THE TRICKSTER

by Muriel Gray

  It was talking now. To itself, not to him. He, after all, was almost it. “Yes. Yes. The Trickster has tricked man again. I am Sitconski. I am Inktomni, I am Inktumni, I am Inktomi, I am who I wish to be.”

  Sam waited, enduring the violation for a moment more.

  “They will see. They will see what becomes of them.”

  Now!

  The shaman drew all his energy and love and shifted in his soul, moving the dark powerful being he had called. He spoke with the last shreds of his power, fading from him as the Trickster gained more and more of his substance.

  “We are no one now. You and I.”

  It shuddered. There was hesitation in its motion.

  “I am Sitconski.”

  “No. You are no one. For I am no one. I leave, and I leave behind nothing.”

  There was a sharp lance of rancor in the stream of corruption, and the dark whirled in fury.

  Sam’s mind was clouding. He must retain the power of prayer. Must keep conscious in this unreal state of unconsciousness.

  “You die, vermin. I become someone. I become you.”

  “And when I die I leave you nothing. Except that which I have called. This is what I am. Will you become that? Will it welcome you? Allow you to command it? When I depart, it commands. It has beaten you to my soul, you nothing, you nobody. You cannot even possess that which you are invited into.”

  There was a roar and a screaming, and the black fury that was the Trickster spiraled in its confusion. The darker thing that was in Sam moved in its own foul excitement, ready to take what the Trickster was hesitating to control.

  As the two fiendish powers struggled with the morsel of this man’s soul, one aching for the flesh to control, the other merely for the flesh and soul to devour, Sam Hunting Wolf found the last of his energy to speak his final prayer.

  The core that contained his soul closed and expelled the fiend from him like a bullet. And as the shrieking and roaring of the foiled beast filled the tunnel, Sam spoke the rest of the prayer to expel that which he had called. It bellowed in agony as it struggled to retain a hold on its host. And in its frenzy it reached out to take more fuel.

  The trick. The big trick.

  The shaman would not be the meal.

  There was so much fuel. A great dark well of evil from which it could drink. The Trickster was an endless feast of dark energy. It screamed as Sam’s prayer continued to shrug it from him, screamed as its cells began to revert to the cells of a man, and the darker, more powerful thing that was losing its host lashed out its tendrils and drew its sustenance from the Trickster before it.

  It could have no hold on the earth. The man was too powerful. The walls tumbled around them as it began to enter, to devour its weaker dark cousin.

  The Trickster screamed, more in fury than in pain. And as a numb Craig McGee watched, hiding the faces of his two companions against his breast, the thing that Sam Hunt had become shimmered and moved and glided like mist into the body of the demonic form that cowered against the shaking wall.

  Sam Hunting Wolf stood naked in front of the horror, unable to move, his regained body a slashed and ruined mess.

  He was still muttering the prayer, the simple one Calvin had taught him, though never knowing its purpose. It was the most simple prayer he ever taught Sam: a small prayer of thanks for the wind and the sun and the earth and the flower. It was a prayer that sealed his place on earth by rejoicing in it in all its forms, making him impenetrable and strong again with love. It was the prayer that would condemn this nightmare to a fight for its own soul with the dark one Sam had called, until the greater darkness sucked it dry and left it canceled and powerless beneath the rock. Powerless until it could grow again. For grow again it would.

  Then they would be ready once more.

  A boulder the size of a car tumbled from the breaking walls and fell feet from the shaman. He continued to mouth the words.

  Two huge cracks appeared above the writhing black beast.

  McGee let go of his two cowering charges and ran for the man. He stumbled and fell, picking himself up and scrambling along the rubble toward him. Rocks fell on him and he shielded his head with an arm.

  “Sam!”

  The shaman muttered on.

  He lunged forward and grabbed the Kinchuinick by the wrist. With all his strength McGee pulled at the big man and wrestled him backward toward the light. The tunnel was caving in with increasing force. As Craig pulled the muttering man free into the light, only he and Sam saw the huge section of wall fall that split the misshapen head of that bellowing horror and buried its screaming blackness beneath a mountain of living rock.

  The naked man collapsed in his arms, and as Craig held him, with Katie and Billy sobbing at his back, the tunnel closed like a mouth and swallowed up its secret.

  She held him, three coats wrapped around his bleeding body, and her head was bent, sobbing into the thick fleece of Billy’s jacket that was lovingly, if ineffectively, laid over Sam’s chest.

  It was Craig who noticed it: their breath swirling around their faces, invisible breath turned to visible mist by the magician cold, was being expelled by only three mouths.

  “Katie. Lay him flat. Quick.”

  High. So incredibly high. From here he could see the whole Wolf River Valley. The snow was stopping. The last lonely flakes were leaving their mother cloud and spiraling down to earth.

  He watched them fall toward the flashing blue-and-red lights that were moving along the highway. He watched them fall around the blades of the choppers that were hovering like bugs over the tunnel.

