Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 1 - People of the Wolf

PEOPLE OF THE WOLF

by

Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear

By Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear from Tom Doherty

Associates the first north americans series

People of the Wolf

People of the Fire

People of the Earth

People of the River

People of the Sea

People of the Lakes

People of the Lightning

People of the Silence

People of the Mist

People of the Masks the anasazi mystery series

The Visitant

The Summoning God

Bone Walker

By Kathleen O'Neal Gear

Thin Moon and Cold Mist

Sand in the Wind This Widowed Land

By W. Michael Gear

Long Ride Home

Big Horn Legacy

The Morning River

Coyote Summer

W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear

PEOPLE OF THE WOLF

TOR

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware

that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and

destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher

has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in

this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events

is purely coincidental.

PEOPLE OF THE WOLF

portions thereof, in any form.

Cover art by Royo Maps by Ellisa Mitchell

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN: 0-812-52133-1

First edition: July 1990

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

TO RICHARD S. WHEELER

WHO HELPED MAKE

THE DREAM COME TRUE.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In writing People of the Wolf we tapped a great number of resources to

buttress our own professional understanding of early Paleoindian

culture. In addition to journal articles, professional reports, and

reference books, we offer special thanks to the following: Stephen D.

Chomko, Ph.D." Interagency Archeological Services, National Park

Service, for sharing his expertise in recent developments in

Paleolndian studies; Ray C. Leicht, Ph.D." Wyoming State Archeologist,

and former Alaska State Archeologist, Bureau of Land Management, for

his help in reconstructing Pleistocene climatology and providing

resources in arctic archaeology; George Prison,.Ph.D." Department of

Anthropology, University of Wyoming, for his observations on mammoth

hunting in The Colby Site; Gary E. Kessler, Ph.D." Professor of

Philosophy and Religious Studies, California State College,

Bakersfield, for his invaluable lessons in mysticism and Native

American religions; Katherine Cook, for her constant support and

willingness to read and reread manuscripts; additionally, our

professional colleagues have provided invaluable classroom discussions,

conference papers, excavation reports, and, of course, so many

stimulating arguments around field-camp fires where dirt archaeology

takes place. You know who you are.

Additionally, a special debt of gratitude is owed our editor, Michael

Seidman, whose interest in archaeology and Native American mysticism

actually generated this series; to Tom Doherty who backed the project;

to Tappan King who wrote in big pencil; to Wanda June Alexander for

pushing so hard; and to all the talented staff at Tor Books.

Introduction.

The pickup bucked and heaved as it bounced over the scraggy greasewood.

Red dust whirled and puffed under the knobby all-terrain tires. In

four-wheel drive, it growled and clawed its way up an eroded terrace,

lining out to lurch and sway over blue-green sagebrush as it headed for

the yellow equipment parked below the bluff on the other side of the

flat.

The driver pulled up amidst the sweet smell of crushed sage and the

bitter tint of alkali dust. Two cats, a backhoe, and a pipeline

trenching machine, along with a handful of pickups, waited, engines

stilled. Only the constant whisper of the wind competed with a low

chatter of human voices.

The driver popped the wind-sprung door open and jumped out, stiffening

his back and stretching after the long drive. Heads appeared from the

pipeline trench, yellow hard hats bright against the wind rowed dirt.

"You're here!" A foreman pulled himself up and stiff armed out of the

trench. " "Bout time. You damned archaeologists are costing me money! We

got to get this pipe laid by the tenth of December, and this delay's

soaking up ten thousand dollars of the company's money a day." The

driver shook hands and nodded. "Yeah, well, let's see what we've got

here. Old floodplain terrace like this, you won't find much. Besides,

from the geomorphology, this terrace must be about fifteen thousand

years old. That's the end of the Pleistocene. What you cut is probably

intrusive. Some homesteader buried out here? Who knows?"

The driver reached in the truck, bending around the gearshift levers to

pull out an old military ammo box and a scarred briefcase.

Together they threaded their way through the gnarled sagebrush to the

trench to stare down at an area where the back hoe had peeled back the

overburden. A one-man sifting screen stood propped over a conical pile

of dirt.

"Dr. Cogs?" A young sunburned woman looked up.

"Hi, Anne, what'd you find?" The driver jumped down into the trench.

The young woman looked smugly at the cat skinners and construction

workers as she indicated a black plastic sheet over the square carved

out of the backhoe trench.

"Just a solitary burial, Dr. Cogs." She wiped at a dirt smeared face. "I

was monitoring the trench through here. Thought this would be pretty

dull. Then the trencher clipped an arm. Saw the distal portion of the

radius and ulna in the back dirt That's when I shut them down."

