“Go,” Cracked Bone Thrower told him. “Take your blanket and follow the trails to the boulders. The spirits will watch you. Judge you. If you are lucky one will call to you. When you hear the voice calling from the stone, lie down before the spirit. There you will sleep. The puhagan will watch and see which spirits are called to you. Then they will tell him what to do with you.”
“Just get up and walk up through the boulders?” Butler asked as he got to his feet, still trying to get the chewed root to go down.
Did they really think a piece of woody root would separate him from his body? And what silliness was this anyway? Venturing to the water world? Spirits? It was the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty-seven, for God’s sake! Not the Middle Ages when idiot superstition ruled the world.
Cracked Bone Thrower pointed up the slope, his expression stern.
Toyatawura? What kind of word was that?
In the darkness, hobbling on his bare feet, Butler made his way up into the scattered boulders, some as large as a freight wagon. He tripped over low sagebrush, stubbed his toes on stones, and felt his way.
His stomach pitched suddenly, an eerie tingle running through his arms and legs, down into his hands and feet. His penis began to warm, as though immersed in hot water. The air rushing into his lungs with each breath seemed to vibrate. Around him the night turned liquid in his vision, as though he looked at it from underwater.
Here, a voice called, eerie and soft on the night.
Where?
This way.
He found a level spot, as though it had been dug out before a flat-sided boulder. The great stone was as tall as he. On this boulder-studded slope, one rock was as good as the next. This one felt curiously warm. He took a deep breath, wrapping the sheephide blanket around his shoulders. Cracked Bone Thrower had given it to him. Superbly tanned with the hair on, embroidered, and decorated with porcupine quills, it was remarkably warm.
Butler blinked. The sensation that rolled through him was as if the world were washing back and forth amid waves, surging, ebbing, and flowing.
Looking back toward camp, he could see a solitary figure who stood before the fire. He was glowing as if lit from within.
The puhagan. Watching. Yes, that’s who it is.
“I am supposed to sleep,” Butler whispered to himself, feeling odd prickles run through his muscles and bones. As if that was going to happen. He was being judged, after all. And if he failed, the puhagan would kill him.
Who could sleep feeling the way he did, all prickly and hot, knowing his life was forfeit if he failed the medicine man’s test?
“Does it even matter anymore?” Butler asked himself.
Power brought you here. It wants you to do this.
“To do what?”
Learn.
His eyes felt leaden. Tucking the blanket around his shoulders, he hunched forward and sat in the boulder’s lee. Whatever the toyatawura was, it had fogged his head, heightened his senses. His insides continued to prickle and tingle. Every sound came clearly to his ears. The very act of breathing preoccupied him with wonder; his heart—the pump of life—kept swelling and constricting within his chest.
Why had he never noticed what a miracle it was just to be alive?
Images came slowly at first, just hints, flickers of sights and sounds long gone. Then his memory opened like a rush; the visions spun through his head: scenes from his childhood on the farm. Paw at the supper table, leaned back, his big hands slapping his thighs as he told a tall story about the mountains. These mountains.
He stared into Tom Hindman’s preoccupied face that first day in the hotel lobby, the man clutching Butler’s letter of introduction in his hand.
Images shifted, and suddenly he was back at Shiloh, watching men shot apart and murdered by Federal fire. Death. So much death. In the blackness of a cold Arkansas night, he watched hogs eating partially cooked human bodies in the burned remains of haystacks.
Saw the men and boys shot down for being deserters.
And then, moment by moment, he relived Chickamauga … and terror, and fear, and guilt …
He threw his head back and screamed.
98
September 23, 1867
Butler remembered the coming of daylight, how it shot spectacular colors across the morning sky and set high, threadlike clouds afire with orange, gold, blazing yellow, and violet. The mountains around him emerged from the gloom and seemed to throb with color: purple, green, and gray running together and smearing like melted rainbows.
He was floating, his essence borne aloft by the spirit plant’s wings. His soul hovered in the air above his body. With each puff of breeze, he bobbed like a stem of grass, bending, rising, but unable to blow away.
Toyatawura. This was magic, powerful, ancient, and pure.
And then he began to dream …
* * *
Looking down, he could see his body where it crouched before the stony boulder’s face. When he truly looked at the rock, it was to find a small creature staring back at him from a carving in the stone—a being with a curiously inverted triangular face in an oblong and squat body. It wore a sort of wavering headdress. Pencil-thin arms emerged from the shoulders and bent, as if thrust up and out in surprise. The hands each sported three long flowing fingers. Sticklike legs curled down into long three-toed feet from which sinuous lines of magic flowed down into the ground.
“You called me last night.”
“You called me,” the being replied, its voice reedy inside Butler’s head. “You are lost and need a guide.”
Even as the little creature spoke, he turned, calling, “If you would find yourself, follow me.”
“Follow you? Into the rock?”
“It is the way.”
“Who are you?”
“I am nynymbi. Come.” It
