A lonely stream slithered through a grassy plain. It flowed, swollen by a recent rain. Large sticks, carried by the flood water from a wood far upstream, snagged on big rocks out in the rapids, catching other fallen branches and flotsam, damming the stream. Clouds rimmed in glowing silver drifted across the night sky and the full moon peeked from the holes in their lumpy bodies. White smoke curled from out of the short opening of a primitive lean-to, flickering curves of silver in the moonlight. The lean-to was erected only a few feet from the water, opening toward the stream, a tiny dark mouth agape and thirsty.
Within the deep shadows caught in the lean-to, Buffalo Hump sat naked, cross legged with her head bowed over a pile of steaming river rocks. Naked as a helpless baby. Naked; for just as we enter the world, we leave it with nothing, wholly reliant on the Great Spirit.
Her long hair draped over her body. It was matted and knotted, dreadlocked, looking like cords of loosely spun cotton. And it was wet with hours of sweat. From the hours of sitting in the dark, sitting in the steam that hissed, thick and hot, billowing from a horseshoe ring of hot stones. The coals beneath burned a bright red, casting little light, illuminating none of her features. It had taken her an hour to drill out the first ember. Another to coax a flame out of a ball of shredded grass. It took the better part of a day to grow the fire. Thankfully, the storm had passed the day before and all day the sun blazed, drying out some of the smaller pieces of driftwood. Yet, even then it took time, most of the evening, to get the fire hot enough, to get the coals burning enough to cook the stones so that when she dripped water on them hot steam would rise thick and white.
With sweat dripping from her lips, she mumbled the names of her forebears, of chieftains and wise women, of all those who had led the Buffalo People across the great plains. Forty three names she must chant. Forty three ancestors, each represented by a stone she had collected and thrown on the coals, in hopes that they could carry her prayers to the Great Spirit.
But, a coyote howled. A scout. It came faint, like the wispy memory of a dream. Buffalo Hump paused midst the 22nd name, Iron Horn, and peered through the dreads of damp hair out over the stream and the plains beyond. The dark clouds drifted and the moonbeams coming through down to the shadowed plain scintillated like the gleaming edge of a knife turning in a man’s hand. The stream rushed, rippling and lapping over stones and sticks. The coals crinkled.
Another coyote howled, even more faint, farther away in the night than the first. This was the howl of the new leader, whose name meant One Who Bites Ankles, and her heart quickened.
“Fool,” she muttered as she pounded her fist on her bare knee.
The Hunters were coming, but her ritual had only begun. Quickly, she continued to recite the forty three names, racing through the remaining chain without taking a breath till, at last, she came to the final name, that of her father: Brown Bull. She stood, woozy for the heat, yet her footing remained steady as she walked the feet over the rocky bank to the flowing stream. She dipped a cloth in the water, returned to her lean-to, sat in the center of the ritualistic horseshoe, and wrung the cloth over the red coals and hot stones. She bowed her head into the scalding steam and prayed.
She prayed in the old way in the old tongue and so it came as a song. She rocked back and forth, her eyes closed, her hair swaying over her naked body. She sang of her great need, for justice against the Armadillo Shaman and the Restless he had summoned. She sang for the Coyote Tribe and for its Hunters, prayed that they would wake from the Shaman’s ruse, that they would see through the imposter that was set up as Chief. She prayed and sang that she was alone and that she missed her father.
She fell silent, trembling and waiting. Sweat fell from her nose, sizzling on the hot stones. Her head felt as light as the steam. The red coals, the silver rimmed clouds, the glistening stream all began to spin around in a slow carousel of light and color. A vision was near. She was on the cusp. On the brink. But, the vision tiptoed like a deer, creeping up the bank of the stream, sniffing and nervous as it approached the lean-to. It lingered out of reach, peering from the darkness. If Buffalo Hump raised a hand, if she stirred, she knew the vision would dart back out onto the plains, flee back to the heavens from where it came. She kept her eyes shut, and she pleaded silently, pleading for the vision to come, to reveal itself to her.
The scout coyote howled much closer than before. The leader howled, very close. And then the other Hunters yipped, yodeling their glee as they stalked through the grass, their legs swishing among the tall blades on the far side of the stream.
Buffalo Hump closed her eyes tighter, desperate to receive the vision. But the vision remained where it was, something that can only be glimpsed from the corner of her eye, something that could never be directly viewed. Only bright colors of red and gray could be seen. Only the impression of a woman with a very large nose.
She chewed on her lip, her stomach beginning to churn from the dizziness of her head, still hoping to see something more, yet the skittish vision refused to come closer into full, easily perceptible view.
“Seer,” One Who Bites Ankles growled.
The vision darted from the entrance of the lean-to, bounding up into the dark clouds of the night sky.
Buffalo Hump opened her eyes, her head rolling from the heat. On the other side of the narrow stream, the silhouette of a coyote sat among the rocks. His eyes gleamed green and red in the moonshine. “I apologize if I disrupted your communion with the Great Spirit.”
