and at least a hint of the ravages of war-the War Between the States, in other words. (Was a truer name ever given a conflict?)
While too young in his crick-back father’s eyes to avoid his duties on the land at the eruption of the violence, he had finally risked being nailed to their barn door like a squirrel skin and run off ragtag-drummer-boy fashion to join what had become more a river running against him than one forging south and high. It was by then a tide of blood and a tide of terror spilling back northward. What he actually saw to the south was more the flotsam-let’s-go-get- some aftermath of the crisis, but it forever dispelled any youthful fantasies about the nobleness of battle. All too much of it would never leave his dreams.
He remembered a starving boy stealing an amputated limb from a surgeon’s tent to gnaw. The horrors were as common as the bullet-flecked tree trunks, and no one took any notice. Some of those he watched, skulking and limping through burned-out orchards, seemed more machine than human-beast mechanisms escaped from some delirium. He could remember thinking to his young self, War is an excellent way of hiding deformities and criminal behavior. It is a harvest of madness.
Now, that may seem like an unusual thought for a young turnip-and-potato-growing lad who longed to ride horses and draw maps to have, but there you have it. War as camouflage, and a means of harnessing the energy of widespread psychic disorder. Perhaps young Todd was drawing a bigger map than he realized.
In any case, all these diversions and perversions streamed through his mind on the edge of that overly exuberant rivulet because of what he could not escape in his field glasses. Because of who or, rather, what he saw, relaxed and waiting for him as if his arrival had been long anticipated.
He was looking at a still young man of around thirty, not much older. He was not an Indian-it was hard to say his breeding-and he was mounted on a donkey, but a donkey that was twenty hands high. The man wore some kind of military costume, but unlike any Todd had seen before. It was not a Civil War uniform. Nor was it was some old Mexican uniform from the war of 1845. When he looked more closely, he saw that the emblem on the man’s chest depicted a wheelbarrow with flames rising from it. On the man’s head was a kind of hat made from the pelt of a skunk. Then, to Todd’s astonishment, the hat stirred and the young cavalryman realized that the skunk was still alive! The man was wearing a live skunk-like a hat. And a very ceremonious headdress it appeared, too. The acid in Todd’s stomach roared like the creek.
In the Man Beyond’s rifle sheath was a firearm that appeared to be made of glass and in his belt, like a saber, hung a weird-shaped hunting horn, while on the pommel of his saddle perched a powerful pure white gyrfalcon.
The thing Todd found unaccountable was that the man, the skunk, the hunting bird, and the donkey all waited as blithely as could be amid a large herd of smoldering black bison, the biggest Todd had ever seen. Even standing still (and as if at attention), the massive horned and hump-shouldered animals looked more like fur-draped locomotives than even gargantuan ungulates.
Then, through the field glasses, Todd watched as the man raised his arm. The bison did not react, but the falcon flung itself into the air with a strength that Todd could feel all the way across the creek. Beating its wings ferociously, the raptor soared up over the grassland and came at him. The horse soldier was so surprised that he nearly dropped his binoculars. Faster and harder the fierce white bird came, so that Todd was compelled to reach for his Colt revolver-but then, by God, the man on the donkey waved at him!
Todd got distracted and had to duck as the falcon plucked his hat clean off his head. Unfortunately, in veering to escape the clutching talons the lieutenant slipped out of his saddle and fell on his ass, which startled his steed further and made him see red for a moment. (In fact, the falcon had nicked him.) By the time he was seated astride his spooked horse again, staunching the faint trickle of blood from his hairline, the man across the creek was holding his hat. The man then offered the cavalry officer’s brim back to the beak of the bird.
This time the falcon swooped out over the creek and released the hat into the water. Todd let out a slight cry at this, for reasons he did not understand (and felt ashamed about), and watched as the hat and all that he symbolically associated with it surged off into the current.
