She bowed her head to him; as a female, she need not bare her throat in submission to a male. 'I did, brother,' she replied. 'This is one who leads his pack into danger for the sake of his own ambition and prestige, and does not care what will befall them so long as his power is increased.'
'So,' said the Leader, turning his golden gaze on the young man, who shrank away. 'You think perhaps I should challenge his right to lead, then?'
Again she bowed her head. 'As you wish, Pack Leader,' she replied humbly. 'I am but a young female; I only know this one needs discipline.'
The Leader grinned toothily. 'Then discipline he shall have.'
In a moment, there was a young Wolf where the young man had stood; another moment passed while he trembled with shock and surprise; then the Lead Wolf was on him, treating him as he would any young fool who dared to challenge him for the right to lead the Pack.
There would be no killing-oh no. But before this one was sent back to his body by the contemptuous fling of a pair of lupine jaws, he would be certain he was about to be killed, not once but a hundred times over. Likely, he would not again dare to reach for Medicine Powers he was not entitled to, with the help of peyote. Not after this experience.
Satisfied that the Lead Wolf had the situation well in hand, she stepped back across the threshold and into her own body, just in time to see the competition begin. Para-medics were taking the young man who had collapsed to the I first-aid tent; they were probably assuming heatstroke. He would wake up soon-and with no more thoughts of causing trouble tonight, at least.
Grandfather's hand tightened around hers, and she looked up into his wrinkled, smiling face. 'Well done,' he whispered.
That was all. He never told her what he had done, but later her father told them a story he'd gotten from one of the Tulsa County Sheriffs, about a dog that had spooked the normally steady horse ridden by one of the mounted officers. The rangy dog-reportedly a German shepherd-had driven the horse right down a trail away from the powwow and into a gathering of young white boys who were carrying bats and chains, were drunk, and were obviously out to start a fight. The officer had rounded them up with the help of his suddenly cooperative horse, and had seen they were escorted out of the park-and had arrested the most aggressive for public intoxication. 'Damnest thing they'd ever seen,' her father had said, with a curious glance at Grandfather. 'Those crowd-control ponies just don't spook. And to head in the right direction like that-'
Grandfather hadn't said anything, and neither had Jennifer. But from that moment, the games ended, and the serious work began.
From then on, she'd applied herself with the same determination that she'd given to her studies. There hadn't been much room in her life for anything else, particularly not once she started her sideline of 'finding.' The first time it had been by accident; she'd been working on a case that had taken her up to Indiana, tracing the movements of a child-support dodger. She'd found herself in a tiny town with four hours to kill, and had in desperation followed a sign that pointed the way to a 'county museum.'
'Museum' wasn't exactly what she would have called it. It looked more like the leavings of the attics for miles around for the past several generations. There was an attempt at outlining the county history in the first room, but after that, it had been dusty glass case after case full of mostly unlabeled flotsam. Without a doubt, some of it was genuine and valuable; the Civil War artifacts, for instance-
But right beside war diaries that screamed for proper preservation were stuffed squirrels, stuffed birds, stuffed fish ...
... a mummified mermaid ... a shrunken head . . . someone's collection of jelly jars. . . .
And the relics.
She nearly doubled over with nausea; she couldn't even bear to touch the case. Scalps, medicine bags, articles of clothing, weapons, and three or four dozen skulls, all of them crying out to her of death. Bloody, horrible death. Kestrel had come very near to starting a mourning keen until the Jennifer persona took over.
She staggered to the front of the museum and managed to ask about that particular case. The attendant, a girl who was obviously trying to do her best, first described the terrible problem she was having, trying to preserve the things worth preserving with no money. She carried on at length about the importance of the papers and belongings of the settlers.
Gradually it dawned on Jennifer that this girl never said a word about the Indians; so far as she was concerned, the history of the area began and ended with the white settlers. When she finally got the girl to tell her about the case of bones and artifacts, the girl shrugged dismissively. 'Mound builders of some kind,' she said. 'Abram Vanderzandt found them when he arrived looking for a place to homestead, and they were all dead. Probably some other tribe killed them, and he could have taken credit and turned in the scalps for bounty, but he was an honest man and he just collected a few souvenirs.'
The girl continued, apparently blithely unaware-or uncaring-that Jennifer was Native American, that she had dismissed the taking of 'souvenirs' from the victims of the massacre as casually as if they had been nothing more important than the stuffed squirrels.
For a moment, Jennifer was outraged-until the girl continued. And it became clear that she attached sanctity to no one's dead, and would have happily looted every graveyard in the county if she thought she could get any kind of information from the graves.
And it was her attitude that only those who had left written accounts of themselves-the white settlers-were I worthy of attention that gave Jennifer an idea.
'Well, the reason I asked about that particular case,' she said, interrupting a plaint of how the Civil War relics were falling to pieces, 'is that I collect Indian relics. I don't suppose you'd be able to sell me those, would you?'
The girl gaped at her, then stammered something about 'county property.' Jennifer nodded, and said, 'So who's in charge of county property? The Assessor? Or the County Commissioner?'
It took several phone calls before it was established that the County Commissioner did have the authority to sell property deeded to the museum. Jennifer was not going to let this opportunity slip through her fingers, and the volunteer was not about to lose a chance at some funding for her pet project. So when Jennifer urged, 'Let's go ask him,' the girl led the march straight to the tiny office on the fourth floor.
She had the feeling that she could have bought half the museum if she'd wanted; the Commissioner was overjoyed to sell something the girl assured him was 'worthless.' He was probably very tired of her pleas for money; now she had some, and maybe she'd leave him alone for a while.
Jennifer was fairly certain that the sale was only quasi-legal at best, and she hadn't cared. It was doubtful that anyone would pursue her.
It had taken every ounce of determination to take the box of relics, smile, and thank them.
The place where the settler in question had discovered the massacre was now in the middle of a state park. That made things easier.
Whatever the tribe's rites had been, no one knew them now. Jennifer could only inter them near where they had died, trying to recreate a rite as best she could from her own intuition and Medicine knowledge, as well as from things she had learned about the Peoples who had once lived in the area, gleaned hastily from the county library. She found a place she thought would be undisturbed, one of the lesser, less interesting mounds near what had been the village, and spent most of the day digging into the side. At sunset, she had laid them to rest as best she could.
Then she covered her tracks, and went back to the job she was being paid to do.
But that had given her an idea. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts in profane hands, all over I the country. Not just museums, but in the hands of people like private collectors, and in the hands of the descendants of Indian agents. Some agents had been good, well-intentioned, if woefully Judeo-Christian-centered people, but some had been thieves who took anything they could get their hands on, and others had felt the only way to 'pacify' the Indians was to destroy their culture. Most of those artifacts didn't matter; much-but some-
For some, it would be as if collectors had robbed the tomb of Abraham Lincoln for the sake of the bones, or stolen the relics of Catholic saints out of their shrines. As if some museum knowingly bought the Black Stone after it was stolen from the shrine at Mecca. The remains of Ancestors deserved a proper interment-and medicine objects deserved to go back to the hands that cherished them. That was when she had decided that she would do something about the situation; tracking these objects down and returning them to the appropriate hands. There