Buffalo Hump staggered to her feet. Her hair falling in long dreads over her breasts. She grabbed hold of the top of the lean-to to balance herself. Twenty more coyotes crept from out of the tall grass, only shadows. Some stood on either side of One Who Bites Ankles, their heads hung low, their trailing tongues shimmering in the moonlight, while others prowled the bank, leaping out onto the dry surfaces of boulders in the stream, silent among the rippling water. Buffalo Hump wiped the sweat from her eyes and when she focused on One Who Bites Ankles across the stream, she saw a man. The clouds had parted and a beam of moonshine fell on him. He was short and bare chested, wearing only a pair of buckskin pants and moccasins. There were a dozen or so scalps strung on a leather thong hung loosely about his waist. The matted hair of the scalps draped about his thighs. Also, dangling from his hip was a tomahawk. But a second tomahawk, he tossed, end over end, so it spun in the air a full revolution before he caught it by its handle.
“Are you drunk, old woman? Is that why you’re naked?”
The Hunters laughed softly.
Buffalo Hump let go of the top of the lean-to and tried to stand tall, but she, still dizzy, swayed on her feet and nearly fell. She braced herself against the side of the lead-to.
“She is drunk!” One Who Bites Ankles laughed, followed by his fellow warriors, who remained clothed in their coyote forms.
“You’ve come to kill me,” Buffalo Hump said.
He twirled the tomahawk with one hand, spinning it and catching it by the handle, spinning and catching. “In time.”
“You’ve come to kill a friend of the Coyote Tribe, at the command of an imposter.”
He gripped the tomahawk firmly in his right hand as the others growled. “We’ve come at the command of our Chief, He Sniffs the Sky, to kill a traitor and usurper.”
“Me? Usurper?” She stumbled forward, her fists clenched at her naked sides. “It is the Armadillo Shaman that has usurped the Chief!”
Some of the coyotes sat on the rocks in the stream glanced back at One Who Bites Ankles. “Lies,” he growled at them. “Remember, she killed the Chief’s son and daughter.”
The other Hunters turned the narrowed eyes back on Buffalo Hump, eyes that glinted green and red in the darkness. She staggered, overcome by a dizzy spell, she crumpled to the ground. One Who Bites Ankles scoffed, “Her guilt weighs her down.”
A coyote, one of two that had traversed the boulders and was now on the same bank as Buffalo Hump, turned back to his leader and said, “Or perhaps she offers herself as a wife?”
The Hunter’s laughter echoed on the empty plain.
“I didn’t kill them!” Buffalo Hump threw a rock at the coyote that insulted her, but he easily dodged it. “It was the Armadillo Shaman!”
“It was your counsel that led to their deaths!” One Who Bites Ankles said, “Counsel that I now understand to be treacherous.”
Buffalo Hump scrambled into the lean-to and fetched a large wooly cloak. “Not nearly as treacherous as your heart,” she said. “If not for the death of his son, if not for the disappearance of his daughter, you would not be leading the Hunters.”
A swirling shadow came flying over the stream. She cowered as it chopped through the air, whizzing past her head, stirring the hair about her left temple, and splintering a support post of the lean-to. The roof of driftwood teetered and creaked before it crashed to the ground. With splinters in her hair and eyes wide, Buffalo Hump gazed back at One Who Bites Ankles standing on the far shore.
His hands were empty. He unhooked his second tomahawk and tossed it in the air, end over end, and caught it by the handle. “In time,” he said.
As the Hunters laughed softly, she frantically donned the cloak, slipping her arms into the sleeves which were as big as sheepskin chaps.
The eighteen that hadn’t crossed the stream yet, began to leap from boulder to boulder across the flowing water. The two that had already crossed, their teeth gleaming in the moonlight, growled at Buffalo Hump as she flipped the hood onto her head, which fell like a canvas rucksack covering her entire face. Black horns stuck out on either side of the shaggy hood. From a black snout, she snorted, and two big, brown eyes, embedded in the hood, blinked. She hunched over, a hump rising on her back beneath the cloak like an approaching snowy hill.
“Strike!” One Who Bites Ankles shouted.
The coyote Hunter that made the lewd joke leapt at Buffalo Hump’s throat, but she raised her wooly arms and halted his pounce mid air with two fore hooves. She came down hard on him, and eight hundred pounds of buffalo heft crushed his ribs, splattering him like a swatted mosquito. The second coyote lunged at her hind leg, but the white buffalo spun around and caught him with one of her horns. She slung him, as though he was nothing but a doll, tossing him into the approaching pack. Several of them splashed into the stream.
The white buffalo then charged, plunging into the pack and the shallow stream, splashing water, slinging coyotes like bowling pins. The Hunters yelped and some nipped at her hind legs, drawing red trickles of blood that ran along the white fur of her hocks. She bellowed, her earthy growl rumbling like a lioness, as she sloshed up out the stream. She lowered her massive, shaggy head and charged One Who Bites Ankles. Her hooves scrabbled on the rocky shore. He raised his tomahawk. However, at the last moment, his eyes wide with fear, he dove out of the way. Buffalo Hump continued on across the plain, the fading sound of her hooves rumbled like the gentle rolling of thunder on a summer night.