Sacred Ground Read online

  Watches-Over-The-Land had seen something of what was to come, and what was currently happening far to the east; the encroachment of the Heavy Eyebrows and Long Knives, driving other Peoples before them. The loss of territory. The plagues of smallpox and typhoid. Further loss of territory. The end of the great buffalo herds on which the Osage way of life depended. And worst of all-that the old medicine ways would no longer protect the Children of the Middle Waters.

  At first, he himself had not believed these things. At that time, the Heavy Eyebrows came as admiring postulants, seeking furs and protection from the tall Osage warriors. There were no other Peoples who could stand against them when they met in warbands of two or more gentes, and they roamed a territory that stretched from what became Illinois right down to the Texas border, and from Arkansas to almost Colorado. How could people who regularly defeated the Sac and Fox (whom they called the "Hard-To-Kill-People"), warriors who drove the Cado right down into Texas, ever be defeated? But the visions came, again and again, and more terrible in detail each time.

  He determined to do two things. First, that he would learn all the medicine ways of the Osage in order to save as much as he could, and second, that his children and theirs would learn to hide among the Heavy Eyebrows as easily as he hid among the trees. So he sent out his son, Wa-tse-ta, to the Heavy Eyebrows traders, to learn of them the one trade that all Heavy Eyebrows needed, so that they would not scorn to bring money and work to a "redskin."

  So Wa-tse-ta became both Moh-se-num-pa, Iron Necklace, and Tom Deer, blacksmith. He let his roach grow out, and hid his features under a bluff-paint of soot. And he learned two trades, that of the smith, and that of the shaman. As quickly as Watches-Over-The-Land learned the medicines of a clan and gente, so quickly did Tom Deer, his son, until as many of the medicines as could be learned were learned; both had become Medicine Chiefs, and Watches-Over-The-Land left his land and people for the Other Country.

  Tom Deer taught his sons both trades; his son James Deer saw the warning signs that his grandfather had spoken of, and took his family out into the world of the Heavy Eyebrows for a time. When they returned, the whites thought that he was one of them; he settled on the reservation as an outsider, and only the Osage themselves knew that he was not. When the time came to register, he did not, nor did any of his descendants, all of whom were "Sunday Christians" and practiced their Osage ways in secret.

  As a result, they lost their share of the oil money that finally came in, belated payment for all of the land that had been stolen, the Brothers and Sisters slaughtered for hides, and poor compensation for an entire way of life lost. That was not in James's time, but Kestrel doubted he would have cared. The money was not enough, not nearly enough; apologies at least would have been in order, and were still not forthcoming from the government that had robbed so many of so much.

  Last night, Mooncrow had imparted another bit of tradition to his granddaughter. It seemed that James Deer had also begun another project mandated by Watches-Over-The-Land; he was the one who had begun changing the medicine ways he had learned, until once again, they began to work. That was not the traditional path of the Osage; the Osage way was not to change, but to add to a medicine path, like a spider adding to a web, making it ever more complex. But Watches-Over-The-Land had seen that this would not serve, and had charged his family with finding new ways, borrowing from other Peoples, but keeping the Osage ways as the center. James was the first, Mooncrow the latest, to follow that mandate. Instead of spinning a tighter and tighter web, the Talldeer spiders had descended from the web, becoming hunting spiders, and yet remaining, in all important ways, still spiders; still Osage.

  If other Medicine People had received the same visions as Watches-Over-The-Land, they had not acted on those visions. At least, not so far as Kestrel knew.

  Of course I can't claim to know everything, even if Grandfather would like me to believe that he does! There could be plenty more people like me in other Nations, and like me, they are next thing to invisible. . . .

  That was moot; the important part was that Watches-Over-The-Land had been one of the most powerful medicine men of his time; perhaps of any time. Certainly right up there with Wo-vo-ka, also called Crazy Horse, or any of the other great Medicine Chiefs. He, however, had chosen Rabbit's way; to hide and be silent, in order to preserve things for future generations.

  Many of his medicine objects had been laid to rest with him. If his resting place had been looted. . . .

  The mule picked her way delicately through a mess of blackberry vines that would have snared Jennifer and kept her tangled up for fifteen or twenty minutes. She glanced at her watch, and was surprised at how little time had passed.

  Next time we have to come up here, if Tom's mule isn't available, I'll find a way to borrow horses or mules from someone else. This beats thrashing through the brush all to heck!

  As the mule rounded a stand of blackjacks, the ridge Jennifer wanted loomed right up in front of them, mostly tallgrass-covered slope. Persimmons grew at the foot, young blackjack saplings dotted the slope, and the older trees crowned the ridge. The slope itself faced west; that was what made it perfect for a "burial ground," especially an old one. The Osage of the past exposed their dead to the sky and Wah-K'on-Tahfor at least a season, to give the spirits time to rise. Afterwards, what was left was placed under a cairn of rocks. That was one reason why this ridge was covered with a rubble of small stones. Over time, a lot of soil had settled here, some of it blown in from the rest of the state during the Dust Bowl, burying the remains of the cairns and what they protected. Nature, and not man, had given these graves a covering of earth.

