Blinded by the ash crystals and tortured by seizures of coughing, White Elk slipped into the gray-out. He walked as if on thin lake ice, relying only on dead reckoning to move at all. Pushing the toe of one boot ahead in the ash, he tried to sense firm footing. He stopped to try to determine a bearing and to bury his face into his coat away from the ash onslaught. White Elk wiped down his face with a hand, freeing the margins of his eyes of stone crust. Pushing away his physical pain, White Elk resumed his quest for the snowshoes, stepping into nothingness.
His right foot caught air. Gravity seized his coat collar and yanked him forward. The old body tipped over and fell from the bank of the Lee. White Elk slammed down on his right side, his right arm tucked in under him to take the blow of rounded rock rubble in the streambed. The humerus shattered and the elbow joint punched into his ribs, fracturing several. The man’s head crashed down, the palm of his hand shielding direct contact with the rocks. White Elk lost consciousness upon impact.
Trickling water roused the old man. He was sprawled on his back, his torso dampened by shallow creek riffles and covered with an inch of ash. His head, oozing thin ribbons of blood, faced downstream. Something stood over him. He tipped his head back to get a look, ash pouring into his mouth and eyes.
A great white form materialized from the mineral downpour. It was a dream beast, big and standing erect on four legs—a great ponoká. It towered above him. Slowly the creature lowered its head, bringing a square muzzle down to inspect him. The face was white; all its fur was bleached of color. It spoke to the elder sprawled in the creek in the tongue of the Blackfoot.
“Old man, you have come so far. But you are not finished. It is not the time to take the burden from your shoulders and lay it to one side.”
White Elk contemplated the beast, ash crystals scratching his eyes. It seemed a kindly creature, a gentle spirit. He felt a measure of comfort in its company, despite its great size.
“Human, you must get to your feet. Show your people the way to Stand-off Creek, White Elk,” ordered the animal.
“They are starving. They can’t go on,” groaned the elder.
“They will not go hungry, old man. Your hunger, too, it will be gone soon.”
“What will happen to them, ponoká?” the elder asked, speaking in a whisper and so slowly. “Tell me if you can.”
The white dream-creature raised its head and peered about through the stone-dust storm. “This land will return, old man. It is buried now, and there is more ash to come. But this has happened before, many times.”
White Elk coughed pink phlegm. He spit it out in a shower and it rained down on his ash-matted clothing and face.
“Five thousand moon cycles will come and go, old one. The prairie will return then. The buffalo, they will eat the grass that sends down roots to grow. The ponoká will walk the Otatso, and the wolf will follow to hunt the infirm. The coyote and the eagle will scavenge in the wake of the wolf.”
The elder closed his eyes, moaned and uttered a few quiet words. “What about these people?”
The white creature lowered its head again and brought its jaws to White Elk’s ear. “You will take them to Stand-off Creek now, to the North Piegan village. On the fourth day you will walk out of the ash. You will be free of it at last. On the fifth day, the buffalo, old man, they will be there in great numbers to receive you.”
“Buffalo?” White Elks whispered.
“Old man, you will walk with bison.”
Chapter Seventy-One
Ground fog poked fingers across the crop acreage south of the Independency’s village green. Abel muscled through the gossamer tendrils and the last pellets of miserable sleet when he noticed a single dark figure at the edge of the potato plantings.
Huddled in a rain slicker, farm manager Oleg Knudsen shed dull precipitation into the ash slick at his feet. Only the man’s eyes moved to greet Abel as the community founder approached. Knudsen stood statuesque, rain hood up, hands buried in the pockets of the slicker.
Oleg’s severe gaze mimicked the conditions in the fields. On an evening when yellow evening light should grace the plains and bluffs, slushy sleet was falling on seedling potato plants breaking through the soil. The fields oozed like open sewers. The robust organic earth he had worked for a decade to enrich, and which the colonists had labored unmercifully for weeks to clear to a degree of volcanic ash, was cold and soaking. It was a terrible medium for bringing a fledgling crop along.
Abel stopped alongside his good friend, the drumming of sleet filling the space between each man. “Not pretty, is it?” Abel muttered quietly.
Oleg sighed. “No. It’s a horrible sight, this.”
“What do you think, huh? Can we save the crop?”
“We’ll starve to death if we don’t. Like the Irish potato famine, you know.”
“Got any ideas?”
“Oh, ya, a few.”
The community leader looked squarely at the monk-like figure, hidden beneath the rain gear. Oleg Knudsen was a remarkable talent, Abel believed, whose agricultural skills underpinned the success of the little empire on the bluffs. He was a thinker, a doer. He needed the man’s expertise and creativity now.
“Care to share your thoughts?”
Oleg stroked his bushy chestnut beard, and, speaking in a light Norwegian accent, flung his tenor voice out across the cropland.
“Let’s say the weather stays bad like this, eh. Crops fail altogether or there is so little yield that most people won’t be able to afford to eat. I think that’s a real possibility.”
“I think so, too,” Abel agreed.
“So we’ve got to do something right away. Soon as we can.”
“What do you suggest?”
“When humans first invented this farming business and began putting up permanent settlements, there was always a staple crop or two to see them through the lean times. In the Americas here, it was maize and potato; in Asia it was rice and so on. To leave the hunter-gatherer life behind, people needed at least one master crop to make the huge leap to civilization.”
“So what would your crop be?” Abel sputtered, spitting sleet from his lips.
“Let’s say we need to get from today to this time next year without turning skin and bones,” Oleg offered. “To do it, we’d need a couple of foundation crops. In this corner of the world, it had better be corn and potatoes. There’s no way we’ll get corn at these temperatures, but we might get a few potatoes if we do some sleight of hand. And we better move a hell of a lot more ash and get as big a crop of grass as we can.”
“Why grass?” Abel wondered.
“We eat grass every single day, Abel,” answered Oleg. “We just feed it to the goats and sheep. They’re pretty good at making milk and new little goats and lambs. Grass has always been the feedstock for the algae that feeds the tilapia in the fish tanks.”
“What about these potatoes? They’re just about stillborn.”
Oleg scratched his heavy beard, immersed in thought. “Well, this is what I think we should do. We should pull up a lot of the greens we grow for the wholesale markets and plant potatoes in those unheated greenhouses. Do that starting first thing tomorrow. We dig up the seed and get it inside immediately, then cover as much of the rest as we can with plastic sheeting. Instead of field rows here, we double ‘em up in the greenhouses, pack the plants right in tight together so you can’t so much as take a step without banging into a spud. The seed in these fields that we can’t cover, well, it’ll rot to mush if it stays like this for another week.”