"Intrusive?" he asked, seeing the foreman cross his arms, face stiff.

"No way. She was here and got covered. Um, there's sorted gravels in the

same strata she's in. If I was guessing, I'd say she drowned and got

left behind in the flood."

"On a Pleistocene terrace?" he asked, reaching for the plastic.

Anne's serious response warned him. "That's right. Take a look."

Cogs, with Anne's help, lifted the protecting black plastic from the

excavation. He paused, taking in the skeleton. From the pelvic bones, he

could tell it had been a woman. One arm had flopped out in death. The

severed bone glared garishly yellow white where the trencher bucket had

taken it off.

He bent down over the skull. "Old. Only a couple of teeth in her

head--and they're incisors. Can't hardly see a suture in her skull

except for the squamosals. I'd say somewhere in her late sixties at

least. Probably older. Look at the arthritis in her spine! Must have

hurt like crazy."

From his ammo box, he pulled a trowel and tested the gravel-laden silts

the burial lay in. He chewed his lip and nodded. "All right, I agree."

He looked up at the young archaeologist. "Caught in a flood? Sure, why

not? Explains the preservation."

"We don't find many Paleolndian burials," Anne reminded.

"None from formations this old. I wonder ..." He began digging out

around the rib cage, the trowel ringing across the gravel.

"I didn't want to take it down any further," Anne was saying.

"Considering the age of the deposit, I thought .. . What's that?" Cogs

peeled back hard silt, using the tip of the trowel to expose something

red orange. "You get any artifacts out of this?"

"One piece of weathered shell. Looked like it might have been clam.

Can't say if it was associated." She bent closer as he reached for a

paintbrush and whisked the loose dirt away, exposing a long, blood-red

jasper projectile point.

"Jesus!" he breathed. "Look at that!" "What is it?" The foreman and his

crew jammed in to see.

"Clovis!" Anne breathed. "A genuine Clovis burial." Troweling on her

own, she began uncovering yet another point. "Beautiful workmanship.

Look at this one, red-banded yellow chert. Exquisite!"

"That's a hallmark of Clovis." He studied the point as her deft hands

uncovered it. "Incredible stonework."

She nodded in elation. "That's the most beautiful point I've ever seen."

Cogs frowned. "And an old woman carried them? Says something about the

social structure. She must have been a leader of some kind. Of course

after the Oregon points--"

"Hey, we gotta get this pipeline in!" the foreman complained. "What's

Clovis?"

"The first Americans. Oldest culture in North America," he answered,

rubbing his forehead as he stared. "Nobody's ever found a burial like

this before." "You're costing me ten grand a day for a damned old pile

of bones? By God, I'm writing my congressman about this one. What the

hell--"

Cogs breathed a disgruntled breath. "You're going to get your pipeline

in."

"We are?" The man's voice had softened. He pushed his hat back on his

head.

The archaeologist nodded. "We'll do some testing--um, put in some

excavation squares to see if anything else is buried --but I don't think

there's more here than just this one. You can see the evidence of the

flooding in the pit walls." He shook his head. "Look at her right foot.

See how the bone's all spurred? She broke her ankle once--years before

she died. Must have hurt like sixty to walk on that. It'd never been

set."

The foreman looked close. "Yeah, pretty nasty. How long for you to do

that damned testing?"

"A couple of days."

"I wonder who she was...."

Prologue.

Fire crackled in the sheltered crevice, sparks whirling upward.

Overhead, a matte black of soot had grown velvet, thick, softening the

gritty surface of the rock. Along the lower walls, willow and thick dry

grass broke the chill seeping from the floor. A double hanging of

smoke-darkened caribou hide kept Wind Woman's arctic blasts from

penetrating the cracks in the rock. In a ring around the edges, bleached

skulls from Grandfather White Bear, Caribou, Wolf, and White Fox, eye

sockets empty, stared at the flickering light. The clean white bone

displayed odd colorful designs--symbols of shaman Power.

As the woman leaned tiredly forward, long tangles of thick black hair

tumbled across her face, reflecting a bluish sheen in the fire's glow.

Tenderly, she patted the decaying granite below her feet. In niches and

crannies, fetishes lay bundled in drab browns of willow bark aged and

tinged with smoke from sacred fires.

"I'm still here ..." she murmured, "waiting. You didn't think I'd gone,

did you?"

