Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  At night, when the ul udi came down from the sky and fitted themselves into his body, Baat could see with their ghostly vision. The Forest shimmered then, and he stared through trees and brush as if peering into the crystal clarity of a glacial lake.

  He spied them dotting the terrain, each hunkered under a bush or beside a log, asleep or playing with their small fires, hugging spears, waiting out the night to continue the hunt. At dawn, the ul udi vapored away and left him blunt-sighted as any smallhead.

  Even so, Baat would not retreat to the eastern mountains, where he had lived before, free of the smallheads. He chose to remain, no matter his suffering, tied to these meres and briar patches by memories of a time long lost.

  He sipped from the bone-spout of his water-bladder and washed the dryness of fear from his mouth. Though a creek ambled nearby, he never drank water from his hands. He collected his drink from pools where he could see fish circling above their shadows.

  The smallheads poured their flavorless poisons in streams and still pools and had killed most of the unwary People that way. Even at night, when these puny creatures huddled about their fires, they posed a danger, because they left deep pits in the Forest covered with branches and leaves and set with sharp stakes.

  Sometimes they hid boulders in treetops lashed to trip-vines. Once, as a child, he had found a clansman nailed to a tree with an antelope's prong weighted with rocks and slung from a vine.

  Those dark memories convinced Baat that the smallheads threatened him more fiercely than the Dark Traces. The ul udi killed with Baat's hands and with fire from the sky, pressing alertness into each moment of their victims' anguish, seeking and experiencing death intimately. The smallheads killed from afar.

  To survive their killing wiles these several moons, he moved about rarely and then only at night and with steadfast attentiveness. That had made it impossible for him to follow the north trails to the herds and the icefields of summer. Whenever he showed himself on the grasslands, they came after him.

  And now, despite all his precautions, they closed in here in the Forest. Just yesterday, three smallhead hunters had spotted him hiding in the bramble of a river isle and had used their drums to contact others. He had been forced to kill them during the day, without the strength of the Dark Traces.

  After that, Baat had run east until exhaustion had dropped him in this dark dell. Nightmares denied him rest, and now he felt sick with weariness and fear. He squinted into the sun, paring his attention to the fierce light above the branches, listening for voices that sometimes came from there, when he exercised no wickedness in his heart.

  Distantly, he heard a quiet voice: Why do you stay here, where you are in danger? Nostalgia for these woodlands of your childhood is empty, Hollow Bone. If you die here, the Dark Traces will capture your light and torment you for many generations.

  "Bright Ones!" Baat called and immediately regretted his cry. He laid still, ears straining to hear past the hum of his startled blood and the burble of the creek for tiny sounds of encroaching smallheads.

  Your days are almost ended, the gentle voice opened again in him. Soon, you can join us here in the sky, and we can listen to the wind of the sun as it sings through the heavens—and in that music, you will hear everything there is to know of peace and rest—and love. Come north, to the cairn of your ancestors, to the door of the mountain that leads to the sky.

  North—across the tundra, over the grasslands, where the smallheads could easily track him—did his destiny await him there? From earliest days, long before smallheads arrived, the great ones of his tribe had gone there to die. How he yearned to follow them, to dance among the dolmen altar that the earliest ancestors had built.

  There, the Bright Ones had the power to lift his spirit out of the worn animal of his body and carry him to heaven. Yet, this very hope of joining his ancestors trapped him in these haunted woods.

  As a child, these had been his groves and dells. He had grown up following the herds in summer and wintering among these great firs. In his twentieth summer, without warning, the smallheads poisoned the streams and killed his parents, his two children and their mother.

  Grief-stricken, he left, and for many years lived with another tribe to the east. Now as an old man, he had come back to dance with the ghosts of his youth—at least, so he had thought when he first returned here, seven years ago.

  During those years, Baat had visited the sky often: The Bright Ones came to dance in meres and bogs far from the evil eyes of the smallheads. Embraced by their fiery wings, he had soared up from the hungers of the earth, high into the starry void. And there, he had known glorious raptures among the ul udi, while far below his body slept.

