Rock high saddle viewpoint. Passing the lower viewpoint they’d seen two vans pulling into the trailhead lot below; other hikers would soon be joining them. Bob looked at Harry. “We could get our travel permits revoked for doing this.”
“Not likely,” said Harry. “People see things here all the time, and more often than not their reporting isn’t accurate or taken seriously.”
Bob and Harry grinned at each other like two naughty children, and hurried on.
When they reached the high viewpoint no other hikers were in sight. They took two final pictures of each other, with twin walls of red rock in the background. Bob took out his Model 20 Jaziril and tapped a key. Behind them the air seemed to shimmer, as if suddenly heated.
“Here they come,” said Harry.
A group of four hikers had come around a buttress base and were ascending the faint trail over smooth rock twenty meters below them.
“Now,” said Harry, grinning.
Bob tapped the Jaziril three times. There was an explosion of color, an iris of air opening wide and shimmering brilliantly in emerald green.
“Aurora would be very unhappy if they knew we were doing this,” said Bob.
There was a shout from below.
“I know,” said Harry, “but they won’t hear about it from me.” He gestured Bob forward to the bright vortex of green. “After you, angelic one.”
“And 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
