Pax Dakota

Ken Rand

1883

Iron Shield took a thin breath, bony chest shuddering like butterfly wings, and he exhaled his life into the still night air. His spirit left the material world through the lodge's smoke hole.

His host dead, Watcher found himself homeless.

Watcher cast his awareness through the spirit world and looked back into the material world for a new human host. Limited by the crude magic that made him in the Long Ago Time as warden for Old Enemy, he found none. No new life teetered between worlds, no babes readied for birth in Crowheart village lodges.

If he found no new host — now — all would be lost. Old Enemy would rise again.

From the spirit world, Watcher looked into the material world at the dozen chiefs who'd crowded into the dim lodge to keep vigil. Iron Shield lie still on a buffalo robe mound, eyes shut, jaw slack, as he had for hours. The chiefs hadn't noticed the great leader's quiet passing.

Sweating, feathers abob, Shot in the Hip danced and sang beside the bed. Dust puffed from the dirt floor with each stuttery, stilt-legged step. His hair hung limp, stringy, coated with grit, and his voice rose and fell in cracked falsetto, an old shaman singing desperate prayers to save Iron Shield's exalted life.

Iron Shield — warrior, chief, storyteller, savior of the Six Tribes, Pax Dakota author — lay dead, but Shot in the Hip danced on.

Shot in the Hip danced and sang as he had since morning when Iron Shield collapsed outside his lodge. Day became night and Shot in the Hip danced and sang on and on, pain long since transcended.

Like the wooden-faced chiefs and the people in grim vigil outside the lodge, Shot in the Hip didn't know his efforts to intervene in the inevitable had failed. This Watcher saw as he searched for a new host.

He found none.

Iron Shield had been joking and telling stories to the children outside his lodge, as he did every morning, when he collapsed. He'd fallen with a sigh in a knobby-jointed, leather-skinned heap among the shocked children.

Host suddenly unconscious, Watcher had jerked awake from his spirit-slumber and looked around. At first, Watcher thought the old man had only fainted, so he wasn't alarmed that no new host stood by. But the host didn't recover. Now he was dead.

Time meant nothing in the spirit world. Watcher now moved through the spirit world looking for a new host with the manic speed of a fly. Crowheart's people seemed statues, molasses for blood, as they sat or stood in worried huddles listening to Shot in the Hip's wavery song.

From mind to mind, Watcher searched, finding no new host.

He began to dissipate. He could feel himself coming unstuck, a spider web in a hailstorm.

Panic pressed his search onward, outward, to minds beyond Crowheart, to the threadbare limits of his power.

Word spread across the material world, a wildfire, after Iron Shield's collapse.

Iron Shield dies.

Watcher heard. Telegraph wires hummed from Crowheart up and down the Shining Mountains' eastern slope to Muddy Gap northeast of town, east across the Big Horns, north to Crow and Blackfoot villages in the upper plains, past the northern Dakota border into Grandmother's Country. Host Village to the southwest passed the news east and west along the Pax Road to Dakota and Americans alike on the southern Dakota border from Rock Springs to Denver and beyond.

Iron Shield dies.

Watcher saw. Pilgrims, mostly Dakota, but a few Americans and other foreigners who happened to be in country, converged. The day dragged on, and night fell, clear and brisk. The roads to the north, south, and east filled with churned dust, a silvery-ghost veil rising in the moonlight.

Iron Shield dies.

Pilgrims came. Thousands had come and more thousands were still coming. Among them, Watcher hoped, would be a pregnant woman. He extended consciousness tendrils among the pilgrims, but found no host.

Frustration mounted as his memory and power — the stuff of his existence — faded more, closer to permanent non-being. Desperation drove him to the limits of awareness, searching among the pilgrims.

At last, a pregnant girl came within the outer range of his awareness, far, far away. She reclined on a travois pulled by a horse her husband led afoot.

The young mother grunted in sudden pain and the father, a mere boy, came to her side.

"The baby comes," the girl said.

The boy nodded, grim-faced, and unhitched the horse. He made a blanket shelter from the cold night wind. He found water in a nearby creek, tended to the horse, and made a fire. On the trail, he saw no others. He heard only his wife's ragged, pain-filled breathing, the fire crackle, and a distant coyote yip at the full moon.

Watcher prepared to enter the baby. Still, he may have found the new host too late. Much of his being had already dissipated beyond recovery, as a dream fades with day. His worry hurt like birth pain.

In the intense heat of concern, he assessed his new circumstance and arrived at a dire conclusion. He concluded much had been lost in this latest delayed transit. He now realized in the instant he transited to another host, that each such move over the millennia had cost him a small part of his memory and power. The effect had been cumulative.

