Back bent to her burden, she shuffled on.
Nearer the jutting ridge, she had to detour around other drainages sliced into the plain. Scrubby grass had receded to greasewood, some deflated until roots gripped tenuously at resistant hummocks of soil.
"Don't remember greasewood in here. Don't remember the arroyos so deep either. Changing . . . world's changing ..." She shook her head, muttering to herself, trusting her antique body to jump one of the narrow gashes.
“Too old to be wandering around like a kid on a Dream search. Too old for this."
The sun had slanted to the west, her shadow lengthening as she plodded wearily along the tributary's path. Before her, the rounded profiles of the ridges rose against the brassy sky.
She stopped, aware of a difference. No, no matter how long it had been, she would have remembered. The effect might have been the same if the Monster Children had in the slopes when they battled for the world, cutting long parallel grooves down the soil in intricate patterns around the sagebrush. The hillside was washing away, turning to badlands as the plants that had once held the soils dried in the drought.
She cocked her head, looking at the washed ground she walked on, noting the way the soil looked, how the pebbles remained on the surface.
"Used to be grassy," she remembered, running an appraising gaze over the eroded slopes. Here, the greasewood in the flats looked to be strangling, partially buried by the soils eroding down the side of the hill.
She sniffed at her dry nose and hurried on. "Gonna be dark soon. Better get to Monster Bone Springs and make a camp. Get a good night's sleep for once."
Shadows lengthened, stark in the washed skeletons of long dry rivulets on the slopes around her. Looking closer, she could see much of the sagebrush on the rounded hills had died to become nothing more than fuzzy-looking gray skeletons. The dark arroyo remained a defiant obstacle beside her. Step after step, she entered the jaws of the canyon, plodding along the bottom, trying to remember how far it was to Monster Bone Springs as the worn, rounded hills rose about her.
She crabbed up the slope a ways to avoid the thick net of giant sage—and the ticks that would be waiting on the leaf tips—and turned the final bend, remembering the line of sandstone dipping down along the slopes to Monster Bone Springs. There, at the bottom, a thick stand of giant sagebrush waited, its blue-green color that of silvered spruce needles in the crystal afternoon light.
She exhaled slowly, taking one last sip from her gut water sack, and ambled forward on trembling legs. Monster Bone Springs lay before her, an ancient camping place of her People. Here, they'd killed the last of the huge beasts now known as monsters. From the legends, the animals had had two tails, one in front, one in back. And she'd seen the teeth, long, curved, taller than a man.
Here, she'd prowled around the eroded fire pits, seen the cracked bones, picked up the long stone dart points with fluted bases. Now it all seemed to be washed away. Faint stains of charcoal marked the old hearths, eroded soils slightly oxidized from the long-vanished fires. Flecks of charcoal had washed toward the arroyo. Fractured reddened fire stones had broken in irregular shapes to be scattered like scavenger-gnawed bone and kicked about. Even the thick concentrations of stone flakes—chipped waste from tool manufacturing—had washed away.
The shelter had been hidden from view. At first, she'd thought it another buff sandstone boulder. But as she neared she could see the flattened conical shape of the lodge nestled in the sagebrush. A shabby-looking thing, it barely looked big enough to keep two people from the rain—if it were ever to rain.
She slowed, biting her lip. Who? Anymore, that question could be worth a person's life. Even hers. Not everyone knew who she was in these days of hunger and thirst.
"No one lives forever," she grumbled. "Just feels that way sometimes." She pushed on, looking curiously for the Monster Bones despite her wariness. One stuck out of the ground at an angle back in the sagebrush. The end—as big around as a strong man's thigh—had splintered, drying like the rest of the world. Long flakes of bone lay scattered about in the dark-gray sage duff. A few more faint stains of charcoal blackened the soil, a slight reddish tinge of oxidation around them. These you could almost see the shape of. Fire hearths. Old, so old . . . and almost gone.
The world was changing.
"Hello!" she hollered through cupped hands. "Who's there?"
Nothing moved. Something, a feeling, a wrongness, drifted through her thoughts like a bat in the night.
In the stillness, an infant cried.
The Dream wrenched her back again. White Calf started, blinking her eyes into the night gloom of her rock shelter. Her gut lurched, leaving her physically sick, as if something had been dislocated. She fought the need to vomit. Stillness settled on the night. What had happened? The feeling of sickness reeked of abused Power. But whose? Where?