Touches of Wonder and Terror. James C. Glass
you need to have your earlobes trimmed,” said Bob.
They hoisted their packs, and stepped inside the bright glow.
There was another shout, and then a scream from nearby as the five-dimensional Branegate closed behind them.
BADLANDS DREAMING
“You’re crazy to go out there alone.”
John Natani bristled, Italian blood boiling, but his Indian half forced him to remain calm. “That’s why I’m paying for a long distance call, Joe. I want you to go with me. It’s only a few days, like when we were kids. You remember the place.”
At the other end of the line, Joseph Eaglestaff sighed before answering his childhood friend, remembering how the elders had called them a dreaming pair. “That was a long time ago, John. I’m the one with finals coming up in a week. You’re the one who dropped out of school. What you do is your business.”
“I don’t want to be an engineer, Joe.”
“So switch majors like I did. Ask around, and see what else you’re interested in. It’s either that or stay on the reservation and collect welfare, or move into town for some crummy job nobody wants. You don’t need a vision-quest to make that decision for you; just think about it.”
“I will, when I make Ihamblecza—in the badlands.”
“The heat will boil your brains out. You won’t think of anything. This is the twenty-first century, John. Quit listening to old men and wapiyapi. They live in the past. Take charge of your own life.”
“You hate your own people,” said John, even though there had been times, as a half-breed, when he’d not been treated as one of them. But now his parents were dead, and it didn’t matter anymore.
“I won’t even answer that,” said Joe. “There’s no future for me on the reservation, and I’m getting out. You do what you want.”
“I will,” said John, and he started to hang up the phone.
“John, be careful out there,” said Joe quickly. “Even the old ones knew when to quit trying. Don’t kill yourself for a dream. John?”
“Yes?”
“I’ll be thinking about you.”
“Sure,” said John, and he hung up the phone.
* * * *
The drive north and west was stifling under a searing North Dakota sun in August. Wind from the north brought dry air that sucked moisture from John’s body, leaving his skin covered with a light frosting of salt, and making him feel itchy all over. He gassed up the old jeep at a discount station in Medora, and headed west a few miles before turning north on an old fire road skirting the edge of the national park, up towards high cliffs and buttes banded in red, black and yellow.
Here was his place of silence, peace and solitude, a place to make his vision quest as the old ones had done in the Black Hills far to the south and long before his birth. But here was his place, near his home, near the miserable land on which his people now lived with alkali water and stunted grass.
He could not identify with those who fought to return to the sacred hills. His land was here, burning hot in the sunlight.
The road became shallow ruts in tall buffalo grass, and then there was no road at all. The jeep bounced up the hill until John saw cottonwood trees to the east and traversed towards them, buckling himself into the seat and feeling the weight of the vehicle shift wholly to the downhill tires. The Little Missouri River came into view below, a muddy trickle shining mirror-like in the summer sun. He parked the jeep at a precarious angle between two trees and got out to chock the wheels with dead branches.
He threw his pack on the ground and checked the contents: a pair of gallon plastic bottles filled with water, three chocolate bars, and a package of Fig Newtons. It was enough for maybe three days, but he felt guilt. The old ones had gotten along on far less. He closed the pack and ate one candy bar while he cinched up, then covered the jeep with a green tarp and secured the four corners to trees with nylon rope. He hoisted the pack on his back, adjusted the straps, and then started down towards the river, looking back once to check the jeep. It was not visible twenty yards from the trees. When he reached an old road paralleling the river, the long walk began.
In nearby Medora that afternoon and for three days thereafter, the officially recorded high temperature reached one hundred and four degrees.
John followed the road for five miles, his mind a blank, eyes staring at the rutted bentonite, and scoria chips ahead of him. He didn’t notice the heat at first; wind blowing down from the high, colorful buttes cooled him. The road veered upwards to the north, crossing a sandy saddle strewn with the bones of some hapless, small animal, and he stopped there for a moment, breath suddenly quickening. Ahead of him lay a green valley of buffalo grass, a trickling stream carving jagged, rust-red gashes across it towards the high plateau rising on the other side, and up one ridge dark shapes were moving rapidly. Even at this distance he could hear their coughing and growling. The buffalo were here, and it was a good sign.
He quickened his step down into the valley as the road changed to trail to a single rut to a faint line of bent and crushed buffalo grass meandering past a prairie dog town long abandoned, and up a long draw towards the high plateau above him. The draw became a clay shelf, strewn with bits of petrified wood from another age; the climb was suddenly steep, his feet slipping, and sweat running into his eyes. Near the top he stopped to remove his pack and sip from the water bottle.
The ground moved.
Five yards to his right a bentonite cliff thrust upwards twenty feet to the high plateau and all along the edge the buffalo herd suddenly appeared, rushing by and growling at the man below them. John Natani felt fragile in the presence of such massive animals. He was curiously unafraid. Two bulls moved by, large as his jeep, ignoring him, then several cows and a calf, the rest of the herd thundering by beyond the edge. John’s heart quickened when a cow lurched to the edge, glared down at him angrily, and pawed at the clay with sharp hooves as a calf pressed against her. A part of him screamed in fear, another part freezing him calmly in his place, raising his arms towards the frenzied animal and speaking to it.
“I come to find the buffalo woman; I seek Ptesanwin. Lead me, so I may make Ihamblecya.”
The cow had no chance to answer. Behind her the monstrous lead bull suddenly appeared, head lowered, one terrible horn disappearing up the female’s anus, and she jumped screaming, scrambling ahead of her tyrant and away from the cliff edge. The ground trembled again, and was still.
John took the few remaining steps up to the high plateau and saw the herd moving quickly across it towards the west, through ripe buffalo grass covering the treeless plain to the horizon. When he passed them at great distance, two hours later, they were paralleling his course. John Natani found significance in this. The Ptepi were with him, and Ptesanwin would be near. He lowered his head and trudged onwards across the endless plateau.
When he reached the end of the grassy plain the sun was high. His lips and tongue felt swollen, and pack straps chaffed his shoulders raw. He stopped for a moment, took a long pull of warm water from the bottle, hoisted his pack once more and began picking his way carefully down narrow, sloping clay ledges into a canyon with no name. One moment a gentle breeze was cooling his face, but as he dropped below the edge of the plateau it seemed the furnaces of hell were unleashed upon him. His first breath of hot air rising from the canyon floor made him gasp, and his eyes were suddenly dry. There was no water in this canyon, but it had seen better times of green forests and sparkling streams. Along the bentonite shelves that were the canyon walls lay silicified remains of giant trees that had once cast shade here. Volcanoes to the south and west had killed them with ash and poisonous gases, and now their crystalline bodies glistened in the sunlight. Small Junipers clung tenaciously to scoria outcroppings in the gray clay, a hopeful sign of life and splash of green in a world of alkaline white, red and gray.
John moved across the clay, feeling it crackling beneath his feet, listening for a sound