When he'd inhabited the baby who'd become Iron Shield seventy years ago, he'd been aware — as now, again — that his power had almost ended. He couldn't afford further loss of those powers. Back then, in the lucid moment he experienced during transit, he'd put into the babe's mind and its mother and father and certain others, the seeds of a plan to compensate for his accumulating power loss.

Iron Shield, called Little Fox at birth, had visions of a great task he must perform, renewed during his life in occasional visions and dreams, reinforced through similar dreams in advisors and mentors. He'd lead The People to create a nation around the place where Old Enemy's prison lay. That nation would protect the site. The site would become sacred. Untouched.

The plan was bold but necessary. When he made it, Watcher sensed he could no longer guard the site alone.

Watcher's will became manifest as the Plains War, where Iron Shield earned his exalted name. Dreams and visions Watcher had planted piloted an unprecedented allegiance, a power and will among the nations to drive out the invader. Victory, the Pax Dakota, came after long and bitter struggle and sacrifice.

But the victory was flawed, like the fading magic that created the vision behind it. The nation staked out in the high plains didn't encompass Old Enemy's burial site as planned. The whites — the wasichu — had fought hard in that spot and had fixed the site on their side of the border.

To wasichu, the site was not sacred. It was not protected. A simple accident could breach it.

Watcher's desperate plan, through Iron Shield, succeeded in creating the Dakota nation, but it failed in its main mission — create a sacred barrier around Old Enemy's prison.

Watcher, as he entered the baby in the girl's womb, had to come up with yet another plan. Now. Even as complex and fraught with danger as the plan was, it took no more than the wink of a human eye to orchestrate, and he knew it must be his last try. He feared, when awakened again at this host's death to assume his next host, he'd be too weak to go on.

Last chance.

As he entered the babe, he cast one last look around, the last before he slept another generation. He touched minds, fed such visions as he could to support the baby in its coming role as The People's savior.

Then he —

— hesitated.

An idea so novel came to him that Watcher gasped with excitement. The baby kicked so hard the mother cried out. The premise — Watcher would fade and Old Enemy would escape. When Old Enemy did, he'd discover Watcher and finish him off. Then his terrible reign over The People would resume.

The plan, based on that premise, was desperate, bold.

He reached through the spirit world, seeding a dream here, a vision there, and yet another in particular, over there. Fading, he worked fast, did the best he could. He tried to touch minds and sculpt them as a potter might sculpt clay. He tried, but he didn't know if the impressions took, or how well.

Then, he spoke, loud and firm, inside Shot in the Hips weary, dazed mind.

At last, mission accomplished — so he prayed — Watcher rested.

Shot in the Hip stopped. He swayed, dizzy in his abrupt stillness. The swirling world around him went quiet. No chief moved. The people outside the lodge stood, still, in a cold hush. A gusty wind fluttered tent flaps and a horse neighed. A dog barked. The fire popped and hissed.

Shot in the Hip heard Iron Shield's voice. At first, he didn't recognize it. A young warrior spoke, a younger Iron Shield, not the old bonebag who lie before him.

Shot in the Hip's arms dropped, shoulders sagged. A moan escaped his ragged, tired lungs. The chiefs echoed his moan, knew its meaning. The moan echoed in the wind outside, and The People echoed the wind.

Iron Shield is dead.

The moan became a lament, a high-pitched wail, and it spread throughout the village and to the thousands approaching on the road. By telegraph, within minutes, word went out to the world.

A great man has died.

Shot in the Hip paid no heed to the grieving around him. Instead he focused on the distinct inner voice. Go to the babe. Go now. You will know the way. A vision accompanied the bidding — a baby birthing.

The vision came and went in an eye blink. It had been clear enough at its core though it had ragged edges. The baby was sacred — wakan. The baby would be the nations' savior, as Iron Shield had been.

Shot in the Hip's role also seemed clear. Find the baby and see to his education and spiritual care.

A mist, a vagueness, at the edges of the otherwise clear vision, bothered Shot in the Hip. A little.

As the wailing rose into the night around him, though weary to the bone, Shot in the Hip began his journey, seeking the newborn baby, the reincarnated Iron Shield, to fulfill his mission.

He followed the vision, three days, four days, resting as his body demanded, eating food pressed on him by those he met on the road who saw in his haunted face a holy man on a sacred journey. On the sixth day, he found the baby.

"What have you named him?" he asked the father in a croaking voice. He already knew.

"Joseph Thorn," the father said. He too had had dreams. So had the mother.

When Shot in the Hip held the baby, awe in his eyes and spirit, he experienced an omen. The naked baby pissed in his face and began to cry.

1896

Hot, purple blood streamed down Joseph Thorn's chin, neck and narrow chest. It pooled in his belly-button and the creases of his flat stomach and stained his breechclout. He savored the juicy, coppery tang of the bite of buffalo heart in his mouth for a moment, then swallowed the rubbery lump.