When no answer came, Heron settled back against the cold stone wall,

grumbling irritably to herself. Once-bright designs, now faded from time

and abrasion, etched the burnt sienna of her tailored hide clothing.

Staring into the red shifting eye of the fire, she chanted softly, hands

tracing ancient symbols of Spirit Power in the air before her. She

plucked a handful of dried willow bark and dipped it in a skin water bag

hung from a tripod to her right. Shaking the bark, she threw it onto the

flames. Steam exploded, wood sizzling. Four times she repeated the

process, warm wet smoke billowing upward to the draft hole high above.

"There," she whispered, eyes probing beyond the orange tinged walls.

"I've heard you calling. I'll find you."

Huddling over the flames, she closed her eyes, the traces of her

legendary beauty barely obscured by time's hand. Through her straight

nose, she inhaled four times, allowing peace and tranquillity to flow

through her like morning mist in the valleys. The pungent odor of willow

smoke filled her senses.

Four days she had fasted, singing, bathing in the warm waters that

bubbled up from the earth, steaming in the frigid air beyond the

shelter. She had sung, prayed, and purged her body of the ills of bad

thoughts and wrong deeds.

But in the haze of smoky steam, still no vision appeared.

"Well ..." she groaned. "This isn't working. I'd better try something

else."

She hesitated, frightened, feeling the call. Slowly, she filled her

lungs, exhaling, as she looked at the fox-hide bundle. "Yes," she

whispered. "I fear your Power. Power is knowing and death." Her tongue

ran pinkly over tan lips.

The call came again, urgent, tugging her soul. Heron made her decision.

With trembling fingers, she lifted a second bundle from beside her and

undid the layers of tanned fox hide, displaying four thin sections of

precious mushroom. Each of these she passed four times through the warm

willow smoke, once for each of the directions of the world. East for the

coming of the Long Dark. North for the depth of the Long Dark. West for

the rebirth of the world. And finally south for the Long Light and the

life it brought.

Chanting, she forced her soul into the One, careful to keep from the

nothingness that lay on the other side, beckoning, terrifying. One by

one, she purified the mushrooms and lifted them to her lips, slowly

chewing. Bitterness stung her tongue. She swallowed and leaned back,

palms propped on knees.

Before her, the smoke swirled like fog rolling in from the big salt

water. Ghostly images twisted and turned, shimmering in a whirling

dance.

Heron squinted her ancient brown eyes to focus in the haze. Minutes

passed as she peered, forehead furrowed with the effort.

"Who ..."

An image grew in the mist--breakers, smashing furiously against craggy

black rocks. Spume hurled high to the gray skies. There, along the ebb

and flow of the shore, a woman hunched, heedless of the power of the

waves. With a stick, she pried mussels from the rock, dropping them into

a hide sack. Overhead, gulls wheeled and dove. The woman scuttled to the

side, avoiding a foamy wash of water as the surf rushed in. A crab

darted away, disturbed by her movements. The woman--rich with the grace

of full youth--leapt nimbly, cornering the crab, teasing it with the

stick until she could artfully grasp it with long thin fingers and drop

it into the bag.

Behind a towering bastion of black rock, a man crouched, watching. When

the woman scurried along the retreating tide, filling her bag with the

bounty of the sea, he followed.

A thick mammoth-hide belt bound his waist. From either side of a thin

eagle's beak of a nose, gleaming black eyes stared. A cloak of white fox

hide hung over his shoulders. Through the vision, Heron sensed the

strength of his soul, throbbing, intense--a man of Power, of visions.

"He Dreams--even now."

The scene shimmered, emotions billowing through the images: pain, loss

of love, a longing from the very depths of his soul tangled about her.

Heron reached for him, a chord from her own sorrow touched by his

anguish. As she projected, something snapped, crackling along the edges

of the vision like dry leaves. A feeling of parting trembled in the

mists. Awed at what she'd done, Heron pulled back.

The woman on the beach stopped, head tilted, black hair blowing in the

sea breeze. As a hare drawn to the gaze of a fox, she jerked around,

eyes widening as the man approached, face anxious, arms spread as if to

embrace her.

Fear contorted the woman's features. Desperately, she ran, seeking to

dart past him, feet leaving white pocks in coarse gray sand.

He feinted and grabbed her, laughing rapturously as she screamed and

beat at him with futile fists. With the hardened thews of the hunter, he

threw her down, pinning her hands.

"Fight, girl! Fight him!" Heron spat frantically, knotting her fists.

Lost in his Dream, he avoided her thrashing legs, overpowering her until

she lay under him, shivering with fear and panting. He worked her parka

up over her long boots while she cried and twisted. The struggle was

brief, the woman no match for the hunter's strength.

