Gee said, “When first we met, I thought you foolish, inept, and too gullible to work for the Master of the City. But you have grown shrewd, crafty as a cat in your dealings with the Mithrans.” It didn’t sound like acompliment but I didn’t react. He looked up at the sky. “There are still moose and elk to be hunted and eaten, and a night of flying before us. Shall we?”
I looked at the mine and back to him. “Let me slip into something more appropriate.” As the sounds of death echoed up from the mine and the last rays of sunset streaked the sky purple, I slid into the shadows, stripped, stuffed my clothes into the gobag, and found the shape of the blue-feathered Anzu. With the Mercy Blade on my tail feathers, I streaked for the sky.
Eighteen Sixty
A Prequel from Ayatas FireWind from the World of Jane Yellowrock
First published inThe Weird Wild West, an anthology (2015). This short story takes place in 1860, and is written from the point of view of Ayatas FireWind.
Theyunegawith the hairy face was feeding dry palo verde sticks to the fire. The snap and spit of fresh wood was lost to the distance, but the smoke rose and carried on the scant breeze, hot and tangy to Ayatas’s cat-nose. The cowboys he had been following had stopped early for the night, making camp at a watering hole to rest the horses and let the cattle drink and graze. The watering hole and the small crick that carried the spring water into the desert were muddy now with the deep prints of cattle and filthy with cow and horse droppings, and man piss.Ama—the water—was no longer drinkable.
Yunegaalways ruinedama. It was part of what they were, like a wolf howled and bison grazed, white man ruined water. Always.Lisi, his grandmother, told him, “Never live downstream of ayunega. You will drink their shit.” And the old woman had laughed. He wondered ifLisistill laughed today. He hadn’t seen her since the dreams sent him into the sunset, to find the wildfire wind he saw in his visions.
His stomach cramped with hunger, and he pressed down on it with his mind. His people were accustomed to hunger. They did not allow it to rule them, no matter how strong it became. He pressed his paws into the stone ledge and his claws came out, white and pointed and sharper than the claws of the panther that his father and his grandmother had most often shifted into. Jaguar claws were better for what he had planned this night. Jaguar speed and strength, jaguar jaws and killing teeth. Jaguarscent that the horses and cattle would recognize and fear. Jaguar that was stronger in every way than the puma of his father’s clan. That panther that had failed his father at the last and allowed him to die.
Down below, the small fire had caught, the flames a tight blaze in a ring of rocks. The white men were making biscuits in a tin pan, and heating beans that smelled sour. White men ate bad food and were often sick. It was beyond his understanding how a people who were so stupid had lived so long and conquered his own people, theTsalagi, the Cherokee.Lisisaid it was because his own people had been unwise and let them share the land. If his ancestors had simply killed them all, their lives would have been much better today, and they would still have their tribal lands in the green mountains.
The Black cowboys,gvnagei, took care of the horses and piled the saddles around the fire. They put the horses’ legs into twisted rope hobbles, so that they could graze without getting away. This would make his job much easier. He chuffed with pleasure, the sound too soft to carry. His scent was downwind of them, and the grazing prey did not know they were stalked.
The day darkened and the cattle lowed, the sound plaintive and lonely. The sunset was a red smear on the western sky. The scarlet light was hard to see in his cat form—it was much easier to see greens and blues and the silver of gray—but he knew it was there. The western sky was always bloody here in the barren hills of the placeyunegacalled Arizona.
He had been following the cowboys and their cattle for seven days now, and they were far enough into the desert to be at a good place for his ambush. They set a watch, agvnageion a hillock, but he was young and never looked into the hills around him. This was stupid, as Apache were known to raid here. Apache and Ayatas.
The men below him laughed and talked, the strange sounds carried on the nearly still air. Black men and white men, in two small groups, working the cattle but not working them together. Divided by tribe and skin color andyunegafalse superiority.Lisihad said the white man would eventually stumble and fall on his pride, but Ayatas had not seen signs of that, at all. He had believed her when he was a child, butLisihad gotten foolish in her old age.
Back then, when he was a boy, living with her, he had been calledNvdayeli Tlivdatsi, or, as the white man would say, Nantahala Panther, but the Nantahala River was a thing of memory, lost to his people since theyunegasent them from their tribal lands into the territories. Panther had been his clan name and his father’s beast. But the panthers had been hunted by theyunegauntil they were no more, in the mountains of their first home, and theTsalagihad been driven away, in broken treaty, by lie-speakers of theyunegagovernment. His childhood names were words of sadness and grief, and he had changed them after his spirit walk. He now called himselfAyatas Nvgitsvleor FireWind, for the raging fires he saw in his dreams. He had leftLisi’s house and searched for the winds for years but still had not found them.
Instead, he had been chased and shot at byyunegaand by many of the tribes he had come across. The Apaches were the worst, and the best. They were fierce and they might stop the white men. If they killed him and yet destroyed the white man, he could die happy.
But on his search, he had found a dead jaguar, shot by ayunega, beheaded and skinned, for sale to fur traders. The carcass had been three days old and stinking. But Ayatas had defleshed the feet bones and boiled them clean, and added the toe bones to his bone necklace. Now he could become jaguar any time he wanted, anytime he could bear the pain and hunger of shifting and walking in the skin of the beast.
