Except the vision had come. While she prayed and fasted on the high peaks of the Buffalo Mountains, something had happened to her. Four days she'd been without food or water, chilled by the cool night air, desiccated by the rays of the spring sun; she'd shivered and purged her soul.
Naked, she'd sat on the high point, seeking the source of the call that had driven her all her life. Each time she had retreated, tried living like a human, the call had returned, imperative, driving her to abandon each of her husbands and the children they'd sired off her. Each time she'd returned to the high places to seek the source of Power.
So she had gone again, until, on the fourth day, a man's image had formed in the clouds, his features lit by the blinding rays of the sun. A handsome man, tall, his Power had sung in silence, dwarfing the clouds, a presence of warmth and sunlight.
She'd watched in awe as he smiled at her, an arm rising to point southeast toward the plains where her native peoples had lived since the time of the First Man. As quickly as it had come, the image faded to be replaced by that of Wolf, eyes glowing yellow as sunbeams pierced the clouds.
She'd blinked then, heart racing in her chest, staring up in wonder at the puffy white formations of a giant thunderhead. Weakened and shaken, she'd climbed down, found her clothes, and eaten before setting off on the journey.
"Wolf Dreamer," she mumbled. "He brought me here."
She took a deep breath, shaking her head and slowing to a stop. Her tongue smacked, sticky in her dry mouth as she squinted into the white glare of the beating sun.
An old woman alone in the vastness and heat, she stood, back stooped from the tumpline holding a bulky pack on the fulcrum of her hips. She peered around in all directions, catching her breath. The distant bluffs shimmered like a Spirit Dream—jagged outlines wavering. Even the blue vault of sky above had dulled, faded and parched. Outside of the restless whisper of the bone-drying breeze, only a grasshopper clicked to the emptiness. Even the birdsong had stilled during the heat of the day.
The spirit of the land smelled of heat, of prostration. The odor of dust tingled pungently in her nostrils.
Years of sun had seared her face into a shriveled husk of burnt sienna. Each pain, hunger, sorrow, and triumph of her long life lay etched, mapped in the maze-work of wrinkles that draped from her broad-cheeked skull. Eyes, knowing and powerful, burned from behind the sagging folds of brown skin. An undershot jaw betrayed the loss of all but a few of her wear-polished yellow incisors. Gray wisps of hair strayed from her short braids.
Her chest rose and fell as she hawked the thirst-spit from her throat and spat onto the gray-white clay. Fingers of hot breeze pulled at her, tugging at the few fringes remaining on the grease-stained dress, fluttering the tatters, rumpling the seat worn so shiny thin under her gaunt buttocks. Around her shoulders, a section of buffalo gut looped, the curve hanging over her hip, taut with tepid water. She found the end, lifting the gut until she could trickle a stream of moisture between thin brown lips.
She made a smacking sound, eyes always on the irregular horizon where it danced and wavered in silvery patterns.
"But then I made my choice years ago, didn't I?" She chuckled: the sound of sagebrush on leather. She shifted the pack on her back, easing the tumpline where it pulled at her forehead. Wearily she took up the march again. Beneath her tattered moccasins, bristly grass crunched—autumn brown even though the season had barely passed late spring.
To her right, a jagged arroyo cut the valley floor—a cracked wound in the dry breast of earth. The scaly sides of the vertical walls had patterned in desiccating fractures where the buried soils split, furred with exposed red roots. An impassable barrier, the gash dropped the height of two tall men to the gravel-traced channel bottom hidden in the noonday shadows. Across the dry flood plain to her left, rose a series of gray-white and buff buttes, sucked dry by the power of Father Sun.
“Maggot crawling luck," she grunted, coming to a stop. Before her, a confluence yawned, another sheer-walled tributary meeting the main channel. She walked nearer to stare down into the gash. Once, in a time long past, she would have slung her pack across, taken a run and vaulted the narrow chasm. Now she could only sigh, and go the long way around on her ancient, rickety bones.
The hard white earth reflected, rolling heat over her as Father Sun burned balefully down. The more she sweated, the quicker the wind drank her moisture away.
"Ah!" She blinked in the glare, staring at the headland forming out of the shimmering air. A line of sandstone slabs jutted from the ridge top like awkward vertebrae to cast fragile shadows down the sagebrush-dotted slope. 44 I know where I am. Monster Bone Springs is up there. Ought to make it by evening. Used to be good water there."