He held the heart up in one hand and let out a whoop, blood sputtering on his companions gathered around and into the tall, green grass where the buffalo lay, legs still twitching. Another boy — Henri Red Horse, a French-Dakota from Muddy Gap — snatched the dripping lump from Joseph's up-raised hand, bit into it and joined the cry. The other two boys who'd been party to the kill followed suit, snatching and biting the warm, smoking heart in order of an unofficial, undeclared ranking that had emerged in the course of the ritual week-long hunt.

They were men now, the group of boys, twelve and thirteen years old. They'd killed a buffalo, successfully completing their first buffalo hunt in the Dakota herd that roamed the grasslands east of the Big Horns. They'd gathered for the annual hunt, a national coming-of-age ritual, from all over the Dakota. As tradition provided, the keepers of the sacred herd divided the hundreds of boys into groups of six or seven in each group on the first day and sent them off to hunt.

The boys who had been chosen to ride with Joseph Thorn had heard his story. Everyone in the nation had. Born the very day Iron Shield died — some said the very hour — he was blessed with a spiritual gift unique among men, it was said. The boys, feeling especially blessed to ride in his company, silently agreed he would carry the pipe on their hunt; he would lead.

But while other teams had secured their kill on the first or second day, their hunting had gone bad. One boy had been thrown from his pony and had broken an arm within an hour of their first excursion from the main camp, ending the hunt for the day. The unfortunate boy would be denied his rights to Dakota manhood until the following summer.

After that bad first day, it got worse. The herd had scattered by the second day, pursued across the grassy plain by frantic, yipping bands of boys. His group, Joseph ostensibly in the lead, had trouble finding, let alone getting near, any part of the herd on their third day when most other groups had already retired from the field and begun celebrating their kills in the main village of Greasy Grass.

On the fourth day, a thick sub-herd of a hundred buffalo had been spotted and the group mustered a coordinated attack that had permitted three of the boys to fire dozens of arrows at targets only feet away in the very heart of the herd. All arrows missed and another boy was injured and had to retire from the field. Disheartened muttering surrounded the remaining four boys campfire that night.

It rained the fifth day. The boys sat through the day in stony, cold silence.

The sixth and last day of the hunt dawned with a fist-fight among the boys before their campfire was even put out. The dejected bunch set out for Greasy Grass, a long hot day's ride, where their failure would become known across the nation. No songs would be sung about them when they got home. They would return next summer to try again.

Joseph, humiliation an iron cloak on his slim shoulders, his heart a hot coal in his stomach, led them eastward across the vast green sea toward Greasy Grass.

Led them. Joseph snorted. He didn't lead. He merely rode in front, an unspoken arrangement made as they had set out that first day. He hadn't wanted to carry the pipe for the band, but what choice did he have? When they first met him, the other boys had treated him like, like —

"Hey," Tin Cup said. "Would you look at that?"

"What?" Joseph looked up — he'd been dozing, bent over his cantle in the cloud-speckled, hot late-morning sun. Tin Cup pointed ahead. The boys had become so disconsolate they'd neglected to watch where they were going. Fifty feet away stood an old bull, facing them, tail twitching listlessly amid a cloud of flies, atop a low rise. They'd all been riding, eyes on their pony's necks, not on the knee-deep grassy sea around them. They'd all given up.

"A sign, eh?" Henri Red Horse said and Tin Cup and Long Neck Howard grunted agreement. Their tones made it clear; not a good sign, the sudden appearance of a lame, blind bull, unworthy of the hunt. Henri spat loudly; a statement. Joseph said nothing, bitter disappointment constricting his throat.

The bull's eyes were pale, like damp cotton. A watery discharge oozed dark streaks down its dirt-caked face. It held its right back hoof gingerly off the ground. Blind and crippled, abandoned by the herd, it would die before sunset.

Joseph had been so dejected he hadn't noticed the buzzards gathering, riding the thermals above them, and milling and hopping in the waving grass thirty yards off. A lone coyote sat, pointed ears and nose peeking above the grass a hundred yards away. Other coyotes no doubt hid in the tall grass.

An old bull, not worthy of the hunt.

Joseph looked at his companions astride their still, sweaty ponies. They avoided his eyes, watching the buzzards among the sheep-like clouds or listlessly brushing their ponies' wind-tangled manes. The unwanted and unearned reverence they'd treated him with on the first day had descended day by day through antipathy to — he saw it clearly now — disgust, even hatred.

The boys who, only six days ago, thought him endowed with some spiritual dispensation, a special magical link to powers beyond their imagining, now saw him for the failure he was. He was just a boy, frail and frightened just as they were, just as determined to hide his boyish fears behind a mask of bravado.

Just a boy. Nothing more.

