The Sacrifice (5 page)

She scanned the landscape. A large herd of buffalo was wallowing downriver, and a few pronghorns stood looking at her. She watched for some time, but saw nothing to indicate the presence of other humans, so she rode out to the river.

It was twenty horses wide and running furiously. She looked to the buffalo again. Where there were this many, enemies might well be concealed nearby preparing for the hunt. She did not want to alarm the animals and thus give herself away, so she followed the river in the other direction.

She saw many tracks in the dried mud—muskrat, buffalo, rabbit, mice, deer, coyote, bobcat, an occasional bear—but no sign of horses. She walked Bull along the grassy bank until it was too dark to distinguish prints from shadows. They spent the night in the open, away from the river. She slept hard, but a nightmare jolted her awake before dawn. She sat up, gasping in the dark, trying to calm herself. It was a familiar dream, in which Born-great was hiding behind their father's backrest with a hatchet, waiting for her to fall asleep. After this dream, she never went back to sleep.

As soon as there was light enough to see by, she started on her way again.

Three more days dragged on. The country was changing now. For long stretches, hills pressed close to the river. Twice she spotted horse tracks, but they were too old to have been made by the war party. Toward evening of the third day, she came to a place where the river forked.

She rubbed her neck, stiff from peering so long at the ground. Ahead, the main river branched off toward the sunrise and was lost in woods and cliffs. She strained her eyes in the gathering dusk. This way would probably be impassable.

She did not think any Headcutters lived this far toward the land of forever summer. With every step she might be riding farther from the trail she sought.

She searched the ground halfheartedly a while longer, until a track stopped her abruptly. She slid to the ground and crouched to examine it more closely. Several indistinct tracks led to this one at the water's edge, printed clearly in wet sand. A large bear had stepped here, recently. The angle of the toes and the long distance between the toes and the claw tips told her it was a grizzly. She pressed both hands into the deep print. A large grizzly.

Fearful of stumbling upon the creature in the dark, she decided to make camp immediately. She snatched Bull's bridle and led him quietly up a long, grassy slope. When she was satisfied they had left the bear behind, she unloaded Bull in a stand of slender aspen near a stream. A tender spot had developed on his back from the saddle. She packed it with mud and picketed him close by to graze.

The girl was hungry for fresh meat, but only a fool would hunt in strange country after dark with a grizzly roaming about. She sat with her back against a sapling, chewing on dried meat from her pack, feeling tired and sore and discouraged.

The air was crisp. Behind the hills, the horizon glowed turquoise, climbing to green-blue, and overhead, the dark blue just before black. But the colors and the comfort they brought her were soon swallowed in blackness. Through the tiny, fluttering aspen leaves she counted many stars, and felt very lost.

She could not keep on like this. Who knew how long this river was; it might go on for days, or it might fork off again and again until it disappeared in a trickle. She would not find the war party.

Born-great's ghost must be feeling smug.

What was she going to do? She had food left for two, perhaps three, days. Then she could survive for as long as she was able to find game. But still she would be lost. Lost and alone.

“Bull, have I made a mistake?” she asked quietly. “Grasshopper is sorry for calling me an orphan—he stood up and told the entire village that I am a better warrior than Laughing Crow. Would it truly be so terrible living in his family?”

Bull went on grazing.

“Then I would have a mother.” Grasshopper's mother was a fat woman who worried a great deal about him.

She thought of her own mother, whom she had never known, but secretly liked to imagine. In her mind her mother was a strong, quiet woman with fine skin and doe eyes, who tied her sleek hair with blue beads, and wore a white antelope-skin dress, and sang the girl to sleep.

A sudden grief for her father washed over her. She pressed it back.

What would she
do
if she lived in Broken Branch's lodge? Just be a girl? She would not even be good at that; girls dug roots and cooked and sewed beadwork and did many other things of which she knew little.

Also, girls courted, and married.

Grasshopper's brother Lies-down-in-water came into her mind. He was good-looking in a quiet way, and surprisingly big when he was near her. She always felt embarrassed around him, although he never spoke unkindly to her. He never spoke to her at all.

