People of the Earth (3 page)

 
          
 
"Oh, Christ!" Gillespie groaned.
"That's all we need. That'll get the damned Indians involved. Then we'll
have an Indian monitor running around and being a pain in the ass." He
looked at the shark's tooth in his hand. Yes, part of a necklace—and buried
with the skeleton all those years.

 
          
 
"A damn dead man!" Swenson
whispered.

 
          
 
"
Dead's
right.
He's been lying under the dirt this long, he won't mind a while longer."
Skip pointed to the end of the pad where the
backdirt
had been piled.

 
          
 
"You mean you want me to ..."
Swenson's mouth dropped open, exposing his two
missiiteeth
.

 
          
 
"Damned right I do." Skip gestured,
his gaze drawn to the skull that stared up at him with sightless eyes.
"You'd have crunched him with the Cat on the next pass. What's the
difference? Hey, what's this? You going goofy over a dead Indian? Aren't you
the guy that cleaned out that bar down in town?"

 
          
 
"Yeah, but-"

 
          
 
"Then get on that Cat and hit it, Red.
The longer this thing's exposed, the more nervous I get."

 
          
 
Swenson cocked his head, squinting in the sun.
"You know, I heard about a guy up by Gillette. Found a mammoth tusk and
took it home. Made it all the way up to crew chief in the mine he worked
in."

 
          
 
Skip shot him a measuring look. "Yeah,
well, Red, you tidy this up and there might be another thousand dollars in your
check at the end of the month. Keep your mouth shut and there's always a job on
one of my projects."

 
          
 
Swenson shrugged awkwardly. "Anything you
say."

 
          
 
A thousand in Swenson's pocket made a better
deal than paying out fifty grand and losing months while the archaeologists dug
the site. Besides, Red would drink it all away within a month or two anyway.
Then he'd be back to shagging overtime to meet his truck payments.

 
          
 
Gillespie walked back to the Ford and threw the
shovel in the back. He kicked the sand off his ostrich boots and slid into the
driver's seat.

 
          
 
The yellow Cat chattered as the
catskinner
started the big diesel and backed up,
accompanied by the sound of loud warning beeps. Skip watched as Red lowered the
blade and moved forward to the clattering of the tracks, making another cut,
destroying the last evidence of the house-pit site. Skip caught sight of one of
the bones as the heavy blade rolled the roiling cascade of dirt. Red backed to
make another cut, piling the rest of the skeleton into the
backdirt
.

 
          
 
Skip slipped the truck into gear and drove
onto the rough two-track that would take him back to the main complex. Five
minutes to the meeting with the engineers.

 
          
 
He still held the fossil shark's tooth. The
stone felt cool and heavy in his hand. How many centuries had it lain next to
that skeleton? How did a bunch of dumb Indians drill a hole through stone like
that? What damn Indian would have done such a thing?

 
          
 
Who the hell cared? Skip had a project to
build.

 
          
 
Three Forks Camp,
Wind
Basin
, 5,000 years before present.

 
          
 
Sandstone the color of dried blood rose in a
sheer ridge that jutted from the rich grasses of the river bottom. The shape of
the ridge goaded Sage Ghost's frightened imagination while he lay hidden in the
grass; it looked as if some huge buffalo's back thrust up from the land itself
to shelter the Earth People's camp from the prevailing winds. He shifted his
gaze back to the camp he spied on. Sage Ghost belonged to the Sun People—a
member of the White Clay clan. Here, in this southern land, he hunted again. He
pitted his skill and cunning against an unknown people. Failure would mean
swift death.

 
          
 
A shaft of sunlight split the clouds,
brightening the crimson stone of the ridge until the rock seemed to burn.
Erosion had carved the slopes; Sage Ghost could see the bones within the
buffalo-shaped ridge. Did his imagination trick him, or did the ridge contain
some Power he couldn't understand?

 
          
 
Is that the Power of the Earth People? Do they
draw monsters from the dirt and rock? Stories told by Traders haunted his
memory—stories of Spirits the Earth People had tied to the rocks and trees. And
if the Earth People catch me, is that what they'll do? Kill me? Trap my soul in
the ground to wail forever in darkness? Thunderbird, help me! Taking a deep
breath to buttress his courage, he returned his attention to the camp.

 
          
 
The spot had been well chosen, with a southern
exposure to catch the sun in winter. Five earthen mounds humped the sandy soil
at the base of the ridge. Each no more than four long paces across, the
dwellings resembled wasp nests, or the doings of some huge mud dauber.
Openings, at ground level, faced the southeast. For the moment, the door flaps
of tanned animal hide had been rolled up and tied with thongs.

