an old one. The Osage of the past exposed their dead to the sky and Wah-K'on-Tahfor at least a season, to give the spirits time to rise. Afterwards, what was left was placed under a cairn of rocks. That was one reason why this ridge was covered with a rubble of small stones. Over time, a lot of soil had settled here, some of it blown in from the rest of the state during the Dust Bowl, burying the remains of the cairns and what they protected. Nature, and not man, had given these graves a covering of earth.
The burial site looked no different from any other brush-covered ridge out here, and if she hadn't known what it was, she would never have been able to pick it out.
Normally. She halted the mule and squinted up at the ridge, shading her eyes with her hand.
The damage was obvious as soon as she was able to pick out what was shadow and what was disturbed ground. Oh, hell.
She nudged her mount forward and up the slope to the site of the looting, then pulled the mule up, ground- tied her, and dismounted. It was no better at second viewing. The shallow graves piled high with crude cairns of rocks were lying open. There were a few signs that the looter or looters had been in a hurry still lying about in the form of odd beads, broken pottery, crumbling baskets. Everything portable had been taken, down to the bones.
The bones. Theft of possessions would not have riled the Little People. Theft of remains, however ...
Some five or six graves had been looted; from the grass sprouting in the turned earth, and the amount washed back into the holes, it looked as if it had happened right around April.
Damn, damn, damn.
This was more than Kestrel could handle easily; she wanted to start a mourning keen right here and now. But a mourning keen would not help, not now. So she put on her Jennifer mask and persona, invoked her experience as a P.I., and began collecting what little evidence there was. She had two cameras with her; a Polaroid and a 35-mm. Clinically, dispassionately, she began to fire off Polaroids, then took a full roll of 35-mm film for later development.
Meanwhile, she went mentally through all the possibilities for some sort of official investigation. I could call in the cops, but this is the county, and they 're overworked. The only way they'II catch whoever did this is if they come back, or start boasting. Even if they caught whoever did this, what could they do? If we were lucky, the perps would get the standard slap-on-the-wrist for graveyard desecration. Lucky, because this isn't a registered, official county graveyard, which might mean that the law wouldn't even allow us that much. What is the law about graveyards on private land? I don't even know that; it's never come up before.
She hung both cameras over the saddle horn by their neck straps once she had all the evidence there was to get. Then, biting her lip a little in apprehension, she went farther up the ridge, to the very top. Right where the sun lingered the longest, and the view was the best.
Right where the remains of a cairn were the most obvious to someone who knew what to look for. And where a hastily-dug hole in the ground was equally obvious, once you got past the bushes that screened the place from below.
Oh, shit.
Watches-Over-The-Land's resting place was as empty as the other six graves.
The strictly physical was easy to take care of, so long as she kept her Jennifer persona in place. There was absolutely no point in trying to sort out whose bits belonged to whom, and really, even for the medicine it didn't much matter. The spirits of those left here had long since gone into the West, and what had happened here would not materially affect that.
Unless, of course, the person who had taken the bones had been some kind of magician or medicine person himself. Then he could use the relics to draw those spirits back, against their will... imprisoning them in this world, making mi-ah-luschka out of them.
Which might very well be why the feeling of dark anger lay over this hillside, dimming the sunlight.
She picked the deepest of the holes, gathered everything that was scattered, and carefully laid it all on the bottom, covering it over with loose dirt and rocks. She hadn't brought a shovel, so she used her hands.
When she finished and straightened, she already knew it wasn't enough. The air vibrated with the rage of the Little People, exactly as if she stood in the middle of a swarm of angry bees.
The menace was there, not for her, but for whoever had done this. And there was a sense of frustration and bafflement, too, as if the mi-ah-luschka had somehow been prevented from tracking this person, or that he was protected in some way from their vengeance. . . .
Which argued even more for it being some kind of medicine practitioner.
Well, there was one thing she could do. Provided that none of the Ancestors had been drawn back, that is. She could invoke the fire of Wah-K'on-Tah, and burn away all connection between those spirits and their remains.
This was not something her own Ancestors would have known how to do; it was another of the innovations of the Deer/Talldeer family. An innovation made necessary by the number of Heavy Eyebrows stealing from gravesites, not only for museums and collectors, but for darker purposes.
Or even purposes they didn't realize were dark. How many turn-of-the-century Spiritualists had unwittingly called back spirits to be their 'Indian Guides' to the Afterlife, using stolen bones? Probably quite a few, judging by the old papers of the Spiritualist Society. . . .
There was sage on the hillside, and sweetgrass; redbud along the creek bed, the blue mud for paint. Everything she needed was here. Maybe this was all that was needed for the Little People to settle down.
Maybe.
The sunlight seemed thinner on the hillside; she hadn't even worked up a sweat reburying the remains. And although she did get hot and sweaty collecting her redbud and sweetgrass, when she returned to the site it was like walking into a shadow.
Not a good sign.
She started her fire and her little smudge of smoke, painted her face with the charred end of a redbud twig, then stood tall and straight in the eyes of Grandfather Sun. She closed her eyes and raised her face, the warmth of the sunlight full against her cheeks, steadied her breathing until she reached a still, calm center and filled herself with Power.
Let it begin.
The creek was safe enough to wash in, although she would not have tried drinking it. She splashed cold water all over her face and arms, flushing off the paint, scrubbing away the dirt she'd accumulated.
She glanced back over her shoulder at the hillside, glad enough to be down off the site. The anger up there had diminished a bit, but it was still a potent force, and she would not want to go up there after dark. And although she had a certain level of calm-after all, she had at least done something-there was also a corresponding level of frustration. Some force was working against both the Little People and her own attempts to discover just who was responsible here. Something was clouding the trail. Yes, this site had been robbed. Yes, it was possible that the relics had been taken from here and cached at Calligan's development site. But the trail had been broken and muddied past all retracing, and there was no way of knowing for certain unless she could actually get her hands on an artifact from the development.
It was just as possible that whoever had robbed this site had no connection with Calligan at all-even though the vision quest she had undertaken had seemed to imply a connection. Medicine worked the way it wanted to, sometimes, and that vision quest could simply have been telling her, 'that job is not important-here is something you should be doing something about.'
There were seldom any black-and-white answers in Medicine, at least as Mooncrow taught it.
It took a while to get the dirt out from under her fingernails, but if there was one thing she hated-and one thing that gave people a really bad impression-it was dirty fingernails. By the time she finished, she was starving.
So she took just long enough to share her lunch with the mule, while she tried to think of something she had left undone, or anything else she could do. Finally she shook her head, and swung herself back up into the mule's saddle.
It was going to be an uneasy ride home.
_CHAPTER NINE