  Among those raptures, memory blazed: He danced with ghosts of his young family and lived a summer of happiness so sharp and intense he wearied of the anguish he had endured in the years since.

  In autumn—scrawny from dreaming when he should have been hunting—he returned serenely to the eastern mountains, to the tribe of People, where his second family flourished, far from the smallheads.

  In many ways, life in the mountains had been good to Baat. The children he had fathered there had grown to have children of their own, and they revered him. Even so, he felt incomplete in their quiet realm, for this particular tribe of the People did not have or even want ghost dancers.

  In this eastern tribe, the ul udi arrived only in dreams, and by day the People actively suppressed those celestial spirits. At first, Baat had been glad for that. He had wanted to forget, simply by living each of the first twenty years of his life again without ul udi or smallheads.

  Only as old age made its claims did Baat yearn to call the cold fire down into his flesh once more. He quested others of his kind. He did find them, childhood chums, who had lingered around the Forest despite the danger of the smallheads.

  Sharing their woe, though it fed Baat's hopelessness, made him feel stronger, because he was not alone. Then, he stopped finding them. Only smallheads remained in the Forest where the People had once lived freely.

  Most of the summer that Baat skulked about the ancient woods, he believed he would return to the mountains. The season's longest day came and went before he admitted to himself that something more held him here. He had not relived the memories of his first family at all, had not even floated with the ul udi in their heaven. All he had done since arriving was watch for the smallheads.

  Come north, to the cairn of your ancestors, to the door of the mountain that leads to the sky.

  Baat's instincts wanted to obey the ul udi and go there, where he could dance in the cold fire with all the ghost dancers who had ever lived. At the sky altar, he could make arrangements for his own death, for the time when he would undertake his last trek across the tundra a handful of summers ahead.

  With his sons helping him, he would dance around his own corpse. In the north, where heaven came down to earth, holy cairn rocks anchored the sky to the ground. The ul udi walked that land in bodies of light like creatures of flesh. Only there could he leave behind his body like a shucked garment and journey to heaven with the Bright Ones, never to return.

  Forlornly, he realized he could not embark north without the smallheads tracking him. They populated the Forest fringe and roved the tundra in fierce bands.

  With no one to warn him as he slept in the day, the more vulnerable he would be, not only to smallheads but to ravenous beasts. If even one of his People had remained to travel with him, as the journey north required, perhaps the crossing would be possible.

  Several months ago, he had still hoped to find one of his own people to share the journey with him. He had come north early in the season to seek out the old places where the tribe once lived. Perhaps one of the others would have returned here too—though that hope now seemed foolish. The smallheads had overrun the old places. How could he ever have thought that any of the People would return to these woods of death?

  One small, desperate chance remained if all else fai
led. Not far from this shadowy tarn of vipers and humpbacked boars lived an old smallhead woman. Sly-eyed as a marmoset, she had learned from witches before her how to catch ul udi in crystal rocks.

  Certain crystals entranced the People, and these smallhead witches knew how to use those spellbound bodies to speak with the ul udi. From the ul udi, witches got their power and learned the secrets of heaven and earth.

  Baat decided he would go to the witch and seek her help eluding the smallhead hunters. If she watched over him while he slept so that he survived the pilgrimage to the cairn of his ancestors in the north, she could use him. He would submit to her crystal-induced trances so that she might converse with the ul udi.

  Baat sat up from where he lay, vision branded from staring at broken shafts of sunlight. He must be very tired even to consider trusting a smallhead witch. He rubbed his face with his hands, and fatigue darkened in him.

  )|(

  "We need something more," Hamr said, holding up the two rabbits they had stoned. "The Thundertree are laughing at us. We ran from their mask, and now they are laughing at us. We can't go to them with two rabbits and ask for a place at their fire. We must go back into the Forest and kill something larger."

  Timov leaned against a boulder, tightening the straps of his sandal. Duru watched wind ripple across the grass range. Neither of them wanted to look at Hamr.

