“The meat has little odor. It smells clean. It is still fresh. The flesh is dark because it is still in blood. It hasn’t drained away, you know, like when we stick a hog and let the blood run out.”
“What should we do, White Elk?” came a voice from the creek bank.
White Elk grinned, flashing his teeth. “Build a fire now. We all need to eat.”
A roar went up from the motley crowd gathered along the bank. People exploded into action, sweeping into the forests to gather fuel wood. The elk was pulled out of the stream, the body skinned in minutes, entrails removed, and the flesh, heart, kidneys and liver cut into thin strips to be skewered and placed over flames.
White Elk watched the proceedings, one hand held over his mouth. Petah observed the old man in a pensive mood and came over to him.
“Old one, you seem troubled.”
White Elk sighed, “Oh, no, my Petah, I am fine. I am just thinking a bit.”
The woman, once radiant but now pale and emaciated like the others, prodded him. “What must you be thinking now that we have found food?”
“I was thinking about the ponoká that died here. Three months ago, if an animal had died in the stream, there would be eagles and ravens perched in the trees, vultures overhead. There would be coyotes coming to feed. A bear or a mountain lion would have tried to move it and cache it somewhere in the trees.”
The young woman reacted little to the old man’s words.
“But we found the ponoká first. That means one thing, Petah. It means that there are no longer any of our animal brothers about. They have probably died. The eagles, maybe they have flown away from the ash to where living is better. I hope so.”
“I wish we could fly away, too,” said the woman softly. She lowered her head and walked away.
The Blackfoot built a large hot fire, sharpened dozens of long sticks, and skewered the freshly cut meat. One by one, the people ran their sticks out over the fire to roast the flesh. Most were too impatient from hunger to lodge the end of the branch into the ash on the ground and wait idly by to let the food cook. Each waved and turned the meat around and around in the flames, listening for the sizzle and pulling the stick out of the heat to sniff and savor the aroma of the roasting protein.
White Elk watched the people brighten before his eyes. Smiles flashed about the fire and eyes filled with color. Talk and laughter erupted, filling the woods with merry chatter, loud enough to drown out the stream. Goaded by hunger pangs rumbling in empty guts, a few wanted to sample their fare within a minute or two, but the older members coaxed the younger ones to be sure to cook the food thoroughly.
The first bites of roasted elk brought shouts of glee. White Elk waited until everyone around the fire had finished cooking and had settled down to eat. He then brought a slender slab of elk flank to his mouth and nibbled a tiny piece away. He chewed it slowly, mixing saliva with the food so that his mouth became saturated with the ancient flavors of wild meat. The sensation of the rich smoky taste vibrated throughout his body, wringing a weighty sigh from the depths of his lungs.
The clan fell silent, fixated on the urgent task of filling their bellies. They were ravenous and did not slow the pace of their eating until they had cut up, cooked and consumed the animal.
The sun, nearly invisible behind the black shroud of smoke still filling the heavens far to the south, told White Elk that it was mid-afternoon. There was work to be done, locating, killing and quartering whatever elk they could find. But the elder thought it best to let his people rest for half an hour, time enough for nutrients from the meat to find their way into the bloodstream and provide some energy for the toil ahead. So the old man signaled for all to relax and sit or stretch out by the fire. Like puppies in a whelping bed, young and old piled onto one another around the flames. Some fell asleep in seconds.
The pain in White Elk’s left knee made rest impossible. He kneaded the muscles and bones at the knee, trying to exorcise demons from the joint, when a shattering thunderclap rammed through the valley. Volleys of cannon shot sound reverberated off Chief Mountain and bounded into the vast prairie spaces to the east. The blasts startled everyone and fear froze in the faces around the fire. But as the noises rumbled away into the plains, the tribe settled down again.
White Elk, ignoring his knee, got to his feet. He scanned the horizon above the trees for signs of trouble. He could see nothing more than the now familiar black screen of smoke that hung from the heavens in the south. The explosive sounds unnerved him, so similar were they to the roar from the throat of Yellowstone three months past.
The people had rested long enough. White Elk roused everyone and set the tribe in motion once again. Within minutes, the strongest had vanished downstream, towing their travois.
Around the first bend in the creek below the campfire site, several more elk were down in the stream. Tribe members fell on the animals with axes and began dismembering the carcasses. A sinewy young man, running in the creek, called out to those upstream that there were many elk stranded in a streambed elbow just ahead. White Elk left the workers butchering the two ponoká in the creek bend and went down river to see for himself what the young man was calling about. He paced 300 feet along Lee Creek until he could see a large blowdown tangle in the distance. Many people busied themselves at the foot of the forest debris, cutting into the bodies of two-dozen animals.
In desperation, White Elk theorized, the elk must have congregated at the edge of the massive tree fall. It blocked their way north during a period of intense ash rain, so they must have huddled there against the volcanic storm and, slowly over several weeks, died of starvation or respiratory distress.
Elk quarters piled up in the travois. White Elk moved from one to the next, removing the hide to lessen weight. He was immersed in his labors when a rising, whispering swell permeated the evergreens. The elder looked up from his work to listen. Around him, others stopped their efforts and stood captivated by a steady hiss infiltrating the tree stands. White Elk spun around and yelled down to those dismembering the elk carcasses, “Stop. Stop. Cover your faces. That’s volcanic ash coming.”
In mid-sentence, a wall of gray sleet billowed out of the pine and swept over Lee Creek. Torrents of volcanic fluff clamped down on the work camp. Millions of dead mineral flakes cascaded from the heavens, swallowing up everyone as the clan made a frantic dash for cover and to find anything to cover exposed faces. Dimensions disappeared in the gray foulness, leaving many stumbling blind in the blizzard.
White Elk pulled a travois off the ground and angled it against tree trunks. He pulled others up and did the same, and screamed for anyone who could hear him to follow his voice and duck under the travois, standing like lean-tos against the trees. Gray ghosts crawled under cover as the old man kept up his wailing calls to guide people struggling in the volcanic void.
In a single minute, the joy and exhilaration of being able to harvest much needed food evaporated and was replaced by gasps for breath. The ash deluge horrified White Elk. The new fall was equal to the worst days of the terrible first week of May. No snowfall he had ever witnessed in all his years had fallen with such force.
A flash of fear pierced the elder’s bowels. The snowshoes, discarded while everyone worked over the elk, were essential to their ability to move, to their very survival. They had to be retrieved. They could not be allowed to be buried out of sight.
White Elk rolled out from under the travois and got to his feet. No one noticed him leave. He stood for some moments trying to sense the direction he should move in; he could see nothing substantial. The snowshoes would be piled on the banks alongside the creek. All he had to do was estimate the direction and the distance and shuffle away until he came to the point where the bank dropped away. With his feet, or on his hands and knees if need be, he could swing along the bank and feel for the snowshoes.