great towers of rock and broken slabs fringed with frost and carved with grotesque images of animals and nameless gods. They raged underfoot and climbed into the dismal sky. And everywhere, a strange mephitic odor of mold and rot.
'Can't say I like this place much,' Longtree said.
Bowes looked at him with a cold glare in his eyes and looked away.
There were bones everywhere, animal bones. The skeletal trees were decorated with them. Some were fresh, bleached white with bits of meat clinging to them, others gray and cracked with age. All were covered with frost. They were from large animals. Longtree saw a few horse skulls, half-buried in the uneven ground.
'Why the bones?' he asked.
'It's a custom with these people to kill the deceased's favorite horse upon burial of its master,' Bowes pointed out. 'Sort of a sacrifice, I guess. That and the Skull Society, maybe.'
'Up there,' Longtree said, gesturing to a low bluff crowded with dark shapes.
'That's the place,' Bowes said.
The graves of Crazytail's clan were set on a long, low bluff of misshapen, craggy trees. Wooden frames-some new, some old, others impossibly ancient and crumbling-were set about, covered in tanned buffalo hides scrawled with drawings and weird letters. Other frames carried the stretched and sunbleached hides of wolves. There were wooden staffs driven into the hard earth, decorated up with feathers, paint, and beads. On them were the skulls of wolves and men. Dozens and dozens of them. They were all yellowed, cracked, ancient.
Bowes set the lantern down atop a cairn of stones. It was a recent piling. These stones didn't have the weathered, arid look of the others and they weren't covered in blankets of furry, winter-dead moss and fungus.
'My guess is Red Elk's under here,' Bowes said.
Longtree, the tails of his coat flapping in the wind, said, 'Let's take a look.'
It took them about thirty minutes to remove the stones, most were frozen in place and only a good blow from a shovel would loosen them. Longtree then took the pickax and broke through the frozen ground. None of it was easy. The frost line went down a good ten inches and the earth splintered with each blow like flint.
'That's good,' Bowes said. He took the shovel and carefully dug through the soft, sandy earth. 'The Blackfeet don't bury their kin very deep. Shouldn't have to dig down,' he grunted, 'more than a few…feet.'
When they caught sight of a flap of cloth, Bowes used his hands to clear away the soil. Red Elk had been wrapped in a blanket. Bowes, with what seemed genuine respect for the dead, gently pulled the blanket open. Beneath, there wasn't a body, but something that looked like a buffalo skin shroud, stitched up and painted with images of the sun and moon.
'We'll have to cut this open to take a look at him, ' Bowes said, like it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.
Longtree kneeled next to the body, pulling his knife from its sheath. 'Just one quick look,' he said. He cut the buffalo sinew stitching as far down as where he figured Red Elk's waist would be. With one look at Bowes, he pulled back the skin shroud.
'Are you going to tell me what we're looking for now?' Bowes asked.
'You'll know it when you see it.'
Red Elk had been buried in his finest. He wore a shirt of soft antelope skin and leggings of the same. Both were decorated up with dyed porcupine quills, feathers, beads, and little bells. The women who'd prepared him for burial, as was the custom, had painted up his face with intricate streaks of white clay and earthen yellows and blacks. A war club ornamented with eagle feathers was sewn up in the shroud with him, as were his tobacco pouch and medicine bundle, both of the softest unborn buffalo calfskin.
Longtree examined him minutely with aid of the lantern. His neck was twisted at an odd angle from the hanging and his skin had shriveled to a blotched brown that clung to the skull beneath. Beyond that, the cold and soil had stopped any real decay.
'Well?' Bowes asked impatiently.
Longtree covered Red Elk back up and wrapped the blanket over him. 'Nothing. I'm relieved. Very, very, relieved.'
'What did you expect to find?'
Longtree ignored the question and filled in the grave. Bowes helped him pile the rocks back in place. In a few days, after the frost settled back in, no one would know the grave had been tampered with.
'Look at this,' Bowes said.
Longtree looked where he indicated. Another grave, an ancient one by the look of it, had been opened. Rocks were scattered aside. All that remained of the grave was a four-foot deep trench. But it was gigantic. Far too large for a man. You could've buried a horse in there. Maybe a couple of them.
'That grave was opened,' Longtree said. He pawed in the trench with his shovel. 'Empty. Now why do you suppose the body was carted away?'
Bowes shook his head.
Longtree took the lantern to another grave a few yards away. This one was particularly ornamented with skull poles and painted up hides on frames and slabs of rock covered with drawings and writings that were obscured by the years. There were no less than half a dozen human skulls here and twice that many of wolves. Some of the poles had fallen, the skulls shattering like brittle yellow porcelain. It looked to be very ancient.
'Who do you suppose is down there?' Longtree asked. 'Ghost Hand?'
'No, he's farther up on the next hill.'
'I'd say whoever it was must have been important.'
Bowes licked his lips. 'They're all important up here. All big, bad medicine men,' he told Longtree. 'But this one…shit, he's been in the ground a hundred years or more. Maybe twice that.'
Longtree was thinking the very same thing. He wasn't sure why, but he was certain there was an answer up here somewhere. And this grave…it was so ornamented, so well-tended…it spoke to him.
Longtree removed a stretched yellowed skin atop the cairn and it came apart in his fingers like candied glass. He began to loosen the stones with powerful swings of the pickax.
'I'm finished,' Bowes said, throwing up his hands. 'I wanna know what the hell this is all about.'
Longtree kept working. 'When we find it-if we find it-you'll know.'
'Goddammit, Marshal, I'm risking my neck out here! Tell me what's going on or I'm riding out!' Bowes shook all over. Then, calmer, 'Digging up Red Elk's one thing, but this one…Christ, he's been dead for centuries. What can he have to do with anything?'
'I hope nothing,' Longtree panted.
Bowes spat. 'Damn you, Longtree.' He came over and started working.
It took them longer to take apart this cairn. Countless generations of rains, freezes, and baking summers had welded the rocks together as if they'd been mortared in place.
When they were done, both men had long since shed their coats, sweat steaming on their faces. A slab of rock was beneath the cairn, this one painted with things that were neither animals nor men. They had to use the shovel handles like levers to slide it free. And then they had to chop through the frost line and the hard packed earth beneath.
The wind had picked up considerably, howling out of the north. Wolf hides and moldering ceremonial blankets rustled and snapped on sagging willow frames. That wolf started up in the distance, baying its ancient dirge. The pale moon looked down, piercing the grotesque, dancing shadows.
Longtree found the first tattered remains of something like a skin-tarp and the two of them cleared away dirt and rubble. The tarp came apart in their fingers, rotted and half-frozen.
'Christ,' Bowes said, turning away, 'that stink.'
Longtree smelled it, too: A heavy, thick smell of decay and grave mold. An odor nothing dead for untold years had the right to possess. It was a black smell, a suffocating evil odor of slaughterhouses and disturbed graves.
'This ain't right,' Bowes said in a weak voice.
The grave, once completely unearthed was huge. Gigantic.
The body was stitched up in a hide shroud, too, but blackened with age, covered in spots with mildew and damp gray fungi. And it was not buffalo skin. It had a smoother texture. Was very fine. Longtree suspected human skin, but didn't mention the fact. Whatever it was, given the size, it had taken a lot of pelts.
Longtree slit it open, not being too careful. His fingers trembled. The baying of that wolf took on a high, shrill
