‘What are your plans in the event the weather has crippled this crop?”
“If we lose this crop, we’re history. We can’t plant again. Even if we could find seed stock to plant, it’d be too late: tomatoes, cukes, squash, pumpkin, all gone. The sweet corn would never mature. We’d just grind up what’s in the field for silage. At least then we could feed the silage to somebody’s cows.”
“Can you salvage anything at all?”
“The broccoli and cabbage, yes, maybe. They can take some hard cold. But let me tell you something, young lady, if this is going on west of us, out in the corn belt, there isn’t going to be one kernel of corn to fatten up a hog, not one kernel for your corn flakes.”
Abel triggered a remote and settled on NBC, running taped footage from the previous day. A husband and wife team leaned against a door opening in the wall of an empty tobacco-curing shed. The fields stretching alongside the shed had been tilled under and not a thing was growing in them. Abel’s ears rang with Kentucky twang as the man, dressed in a windbreaker and Cincinnati Reds cap, fielded questions from a reporter off-camera.
“We was supposed to enter the new emergency program. The county agent told us we was going to get seed and nitrogen fertilizer so we could bring in a crop of feed corn. We’re tobacco, always been tobacco. They told us we had to make the switch right away, you know, till under the tobacco and get ready for corn. They was going to bring in a corn drill and everything for us to use for a day so we could plant. They’d show us how to use the thing.”
The farm wife, in well-worn coveralls and a NASCAR jacket, scowled at the camera. “We ain’t seen no corn. We ain’t seen no nitrogen fertilizer, and we ain’t seen that planter contraption neither.”
The man pointed out across the fields that, under normal mid-June conditions, would be brimming with knee-high green.
“We tilled under everything, see, as we was told. But it’s been almost a month now, and we got nothin’ to plant. I been callin’ all the time, but I get no answers. I did find out from the auction barn that they ain’t no seed corn to be had anyway. It’s all in the ground in the Corn Belt, but nothin’s comin’ up. Too much frost. Corn can’t stand it, you know.”
His mate spit to the earth. “What are we supposed to do? We got no crop comin’ now. The feds tell us do this, do that. It’s an emergency. They’ll pay us to plant the new crop. But we got nothin’. It ain’t right. You can’t eat dirt, now can you? You sure as hell can’t smoke it neither.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Three lunar cycles removed from the day of the Yellowstone eruption, White Elk concluded that Napiw had abandoned the Blackfoot to the ash. On every front there was a new menace rearing its ugly head to strike out at the children and the oldest citizens—darkness, blowing ash, clogged lungs, so little food of any kind. The cold, the perpetual confinement to the community center and the constant expressions of fear and pain on the faces of the adults all conspired to sap vitality from the little ones and the aged alike.
And still ash fell occasionally in the folds of the mountains and across the western prairie. White Elk no longer recognized Chief Mountain village. It had been swallowed whole by the volcanic filth. Only the tallest rooftops poked up above the gray, those having been saved from collapse by constant shoveling. Occasional rains turned the land to a sea of slurry.
The skies above Chief Mountain had been corrupted by the stone rain. Dull twilight took the place of the blue vault during the sunlit hours. To the south, the horizon sulked under a gangrenous screen of smoke, the sun invisible. Late in the day, the solar ball appeared low in the west as an angry blood red disc, just before it drooped over the rim of the world. Without its warm embrace, the vile days of summer were sharp with chill.
Scores had died and many more were in respiratory distress. Famine gnawed at Blackfoot flesh. All were living off their body fat, a few roots from a town storehouse and the last of meager rations from the village store. The few horses, chickens and pigs that the community kept had been slaughtered and consumed in the first weeks, as most had been injured or killed in the blast surge on the first day of May.
White Elk thrust the front entrance door of the community center aside. He stepped out onto the landing, coated with gray dust but free of heavy ash deposits. The air was still, as White Elk had hoped, the early morning atmosphere icy. White Elk sensed it was comfortable enough to give the order to go. Today they would leave to find the Kootenai elk herd stranded below the north face of Chief Mountain. They could wait no longer.
Slipping among the sleeping children, White Elk woke men and women of the community. Most were desperate to do something to improve their condition. Some saw the community center as a coffin that would soon seal shut over them if they did not take action. Leaving Chief Mountain for the North Piegan villages in Canada was the only chance to salvage their lives.
The Blackfoot would be beasts of burden, a hand-fashioned towing travois lashed to every able-bodied soul. They would carry blankets, a few tents, knives and axes, water, and little else. If the very oldest residents became too weary or sick to continue on, they could ride in one of the travois.
The plan devised by White Elk and several elders was to fasten snowshoes to the feet, tow the many travois and walk the twelve miles around the east flank of Chief Mountain in one day, trying to manage a mile per hour. By nightfall, they needed to be in the vicinity of the elk herd that was bogged down in the ash up to their withers. According to a scout, the animals were on the lower north slope of the mountain and were dying beside the banks of Lee Creek. On day two, the tribe members would dispatch as many of the stranded elk as they could, quarter the animal carcasses with axes and knives, and load the meat onto the travois. The Blackfoot would eat the flesh of the animals then and there to replenish their strength. On day three, they would continue north, dragging the heavily loaded travois in the hopes of walking out of the heaviest ash by nightfall.
After inspecting the preparations and taking the measure of the mood of the villagers, White Elk felt confident enough to wake those who still slumbered and rally everyone together in the main hall. Every tribe member, every parent and child, assembled in the half-light of the cave-like room. The elder surveyed the haggard clan, their clothes full of grit and dust, their skin and hair infested with mineral film.
“We will go now, today,” White Elk announced, summoning up a voice of strength and volume. “We all know what to do. We are Blackfoot. Once we were strong, the strongest of the native peoples on the plains. Napiw has seen to it that we are tested now. He wants to see if we can rise again and be strong like our ancestors were. We will meet the challenge he has presented to us.”
Men, women and able teenage youth dragged the travois out onto the ash and lashed snowshoes of hardwood and gut or aluminum and canvas to their feet. Volunteers raised the travois units and tied themselves in. The essentials for the trek were placed aboard the haulers. Then tribe members turned to each other and, one by one, bound faces with heavy moist cloth to help filter the air.
With little fanfare, what was left of the South Piegan Blackfoot pulled away from their village, headed for the east flank of the peak of the same name, an apparition to the northwest. The younger members, excited to be free from the bonds of the buried town, sprinted ahead. White Elk screamed after them to slow down and conserve what little energy they had remaining in their underfed bodies.