The conversations were quiet, banal. Shadow-Below sat between the biotech tycoon and a neurosurgeon, ignoring their opinions about tax shelters and real estate markets. Then Porter motioned to Ginger, and just like last night, they stepped away. Another one of their heart-to-heart talks began. But this time Porter did most of the talking and all of the emphatic pointing. His wife laughed him off, trying to defuse what had him upset. But the man insisted on being angry, and whatever he wanted, he finally won out.
Returning to the fire, he leaned over Shadow-Below's shoulder. “My boy's riding with you tomorrow,” he whispered.
"Fine."
Ginger spoke into her son's ear, and then she and her husband vanished again. For a few moments, the boy studied Shadow-Below, and then he rose and walked around the fire to Mara, making some little joke before settling on the log beside her.
But what happened to her companion? Wasn't he sitting there just two moments ago?
Mara smiled politely at her suitor, answering a few questions before distracting him with her own queries. Ten minutes passed, then another ten. And still, the man who never left her sight was absent.
What was he doing in the dark?
Shadow-Below rose and slipped away. A cold drizzle was falling, pushed along by an ominous north wind. Slowly, he circled the fire, building a mental map of the campsite. Porter and Ginger were inside their tent, a single grunt explaining their absence. So this was what the woman did. She flirted with other men until her husband was crazy-sick, and they quarreled and spat, and then they made up. And that's how they kept themselves happy? These people had to be Demons: True humans would never act in such a ridiculous, self-absorbed way.
With a finger-sized flashlight, Shadow-Below found the companion's trail. The soles of the shoes and the man's strong gait led him out to where there wasn't enough water for trees. The darkness opened up around him; he was walking on the open prairie. The man's stride grew noticeably longer. The grass was still parted, the route easy to follow. Shadow-Below began to jog, and he very nearly missed the solitary figure that was doing nothing—a body standing a few feet to his right, in the rain, nothing but the wool clothes to keep him warm. And with a deep voice that had barely been heard all week, the man said, “Conrad, hello."
"Hello,” Shadow-Below muttered.
"I was on my way back,” the man reported. His voice had the hint of an accent, but it refused to be placed. “You shouldn't have worried about me."
"What if you got lost out here?"
"Many things are possible,” was the answer. “But not that."
There was no one else present. Shadow-Below reached out with his senses, and when he felt sure they were alone, he said, “I don't think I've ever heard a name for you."
"Jacob,” the man replied.
"Jacob,” Shadow-Below repeated. Then with a quiet, self-conscious voice, he asked, “Are you a human being, Jacob? Or some new species of machine?"
"Are those my only choices?"
Shadow-Below shuddered. Breathed. “You left her alone with that boy,” he said. “He's down there right now, hoping to get his chance."
"He has no chance."
"But aren't you supposed to be protecting Mara?"
"She is fine. And that boy is nothing."
"So what are you, Jacob? What?"
Silence.
"I've watched you,” Shadow-Below said. “You're strong, but I can't tell how strong. I have seen you eat and drink, or at least pretend to. And you walk off in the morning with a shovel and paper. But maybe last night's meal is only chewed, not digested, and you're leaving it for the ravens."
"Or maybe I am a machine with an efficient chemical metabolism. Have you considered that possibility?"
"Not really."
"Let's change topics,” said Jacob. “Really, I think you're a much more interesting subject."
"Why?"
The dark face might have smiled, but the voice had little joy. “The signals are strong, they tell me. Good data is arriving. All of the probes are performing as expected."
Shadow-Below felt sick, but not nearly as sick as he imagined he would be.
"The shaman himself accepted your gifts. None of the People suspect. Right now, they are sitting at the fire, talking about a strange new fish they speared in the river the other day."
"I don't understand,” said Shadow-Below.
"What don't you understand?"
"Why do you need me? To sneak a few microscopic eyes and ears into their house ... when you'd already found the place for yourself...?"
