It might have been evening yet, or midnight, or early morning, and their memory of leaving Twisted Tree and arriving together where the horses were held seemed like a vision from another world, a faint and foregone era. And as they passed through the broken land, changing yet always the same, space, too, seemed to end, so that they felt they were moving without moving, heading toward a destination at which they'd already arrived. Somewhere within all this the voice of the Badlands began. It came so much out of the land and wind that when they realized they were hearing it, they did not know whether it had just started or whether it had been going on for a long time already. It was a low moan of many different pitches coming from all around them, emanating from the walls rising beside them, dropping out of the spaces between the stars. It rose and fell, increased and decreased without ever ending, a sound so constant and varied, so deep and thin, that it seemed an element they moved through, and they all grew calm, and they imagined at times that the earth produced the music and at other times that the music shaped the earth and carved the dark escarpments around them.
Even Willi, who had never heard the voice of the Badlands nor read about it, accepted the music as part of the place, but after a while he asked, "Where does it come from? This sound? How is it nade?"
"It depends on who you ask," Earl said. The horses plodded onward, their hooves like soft drumbeats keeping some kind of rhythm. "Maybe it's an organ, you know? The wind coming through these canyons. Or maybe, like my uncle says, it's spirits singing. The wind is Tate, the breath of the Great Mystery. Maybe this is the music of Mystery. It sounds that way, you know?"
Willi thought about this, then said, "Maybe it is Inyan and Taku Skanskan singing together."
"Inyan an who?" Carson asked. They were all talking in voices of dream, and they all heard each other's voices as if coming from a dream or entering their own dreams, voices crossing the threshold of sleep.
"Inyan is rock," Earl explained. "The power of rock, you know? The stillness. You know how you can't believe sometimes how a rock can just be and be and be? Just stay that way? That is Inyan. And Taku Skanskan is the mystery that moves. You know?—moves the things that move. How sometimes you can't hardly believe clouds? Or migrating birds?"
They walked in silence.
"Yeah," Carson said, after a time that might have been a long time or might have been short, a time in which they might have moved far or not at all. "I know."
"And Willi is saying they get together sometimes. And sing," Ted said.
"And listen," Willi said "you cannot tell if the music is moving or is still."
And then, at some point, they were moving downward, bracing against the pull of gravity, loosened pebbles rolling ahead of them, the earth jarring against their spines and the narrow lanes of land widening, until they emerged from one of those lanes into a barren meadow set around with sky and with the broken peaks of the Badlands jutting into it. They each knew, without any of them speaking, that they had arrived, and they stopped and circled to face each other. Beasts and men huddled, breathing their white breathing into the circle they formed, until the circle they formed filled with white breath that rose upward out of it and was filled again.
"We come this far," Carson said. "You all sure?"
By their silence they spoke. But because they were human, tricked by Iktomi, inventor of language, and knew the word as the beginning and the end, the holy and the strange and the daily and the everlasting, Earl spoke for all their silences. "We can't let them go. They'd starve out here. And they wouldn't make it back And if they did..."
Nevertheless they stood and waited. The voices of the spirits that inhabited this place, voices of air and earth, voices of all the numerous animals that had died in the long centuries here and whose bones rose up in the rain's erosion, the Wakinyan calling forth the Unktehi, the present calling forth the past, and all speaking—these voices filled the circular meadow, and Carson's and Earl's voices became part of the chorus. And then through it all came the howl of a coyote and then another, answering. The horses raised their heads momentarily and let them drop again.
"I'm wondering," Carson said, "what did the old-time Lakota do when they had a sick or dying animal? All my relations. What'd they do?"
Had this been a place or moment for surprise, they might have been surprised at the question, but they were not.
"I don't know," Earl said. "I've never heard."
"Me, either," Ted said. "You know, Willi? You read that somewhere?"
Willi shook his head: a knowledge lost to all of them, having failed all means of transmission, at least to their small group.