  "Sure, it's going to be scary," Hamr said. "But we can't stay here. The days are getting shorter, the wind sharper. Winter's coming, don't you realize? Winter. We need the Thundertree. So now we've got to show them that they need us."

  "The herds will be coming south soon," Timov spoke, plucking at his sandal. "We can take a big animal when it comes down the trails."

  Hamr blew a sigh of exasperation, threw the dead rabbits to the ground, and turned away. These children thought as children think, he reminded himself and walked to where his two spears stood in the ground, crossing each other. What did they know of destiny? Their lives pivoted about fear and hunger. They would stay here so long as they perceived no danger. Anger seethed in him at the thought that the Thundertree laughed at them.

  He put a hand on the spear tip from his childhood, and the weapon gave him back an instant of strength. With calm regard, he faced his companions again. "All right," he said, quietly, "you can stay here. I will go into the Forest with Blind Side and get our offering. If the Thundertree accept it, I will come for you."

  "No," Duru said, looking to her brother. "We must stay together."

  Timov passed his sister a weary frown. He wanted to wait and knew she would be going with or without him. "We'll go."

  "Not. with that spirit. I need your help, not your reluctance."

  "Then stay here," Duru urged. "Winter is coming and with it the herds, as Timov says. Let the Thundertree laugh at us. At least, they know we are not to be feared. In time, we will earn their respect and our place among them."

  "Maybe they'll come out to us," Timov offered.

  "I'm going," Hamr said and went for his spears.

  Duru picked up her satchel and the two rabbits and looked to her brother. Unhappy, he pushed away from the rock he leaned against and pulled his spear from where it stood. She smiled at him and held up the rabbits. "At least we'll eat well tonight."

  "Yeah, if we're not eaten first."

  Hamr led Blind Side of Life by his rope and did not look back. He knew they were following. Their unwillingness made him feel more responsible for them, and he approached the forest warily.

  While pretending to let Blind Side loiter in the bunch grass the animal liked best, Hamr studied the treeline. The Panther men, who had spooked them, presumably to test the newcomers' courage and worthiness for inclusion in their tribe, appeared nowhere. Nor were there any obvious signs of dangerous animals. Yet even so, he advanced slowly and stopped at the fringe, under the awning of the big trees.

  They built a fire early, while the sun still dazzled in the branches, and they ate facing away from each other, the better to watch for the Panther men or an enemy. Before night fell, they sang the daycount on the calendar bracelet, doused the fire and lay down with their backs to a tree. Fear spoiled Timov's rest, and Hamr too dozed restlessly, anxious for the day so he could begin the hunt.

  Duru, exhausted from her uneasy slumber of the night before, slept deeply and dreamed she woke on her back, her mouth open and filled with nut oil. Her tongue had become a wick. A yellow taper of flame stood on her tongue and illuminated the cope of a forest grotto feathery with ferns. When she could hold her breath no longer, she gasped and swallowed the nut oil and the flame—and her whole body ignited.

  Blazing, she twirled and flapped upward like a burning leaf. Quiet as a star, she burned, silver, cool, shining through the darkness of distance, sliding across the night with a river's leisurely flow. All at once, she lifted beyond the trees and beheld them from above: ghostly clouds of tree-heads shimmering with moonlight. Then tundra, lonely and silver in the night, stretched below. Boulders and stray shrubs swung past. Ahead, a tiny figure appeared, a snowflake, a glistening star, a man rushing closer.

  The surge of her flow stopped sharply at ground level, an arm's reach away from a giant with a face chipped from a boulder, hair like short quills, and a lichenous beard cut by a scar across his jaw and right cheek.

  Above him, the northern lights rippled, a luminous green smoke visible through the transparency of the giant's head and wide-slung shoulders. He is a ghost, she thought. Through his chest, wide as a treetrunk, sleek as the sharks she had seen beached after a storm, she watched two men approaching. She recognized the moon-limned silhouettes of Timov and Hamr.

