Rescued MC

by Bella Knight

Alina grinned back. “Remember that next time.”

  The mountaineering class came back down, run by Wren Molina, a Crow who knew every stream, river, outcropping, and view for miles. Paul was learning with her, and acted as the rearguard for less-experienced hikers. He made sure everyone ate and drank properly on the hike.

  Paul walked up, nodded at Alo, ordered a Coke and paid for it, and lay down on a bench, gasping. Just then, Rina sang the bear song. “Get inside,” he ordered everyone.

  Paul stood, drained his Coke, and helped with the herding into RVs, the tiny houses, and the latrine. The workers got into the food truck. They had a blind up to the right, and the photographers went up in it. Alo heard creaking, and looked up. Some of the RV people had climbed on top of their RV, with cameras and phones at the ready.

  The black bear mother and her two cubs wandered in. Alo stood, while Paul ran into the food truck. He sang, a Hopi song, of Brother Bear and warm days filled with berries and honey, and baby bears playing in the fields. Rina kept up the Crow bear song, from her perch on top of the refrigeration housing. He sang, and the bears came in and sniffed. They smelled the warm paninis, and water from the latrines.

  Alo kept singing, as did Rina, and the bears snuffled around. They found a candy wrapper, and snuffled it, then the baby bears rolled about in a mock fight. Alo sang more, beckoning the bears to the far left with his song, into a thicket of trees that had blackberry bushes below. He sang, and moved his feet in the slow, shuffling Bear Dance.

  Mama Bear did not seem to feel threatened. She saw Alo dancing, and slowly moved toward him. Alo moved back, gestured toward the delicious berries, and the stream below, and sang of them to the bear. She moved toward him, and then stopped to move her cubs along. They followed her, and Alo showed her the good path to the berries, with both his gesture and his song. The little ones bumbled and tumbled, and ran toward the path. Alo hopped back, and stepped aside for them to go by.

  The mother turned, and raised a paw. Alo raised his hand, palm forward. Then the bear followed her cubs, now half-tumbling down the incline, toward the berries. Alo watched them go, and continued to sing, until he was sure the bears were far enough aGhost Path, and then he stopped singing. He walked over and helped Rina down. She looked at him, wide-eyed.

  Leela came out of the food truck, and said, “Thank you, Black Bear,” in Crow.

  He nodded, and spoke to her in that language. “I only told her what was nearby for her to eat.” He turned to Rina. “You sing the bear song well,” he said.

  Rina shrugged. “It’s our family totem,” she said, in English.

  The campers came out of their hidey-holes and off their perches. “That was so cool!” said Mary, a photographer. “I got lots of pictures.”

  “I did too,” said Olaf Gundersen, her husband, also a wildlife photographer. He clapped Alo’s shoulder. “That was amazing. Can we use you in the shot? What was all the singing about?”

  “Bear songs,” said Paul, round-eyed. He came out of the food truck to stand by Alo. “Thank you, Black Bear,” he said in Hopi. Paul had been learning Hopi at the same time Alo had been learning Crow.

  Leela looked Alo up and down. “You know the songs, but you did not tell us you were such a powerful medicine man,” said Leela.

  “He has told us all stories of David, the Paiute medicine man,” said Alina. “He did not tell us that he, too, was a medicine man.”

  “I will call David,” said Alo. “It seems I have much to learn.”

  It took David five days to arrive. He came with Reynaldo, a Crow medicine man, and Mochni, a Hopi medicine man. They took Alo into the hills, did a sweat, and tested and trained him with songs and stories. He went on a vision quest, and saw the bear, and came back dusty, sweaty, exhausted, and ravenous. His new Hopi name was Hoonaw, bear. They feasted on Crow lands, and he was inducted as a Crow medicine man. Reynaldo stood for him, and Reynaldo, David, and Mochni agreed on how to train Alo/Hoonaw in his new life. Each man would teach him for four months, and live on the farm, and bring guidance to the Wolfpack. The Crow were delighted, and Mochni, with long white hair and strong fingers, stayed for the summer.

  They celebrated even more when the rabbits were delivered and installed in their new home, the first lettuce, arugula, kale, herbs, and spinach crops were harvested, two alpacas arrived, and they finally got into a routine that made sense. They began preparing for winter, working on the houses and all the outbuildings. They installed line systems and tunnels to get from house to barn, and to barracks/hydroponics.