  The burial site looked no different from any other brush-covered ridge out here, and if she hadn't known what it was, she would never have been able to pick it out.

  Normally. She halted the mule and squinted up at the ridge, shading her eyes with her hand.

  The damage was obvious as soon as she was able to pick out what was shadow and what was disturbed ground. Oh, hell.

  She nudged her mount forward and up the slope to the site of the looting, then pulled the mule up, ground-tied her, and dismounted. It was no better at second viewing. The shallow graves piled high with crude cairns of rocks were lying open. There were a few signs that the looter or looters had been in a hurry still lying about in the form of odd beads, broken pottery, crumbling baskets. Everything portable had been taken, down to the bones.

  The bones. Theft of possessions would not have riled the Little People. Theft of remains, however ...

  Some five or six graves had been looted; from the grass sprouting in the turned earth, and the amount washed back into the holes, it looked as if it had happened right around April.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  This was more than Kestrel could handle easily; she wanted to start a mourning keen right here and now. But a mourning keen would not help, not now. So she put on her Jennifer mask and persona, invoked her experience as a P.I., and began collecting what little evidence there was. She had two cameras with her; a Polaroid and a 35-mm. Clinically, dispassionately, she began to fire off Polaroids, then took a full roll of 35-mm film for later development.

  Meanwhile, she went mentally through all the possibilities for some sort of official investigation. I could call in the cops, but this is the county, and they 're overworked. The only way they'II catch whoever did this is if they come back, or start boasting. Even if they caught whoever did this, what could they do? If we were lucky, the perps would get the standard slap-on-the-wrist for graveyard desecration. Lucky, because this isn't a registered, official county graveyard, which might mean that the law wouldn't even allow us that much. What is the law about graveyards on private land? I don't even know that; it's never come up before.

  She hung both cameras over the saddle horn by their neck straps once she had all the evidence there was to get. Then, biting her lip a little in apprehension, she went farther up the ridge, to the very top. Right where the sun li
ngered the longest, and the view was the best.

  Right where the remains of a cairn were the most obvious to someone who knew what to look for. And where a hastily-dug hole in the ground was equally obvious, once you got past the bushes that screened the place from below.

  Oh, shit.

  Watches-Over-The-Land's resting place was as empty as the other six graves.

  The strictly physical was easy to take care of, so long as she kept her Jennifer persona in place. There was absolutely no point in trying to sort out whose bits belonged to whom, and really, even for the medicine it didn't much matter. The spirits of those left here had long since gone into the West, and what had happened here would not materially affect that.

  Unless, of course, the person who had taken the bones had been some kind of magician or medicine person himself. Then he could use the relics to draw those spirits back, against their will... imprisoning them in this world, making mi-ah-luschka out of them.

  Which might very well be why the feeling of dark anger lay over this hillside, dimming the sunlight.

  She picked the deepest of the holes, gathered everything that was scattered, and carefully laid it all on the bottom, covering it over with loose dirt and rocks. She hadn't brought a shovel, so she used her hands.

  When she finished and straightened, she already knew it wasn't enough. The air vibrated with the rage of the Little People, exactly as if she stood in the middle of a swarm of angry bees.

  The menace was there, not for her, but for whoever had done this. And there was a sense of frustration and bafflement, too, as if the mi-ah-luschka had somehow been prevented from tracking this person, or that he was protected in some way from their vengeance. . . .

  Which argued even more for it being some kind of medicine practitioner.

  Well, there was one thing she could do. Provided that none of the Ancestors had been drawn back, that is. She could invoke the fire of Wah-K'on-Tah, and burn away all connection between those spirits and their remains.

  This was not something her own Ancestors would have known how to do; it was another of the innovations of the Deer/Talldeer family. An innovation made necessary by the number of Heavy Eyebrows stealing from gravesites, not only for museums and collectors, but for darker purposes.

  Or even purposes they didn't realize were dark. How many turn-of-the-century Spiritualists had unwittingly called back spirits to be their "Indian Guides" to the Afterlife, using stolen bones? Probably quite a few, judging by the old papers of the Spiritualist Society. . . .

  There was sage on the hillside, and sweetgrass; redbud along the creek bed, the blue mud for paint. Everything she needed was here. Maybe this was all that was needed for the Little People to settle down.

  Maybe.

  The sunlight seemed thinner on the hillside; she hadn't even worked up a sweat reburying the remains. And although she did get hot and sweaty collecting her redbud and sweetgrass, when she returned to the site it was like walking into a shadow.

  Not a good sign.

  She started her fire and her little smudge of smoke, painted her face with the charred end of a redbud twig, then stood tall and straight in the eyes of Grandfather Sun. She closed her eyes and raised her face, the warmth of the sunlight full against her cheeks, steadied her breathing until she reached a still, calm center and filled herself with Power.

  Let it begin.

  The creek was safe enough to wash in, although she would not have tried drinking it. She splashed cold water all over her face and arms, flushing off the paint, scrubbing away the dirt she'd accumulated.