“Just being a girl is nothing,” she said scornfully. “I could never live like that.”

She scooped a handful of water from the nearby rivulet and drank, but not much, for the water was lukewarm and tasted stale. In the morning she would find better water. She would bathe, too. Then she would think of a plan to make a name for herself. She fell asleep trying to imagine her victorious return, but somehow it did not fill the empty place in her.

*   *   *

The birds woke her just as the sky was growing light. Impatiently, Bull snorted to be cut loose.

Very high clouds scudded across the sky, but near the ground the air was almost still. Carrying the saddle and baggage herself, and alert for any sign of humans or grizzlies, she led Bull down to the river. He walked in and drank while she splashed the cold water over his back and wiped off the mud she had smeared on the tender spot.

“I will ride bareback today, and let you heal,” she said. He scrambled out of the river and shook himself.

“You look like the horse of an orphan, Bull,” she said ruefully, slipping out of her moccasins. He did look wretched, with his raggedly shorn mane and tail and his winter coat shedding in mangy patches. But where the long, dull hair had fallen away, he glowed gold, and his black legs shone like obsidian.

She stripped off her clothing and stepped into the river. The cold took her breath away. She scrubbed herself and dunked her head, and as she lifted a hand to peel her matted hair out of her face she had a strange sensation: her hand felt hot.

She reached out and felt around in the water. In one place the water was hot.

Trailing her hand in the flow of hot water, she waded upstream in search of the source. Against the current it was difficult to keep her footing on the slippery rocks. Just around a slight bend, a steaming-hot creek poured into the river. She yelped and scrambled out of its path.

She climbed out of the river and stood on the stony bank, shivering and dripping, staring in disbelief.

“This must be the Land of Boiling Waters, Bull,” she said, and ran to gather her clothes.

7

Heedless of last night's grizzly tracks and the possibility of enemies lurking among the trees and cliffs, she urged Bull up a steep slope alongside the hot creek. His saddle bounced awkwardly from the saddlebag strap and to stay on she kept a strong grip on his bridle. They plunged over the crest of the hill through scrub juniper, scattering a band of elk.

Two hundred paces ahead loomed a huge, frozen waterfall, solid white and motionlessly gushing over countless lumps of stone. But the air was nowhere near cold enough to freeze a waterfall. And, strangely, smoke or steam drifted from its crown.

As they approached the base of the strange falls she saw that water was flowing in sheets over it, and the thing was not only white, but dripping with yellow, cream, and dark orange streaks. Water dribbled from yellow icicles into encrusted pools that overflowed into more and more pools, finally draining into creeks below.

She walked Bull close to a steep face streaming with water. She leaned out and touched it. The water was burning hot; behind it the frozen waterfall seemed made of stone.

She swung far to the side, where the stone became a hill of earth, and Bull clambered up.

On top the hill was the same oozing white. It breathed out foul-smelling steam. She tried to stay upwind of the steam while she explored the hilltop. Was this the place of which Chews-the-bear had told his stories? If it was the Land of Boiling Waters, then she knew where she was. The big river she had been following before must be the Elk. From the Elk, she knew how to get home.

But was this the place? She knew that there should be pools of boiling water and bubbling mud in the area. Trees and mountains around her concealed whatever lay ahead.

One other thing she knew about the Land of Boiling Waters was that somewhere in it stood the black cliff. The thought quickened her senses, and for the first time, she wondered … The black rock drew her so strongly it was almost as if it were a part of her that she had been separated from all her life. As if it had been meant for her, not her brother. Could it be?

Perhaps she had been meant to come here. If she had caught the war party, they probably would have allowed her only to fetch water and carry moccasins, not to fight. Perhaps she had been meant to lose her way, to come to the Land of Boiling Waters and find the obsidian cliff. It must be her fate to do something alone, something that would prove she was no lowly orphan, but a great warrior … perhaps even the Great One.

“Yes,” she told Bull with new hope. “We will search for the cliff.”