But he'd never wanted to be more. His companions had hoped to ride Joseph's coat-tails to glory and manhood, that some of his magic would rub off on them, but they'd been deceived.

They deceive themselves. Not my fault for what they believed. Not my fault.

A sudden anger gripped Joseph, a kind of whiskey madness, like he'd seen more often than he wanted to remember.

"You wanted a buffalo?" he said, biting his words. "Well, there's one. Who'll help me kill it? Who?"

No answer.

"Don't be modest. Speak up. I carry the pipe, but I'm generous. Who'll make the kill? Huh? Who?"

No answer.

Bitterness at his unwanted role as leader boiled over and Joseph screamed. He jabbed heels into his pony's flank and the pony dashed forward. He gathered his bow and notched an arrow as he rode, screaming.

The old bull snorted airily, a rusty steam engine, and turned to lumber away. Joseph was on him before the bull had taken a dozen staggering paces. His arrow slammed into the beasts hump to the feathers and with a thump, the bull augured into the ground.

Joseph rode on fifty yards before he could rein in his pony and return.

The other boys had gathered in the dust cloud around the twitching beast, its pale, glassy eyes rolling, wet tongue lolling. In the boys' eyes, Joseph read disgust and revulsion.

He dismounted and drew his knife. "What's the matter with you? You wanted to kill a buffalo, didn't you? Well, here it is. I killed it. I, Joseph Thorn, Shoshone-Dakota."

With that, Joseph began cutting open the bull's chest, to find and remove the heart.

As he did so, panting and sweat-soaked with exertion, he heard the boys whispering among themselves, nervous, frantic.

" — accept this and say nothing to anyone — "

" — at least we won't have to come back next year — "

" — just say Joseph killed it. Nothing more — "

" — say nothing — "

Joseph pulled the grisly trophy from the animal's chest, bit into it and offered the lie to his companions. They bit.

That afternoon, when they returned to Greasy Grass, they were greeted on the outskirts of the bright, noisy camp by Crazy Horse. The old warrior, crippled and almost blind, escorted with gentleness and respect by two young boys, raised his ceremonial coup stick, said to be the very one he used in the Plains War as Iron Shield's greatest and bravest war chief, and feebly tapped each of the boys on the chest.

"Mitakuye oyasin," he said to each boy as he touched their dried blood-caked bare chests perfunctorily with the stick. He spoke the Lakota phrase with reverence even if in a faltering old-man's croaking whisper. It meant "We are all related," and it meant the traditional hunt, as all things, was done for the good of the nation and its people, not for individual glory. It meant that the boys were all now men in the eyes of the nation and by rights were owed the respect due Dakota men.

Joseph endured Crazy Horse's official confirmation of the lie, as did his companions, in silence.

His three companions immediately joined an on-going, raucous celebration, dancing and howling with dozens of other boys around one of several monumental blazing fires, letting the drums beat whatever lies they told themselves into something Joseph knew they'd someday come to believe. Joseph longed to join the dance, anesthetize his guilty lie with mesmerizing rhythm and with numbing exhaustion, but that surcease was denied him. Even as Crazy Horse tottered off with his two youthful aides, a stoop-shouldered, bespeckled Dakota-Negro pulled him aside and escorted him silently to the telegraph lodge.

A telegram for him from his father in Crowheart. Shot in the Hip has died.

Joseph dutifully squeezed tears from his eyes as he stood with the crumpled telegram in his hand, the gray-haired telegraph clerk avoiding his eyes, but it was hard to do. He wanted to dance among his peers, but the tears were expected now so he found them.

A week later, on his return to Crowheart, his cynical suspicions were confirmed. Joseph learned that small boys herding sheep had found Shot in the Hip's body. He'd fallen from his horse on a patch of tricky, rocky trail and had frozen to death within sight of Crowheart. He'd been drunk at the time, the half-empty whiskey bottle still clutched in his hand when they found his stiff carcass.

No surprise. Drunkenness had haunted Shot in the Hip over the years like a bad dream, like a vague, partially coherent dream on which he could never quite focus. So he drank and in time slowly lost prestige and his role as a healer among the people, though he continued to mentor to Joseph, whether Joseph wanted it or not. The drinking never quite worked. Shot in the Hip never brought the fuzzy edges of that long-ago dream — he'd talked about it to Joseph often — into focus.

Didn't matter.

The buffalo hunt had been a fraud. And his peers had told lies about their vision quests the year before and earlier that summer. They'd seen nothing. Nobody ever had. Ever.

Lies. All lies.

Confirmed yet again: almost before he could walk or ride, Joseph Thorn had concluded his self-proclaimed spiritual mentor, Shot in the Hip, the sodden old fart, was a fraud.

There was no spirit world, never had been. It was all a lie, a fraud. Always had been.

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