"Listen to them coyotes," Ted said. "There used to be wolves all over out here. And grizzlies and mountain lions. The old-time people had a lot of help."
"Wolves," Carson said.
He thought of his grandfather again, sitting on that hillside listening to the coyotes calling. And he remembered a picture his grandfather had shown him, of his own father, bearded, rifle in hand, outside a shed that had long since disappeared from the ranch, the corpses of twenty-five wolves hanging head down, nailed to the wall behind him. That old ancestor of his stared at the camera with a look of grim pride and accomplishment. Some of the wolves had their mouths open. Some had them shut.
Carson wondered how many other hundreds of such pictures there were that he'd never seen, and how many hundreds more such scenes that had never been photographed, in how many other such places now swallowed by time. The memory of that photograph filled him with sorrow. He thought of what Ted had said, and he thought that the way of life he now feared losing was itself built on something vanished and gone, and his family in its early ignorance and hope, its eyes cast only on the future, had been a cause of that earlier vanishing. So much gone, he thought. So much going. The wolves had been strangely white in the photograph, white against the dark shed, and his great-grandfather's face was dark under its hat, the rifle dark, only the pelts of the lifeless wolves shining in the sun, as if the last life within them resided yet in their fur and reluctantly left this world, clinging on, a thing of too much beauty, even after the heart had stopped and the feet no longer ran and the flesh had been nailed to the shed. And Carson himself now feeling like something vanished and gone, though his blood still ran in his veins and his feet walked the earth and his voice came out of him in the shape of words.
He felt the spirit of those vanished wolves gathered here, spirits ferocious and merciful and strangely moral, speaking that the starv
ing and the weak shall be the first chosen. And that life shall stumble on.
Then Ted, speaking his words for him, said, "It was different back then. We're doing the work of wolves. They ain't here to do it. We got to do it for them."
FROM INSIDE HIS COAT
Earl removed Norman's .38 pistol, not the same one he had pawned in his drinking days but one he had bought after he sobered up, "kinda to remind myself," he said, "that that's not something I want to get close to again." Earl had asked Norm if he could borrow it. Norm had waited to answer, then said, "Were you thinking you might tell me what you want to borrow it for?"
"I was thinking I might not have to, you know?"
Norm nodded meditatively. "That's a warrior's tool," he said. "Are you going to use it like a warrior?"
"I am."
"Be careful, nephew."
"I will be."
"I don't just mean the pistol. I mean being a warrior is a hard thing. It is. Guard your spirit well."
"I will try to, Uncle."
Now he removed the .38 from his coat, a gray, lumpish thing that during the long walk had knocked against his ribs like a cold, exterior heart. He held it in his hands, looked down at it. They all did.
"You know?" he said. "This scares me."
"It's not goin a be easy."
"I meant, for myself. What's this going to do to us?"
He looked up and met their eyes. A moment of realization and wonder. Quiet and cold and the moan of the land, and their eyes shining and bewildered.
"We'll be OK," Carson said. "It's the right thing to do."
"That is not enough," Willi said.
"Not?"
"Being right is not enough. Even if this is the best thing to do. Even if it is the only thing. We must not think we are pure. Maybe not even OK."
He looked up, at the peaks of the Badlands thrust into the sky all around them, and the bright, indifferent constellations, and then he looked down again at the attentive faces of the others.
"My grandfather did terrible things," he said. "He put people into trenches. He shot them. And the Nazis, they said they could do those things and keep their hearts pure. My father says they thought the Reich would be a perfect world. He says we cannot trust perfect worlds. Or a man who believes his heart is pure."
Willi's father had said these things during their long talk after the old woman's funeral. Willi had never spoken of his grandfather to anyone. He had never repeated anything his father had said, never taken it as his own. It all felt a little strange and frightening. The wind blew, the horses stamped, the earth revolved, the stars cast their vast quantities of light and energy into the void. In the silence Willi watched the others, half-afraid.
Then Ted winked at him, and Ted's sly grin appeared. "Original sin, enit?" he said.