Jacob laughed quietly. Then he said, “Maybe,” with the hard, warning tone. “Maybe what we want is not for this or for that to be done, Conrad. Maybe our purpose here is to have you do these little favors for us...."
* * * *
Another Canadian front arrived in the night, bringing plunging temperatures and hard rain. By morning, the campfire was a stack of cold, half-burnt limbs, and the endless prairie had shriveled to a patch of bottomland and a few feet of river. The rest of the world was gray—dark gray skies and a curtain of gray rain and a distant landscape reduced to its simplest hills and valleys. Everybody dressed in his warmest, driest clothes. Even Jacob sported rain gear—a slick black poncho that shed the water like a lotus leaf. Inside the tents, sleeping bags and extra clothes were stowed into packs, and the wet tents were dismantled and shaken once or twice before being forced into their stuff sacks. Breakfasts were quick and simple. Water was fed into foil sacks that heated and cooked their fancy contents. Shadow-Below smelled cultured oatmeal and honey, exotic coffees and fresh warm bread. He ate a green apple instead, and two cold pancakes from yesterday. Then he walked down to the shore and righted every canoe, and the next person set her pack into the canoe that he was using.
Mara grinned, and before he could speak, she said, “It's all right. Last night, I made a deal with him."
"With Jacob?"
That was a very funny question. She giggled, asking, “Now why would I need to do that?"
The deal had been made with Porter's son.
Other people arrived, and with a patience growing thin, they listened to Shadow-Below explain the day's dangers. This river was cold, he reminded them, and the air was even colder. If anyone spilled, they had only a few minutes to get to shore and find warmth. That's why keeping together was important, because if there was an accident, he wanted everybody's help.
Yet within minutes, every canoe was alone on the water. The rain came in cold dense waves, cutting visibility to a few yards, and the northwest wind began to find its punch. The only blessing was the solitude: Even Mara seemed remote, sitting in the distant bow with her back to him, arms and shoulders paddling with a steadfastness that he hadn't seen from his other partners.
A second canoe emerged up ahead. The boy stared at Mara as she passed by, his face full of misspent longings and a pissed-at-the-rain suffering. By contrast, Jacob seemed infinitely happy, offering both of them a nod and grin, and with his paddle, graciously waving them into the lead.
Sometimes they would drift, letting the current take them, and Mara would look back at Shadow-Below. Her expressions were intense and determined; he could almost see those important questions that she wanted to ask. But she never let herself. Instead, she would ask how to find directions on a day like this, without GPS or even a compass. Or she'd want to know about the edible plants hiding around them. She would pick his brain about hunting deer, and how smart he thought grizzly bears really were, and if he believed that bringing back the mammoths might help make amends for old crimes.
Without question, Shadow-Below enjoyed talking to this girl.
Around midday, Porter and his wife caught up with them, and with the voice of a CEO, Porter said, “Can we make it off this river today?"
"No."
"You're sure?"
Shadow-Below shrugged. “That's why I said, ‘No.’”
Porter shook his head, then to his tiny wife, he said, “Wil
l you at least try and help us here?"
They vanished downstream. And again, the world was reduced to a circle of cold gray air, two people sitting at opposite ends of this tiny realm. Shadow-Below let them drift again. Mara felt his paddle lift, and she responded in kind. Then she turned—like twenty times before, she looked back at him and smiled, trying produce a smart fresh question—but he spoke first. “You're awfully lucky, I think."
Mara blinked, probably trying to guess which luck applied.
"That crash last year,” he told her. “In the summer, like it was. In relatively good weather."
Her eyes grew huge.
"A different day, and you and your brother both would have died of exposure."
She flinched, sucking in a breath and holding it.
"But that's not why I was lucky,” she said.
"Yes,” he said. “I know that story."
The girl suddenly had an injured, even angry expression, and a matching voice snapped, “I didn't tell my father, or anybody else. I promised not to, and I didn't, and I'm not the one you should be blaming!"
"I'm not blaming."