  Mochni, as an honored medicine man, moved into the main house. Mochni was just in time to sing Gerald, Fala Red Fox’s husband, home. The man was buried at the church cemetery, as he requested. Alo and Mochni helped sing Fala through her grief. They took all the sickness supplies out, the special bed and IVs, and everything else, and gave them back to the nursing service. They scrubbed and aired out all the rooms.

  Alo moved into what was Gerald’s sickroom, now repainted blue, with a narrow bed and clean white sheets and a woven blanket. The girl Luisa moved into Alo’s pod. She was seven months pregnant and teary-eyed with exhaustion and emotion. Luisa loved the alpacas and the rabbits, and picked them the best lettuce. She respected Mochni and was wide-eyed to be near Alo Black Bear, the now-famed medicine man.

  Alo had literally never been busier, even when he was juggling his studies, hydroponics farming, the animal feed business, and learning from Henry and David. He learned songs, dances, rituals, drums, paint, vision quests, ceremonies, plants, animals, and more about the history of the Hopi than he thought he could stuff into his head. He made sure Fala was well, made sure everyone kept to schedules, kept Luisa from crying all the time by keeping her in charge of the rabbits and alpacas, and singing her healing songs. He made sure everything at the campground went well, made sure none of the campers were mauled by local wildlife, built four new platforms and two new small houses as the profits rolled in, and was astonished at the sheer number of trips they needed to keep everything stocked at both the farm and the campground.

  They got another truck, an ugly brown and ancient but serviceable one, and Alo made sure everyone got driver’s licenses if they didn’t have one. He broke up drunken fights with the promise of honey mead, kept loud music from keeping exhausted field hands awake, and kept hormone-driven teenagers from unsafe sex with boxes of condoms, and used Luisa as an example of what happens when hormones fly free. Some nights, he barely got everyone fed and sang the sunset song before falling into an exhausted slumber, and was up at dawn the next day. He thought he would scream, melt, or fly aGhost Path, but he just kept going, blessing the idea of winter’s chill so he could finally get some sleep.

  Slowly, slowly, the others proved themselves, and gained more trust and therefore more responsibilities. Omar became adept at getting what they needed when they needed it, could fix damn near anything from a cranky truck to a leaky faucet, and built shelves and the like for the campers. Diana Red Bull moved in, a gangly teen with a scar above her right eye from a fall from a horse, and took over cooking and some cleaning duties in exchange for room, board, and the Wolfpack GED program. They cleaned out an unused sewing room, moved the sewing machine and supplies to the living room, and put her bed and nightstand in there.

  Alina and Paul both excelled at keeping the chickens and horses happy, and Jon was an excellent mountaineer and hiker, Alina almost as good. Delfine, Paul, Luisa, Omar, and Leo took turns on the food truck, and switched off with Alina and Jon on the hiking and mountaineering. Alo finally had actual time during the day to rest. He made sure everyone studied at least a little; they slowly made their Ghost Path through their required classes, including Crow. Mochni was somehow there when needed, despite moving like a turtle in winter. He was there to shoe a horse, or hammer a nail, change sheets, take the biscuits out of the oven, or unload a truck full of groceries. Alo watched, and tried to match the man’s deep knowledge of the flow of life. Bit by bit, they worked their
Ghost Path to harvest time.

  Then, harvest times were upon them, and their responsibilities increased as thousands of people came from all over the country to help with the Montana farmers. The photographers and hikers were edged out for workers, their housing or RV hookups paid for by the sugar beet farmers and companies that bought the sugar beets. They got another two tiny houses built, which were stuffed to the rafters, six people each, along with RVs with nearly as many. Sugar beets had to be harvested when they were at their coolest, and never above 65 degrees Fahrenheit, or they would rot. So, some would go out super early to help run harvesters or drive the beet trucks to the beet depot. The second shift came on and would harvest until the next shift began. When the beets got too hot, the harvesters went home and rested.