"Original sin?"
"Hey, I'm the Pope's man. My parents made me take classes and go to church when they weren't too drunk to remember. I know all about original sin. The whole damn world's fallen. So even if we do the right thing here, it still might be a bad thing. And we're all guilty as hell for doing it."
"Yeah," Carson said. "And maybe we oughta be."
"You know what we have to do?" Earl said. "We have to burn sage."
HE HADN'T KNOWN UNTIL NOW
why Norm had given him the Ziploc bag with dried sage in it.
"Take it along," Norm had said. "You might just need it."
Now Earl removed the bag from his coat pocket, opened it. The smell rose and spread to them, pungent and aromatic. At the bottom of the bag was a disposable cigarette lighter. Earl fumbled for it, brought it out, flicked it to test it. It sprang to life, a tiny flame, and they were all surprised to see each other's faces so near, composed of moving shadow. Then Earl lifted his thumb, and the moving shadows flowed back into the darkness they'd come from. They moved in a dreamlike fashion. Earl handed a few sprigs of sage to Ted, who held them toward him, and Earl lit the dried leaves with the lighter, all of them gathered near to form a windbreak around the flame. Finally the sage glowed and smoked, a powerful and sacred smoke that they all breathed in. None of them knew quite what they should do, whether there was or had ever been a proper ceremony for what they were about to do. Their movements were uncertain, and they looked to one another for guidance. Earl nodded to Ted, and Ted looked at Earl. Then he stepped forward into the small circle they all formed.
He waved the sage slowly. It made red streaks in the air, as if he were writing some indecipherable thing there, instantly gone. Its smoke mingled with their breath. Ted looked to the sky to locate himself, then held the sage to the west, then north, then east, then south, then down to the earth and straight up to the sky, and he passed the smoke over them all and spoke of how they did not wish to do what they were doing, and of their willingness nevertheless to do it. Then he ceased, unsure what else to do or say, and handed the sage to Earl.
Earl turned and passed its smoke over Surety. He walked entirely around the horse and asked for courage for it, and bid it good-bye, then returned and blessed its head again and gave the sage to Willi, who blessed Jesse in German and English and Lakota, and as he walked around the horse, he told it they could not know whether it assented to what would shortly happen, but he wanted it to know they had considered its assent, and that was the best that humans in their ignorance could do, because the gulf between their acts and their awareness was so wide, and yet they had to act, unlike the horse, which had only to live. He told the horse how fraught with peril were their actions and how little they could really know. Then he handed the sage to Carson, who looked at it in his hands, so unfamiliar, then looked at the others, who encouraged him with their eyes, until he turned to Orlando. Holding the sage in his right hand, he reached up and touched the horse on its long and narrow forehead with his left and reminded it of how wild it had been when they first met, how the world had looked like nothing but danger and threat then, but how it had learned to order and trust the world, and how he, Carson, had been honored to be its guide in that ordering. He removed his hand from the horse's skull and walked around it, imitating Earl and Willi, and as he walked, he told the horse that he had perhaps been wrong, after all, in teaching it to trust the world or to believe in the order Carson had taught it, for that order and trust had brought them here, and if the horse could have kept itself wild and suspicious and unwilling to do anything Carson had asked, perhaps things would have been different. But they weren't.
He returned to Orlando's head and returned the sage to Ted, who once again passed its smoke over them so that they all breathed it in, and then he extinguished it by pressing it into the earth.
"It's time," Carson said.
They all looked at Earl, who again reached into his coat where he had returned the pistol.
"We got to do this one at a time," Carson said. "In different places. Otherwise we got a panic. I'm willin to do it all, if you want."
"No," Earl said. "It's all of us."
"We'll take one," Carson said. "Someone's gotta stay with the other two here."
They looked at each other, unsure. "I will stay first," Willi said.
Carson handed him two sets of reins, took the other set in his hands, stepped away from the circle they all formed. The horse turned and followed, and Earl and Ted caught up, and they all walked forward into darkness.