Mara shut her mouth and looked across the colorless water. Then with an almost inaudible voice, she asked, “How is he?"
Raven, she meant.
"Is that boy all right?"
Sliding his paddle back into the water, Shadow-Below said, “Really, I wouldn't know how to answer that question."
* * * *
By day's end, they made it most of the way to the pickup site, with just a few miles and maybe a dozen river bends to conquer in the morning. They pulled off beneath a stand of ponderosa pine—stately elderly trees that once shaded a ranch house, abandoned now and rotting to dust. Several dozen elk were already bedded down in the woods, and they rose together and trotted off—cows and calves leaving behind an animal stink, as well as an appropriate outrage.
Nobody could find dry fuel. As a body, the students looked at Shadow-Below—at their teacher and protector—and he knew what they wanted. But he refused them. He told them to put up the rain fly for his tent, creating a lean-to over a likely piece of ground, and then he walked past the empty house, ignoring its dry interior with the varnished floorboards and forgotten furniture and the flammable trash left behind by previous campers. He found a burr oak instead and gathered up handfuls of last year's leaves, and then with a focus rare in his present life, Shadow-Below knelt on the wet sand and carefully, slowly fashioned a neat pile of shredded leaves, igniting the pile with his laser-lighter and feeding the smoke and tiny embers with his own measured breath, working hard until the blaze dried out pine cones and sticks, sparking them in turn.
Most of an hour went into building a healthy fire. The rain fly—a huge green sheet of modern fabric—grew hot enough to glow but never showed any desire to burn. People sat in front of the lean-to, close together in the endless drizzle but dry beneath their ponchos, heat playing across faces while minds remembered better weather.
Eventually talk turned to the displaced elk.
"They're the big surprise for me,” Porter confessed. “Buffalo and wolves, sure. But when I think ‘elk,’ I always picture Colorado and Montana. Not the flat old plains."
But elk—the wapiti—were native to this ground. Shadow-Below gave a little lecture about how the elk weren't quite as abundant as the buffalo, but millions of them had lived on the grasslands. Relatively few ever wandered into the mountains, except in the heat of summer. That was why Lewis and Clark nearly starved during their winter in the mountains. The native game preferred warm valleys and watered plains over snow and ice. “Elk aren't idiots,” he told the would-be hunters. “But when they were shot at year-round, and their ground was being plowed up and planted ... they had no choice but to find ways to live in the high country, and in every season too."
He was thinking about adaptation. Animals of all kinds could make homes for themselves, and that despite the most astonishing hardships. And in the coming years, like it or not, it would be the same for human beings.
Shadow-Below was sitting on the ground. Mara and Jacob were behind him, close together on a rancher's old bench. Porter asked Mara about elk. He wanted numbers. He liked to hear that the giant deer were moving east, and within a few years, substantial herds would be established in the Appalachians and south into the old Choctaw territories.
Ginger asked, “When did the old elk vanish from this country?"
She was sitting beside Shadow-Below, close enough that their elbows touched. But that felt like a coincidence. And even if it wasn't, he felt insulated by his rain gear, and hers, listening to the rain drumming on his head whenever the conversation came to a pause.
Mara took a deep breath and said, “During the Outbreak."
Shadow-Below looked back at her, showing his smile. “That's a good story,” he allowed.
"What's the Outbreak?” Ginger asked.
"It's the Northern Cheyenne,” he began. Then he looked forward, watching the hot red embers. “In the late 1870s, that tribe was living on a miserable little reservation in Oklahoma. They had a few guns, a few horses. But they wanted to go home to Montana, which is why they slipped away and headed out across Kansas. Of course your ancestors went crazy. Every bluecoat for a thousand miles was put on their trail. And since Kansas was settled ground, they had nowhere to hide. There were some fights, and killing. But most of the Cheyenne made it to the Platte River, and there they broke into two groups. One band went on to Fort Robinson, throwing themselves at the mercy of the soldiers and Washington. But the others moved just a little ways into the Sandhills, picking a valley and hiding there, letting the bluecoats ride through once or twice to convince themselves that the ground had been well searched. Then they prepared for the winter.