  The hunters hurled their spears, and the weapons flew harmlessly through the ghost. Movement turned her attention toward a graben fenced by shrubs as jagged as antlers. The ghost's twin climbed out of that ditch, only this time he did not appear transparent. Not a ghost!

  The giant’s solid form loped smoothly as a wolf behind the hunters. They stood baffled, looking ahead, where their spears had penetrated the wraith.

  Duru wanted to rush to them, to warn them of the giant behind them. Before she could move, she spied another figure, a serpent the moonlight had split to legs and arms, creeping up behind the giant, spear poised. As the snakeman neared, she noticed his white hair streaming like fog from a scarred face twisted tightly to the skull.

  "I see you there, Yaqut!" the giant shouted to the reptilian man, and the white-haired hunter came running toward him, spear raised, face squeezed into a grimace of rage.

  She willed herself closer to Timov, who had turned with Hamr at the sound of the giant's voice. As she approached her brother, he retreated without moving his legs as if falling backward, and she fell after him. Their fall accelerated, then slammed to a stop—and she woke.

  Or thought she had—but she could not move. Though her eyes had snapped open, her body lay paralyzed against the tree where she had fallen asleep. She noticed Timov slumbering under a blanket of leaves between tentacles of tree roots. Hamr sat beside him, head leaning back against the trunk, eyes closed, hands in his lap gripping the rope tied to his horse. In the dark, Blind Side rubbed against the trees and looked like river mist moving.

  Duru burst with fear and willed herself with all her might to stir. She lay like a dead thing, her terror mounting. Then she twisted herself awake so vehemently that Hamr jumped to his feet, spear swung to block an attack.

  Blind Side of Life snorted fretfully, stepped to Hamr for a reassuring pat.

  "I'm alive!" Duru said in a gasp.

  Hamr blew a sigh of relief. "The ancestors are taunting you, little sister." He stroked Blind Side between the eyes and sat down.

  Timov rubbed the sleep from his eyes with one hand and put his arm around the sobbing Duru.

  When she could talk, she related what she had seen. Hamr huffed a skeptical laugh and closed his eyes. "A dream, a nightmare," he told her reassuringly.

  "It wasn't a dream," she insisted.
"I flew, far from my body. I had trouble getting back in."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I saw it all clearly. There's another hunter around here. The ghost man called him Yaqut."

  Timov sat up, alert now. His eyes opened wider with fear. "The ghost man sounds like the giant I dreamed about last night," he said. "There's an evil spirit in these woods."

  The three sat in silence, letting that possibility sink in. Then Hamr got up and stoked the fire. "All the more reason to find the Thundertree. We need a home, safe from spirits and beasts. Rest now, the both of you. Tomorrow we'll get our offering."

  "Hamr's right," Timov agreed finally. "The spirits taunt us out here. Go to sleep now. A better dream will soothe you."

  Duru closed her eyes, met loose stars jiggling there. Her brother fidgeted with his own anxieties. She stared out into the dark woods, wondering what had really happened. By dawn, she had convinced herself of her dream’s reality. As they resumed foraging, she looked about for signs that another hunter lurked nearby. She climbed into a tree with her brother and scanned for smoke in the Forest or a human form on the northern plains and found neither. As the morning wore on, she began to believe that the ancestors indeed toyed with her.

  At midday, Timov spotted a roe deer that stood immobile in a thicket of ash trees. The dark berries of its eyes watched to see if they had noticed it. The wanderers backed away and crouched out of sight.

  Hamr tethered Blind Side to a sapling, signed for Duru to stay with the horse, and indicated that Timov should crawl with him. Hunched over, they scurried downwind among the trees until the deer's white rump came into sight through a screen of sunstruck foliage. It sipped at a brook, apparently mindless of them.

  Hamr crept forward, slow enough not to rustle branches. Timov followed, froze when the deer's head came up. Hamr had to edge forward another pace to throw his spear free of the bush. He waited with aching stillness. The deer's head lowered to sip again, and the hunters nudged forward.

  Hamr lifted his spear.