“What do you want, for chrissake?”
“What’s going on here, Andy, eh?” Harland scrutinized the skins nailed to the wall. “What’s all this?”
“A little payback.”
“Payback? For what?”
“Got pinched for jackin’ deer, so I’m pushing back.” Regas spit at the shed wall where the skins hung.
“So now you’re jacking farm animals from the bluffs?” Harland asked bluntly.
“It’s called filling my belly.”
“I brought you some food, a few sacks of corn.”
“Well then, I’ll eat pretty good.”
“Andy, I didn’t come here to talk about your eating habits. I need you down in Sweetly in a week, when the National Guard gets into town.”
“I told you I’d be there.”
“I’m counting on you.”
“When I’m done with that Whittemore asshole, I’ll be down.”
“What are you bothering with him for? He got the message from us loud and clear. Don’t waste your time on him.”
The farmer turned his back on the soul he and his wife had taken in as a ward of the state when Regas was a boy of eight years. He strode a few steps and turned. “There’s another thing.”
Regas continued dismembering one of the goat carcasses. “What’s that?”
“It’s your mother.”
“Yeah, and?”
“She’s sick, Andy. She’s come down with something serious.”
Regas glanced at Harland a second, shrugged and returned to his work.
The farmer shook his head in disgust and turned away from the young man once again. Harland ambled off toward the porch of the rundown structure the young man and several others called home.
“Where are you goin’?” Regas roared after the farmer.
Harland didn’t acknowledge the question.
“Man, stay out of my place.”
The Swede kept moving.
“Stay out of my fucking place.”
Chapter Eighty-Four
White Elk slept peacefully. His wounds were healing rapidly now. Liz studied the Blackfoot elder’s stone face as he slept, fascinated with the deep wrinkles of age, like Badlands arroyos.
With little to do while her bones knitted, the geophysicist took to assisting White Elk in his recovery, washing him, feeding him, and keeping company with him in the hopes he would spin yarns of Blackfoot lore to keep his mind off his pain. He did not fail her. His tales seemed to brighten both their spirits and make the long hours of recuperation speed by.
The Blackfoot doctor, Sinopa, entered the tiny moonlit ward to check on her patients. She found Liz seated at White Elk’s bedside, swaying quietly in the rocking chair Sinopa kept in the ward.
“How is he doing, Elizabeth?” asked the doctor.
“He’s at peace tonight.”
“Ah, that is a good thing. And you, my dear, how are you feeling this evening?”
“Much stronger, strong enough to think about making the trip east soon.”
“You may be able to. You have responded well to our healing practices. They work as no others.”
Liz chuckled at the doctor’s words. “You are the one who has worked, Sinopa. You are a fine doctor.”
“Made better by our faith and our rituals.”
Liz smiled at her caregiver. “I can’t argue with you on that.”
“I believe it in my heart, Elizabeth. Here on these reservation lands, we have to straddle two worlds. We live in both of them. In order for me to do my work well, I need the power of both worlds, of two medicines, to heal my neighbors.”
“How do you manage?”
“You’ve seen it for yourself, in White Elk. He was drowning in his own fluids when he came to us out of the ash. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“I needed to drain his chest to allow his lungs to expand, so I used a simple modern instrument to open the chest wall to let the fluids drain. Powerful antibiotics kept infection from gaining a toehold. But the ancient power of shamanism had just as profound an impact on White Elk. The dances, chanting, the herbs and sacred objects, all of these are as powerful as drugs for him—maybe not for you, but for him.”
“I am a woman of science, Sinopa. I have a little trouble accepting some of what you say wholeheartedly.”
Sinopa smiled wide enough to part the darkness. “Well, I was trained to be a doctor at Dartmouth. That would make me a woman of science, too, yes? But my Blackfoot heritage blessed me with other means to fight disease. I use them. You have heard of the placebo effect, have you not?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Medical science tells us that the placebo effect is a very powerful tool that can be used to shorten the duration of illness, or lessen pain, or to instill a sense of well-being in the sick. A patient who believes he or she will get better has a better chance of survival. There are a thousand research papers in journals that attest to that.
“The healing rituals, they are a godsend to our people. They mend much faster when we practice them. They are a link to the deep past, where our ancestors reside. Our rituals, our dances, our medicine bundles, they put us in touch with our culture from before the whites arrived. That is a comfortable place for us, a wellspring of honor and true faith.
“When we partake of our healing ceremonies, our people know they are being cared for in the physical world, and they also know they are being cared for in the spiritual realm of our ancestors. That is the secret and the power of ritual.
“So, as I have told you, I practice in two worlds. I know that each is more effective when used in conjunction with the other. One is not better than the other. White Elk there, he would be the first to agree.”
Chapter Eighty-Five
Wrestling into union suit underwear, heavy wool pants and work shirt, Abel mentally braced for a day of unrelenting toil harvesting what few spuds might be gleaned from the potato acreage. He and farm manager Knudsen already knew from samples extracted from the potato rows that the crop yield would be meager. Abel considered the little community fortunate to have anything at all to dig up from the cold soils. There would be no harvest on the vast potato farms across the Northwest, he understood. Every inch of the famous potato lands of Idaho and Oregon had vanished forever beneath volcanic tephra. There would not be one Ore-Ida French fry to be had from buried processing plants in communities along Idaho’s border-to-border Snake River Valley. The valley farms had ceased to exist.
In his tiny cabin kitchen, flashing canines and incisors in a head-splitting yawn, Abel lost his grip on a coffee pot as he filled it with water; it clattered into the sink. Muscles in the shoulders locked rigid from 10,000 canoe paddle strokes on a lake full of heavy chop the day before. Rabid about avoiding commercial over-the-counter drugs to relieve pain, he longed for a massage to loosen knot-bound tissues.
Retrieving the pot, he spotted Bobcat on the approach to the cabin. Abel threw the door back for his friend.
“Hello, Bobcat, I was expecting Oleg.”
“He’s the one with the red beard, remember?”
Abel managed a laugh. “I thought you’d still be sleeping in after the day we put in yesterday.”
“Couldn’t sleep. Here.” Bobcat handed Abel a slip of paper.
“What have you got?”
“Look at it. I came across it last night. I got a little web traffic, finally. It’s a list of names—survivors.”
“Survivors?”
“Flight 402 out of Bozeman.”
“This?” Abel held the paper to his face and squinted at the type, trying to bring the letters into focus without his reading glasses.
“It’s some sort of Canadian government data from Alberta officials, I believe.”