried out of reach. In its place were the plains of the moon. Rains and melted snow had fused the gritty ash surface into a thin welded crust. It knocked the blinding dust down, at the very least, when the westerlies didn’t blow too hard.