  And he saw them fall on the four tiny figures, huddled in the center of those straight, black lines that cut through the white snow so far below on the earth.

  It was so very far away. Up here, where the sun was emerging from behind the retreating storm clouds, it was warm and fresh and beautiful. The peaks of the Rockies were endless. They stretched before him like waves on a stormy lake, their white and blue points casting shadows and painting gullies. Rivers and lakes sparkled in the light, and the world lay beneath him like an offering created for his approval, poured into a mold and made anew for his eyes. His eagle eyes.

  Hunting Wolf.

  Eden’s voice. From somewhere. Somewhere in the sun, too bright for him to see.

  Hunting Wolf. Hear me.

  Sam stretched a mind that was already lazy with the warmth, dazzled by the light. He tipped his wings and circled, trying to see Eden. The sun blazed at him and he failed. His world was growing brighter, the details of the beautiful earth below him becoming more difficult to see.

  Eden. I hear you. He spoke in his mind, knowing the voice that addressed him was also not one that had sound.

  You part from the earth, my grandson. Is that what you wish?

  The sun. So warm. So bright.

  Do I, Eden? Where am I going?

  There was a breath of wind in his wings. It lifted him like a hand below his breast.

  When we leave this earth, leave behind this fragile living dream from which we strive never to awake, neither you nor I can know where we head.

  Sam blinked in the light, his heart growing suddenly heavy at his grandfather’s words.

  Am I dying Grandfather?

  There was another gust beneath his feathers, colder this time. He became aware that his body had weight.

  Eden’s voice was distant now, and it sighed on the air like the breeze, making Sam cock his feathered head to catch his words.

  You were born Indian. You will die Indian.

  Sam breathed in the cold air, now losing its warmth as he circled faster and faster, though he could not tell if he flew toward the sun or toward the earth.

  It was so bright. There were faces in the sunlight. The face of a woman, her eyes full of love, and two children laughing and smiling.

  There was a beating on his chest. A punching. Something so heavy, so hard striking him on his heart. Again and again and again.

  Born
Indian. He would die Indian. Yes, he would.

  He would die Indian.

  The eagle, its wings burning in the sun, tipped its great span and dived.

  65

  “Four minutes. I guess four minutes.”

  The man looked toward the distant tunnel. A neat concrete arch.

  The small head had bobbed up from the rail to which its ear had been applied, and the child ran back to her father with rosy cheeks and swinging black hair.

  The trains’ new route made them appear faster than they had in the past, cutting a minute or so off their entrance into Silver from the time they first entered the re-designed upper tunnels.

  “Get back, then.”

  The child obeyed and they waited until the singing rails gave way to the thudding of an engine, and hundreds of tons of metal rolled slowly over two dollars.

  It took longer than they thought, and the man sat with his big hands dangling over his knees while the train got on with its unpatriotic job of vandalizing coins. This was a big train. But the man and child could wait. They liked to wait.

  Billy Hunting Wolf turned the flat shiny saucer over in his gloved hand. It caught the sunlight and lit his face from below.

  He looked down at his daughter marveling at her trophy.

  “Do I win, sweetheart?”

  The child looked up at her father with an unusually solemn expression, eyes black coals of serious love. “I guess so.”

  “Then I give you mine. You win it for knowing more about trains.” He held out his coin.

  Her brown, oval face lit up and she threw herself at him and wrapped her arms around his big neck. When she spoke, it was rapidly, in a high, excited voice, as if there was little time to speak.

  “Can I show it to Granddad and Grandmom when we get to the reservation and say it was mine?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Sure. Of course it’s yours. Doesn’t matter who put it on the rail, does it?”

  She shook her head in glee, then thanked him solemnly in Siouan and ran off toward the truck.

  He loved Smiles at Life so much that sometimes he wanted just to sit and look at her, watch her elegant movements and childlike concentration unobserved. But when he and his wife traveled to Redhorn to see Sam and Katie tonight, he was going to have to fight for her attention. His parents would be waiting on the porch as soon as they heard the truck struggle up that snow-clogged dirt track. Probably before they heard it. And the moment they pulled up and that tiny girl ran to her grandparents it would all be over for Billy and Lou. There would be no competition. Sam would scoop her up and that would be it.

  Billy stood up and brushed the snow from his trousers, and a sudden wind coming from the mountains assisted, chilling him as it whipped around his body.

  He looked toward the mountain above the darkening tunnel mouth, its violet peak cutting the sky like a broken blade, and shivered in the message of its wind.

  Billy closed his eyes and spoke the prayer in Cree that his father had taught him.

  “Great Spirit, I thank you for this wind on my face. The wind that was once upon the sea, that was once the rain, that once watered the flower, that was once the soil, that was once the earth that nourished me. I see you in the sky and in my child and I pray you keep my heart as pure as your love of me.”

  He opened eyes that were brimming with tears, looked once more toward Wolf Mountain, and with a slow tread walked back to the pickup truck and started the engine.