Mystic Cowboy

Chapter One

He let his mind go blank as he stared at the fire. Years of practice kept his feet and hands still until he was little more than the stump he was leaning against. The calm that overtook him left little else. In the distance, a coyote set off a round of cries into the night. The crickets called over the breeze like young braves singing to their lovers while the grasses shushed the river like a mother comforting her baby.

The sounds of his world surrounded him and told him he was right with it. He was where he belonged, doing what he should.

If he was patient, he would see his next idea in a vision. Recently, he’d been getting real good at being patient. Patience was getting his work into art galleries from South Dakota to New Mexico, and that one pipe bag he’d made last year was in the Museum of the American Indian in D.C. Patience was making him a major player in the world of Indian art.

He sat for a long time, but time itself wasn’t important. What was important was patience, the vision. And the next bag. The longer he sat, the better the idea would be.

At some point between the hoot of a hungry owl and another breath of wind, things changed and the vision took him. The temperature dropped from sixty to six in a heartbeat. The snow seemed not to fall from the sky, but spring straight out of the ground. The fire disappeared into the steam of breath coming from his mouth. He could just make out the low ceiling of smoke that pointed to a village over the next hill.

Peace filled him. Nothing else mattered but this connection to the past, the past that held the key to his future. Nothing else mattered but a winter’s day on the plains. He could see it now. The white background. His next pipe bag would be a winter scene.

The thud of hooves drew his attention. A horse, the red paint on his face looking like blood in the snow, ran toward him from the east. White flakes were kicked up with each stride, shrouding the horse in a cloud of ice.

A horse. A red-and-white paint horse running through the snow. The image assembled itself in his mind’s eye. Tanned leather, long fringe, beaded tie done in the same white. It would be a beautiful bag.

The horse ran right past him, so close that he was lost in the ice cloud. He waited. This was the end of the vision. As soon as his eyes cleared, he’d be back in front of his fire, next to the river on an early May evening. And then he could get started on his leather.

But it didn’t happen. Instead of the past leaving him behind, it pulled him deeper into the vision. When his eyes cleared, he saw the horse was gone, and he was colder than he’d ever been in his life. Feeling suddenly a little lost in time, he looked around the place he was in. And what he saw only added to his confusion. Instead of four prints in the snow, he saw only two headed toward the village.

He stared at the tracks. Not hooves—not a horse. Human. Small human prints. It looked like the heels were dragging a little, fanning the snow out in a long tail behind each step. He didn’t know what to make of them, but he tucked the shape and size away in his mind. Maybe he would do a pair of moccasins too. He hadn’t done mocs for a good long while.

Just a pair of mocs couldn’t be why he was still here freezing his ass off in the snow. The village. Something in the village was pulling on him. He began to follow the tracks, tripping through the snow banks. He didn’t remember walking being this hard. Usually, if he moved at all in his visions, he seemed to float above. But not now. The cold air tried to rip the breath from his chest as the snow clawed at his feet. He fought on, trying to remember that this snow wasn’t really here, and that he wasn’t about to get frostbite chasing down a horse that left delicate human footprints. This was all just a vision. Nothing more.

He lost his footing and slid the last few feet down the hill and into the safe circle of tipis. It was a little warmer in the circle, sheltered from the wind behind the hill. He stood, dusted the snow from his braid and looked for the tracks.

And saw nothing but bodies.

Panic stuck in his throat as he began to count the dead. Five here, seven there—the numbers climbed quickly. Dressed in the traditional buckskins, the people—his people—lay on the ground where they’d fallen, their pocked skin almost as white as the snow that held them in its grasp. There was no blood, so it wasn’t a war party or the blue-coat soldiers come back again.

He looked at each member of his family, held forever in death’s grasp. There was no one left to perform the death rites, no one to keep their souls until they were ready to be judged by Owl Woman.

The sickness had come.

Through the haze of horror that blinded his eyes almost as much as the wind-whipped snow, he tried to focus on what he knew. He knew what—and when—this was. This was the smallpox epidemic, and it had wiped out whole branches of his tribe, the Lakota tribe, back in 1831. A hundred and seventy years ago—a past long dead.