He continued to study the lake, possibly looking for either a hoof or a monster that might be sticking out of the ice. “Yes.”
“How come you didn’t tell me?”
The double head dipped, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a grizzly shrug. “You had to arrest that one before you could come after these. I thought I could keep an eye on them while you were busy.” He studied me. “You don’t tell me everything down below, Lawman, and I don’t tell you everything up here. Like I said, the rules are different this high-we do not have the final say.”
“How so?”
He breathed deeply and thought about it. “Down there-it is so loud and so busy we can block them out, but up here is different.”
I wasn’t sure I knew what he was talking about, which was nothing new with Virgil White Buffalo, Kicked-in- the-Belly band, Crazy Dogs warrior society. Nonetheless, I thought I’d give it a shot. “Virgil, that wasn’t you down at the West Tensleep parking lot that drew me over and showed me where the Thiokol had gone, was it?”
He looked around, his gaze stopping here and there as if he were seeing something or someone I wasn’t. He didn’t move for a moment, then the wind struck his wide back as if urging him onward, and the dark hollows above his cheekbones turned toward me. “There is the singing water and the drumming rock and this is the way of it. Listen.”
Foolishly, I thought he was going to say something more. “What?”
“I am serious now. Listen.”
I finally got his meaning and stood there trying to hear the report of Shade’s. 223, cries for help, or even Water Monsters and Thunderbirds, but all I could hear was the wind and snow scrubbing the high country like an unforgiving brush. “I can’t…”
“Listen.”
I tipped my hat back in exasperation. “What the hell am I listening for, Virgil?”
“They follow you still.”
My skin prickled, and my mouth grew dry. All I could think of was what had occurred since my experience on these mountains more than a year ago. I thought about almost drowning in Clear Creek Reservoir, racing a borrowed horse across Forbidden Drive in Philadelphia, hunting a killer in a ghost town, and being drugged on a mesa in the Powder River country. Strange things had happened to me in all those places, including the parking lot at West Tensleep only yesterday, but I’d filed all those instances away as explainable phenomena. What stood before me now was much larger and more powerful than the giant cloaked in a bear hide. As strange and mystifying as it might be, I needed to know. “What are you saying, Virgil?”
“The Old Ones, they have spoken to me for the first time-or maybe it is the first time I have been able to listen.” He smiled a little and turned his head to catch the corners of the wind as it redirected itself around him, and it was like the snout above his head tested the air. “They tell me to watch over you and to keep you safe-which is all very strange.”
I stood, now especially anxious to stop talking and get moving.
“They don’t watch over white men.”
Slipping the rifle strap onto my shoulder, I took a few steps toward the opening that led toward the trail. “Well, I don’t know what to say to that, Virgil.”
He let the smile play on his lips like a warped board. “You saved an Indian the last time you were up here, yes?”
I froze, and not because of the temperature, and thought about how Henry had taken a bullet that could’ve easily been mine. “Sort of.”
“So…” The giant nodded his great, hooded face, the slight glimmer from the reflection in his pupils remaining steady as he lowered his head to look me in the eye. “What Indian are you saving this time?”
It was a command performance asking for a response, but now was not the time to discuss things that would derail the entire venture. It was hard, but I remained silent.
The wind gusted against him again, but he stood in front of it, unmoved. “Still keeping secrets from me, Lawman?”
A few flakes blew into our protected area and lit on my face, burning like ash. “Maybe it’s like you said; up here we don’t have final say.” He was still, like a hunter is before the defining act, and all I could feel was the sympathy I’d had for the giant when I’d heard the boy’s name.
“No, we don’t.” He shrugged the cloak higher with a roll of his shoulders; maybe the inactivity of not moving was beginning to have an effect even on him. “You have great sorrows burning in your heart, and you’ll have more sorrows with someone very close to you in the not so distant future. The Old Ones have told me this, and that’s probably the most important thing I have to say to you.”
I readjusted my goggles and watched the world suddenly glow as if in a warm fire. “Are you telling futures now, Virgil?”
He smiled as he stood and approached me. “I am. How do you like yours?”
“Couldn’t you have just told me I was going to be rich someday?”
He considered it. “No. Now, do you have something you wish to tell me?”
I chewed on the inside of my lip. “Not just yet.” I readjusted my hat. “And now, if you’re through gazing into your crystal ball, how about we get going?”
He stared at me a few moments more with the smile still in place and then raised his arm, inviting me to take the lead. “I’ll assist you for as long as the Old Ones tell me to.” With the next statement, the smile faded a little but was still there. “Pax?”
I smiled back till I was sure my teeth were going to crack. “Pax.”
Rather than follow the trail and face the drifts, Virgil decided that we would make better time crossing the frozen, windscrubbed flat of Lake Marion or Dead Horse, depending on your Maker.
After climbing over a few boulders, I removed my snowshoes and attached them to the pack. We stood at the precipice of the expanse, and I studied the ridge at Mistymoon that appeared and disappeared with the changing cloud currents. “We’re also going to make some pretty majestic targets out there on the ice if somebody, and I mean Raynaud Shade, is aiming a laser sight at us from up on that ridge.”
Virgil had draped the remnants of a wool trade blanket across his face for protection against the wind, and pulled it down with a forefinger to address me as he scanned the deadstand, beetle-killed trees. “No one there.”
I stepped off onto the slick surface under the skim layer of snow that the wind had left as change. “Fine with me; you’re a bigger target than I am.”
He muffled a laugh as he re-covered his face with the red cloth and then wrapped one of the grizzly arms across it and over his shoulder with the panache of a high-fashion model. “Like a tin bear in a shooting gallery?”
Boy howdy.
After a couple of hundred yards I came to the conclusion that the surface was slicker than I’d thought, and the light layer of driven snow made ball bearings under my boots, causing me to slip and catch myself with each step. It was getting to be like a tightrope act, and I was about to turn and tell Virgil to forget about this route when I took a long split and rolled to my right, the weight of the pack and rifle forcing the side of my head to strike the ice with full force.
“Where are we going?”
“If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”
He watches as the almost-man drives the truck, newer than his grandfather’s. The truck is loud and he watches the strange territory pass by the window, growing higher and more rocky-mountains unfamiliar to him.
There was a time when his grandfather took him to a place like this, telling him stories of the mighty warrior that had helped the Thunderbirds in their battle against the Water Monsters. He said the man had gone so far that he had forgotten who he was and from where he came. This will never happen to you because you will find the hard edges of the earth rounded by those who love you, he had said.
After many miles the boy begins to cry, softly at first and then stronger.