"Except food was scarce,” he said. “There were no buffalo left, and the ranchers would miss their cattle. Famine seemed inevitable. But one day, a herd of elk suddenly came over the horizon. There were a hundred of them or so, all running straight for the Cheyenne, and the natives slaughtered that herd and survived the winter because of it. Eventually they earned themselves a crappy little piece of land back up in Montana, and against long odds, they convinced themselves they were happy."
"I didn't know about the Cheyenne,” Ginger admitted. “Or the elk either."
The mood was relaxed and thoughtful.
The little woman laughed. “Wouldn't it be incredible?"
Her husband wondered, “What would be incredible?"
"If somewhere in this country, there were Natives still living like they used to. Wouldn't that be fantastic?"
Shadow-Below felt his heart kick and belly tighten.
"They couldn't hide all these years,” her husband said. Pragmatic and sober, he said, “One winter isn't the same as a hundred and sixty years."
"Unless they had help,” said the biotech tycoon.
Shadow-Below started to turn around, and stopped himself.
"Help?” asked Porter. “What do you mean?"
"Some of the local people,” Ginger offered. Then she grabbed Shadow-Below by the poncho, tugging on it while saying, “If somebody felt sorry for them, or maybe there's some other reason ... I don't know...."
Now he looked over his shoulder. Mara's face was half-shrouded by her hood, but the green eyes were staring at him, a palpable panic building. And Jacob only seemed calm and measured—the tense jaw and bright blind eyes signaling his own genuine alarm.
Everybody else was caught up in the speculations. These were smart people with a subject everyone was interested in, and suddenly they were talking about the qualities they would want if they were living in this wilderness. Water was mentioned, and someplace to hide. They talked about digging underground homes and living like prairie dogs, and then somebody was describing how they could get secret help coming from relatives still living on the reservation—
Shadow-Below turned around, and with a tug of his hand, he pulled back Ginger's hood. The thick red hair g
lowed in the firelight, and her freckled face looked up at him with a mixture of wary pleasure and delighted surprise. Then Shadow-Below dipped his head and opened his mouth, kissing her little wet mouth, pushing with his tongue until that precise moment when everybody had stopped thinking about lost tribes living under their feet.
* * * *
The trailer looked empty, and if he were anyone else, it would be empty when he stepped inside. Two trap doors led out into the back. The boy always kept watch through the slits in the blinds. But it was only Shadow-Below back from his travels, and Raven remained seated in the living room, barefoot and unwashed, the LCD screen split in two, a live soccer game from Germany competing against one of the old John Wayne Westerns.
Raven looked up when Shadow-Below came into the room, probably expecting to look down again right away.
His gaze froze.
"Your face—” he began.
"Yeah?"
"What happened to your eye?"
Shadow-Below shrugged, as if the bruise was a mystery to him too. He set down his pack and looked at the dirty plates stacked on the floor and on a chair that neither of them liked to use. He could smell the boy from across the room. Something was cooking on the stove. He lifted the lid and saw a thick-bodied fish surrounded by boiling water. In ways that he couldn't quite name, the fish was wrong. The proportions were odd, and despite the heat, the eyes were not growing pale. Then he realized that the fins were moving on their own, and the gills were pumping, trying to wring oxygen out of the bubbles and hot water.
He dropped the lid.
"I caught it yesterday,” Raven mentioned. “I started cooking it last night."
Shadow-Below turned and stared at the screen. Robert Mitchum was staggering around the jailhouse, suffering after a lot of hard drinking. A goalie was grabbing the soccer ball out of the air, saving his team for the moment. And his nephew continued to stare at the horribly blackened eye, finally asking, “Which one of them hit you?"
"The billionaire's son,” he admitted.
"Why?"
FSF, March 2009 Page 18