Along the tops of the hills, the wind picked up, the tingle of magic brushing along his spotted pelt. He chuffed, his whiskers moving as he scented the magic in the air, his ear tabs flitting. The woman was right on time. That was another thing he had found, the white woman with hair the color of the sunset. She called herself Everhart, which he had translated into Forever Heart, orIgohidv Adonvdo. Or perhaps she had meant Forever Deer, which would beIgohidv Awi, but sounded stupid. Deer were prey. The woman was not. The woman had magic, though different from his, and different from the magic of the shaman of his clan. She called herself a witch. She did things that she called workings. And she was his. Hislisiwould have wanted him to find a girl of theTsalagi, but he hadIgohidv, his Forever woman. This was much better.
As the magics grew, the wind picked up and whirled, making the leavesof the tree whisper, making the white man’s fire dance. On the hillside, thegvnageilookout stood up and stared out over the open space. His eyes tracked the wind, moving back and forth, as if he too felt the magic. But Ayatas knew that humans could not feel the magic of his Forever woman, and that no men of her tribe had magic. Thegvnageishielded his eyes from the last of the dying sunlight and focused in on the ledge where Ayatas lay.
Perhaps he was wrong. This man might have different, dangerous magic.
The wind shifted and the smoke whirled and swept into the cowboys’ eyes. Sparks flew and swirled among the leaves in the tree. It was drought season and any small sparks were a danger. He saw the tree catch fire; even from so far away, he could hear thewhooshas it caught and blazed. The men screamed and began to pick up camp, moving away. Ayatas chuffed with laughter. The smoke swirled again and careened among the horses, carrying sparks that bit and stung. They were too small to do real harm, but the pinprick fires hurt like a cowboy’s spiked rowels and the horses threw up their heads and snorted, lashing their tails. One whinnied, its eyes rolling white. The others picked up its fear. One began to buck and lost its footing in the twisted ropes that tied the horses. It fell, screaming.
The wind whirled faster, up along the ledge where Ayatas lay, picking up his scent before whirling down into the gulch. The smell of jaguar and fire reached the cattle, and the mindless beasts stomped and lowered their heads, rolled their eyes, seeking out the dangers.
Thegvnageilookout pulled his gun, a six-shooter, and stared right at Ayatas’s ledge. But the man was too far away for a reasonable shot. He would have done better to have a rifle like the one that Ayatas had taken from the dead body of an Apache who had challenged him to combat.
Ayatas pushed up to a sitting position, certain that he was now hidden in the shadows of the falling sunset. Below him, in the growing darkness, the white men were fighting to keep the horses calm. The cattle stomped. A mother was nudged away from her calf and she bellowed a warning. She raced up a short rise and lowered her head. With one horn, she gored a steer in the back. Two other steers jumped and hopped on four feet,bouncing in fear at the confrontation. Dust rose and added to the shadows. He growled, the sound coming from deep in his chest.
The cattle started bucking, the delicious scent of their fear growing fast.
They split, one group galloping into the sunset. The other beginning a constricted, spiraling race that grew tighter and tighter as the panicking cattle followed the circling female, frantically searching for her calf. Ayatas raised his head and called, the vibration sending the cattle into a frenzy, stomping hooves and goring horns. The smell of blood and panic rose on his woman’s magic wind. Ayatas licked his jaws in hunger.
He called again and raced down the cliff, his spots hiding his movement. A gunshot sounded. Men screamed. Horses screamed. On the wind, Ayatas heard his woman’s laughter.
He leaped down twenty feet, asyunegawould calculate it, and landed with his front paws together, pushing off with his back paws as they touched down. He leaped on a young steer, his weight driving it to its knees. He caught its windpipe between his fangs and clamped down. Instantly the steer’s back legs buckled and it fell. Ayatas dragged him into the small cave he had prepared before the white men arrived. Concealed behind brush, it had remained hidden. The steer struggled feebly and tried to get up. Ayatas held tight, and the steer flopped over. He held the killing bite for longer, to make certain that his dinner was dead. Then he ripped out its throat and gulped down its blood, his hunger, carefully held in check, instantly freed. He gorged on the soft tissue and blood, eating until the pain he had been fighting dissipated. He needed to eat more, much more, but his woman’s magic called to him and he raced out of the small depression in the rock.
In the gathering dark and confusion, he saw that several horses had broken their hobbles and raced into the night. A group of men on the other horses raced after the cattle. The white men would chase the larger cattle group first. Ayatas followed two horses, the man part of him herding them toward his woman.
When the moon was full overhead, throwing black and white shadows, he chased them into the small arroyo where she had camped. His woman caught them with her song. She gentled them, as she had him. And she led them all to water.
Later, he followed his own trail back to the small cavern and pulled his kill out of the bushes and deeper into the desert. He ate. In the morning, he would carry the carcass back to the woman and shift back to human. Together, they would butcher and smoke the rest of the meat and then they would ride on, looking for the wildfire winds of his dreams.