She headed Bull around the flank of the mountain from which the stone waterfall grew. They walked among huge gray hulks of rock that stood like ghostly sentries on the mountainside, and headed up the bed of a rocky stream that had cut a narrow pass between the mountain and its brother.

Emerging on the other side, she felt as if she had walked into a strange land. An immense green flat sprawled out before her, almost too bright to look at in the sunlight. A single large stand of lodgepole pine stood in the distance. Far away, mountains rose abruptly from the valley floor.

The sun felt warm here and the air was still across the wide flat. Antelope skittered away before them through thousands of little white and blue flowers, and blankets of yellow. White birds of a kind she had never seen before soared overhead, squeaking mournfully.

Along the banks of a small lake she found plentiful mule deer, elk, and moose sign. In the distance, brown spots moved over the meadow.

“Buffalo,” she said, yanking Bull's head up from the tender grass. “Surely neither of us will go hungry.”

Though the buffalo were far away, she thought nothing of their galloping off as she rode toward them, until she heard a roar and noticed the bears. There were three: a large dark one, a smaller blond, and a smaller brown. A mother with cubs?

She was downwind and the bears had not noticed her. She drew closer. From a stand of firs near the edge of the valley she saw from the dished-out faces and massive humps of muscle at their shoulders that they were grizzlies. The small bears were actually quite large, and the large one was too big to be female. She wondered if he had left the big print by the river. He was dark brown, close to the color of Chews-the-bear's grizzly pelt.

Her eyes narrowed as she thought of returning home with the big bear's pelt on her back. But even she was not desperate enough to attack a grizzly. She watched the smaller bear, a cautious, reddish-blond creature, pad toward the small brown bear. The big brown laid its ears back and growled through bared teeth. The golden bear stopped, then tried again. She decided that they were two males fighting over a female. The golden bear must be a young male with no territory of his own.

The big bear let out a roar, sending the golden bear bolting away a few paces. The big bear charged into him, slamming him off his feet, and gave one heavy swipe at his face before the golden bear galloped away. The big male chased him to the edge of the meadow, then loped back to the small brown bear, licking her muzzle.

Reluctantly, the girl turned away from the grizzlies. Now that the young one had been banished, she might be noticed. She guided Bull into the trees.

She had ridden a long time, out of the main valley, and was exploring along a winding creek when she began to feel drops on her face. Charcoal-gray clouds were seething along one edge of the sky. Suddenly the clouds split with lightning. At the thundercrack, Bull stamped and snorted.

“Easy, Bull,” she soothed, looking for shelter. To their left a cliff molded of granite columns rose out of the grassy floor. She dismounted and led Bull through trees and undergrowth in search of a cave or sheltered wall.

With surprising swiftness the dark clouds moved over the valley, and with them came the wind, as strong and sudden as a splash in the face. She found an overhang in the rock, and maneuvered Bull into the space underneath just as rain began to pour from the sky.

The wind whipped the rain into crazy dances, soaking her moccasins and leggings up to the knees in spite of the overhang.

After a moment, hail began clattering against the cliff-side like a barrage of rocks, battering their legs. Bull lurched about anxiously and it took all her strength to hold his head.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm passed over them. The grumble of thunder was audible in the distance, but here the sun already peered down on the glistening grass as she led Bull out. Hailstones the size of acorns lay like sparkling gifts on the meadow.

She reached down to pluck one from the bank of the creek. As her fingers closed around the ice, something else caught her eye. In the sunlight the coarse, wet sand sparkled like shards of obsidian. Black obsidian.

She dropped the hailstone and raked her fingers through the gravel. She looked closely at the black glitter on her fingertips, then the ground around her. There were some rocks of the stuff—and a boulder.

Scrambling over fallen rock, she reached the cliff, and pressed her hands against the rough pillars. They were scaly with gray and bright green lichen, and high overhead the rock was honeycombed and swirled with red, like the marrow of a bone. But if one looked closely, patches of wet black gleamed through. This cliff was not formed of granite at all, but of obsidian.