  She glanced back over her shoulder at the hillside, glad enough to be down off the site. The anger up there had diminished a bit, but it was still a potent force, and she would not want to go up there after dark. And although she had a certain level of calm-after all, she had at least done something-there was also a corresponding level of frustration. Some force was working against both the Little People and her own attempts to discover just who was responsible here. Something was clouding the trail. Yes, this site had been robbed. Yes, it was possible that the relics had been taken from here and cached at Calligan's development site. But the trail had been broken and muddied past all retracing, and there was no way of knowing for certain unless she could actually get her hands on an artifact from the development.

  It was just as possible that whoever had robbed this site had no connection with Calligan at all-even though the vision quest she had undertaken had seemed to imply a connection. Medicine worked the way it wanted to, sometimes, and that vision quest could simply have been telling her, "that job is not important-here is something you should be doing something about."

  There were seldom any black-and-white answers in Medicine, at least as Mooncrow taught it.

  It took a while to get the dirt out from under her fingernails, but if there was one thing she hated-and one thing that gave people a really bad impression-it was dirty fingernails. By the time she finished, she was starving.

  So she took just long enough to share her lunch with the mule, while she tried to think of something she had left undone, or anything else she could do. Finally she shook her head, and swung herself back up into the mule's saddle.

  It was going to be an uneasy ride home.

  _CHAPTER NINE

  jennifer drove back to Tulsa with the radio off, her thoughts full of thunder, thirsting for revenge, and in no mood to appreciate the lovely weather.

  She had put as much back into the vandalized graves as she had been able to find, and at least the bones could no longer be used for Bad Medicine, but most of the resident spirits-and more importantly, the Little People-had not been in any mood to settle. The feeling of the place was as bad as anything she had ever felt on Claremore Mound, and it was as plain to. her as the blackjacks on the ridge that the mi-ah-luschka were out for blood, arid nothing less would satisfy them. She didn't blame them, and in fact she would normally be more than pleased to let them have their way.

  The trouble was, that wouldn't get back the medicine objects that had been taken from Watches-Over-The-Land's grave-and if someone who knew how to use them got hold of them-

  Or worse yet, if someone who didn't know how but was open and vulnerable got hold of them-

  Some poor fool trying to "get in touch with his roots"- or at least, the one-tenth of his roots that were some kind of Native American-oh, the mi-ah-luschka would have a wonderful time with someone like that. True, he'd be a bonehead to buy artifacts from someone who wasn't a reputable dealer, but being a bonehead didn't necessarily warrant the kind of trouble the mi-ah-luschka would visit on him.

  They might even succeed in killing him.

  And meanwhile-meanwhile there was the very real possibility that the things looted from Tom Ware's ranch were the same ones plowed up by Rod Calligan's men. And if that was the case, the Little People would be after every man on that crew like flies on a deer carcass. They certainly didn't deserve retribution! The mi-ah-luschka might even be indirectly responsible for the dozer explosion; that meant they'd already killed. Blood fed them; there would be more killings. And the Little People were definitely of the "kill them all and let Wah-K'on-Tah sort them out" philosophy.

  She rubbed the back of her neck and stared at the road ahead, trying to think in practical terms. First, she needed to have someone alerted to the desecration, so if the relics came on the legitimate market they could be confiscated. Let me think. Nobody on either side of my family is registered with the B.I. A'., so there's no way I can lodge a formal complaint, either with the B.I. A. or with the Principal Chief.

  Here was where the flip side of not being registered came up. There were ways in which Jennifer was handicapped in dealing with government authorities. Registration was a touchy point with a lot of Native Americans, and definitely with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was a touchy point with the B.I.A. precisely because of the whole reason the B.I.A. had been created in the first place; to control Native Americans. The Bureau had
theoretical control over tribal lands, tribal moneys, over the stipends that whites thought were "welfare" and were really nothing more or less than the pittances the United States Government owed Indians for the lands that had been taken away from them, stipends paid out over so long a period of time that even some Indians didn't really know what they were for.

  We take away your hunting grounds, we take away your lands, we take your children and your traditions, and in return, we will give you the food and shelter you need. That was how the treaties read, when you cut out the bullshit and fancy language. How the Bureau had carried them out was something else entirely.

  Jennifer was already angry; the inevitable recollections of what the Bureau had done to every Native Nation only made her angrier. She gripped the steering wheel as if it had become a weapon.

  All right, better just let the anger run its course, and not let it fester. She let the associated memories of long-ago wrongs play through.

  More often than not, the Bureau read the treaties as an excuse to kidnap Indian children from their parents and lock them up in "boarding schools" where they were forbidden to speak their own language, practice their own customs, or worship anything but the White Christian God The Father Almighty.

  And people wonder why so many of us became alcoholics.

  The last treaties had been written with the understanding that the Indian was a vanishing creature, to follow after the buffalo, and the Great White Father would simply look after him in his decline and move in to take the little that had been left when he was gone. And in the case of some Nations, that was precisely what had happened....

  O for a time machine, and a gunpowder and rifle factory. . . .