“The deep past is talking, get it? We’re the only ones listening. Nobody else can hear the past quite like we can; the lost messages can’t be translated any longer. But we’ve intercepted the messages and we can do the translating, see?
“That’s the difference between us here at Independency and Jack and Jill in Westchester, Georgetown, Shaker Heights and Beverly Hills. What are they going to do, fill the interiors of their SUVs with water, stock them with fish, and plant rice on the seats?”
Chapter Seventy-Six
A silver coyote lifted its muzzle to capture a scent streaming on currents of cold air descending the east flanks of the mountains. Erect ears had picked up unfamiliar sounds. Hidden by a hedge of brush in the drainage of Stand-off Creek, the animal waited until gray phantoms materialized. The coyote slipped away.
An emaciated Blackfoot male appeared, hauling a travois, moving at a hasty clip in snow and prairie grasses. Gray from head to foot after walking four days in blowing ash, the man marched into clear cold air surrounded by a verdant, unblemished environment.
On the fifth day of the long march from Chief Mountain village, he had slipped from under Yellowstone’s smothering ash blanket. As the man crested a gravel bar at the edge of the stream, he saw chimney smoke in the distance. A North Piegan tribal community, the village of Stand-off Creek, was within reach.
“Ah-eeeee,” the man yodeled into frigid air, lofting his call southward so his fellow Blackfoot on the march would know they had reached the end of their ordeal.
White Elk, sprawled in a blanket slung between travois poles and barely conscious, heard the call. A young woman walking beside him heard it, too.
“What is that, Petah? I heard something.”
“White Elk, you are awake?”
“I have been for a time. That call, what was it?”
“I think we are nearing the North Piegans. That’s a signal that we are close.”
The elder shifted his position, trying to dampen scalding pain from his arm, ribs and lungs. “How did we get here?”
“You told us where to go, White Elk.”
“I told you?” he whispered.
“Yes, days ago.”
“I do not remember.”
“In Lee Creek, we found you. You had fallen.”
White Elk appeared confused.
“You were hurt, but you told us to keep going no matter what happened, to follow the Lee to the big bend. There you told us to strike a course due north and to walk three days.”
“I told you that?”
“You said that the white ponoká gave you instructions.”
“The white one?” The grand dream beast reared up. He conjured it in three dimensions, so real he thought he could touch the animal.
“That’s what you said.”
“He came to me in the Lee, Petah, do you know that?”
“Yes, White Elk.”
On the approach to Stand-off Creek, Petah insisted that White Elk’s travois be turned around and then lifted at an angle so the old man could see across the valley to the North Piegan village. With the travois as support, White Elk was trussed up so that he could make out what the others were seeing.
The world before White Elk stretched away clean white and green. The Rockies to the west bore evergreen flanks and gleaming snowy summits. The endless flat prairie at the foot of the peaks, stretching to horizontal infinity to the north and the east, was a glassy calm ocean of pristine snow. The immense scenery cradled a small cluster of dark angular shapes, the roofs of homes, village and farm buildings.
On the broad shoulders of the prairie, hundreds of tiny black forms roamed over the snows.
“Petah, what is that far off? I can’t see well with these old eyes.”
The young woman looked at White Elk and smiled.
“Buffalo, old one. They are buffalo.”
On the fringe of the North Piegan tribal village at Stand-off Creek, Alberta, residents gathered in a tight cluster and beheld an unearthly visage. Stretched single file across the southern horizon, a line of ghosts crept, easily overtaken by snowdevils twisting in the unceasing prairie wind. Many of the poltergeists were towing burdens that slowed their progress. Who were these people coming north? What weighty possessions were they hauling? Every soul out on the prairie margin was the color of the Yellowstone ash that had fallen in torrents on the borderlands.
A North Piegan elder squinted to bring the undulating horizon line into focus. He stood transfixed for a minute. “Unbelievable,” the man gasped. “Praise Napiw.”
“What do you see,” burst a voice from those watching the distant gray creatures.
“Our brothers and sisters to the south, they are coming.”
On the in-run slope to the village, Petah, daughter of the Blackfoot physician, watched figures amass before the dwellings ahead. Each individual in the distant community was facing in her direction. Joy, that forgotten emotion that had lain buried in the ash layers for months, danced pirouettes about her heart. They were walking out of danger. They really were.
As the South Piegan band approached the North Piegan village, citizens of the town rushed forward to greet the ghost travelers. Shouts of greeting rang in the mountain folds and swept away into the prairie. Villagers threw up their hands when they recognized relatives and friends. They embraced their fellow Blackfoot. Many exhausted trekkers collapsed in the arms of the northerners, unable to expend another ounce of energy. Cries of agony punctuated the din when people learned of the deaths of kin, lost to the ash and the firestorm.
In the crush, young Petah thought only of tending to White Elk. He needed to be taken immediately from the travois he was lashed into and brought to a warm space for treatment. White Elk smiled at the exhausted youngster as she made him comfortable and told him she would get help to move him indoors. As she turned to go, an elder female loomed before White Elk’s vision, pulled brutishly at the shoulder of the young woman, and looked into her face. The matriarch clasped young Petah in an iron embrace and dug fingers into her back. The woman lifted her head to the clouds and howled in relief at finding her only daughter safe. White Elk recognized the doctor, Sinopa, missing for so long.
Sinopa placed a hand against the travois to steady herself as she and Petah finally broke their embrace. North Piegan tribal citizens formed a clutch about the women and White Elk. Petah stumbled. The trauma of the five-day death march from Chief Mountain left her suddenly unsteady on her feet. She grabbed for her mother’s hand and held it in a vice grip, as if to gain a great measure of strength from her.
Petah wiped ash from her face and addressed her mother and the many others now gathered. “You must know, everyone, that our beloved White Elk brought us here. He saved us.”
All cast eyes on the aged, stricken human sprawled in the travois. White Elk struggled to raise a hand in a simple gesture of greeting.
“He is the reason we are alive today. This man,” cried the young woman, battling tears of exhaustion, “this man works miracles.”
Chapter Seventy-Seven
The village green at Independency resembled an eighteenth-century New England common. Small homes, guest cottages, and town buildings stood at the edge of a tree-lined rectangular expanse. To relieve the mounting psychological stress of living in a volcano-fouled environment, Abel insisted the green be liberated from the ash. It had become an oasis of verdant life in a desert of gray ugliness.