“Reckon they’s Natchez whores rougher’n that,” Pettigrew noted.
Butler shot a warning glare over his shoulder to silence the corporal.
Cracked Bone Thrower inclined his head toward the women working on the slope below. They bent over mountain-sheep hides, hacking and scraping to flesh them. “As cunning as Pa’waip is when it comes to seducing and killing men, so are the Water Babies skilled at trapping women. We call them the pa’unha, and they look like abandoned infants left beside the waters of a creek. When a woman picks one up and places the pa’unha to her breast, it grabs her by the nipple. It never lets go, and bite by bite eats the rest of her.”
Pettigrew snickered rudely. “Puts a whole new twist on ‘breast feeding,’ don’t it?”
“Corporal, you will be silent!” Butler snapped.
Cracked Bone Thrower ignored him, as he often did when Butler talked to his men. “In the middle world, Wolf and Coyote and Rabbit and Pack Rat fought the monsters and created life and death. In the sky world Eagle, Falcon, Hawk, Hummingbird, and Chickadee learned to fly and to work the Powers of the sun, clouds, wind, lightning, and rain.
“The first humans were born after Coyote snuck his pizzle into a spirit woman. That old coon had to knock the teeth out of her cunt with a rock before he could have her. Afterward she gave birth to the first people. Kept these newborn people in a basket, but they eventually got out and ran around fucking and having babies. And some became the Newe. Our people.”
This time Butler turned far enough to glare at the men, ensuring their silence.
Cracked Bone Thrower pointed to the peaks across the valley. “White coons call those mountains Absaroka. Dukurika call them the Wind River’s Mountains because they are the birthplace of the water. Water is everything to my people.”
Butler stared at the distant peaks, feeling the slight chill to the air. Behind them, just down from the ridge and sheltered from the west wind, the Dukurika had set up their hide-and-brush lodges in little hollows cut into the slope. It might be hell to climb to, but from here he could see clear across the Wind River Basin to the distant Green Mountains. Had to be a hundred and fifty miles or so.
Butler had counted sixty-seven men, women, and children, and sixteen of the big dogs. Just below the alpine camp lay a snowfield, its surface covered with bighorn sheep carcasses—and the reason the high-altitude camp was occupied.
The day after they’d brought Butler here, the band had managed to herd a flock of bighorn sheep into a V-shaped drive line on the other side of the ridge. He’d watched from a distance as the people and dogs had slowly eased the animals into the trap’s confines. At the puhagan’s cry, they had rushed the milling sheep, funneling them between the narrowing drive lines and into a log pen. Even as the sheep piled together a large net had been thrown over them. As soon as it settled, the panicked sheep had crouched down as though paralyzed.
Butler had turned away as men and women with clubs waded in, whacking and smacking. It may not have been pretty, but it was over within a minute. Then the real work began as the carcasses were dragged out one by one, gutted and quartered, and carried down to the snow patch to cool.
“Winter food,” Cracked Bone Thrower had told Butler and the men. Though Butler had offered to pitch in and carry his share, Cracked Bone Thrower had told him, “You stay away, Man Who Talks to No One. Puhagan is still uncertain about your Power, or even if it is good or bad. People don’t want you close yet.”
And maybe it was for the best. To Butler’s chagrin, even when he went about collecting firewood for the camp, all but the littlest of children worked harder than he could. He’d stop, gasping for breath, while the little tykes would race up and down the slopes, hopping from rock to rock like Shakespearean sprites.
Though the people treated him with reserve, not wanting to get too close, he’d gotten a good look at them. Unlike the Cherokee, or the Cheyenne he’d met on the trail, these were a tall, muscular, sun-darkened people. They worked almost naked while mucking around in the blood and gore of the kill pen and gut piles, and then scrubbed themselves clean with snow before dressing again for the evening. He had never known Indians as clean and well dressed. Or nearly as attractive.
He was constantly disciplining the men, minding them to keep their tongues civil, especially when it came to comments about the half-naked young women with their glistening black hair and supple, bare-breasted bodies.
When the Dukurika thought Butler wasn’t looking, they laughed, joked, sang curiously unintelligible songs, and played, often slinging guts at each other, or pulling other tricks. The children were obviously loved and indulged as they crawled over the adults, got their heads patted, and were constantly attended to.
The men were all muscle and sinew, and possessed of a self-assured virility. The women, too, were lithe and muscular, with an almost irresistible allure, as if their athletic bodies exuded some elemental sensuality. The pregnant women were the most remarkable to Butler, working right alongside everyone else, apparently oblivious to a condition that would have required their enforced isolation back in American society. Here they carried on as if their swollen abdomens and protruding navels were no more out of the ordinary than the clouds in the sky.
Was this what Rousseau had been thinking of all those years ago when he wrote his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality?
That afternoon the Sheep Eaters started down the mountain. Packing camp hadn’t taken more than fifteen minutes. The brush-and-branch lodges were simply abandoned, along with the grinding