  Alo put people on at the food truck with bags of a dozen breakfast and lunch sandwiches, and had a coffee station with huge urns to fill up vacuum flasks on the honor system, with sugar and cream packets. One coffee was one dollar, which more than paid for the urn and coffee with the sheer volume of coffee sold. They were back in the food truck at 5:00 AM to do the same thing. They fed people in huge waves, and the workers slept in shifts. Silence was the rule, music or radio in headsets only, to let people sleep. The Wolfpack supplemented themselves with Crow helpers, eager to make money off the workers to fund the frigid winters. The convenience stores had empty shelves at some point nearly every day; Wolfpack and Crow helped with the driving to keep them stocked. Rain kept people from harvesting; people caught up on sleep during those times, including Crow and Wolfpack.

  The Montana Wolfpack put most of their studies aside, too busy except to keep up with the flood of people. The Wolfpack supplemented their income by buying snacks and drinks wholesale, and selling them all along the farm routes, by truck or on horseback, to workers unable to get off their combines to eat or drink. Truck drivers, driving parallel to the combines, would pass them through to the combine drivers in exchange for cash. They would use the cash to buy more drinks and snacks for themselves on the Ghost Path to the beet houses or silos for grain, and buy more on the Ghost Path back. They sold coolers full of drinks every day.

  They got two more platforms up for tents, and set up bunks inside military-sized tents. They packed them to the rafters, even with sleeping bags on the platform itself. They took down the smaller tents and put up more bunks and military tents on all the platforms, extending some of them. The workers were delighted; all the hotel rooms, campgrounds, and inns were full for many square miles.

  Crow on the res fixed up their homes and moved out to live with relatives, inviting workers to move in during the working season. They got another tiny house up at the campground, and it was full before the paint was fully dry. They got in two more RV parking places, and those were taken as soon as the cement dried. People came and pitched tents on the ground, and hung hammocks from trees. They even had people sleeping in the open, despite the nights’ chill in sleeping bags. There was just no more housing to be had. They added more toilets and showers, to everyone’s relief, then more washers, and two large-capacity dryers. In the face of desperation and the siren call of company money, the Wolfpack moved themselves and all their things out of their rooms, moved onto cots in the living room, and rented their precious pods to workers willing to pay a premium for hot showers and farmhouse food. Lily kept in touch with Alo, delighted that they were recouping their startup costs so quickly. Their outlays had been huge, but they made money as if it was growing on Montana pine trees.

  It was a race to get the crops in before the snows fell —sugar beets, barley, soybeans, wheat. The people would wake up, grab their food bags and drinks, and stumble out in waves. They would drive together in ancient pickup trucks and people-mover vans —some slept in their cars and vans as well, lined up in the parking lot, along the campground road, and even state road, six trucks deep. They would go out, being as silent as possible, and rumble down the high Ghost Path to the farms or to truck pickup stations. The next wave would wake up a few hours later, then the next wave, and so on. The sugar beet people would all come back by two in the afternoon and sleep, and then the first wave would go out again. The other crops had people going out at dawn, arriving back in the dark.

  Alo kept wondering when it would end. They were all zombies, sleeping in shifts, except their pregnant and much-fussed-over Luisa. Luisa smiled a lot more, kept the animals fed, and made hundreds of sandwiches and little containers of carrot sticks with dip and apples, or bananas that the Pack ate to stay fed, along with water or soda. Everyone slammed coffee or cola as if caffeine was going out of style. Fala came out of her grief-induced hibernation to keep the farm running and barn guests fed, freeing Alo to keep the campsite running well.

  Finally, finally, the weeks sped by until the combines started reaching the ends of the fields, the last trucks were driven to the sites, and the last shift ended. Alo ordered up a roasted chicken feast, with cheesy potatoes, biscuits, honey, butter, and sodas or coffee to drink. He drove over more picnic tables from the house, and the harvesters fell on the food like wolves. They paid for their fine meal, played a last game of poker together, drank the last soda, and went to sleep. They did the same for the harvesters at the house.

  In the morning, everyone except Luisa was on cleanup duty at the campsite. Omar went to get more trash bags and to fill up the depleted food truck. They got everything cleaned, top to bottom. They took apart and stored the bunks, put the farmhouse picnic tables back, and put the pup tent back up.

