People of the Fire(71)
He burst from the trees, heart leaping as he found the camp peacefully intact.
"Red Hand!" he called out, waving furiously. "Grab your weapons! The Short Buffalo People have come again! This time, let us surprise them!"
Within minutes, he was leading his hunters back down the trail. All that remained was to locate the tracks of the intruders, hunt them down, and kill every last one.
The fire crackled and popped, sending flickers of yellow light to play on the soot-thick ceiling of White Calf's shelter. The air swelled with the scent of roasting buffalo hump and boiling tongue mixed with dock, wild onion, cattail root, bee-plant leaves, and sego-lily root.
Little Dancer worked his sore shoulders, feeling the pinch of overtaxed joints. Tomorrow, every muscle in his body would be screaming. He looked over to where his father sat beside a rack of drying meat. Satisfaction filled Hungry Bull's face, animation from the success of the hunt momentarily replacing the sadness that normally filled his eyes. Two Smokes propped himself against the back wall, agile fingers working supple leather as he trimmed cured hide for moccasin soles to shape with a sharp chert flake. Elk Charm stood at the rear of the shelter, studying the hanging bundles and medicine bags. The firelight played in her shimmering hair. Little Dancer couldn't keep his eyes off the girl as she moved, graceful, like a deer in fresh snow. White Calf sat by the fire, fussing with the coals with a piece of firewood.
Little Dancer watched uneasily as White Calf bent forward, staring into the buffalo-gut paunch that hung from the juniper-wood tripod. "It could use another couple of stones. It's steaming, but we want to keep a good boil in it."
Elk Charm hurried to help and used the hearth sticks to grab another cobble from the glowing coals and drop it sizzling into the stew. Bright black eyes flashed in his direction as she replaced the sticks.
A curious feeling, a warm excitement, formed deep inside Little Dancer—and it heightened as their eyes met. The air between them might have been charged, so painfully could he feel her presence. What was it about her? Why couldn't he get her out of his mind?
He dropped his gaze, amazed to find himself awkwardly engrossed with his fumbling hands. Try as he might, he couldn't still his fingers. Every nerve in his body demanded he do something. He stood up, paced a couple of steps, and dropped to squat where he'd been in the beginning. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the girl's amused smile as she sought to avoid his glance.
The Red Hand had passed through and camped near White Calf's more than once over the years. On those instances, he'd played with the children. He'd even met Elk Charm a time or two. One time, he'd spent an afternoon with her and a couple of other children playing at stick and hoop, laughing and running. So why hadn't he noticed the tones of her skin, the way her hair gleamed in the light, or the mysterious depth in her dark eyes before? Now her every movement absorbed him, almost to the point of being painful. No matter how he tried to center his attention on other things, he couldn't help sneaking a glance at her, wishing she'd smile at him, talk to him.
For the moment, the girl had involved herself with a careful study of the spiral pecked into the rear wall. White Calf had daubed the lines with yellow from crushed balsam flowers.
Elk Charm reached up to touch it, her finger lingering on the stone before she looked at White Calf. "There are a lot of spirals like this pecked into the rocks on the north side of the mountains. I remember them from when I was a girl. We'd camped there to meet with the White Crane People. I think they were trading."
White Calf nodded. She'd been curiously reserved for 01 her predatory gaze going first to the girl and then to him. He hated it when her eyes got that smok veiled look. Some worry preoccupied her, an uneasy premonition lurking in her mind. What had he done to stir her cranky soul this time?
As if the morning breeze had shifted to blow a clinging smoke away, Little Dancer realized it wasn't him, but Elk Charm. White Calf didn't want Elk Charm around. He perked up. Why? What was it about her?
"You know about the Spiral?" White Calf asked, shifting her glance to Elk Charm.
"Just that it's Powerful. It's old, isn't it? Something from the time of the Monster Children and the Hero Twins?"
White Calf smiled wistfully, eyes going to the rock art. "Yes, child, it's old. The Spiral is as old as First Man. In the beginning, the Wise One Above made a world. Then he made animals and men. For a long time things were good. Then, like always, something came along to mess it up. It might have been the people. Maybe it was the animals, but somewhere, the One of creation got separated. Split apart. Everything started going in different directions. Humans came to believe they were the most important beings in the First World and they ceased to thank the animals and plants for giving themselves as food. Animals started to think they were the most important, and they left the people to starve, refusing to offer themselves to be killed. Like a flawed chert nodule struck with a hammerstone, it all shattered into different directions and nothing fit together anymore."