 
          
 
A group of elderly men and women sat under a
sagebrush sunshade in the trampled place between the structures. A smoldering
fire contributed desultory tendrils of blue smoke to the evening. With a great
waving of arms and cackling speech, one of the old women dominated the group as
she told a story. Heads nodding and bobbing, the listeners watched enraptured.
The odd language carried to where Sage Ghost lay. Their tongue sounded like the
cooing and clucking of the mourning doves—and every bit as incomprehensible to
him.

 
          
 
Power had brought Sage Ghost to hide here
among the thick clumps of giant wild rye along the river. Here he could spy
upon the Earth People's dirt-covered lodges. The vision had told him that the
Earth People would kill him if they caught him. He glanced around anxiously,
peering through the tall grass as he sought to place every potential escape
route in his memory. If someone sounded an alarm, where could he run? He didn't
know this country, didn't have that feeling for the way the land lay, or how
the trails ran.

 
          
 
Sage Ghost carefully straightened his leg
where it had begun to cramp. He lay on his muscular belly, curled around
tussocks of grass like a human snake. The thick black hair over his forehead
had been pulled up in a roach and pinned with a buffalo-scapula clip; the rest
hung down his back in a tumbled, gleaming stream. A line of five black circles
had been tattooed across his forehead. Wide cheekbones gave his face a craggy
look, the skin sun-darkened and weathered. His long nose sprouted like an
eagle's beak over a broad-lipped mouth. From under heavy brows, keen eyes
studied the camp of the Earth People. Broad shoulders rippled with muscle, as
did his arms: muscles to power the gleaming darts gripped in his callused right
hand and the
atlatl
—a chokecherry shaft as long as
his forearm, with a curved antler hook in the end. The
atlatl
acted as an extension of the arm to increase the power of a cast dart by as
much as two hundred percent. The deadly dart—as long as a man was
tall—consisted of two parts: the stone-tipped
foreshaft
,
which detached upon impact, and the fletched shaft that bounced back and could
be retrieved, quickly fitted with a new
foreshaft
,
and thrown again.

 
          
 
Fear slipped along his spine on feet of ice.

 
          
 
The vision brought me here. Led me over the
long trail to this place. He raised his eyes, whispering as loudly as he dared,
"Where is the child? Haven't I proven myself worthy?"

 
          
 
He gazed into the deepening blue of the
late-afternoon sky. Sage Ghost had always felt a healthy respect for Power—but
he'd never sought it the way some did. He'd been content to hunt, to raise his
family and love his wife. Calling on Power left him uneasy; Power and fire were
a lot the same. They could be managed and manipulated when treated with
respect, or, if treated casually, they could scorch the world or sear the life
from an unwary man's body.

 
          
 
And here I am, far from my people and the land
I love. Where is the child? Or has the Power turned against me? Am I about to
be destroyed? Burned up and turned to ashes, with no one to mourn my soul?

 
          
 
Power was the business of the shamans—the
Dreamers and Soul Fliers. They knew the ways of Power as eagles knew the ways
of the air currents high overhead. Soul Fliers could loosen their souls from
the body and send them wheeling through the Dream the way Eagle circled in the
sky.

 
          
 
Sage Ghost had never had the calling to seek
Power. A Soul Flier might know how to free his spirit and sail like Eagle on
the winds of Power, but Sage Ghost had always known he would tumble to the
unforgiving rocks below.

 
          
 
Events change a man's life. Desperation drives
the most resolute to seek that which he's always avoided. The death of Sage
Ghost's daughter had changed his life, and the life of Bright Moon, his wife.
Stung by the grief in Bright Moon's eyes and the ache in his own soul, Sage
Ghost had raised his arms and called on Power, and Power had led him south, to
spy on this curious camp.

 
          
 
Sage Ghost struggled with an impulse to run,
to get away from this land and this strange people. But to do so would offend
the Power that had brought him this far.

           
 
My soul is a bit of thistledown cast loose on
the winds. A shiver—like the prickly sensation of grasshopper feet on
flesh—worked down Sage Ghost's spine.

 
          
 
Evening continued to settle over the warm,
dusty body of the earth. Streaks of reddish cloud flamed in the dying light of
the sun. Insects chirred and clicked in the grass around him; a breeze rustled
the rasping green stems. Mosquitoes hummed irritatingly but without the
annoying persistence of those common to his home country to the north. Frogs
stroked the quiet air with guttural cries.