  Within an hour, after noon, leaf peepers were there with cameras, and took the newly-cleaned tiny houses. The hikers showed up next, and took the tents. Some leaf peepers came up with RVs. Soon, they had a full campground —a normally full one, not one with three times the people it had been intended for. They left Delfine and Paul to check people in and feed them sandwiches and sodas, and went home to clean up the pods. Things weren’t too bad. They aired everything out, scrubbed everything, and then moved everyone back where they belonged.

  They took shifts, and Alo made sure everyone slept. He went over with Leo to spell Paul and Delfine, then Leela and Rina came over. “You all stay until nine, you hear?” said Alo.

  “We’ll be fine,” said Leela, grinning. “We made enough for the winter, and we rented out our house, too, so now we’re half Ghost Path to Rina here going to college.” Rina giggled. “And tonight, we’ll finally get enough sleep!”

  Alo went back with Leo, put his room to rights, helped with the cooking, got dinner on the table —roasted corn, acorn squash spaghetti with tomato sauce and fat chunks of Italian sausage, biscuits with honey, and lemonade. They ate like pigs. Alo went out to sing down the sun, and every single one of them went to bed, hours early.

  Mochni left a week later, after taking Alo nearly everywhere on the land. “I have little more to teach you,” he said, in clear Hopi. “You have learned the sacred songs and stories. You know the dances, the animals, the paint. You know the medicines for many things.” He pointed at Alo’s heart. “This is what you need to keep close, Black Bear. It is too easy to become so busy that you forget to take care of yourself. I saw you strive to do this, and to take care of your people. It is even easier to put aside the spiritual things, to stop walking the Ghost Path, for money. You never stopped walking the Ghost Path, even as you took money. You sent the money to pay for all you have done, and built more, and kept many people fed and sheltered. You did not cheat the whites, even though they have cheated us in the past.” He smiled. “You kept calm in face of obstacles, large and small. You calmed the hearts of angry men. You kept the ridges from being overrun with people, so the fox, deer, elk, rabbit, and bear would be safe. You kept the people to well-worn paths, not leading them astray in the wilderness. You looked out for the safety of many, all at the same time. This is your tribe, Black Bear. Do not desert it or shy a Ghost Path from the difficult things.” He nodded once, gave Alo a medicine pouch, and hung it around his neck. “Walk the Ghost Pa
th in peace, Black Bear.”

  Alo felt the old man’s hand on his shoulder. “Thank you for all you have done here, for me, and for us all.” Mochni gave him a last smile, got in his ancient blue truck, and drove away.

  David came up just before the first deep snowfall. “I am only here for a few weeks, Black Bear. I have already taught you Paiute, our stories, our medicines. I have more to teach, but I had a great talk with the Hopi, and Mochni is delighted with you. He says it speaks well of us to have such a young man walk the Ghost Path. I do not disagree.” They sat by the warm fire.

  “Now, first, we must set up winter tasks for your people,” said Henry.

  “We have the first carding, and the Goat Girls told us everything,” Alo said. “We’ve washed, carded, and spun all we have.”

  “Dyeing,” said David. “I have a list of the favorite colors from Numa. Ship her either the undyed wool, or learn to dye it.”

  “It’s a good task,” said Alo.

  “There’s weaving, crocheting, and knitting. Crocheting needs only yarn, a hook, and a ball of yarn. It is deceptively simple; it is difficult to master. Your first work will be a mess at first, so use garbage yarn to practice. Continue, and you will have a good industry. You have been to the Navajo, and you know weaving.” He grinned. “And the Crow are master beaders, so you can make ceremonial things or jewelry for tourists.”

  Alo nodded. “We can make rag rugs. Many people will buy such things here. I am having a 3D printer shipped here; it’s in transit, stopped by snow.” He grinned. “We can make clothes, 3D printed tags, and toys for dogs. Once we turn a profit, we can give a second of everything for shelter dogs. Dogs are like family in the big cities, and we can ship anywhere, except for the snow causing delays.”

  “What about Kieran and Pavel’s business?”

  “Raising and training dogs? They have working dogs here, border and regular collies, German shepherds, and the like. Dogs with long coats that can be trained by whistle,” said Alo. “I’ve been thinking about that. I think rescue collies would be…”