Needless to say, Lieutenant Todd was discomposed by these events and blew a blast on his bugle to signal Sergeant Scoresby that it was time to come forward with his supporting battalion, which was poised for action about three-quarters of a mile away. Scoresby’s men answered the call, but to Todd’s dismay, so did the falconer. He raised the eccentric hunting horn and blew a deep, rich tone from it, more primal than symphonic-with amazing effect.
There had been no bison on Todd’s side of the rushing creek before then that he had noticed-and it is very hard to overlook a huge herd of potentially deadly mammals. But there were now. More than he had ever seen, and he had by that point seen a lot. He was hurled from his horse. He felt his intestines contract and his breathing stop, and then the cowardice of gratitude-for the flood of brutes had turned in the direction of Scoresby’s approach, as if on command, and begun to pound their way toward the advancing line of soldiers, who had yet to make visual contact with this fantastic scene but could no doubt hear the vibrations. Faster and harder the monsters picked up momentum, rumbling toward the hapless horsemen like an avalanche of muscle. My God! thought Todd in panic. They’ll be trampled!
But Scoresby and company had turned tail and begun retreating for all they were worth-for their split-second assumption was that Todd, being closer to the rampaging herd, had already been more or less obliterated. Later, a search party would be sent out to recover his mangled body. Scoresby had a very cut-and-dried approach to decision-making, with his own survival ranking very high. He rode like the proverbial wind.
Todd, meanwhile, was too unhinged to have a strategy just then (perhaps ever again). He was relieved, of course, not to have been ground into the grass, but he was also perplexed by the lack of dust in the air in the wake of such a torrent of hooves and horns. He had, as noted, never seen such large bison. And he had never seen so many bison of any size at one time. But he had most assuredly never seen so many bison of any size disappear so fast. That concerned him-for a fleeting moment, almost as much as the dawning awareness of how alone he now was. For a man used to knowing and paid to know where he was and where others should go, he was now acutely conscious that he had no idea that he could trust anymore, save that others should not go where he was just then, and that he would have been very happy to be elsewhere-anywhere else. Even Turnip.
Nevertheless, he tried to compose himself in accordance with his military training-recalling as much the words of his scoffing, colicky father as those of his remote and safe captain. He had to meet the situation, whatever presented itself, with some semblance of dignity and astuteness. He had, after all, been chosen for this post and this particular assignment. He took stock.
No horse. Comrades scattered. And… and…
If the bison that had materialized on his side of the creek were surprisingly no longer in sight, the others across the way were still very much in position. To Todd’s utter consternation, they were now sitting as if awaiting instructions. Each and every last one of them was turned to face the man with the falcon, like expectant children waiting for a storyteller to commence.
The young soldier was forced to conclude that he was in the single most awkward, irritating, and sheer shit- frightening situation he had ever been in. But he was wrong, for the next moment brought about a change of mind. A loss of mind, he feared. He had thought that the land across the water flow had been steepening, as impossible as that seemed. All too soon, however, he became convinced, because a ridge formed above and behind the man on the donkey… and others appeared. Not ridgelines.
He had been prepared to see at any given moment the silhouettes of a Sioux scout party, but he was not at all prepared for the vision he was having now, still sprawled on the ground where he had fallen. The surveying and engineering training he had, his whole Turnip-raised practical hog-and-potato background, forced him to classify the arriving visual information as a delusion-some pathetic personal breakdown in perception and courage. But the more he gasped openmouthed at them, the more foreboding his surmise became: he was confronting something-or, rather, things-that really were there. The shock waves of this realization shot him to his feet.
Appearing on the emerging hillcrest was a spiral chain of figures arranged in a kind of military formation, he presumed-but what kind he could not say. A severely worrying kind. There were Indians-Sioux and other tribes he could identify. There were also Negroes, but not dressed as any he had ever seen. They wore bones… and bright colors… and… there seemed to be some women, too. Various colors and races. He had never seen females arrayed for battle-if that was what this was.
But there were others… people like he had