Heron shook her head as he took the woman on the sand, Power spinning

out of balance in the vision.

Spent, the man stood, an absent look on his face. His fingers shook as

he refastened the bindings of his long boots. Almost by chance, his eyes

met Heron's as she peered through the mist. He stiffened, whispering

under his breath. He looked back at the woman on the sand, horror

melting his expression. Dazed, he shook his head, backing away. As

suddenly, he turned, staring into Heron's eyes with hot anger. A

clenched fist raised. His handsome face twisted as he cried out, an

impassioned plea in his voice, tears streaking his cheeks. Then he

turned, running away, leaping rocks in his flight. His voice echoed

hollowly, a howl in the fog.

Mist swirled as the vision faded into dusky obscurity.

The call came again, loud now, insistent. Heron rubbed a callused hand

over her face. "It wasn't him. No .. . not him at all. Who then? Who..."

Reaching for willow bark, she threw a handful on the glowing coals,

following the path of the call through the One.

Another vision grew in the billowing steam. The woman from the beach lay

naked, her stomach child-swollen, navel protruding. Around her, other

women watched, eyes gleaming in the light of a birch and willow fire.

Sweat dampened the woman's brow and trickled down from between her

breasts to stain the hide she rested on. She contorted, legs wide, as

the other women leaned close, peering intently. The woman gasped and

cried out, breasts heaving as her water broke and pooled dark on the

umber hides. One of the old ones nodded. The birth came with difficulty.

The fetus emerged, red, blue, and streaked with the fluids of the womb.

A striking woman bent down and bit the umbilical in two while others

took the child, rubbing it dry with grasses. Heron's heart tightened

with hurt as she recognized the beauty:

Broken Branch. Clenching fists, she prayed fervently that Father Sun

would curse her enemy to be buried at death, her soul locked beneath the

dirt for all eternity.

Heron focused on the baby again. A shaft of sunlight filtering through a

rent in the roof above danced on the child.

The woman, stomach still distended, writhed again, pushing, crying, legs

twisting while two of the others held her ankles. A second child

emerged, feet protruding. A crone moved to crouch over the mother, head

cocked as she watched. The young woman wailed as gnarled hands reached,

parting the tissues, and worked the child. The old one muttered and

shook her head. Wincing, she pulled, turning the baby. The woman

screamed jaggedly as the child came, gouts of blood following in a

flood. "Too much." Heron mouthed the words silently, knowing the signs.

Something had torn inside. Bright blood welled over the infant as its

head cleared the pelvis. Such a big child, he shrieked angrily into the

new world, heedless of his mother's lifeblood where it trickled into his

toothless mouth.

"Bad blood .. . bad," Heron murmured passionately, fear for the woman

building in her breast. Heron blinked as the mother's bleeding saturated

the hides and her breathing stilled despite the healing songs of the old

women. A slack look replaced the fevered glow in her eyes. Her legs

kicked limply and stopped as her color drained with the endless crimson

rush.

Boys, both of them. Hunters for the People. Careful hands stroked the

second child, seeking unsuccessfully to wipe away the clinging gore, as

the umbilical was bitten in two and the child placed by the first. From

somewhere above, a black feather wafted down, settling beside the

infant. As he squalled, his tiny fist grabbed it, twisting it in rage.

Heron studied them where they lay, side by side. One bawled angrily,

blood-streaked, a raven feather in its tiny fist. The other wiggled and

kicked in the shaft of sunlight, eyes unfocused as if lost in a Dream.

He blinked, wailing softly, and for a brief second, his eyes seemed to

sharpen .. . seeking her beyond the mists of the vision.

"You? It was you who called?" Heron nodded, leaning back, tongue running

over the gaps in her worn teeth. "Yes, you Dream, child. I see Power in

your eyes. And now that I know you, I'll be waiting." The vision broke,

wisps of smoke carrying it up through the rock to the chill night

beyond. Heron clenched her hands into fists, reeling from the effects of

the mushroom. She staggered to her feet and wobbled past the

caribou-hide hangings. Frigid night air gripped her, causing her to sink

to her knees. The thick sulfur odor of the hot springs clogged her nose.

She bent and vomited violently.

The voices of the mushrooms whispered in her blood, death hanging in

their sultry tones as she struggled to keep the One, to allow the

mushroom to fade in her veins.

As she blinked and rubbed her mouth, a wolf howled in the night, loud,

piercing, tying itself to the vision.

Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 1 - People of the Wolf

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