 
          
 
Inclined hills rose to the west, buff slabs of
uptilted
mountains stippled by limber pine and
juniper where the trees had knotted thick roots into the cracked rock. The
implacable face of the mountain had been cut by the three forks of the river in
the way a
chert
knife might rip through a lodge
bottom. The waters ran cool and clear through the shaded, tree-choked canyons.
Behind him lay the blue-gray range of mountains he had crossed on his journey.
The northern slopes had risen gradually until he reached the divide. From there
the way had turned treacherous when rounded caps of weathered granite had
dropped off in precipitous cliffs. A misstep would have meant death. The range
stretched east-west, hemming in this giant basin of rock, sand, and desiccated
clays.

 
          
 
Beyond those mountains, more weeks' travel away—north
of the Fat Beaver and the Dangerous rivers—lay his own familiar rugged steppes.
There, along the many drainages that fed the
Bug
River
, the White Clay clan of the Sun People
struggled to hold their territory. Their grasp on the rich land continued to be
peeled back, a
fingerhold
at a time. Other clans of
the Sun People moved out of the north to drive the White Clay before them like
husks of grass before a powerful wind. Keen-eyed warriors of the Broken Stone,
the Wasp, the Black Point, Hollow Flute, and Snow Bird clans lashed out-each
clan a burning stick whose very numbers caused a conflagration across the
north.

 
          
 
Sage Ghost's attention returned to the curious
dwellings. These Earth People might have been pocket gophers, the way they
lived. Like the shy rodent, they flung up a pile of dirt and lived below it. A
lodge made of earth? And dug into the ground? How impossible to conceive. How
did they think— these people who lived in the Earth Mother's breast? How could
they keep from going as crazy as a fly-ridden buffalo from never feeling the
wind rock their lodges, never being able to roll up the bottoms and peek out at
the world? Who would have thought that humans could live in such a way?

 
          
 
A yipping band of children popped one by one
from the dark gape of a doorway. Sage Ghost narrowed his eyes, studying the
thin girl who ran laughing with the little boys. A quickening of his heart
matched a curious light-headed joy. Power stirred in the air around him.

 
          
 
The child!

 
          
 
He tensed, excitement pulsing with the blood
in his veins. The Singers would raise their voices in the winter lodges as they
related the story of Sage Ghost's Spirit Hunt.

 
          
 
The Traders had told the White Clay fantastic
stories about the Earth People for as long as Sage Ghost could remember. But to
see them in the flesh? Did Traders feel the way he did right now? Did they know
this sensation of wonder? Traders went everywhere, the magic of their Trade
protected by the Power of their wooden staffs. Sage Ghost remembered wondrous nights
around crackling camp fires when he'd eaten foods made by the Earth
People—shared those tastes and by doing so, shared a bit of soul.

 
          
 
Is that what brought me here? The Power of the
Trade? Is that where the link was forged?

 
          
 
A curious elation possessed him. He had
fondled the Earth People's finely crafted bone-bead necklaces and breastplates,
and admired their skilled leather work dyed in purple, yellow, and red.

 
          
 
And they must know of us. For surely the
Traders had told the Earth People about the White Clay—and perhaps the
beadmakers
had eaten smoked-and-dried buffalo, moose, and
elk jerky, the animals killed by his own hand.

 
          
 
Is that the Power of Trade? Is it a sharing of
Spirit and Soul? Do all people, no matter how different, Trade pieces of themselves
through the things they make?

 
          
 
In the camp, the slim girl laughed and clapped
her hands as she taunted one of the little boys and skipped out of his reach.
She moved with the grace of a yearling doe. The dying light gleamed off the
wealth of her long black hair.

 
          
 
The old woman stopped her story, turning to
glare. Raising her voice, she berated the girl. The boys immediately backed
away, leaving her alone before the old woman's wrath. The hag erupted in
another outburst and the girl nodded, eyes downcast. Then the child fled,
lustrous hair streaking out behind her.

 
          
 
Sage Ghost started to edge away—to slip
silently over the cut bank and skirt the camp—when movement caught his eye. His
mouth went dry.

 
          
 
A huge black wolf watched him from the shadows
of the greasewood. Its triangular ears pricked forward, while gleaming yellow
eyes seemed to burn into his soul, measuring, probing. Power pulsed in the air.

 
          
 
This is the place. Fragments of the vision
returned to him. Giddy energy charged his muscles. Breath shortened in his
lungs. Power did that, sneaked up on a man and blew through his soul like a
freezing wind.