TCF

When Jashen translated  for Mark  the passage  of the  refugees trodding west from Rumbek he asked Leliel,  with some annoyance and unbelief, “Were you really this running girl?”

Begging pardon from Mark, she told  Jashen to fetch his  bow in one hand,  took him by his  other hand, and led  him through the woods to a large flat clearing. The place served as a kind of parade ground  in Nyduly. There Leliel stood twenty  paces from Jashen.

“Fire an arrow at me,” she said, and when  Jashen howled in dismay that she was wasting his  time she said, “I am serious. Do your very best to try to kill me.”

He released the dart. Leliel’s muscles exploded into motion. She ran backwards across the grass of the  clearing faster than the arrow could follow. Then she turned and disappeared into the thick wall of trees at the far side of the open space.

In short order Leliel came to The Teacher by woodland paths well known to her. He was alone. When he saw Leliel he made a gesture of welcome and bade her to sit.

Sha said, “Teacher, you have said you have put Jashen in close proximity to me  that nature  will  take its  course, and  this nature has done, and now he is Made among the B'nei Elohim. But I have already recited the  White Scroll up  to the war  of the dragon and Jashen now seems to be cooler toward me."

Yeshua asked Leliel, “But what are your own  feelings? Do you find young Jashen to be pleasing to your eye ?

“He is a  vision  to  drink in,”  sha  replied. “I could imagine spending more than a  lifetime with  him. Yet I do not think he feels the same way about me.”

Yeshua replied, “Jashen  feels as  though he  is swimming  in water over his  head. He’s felt that way ever since he jumped in after you  at Green  Dome. I’ve given him  a new  name to acknowledge his manhood, but he  still lacks the full confidence of a  man. Jashen was  whisked from  the  land  he  knows  to this  place, which  is surpassingly  strange to  him, just  as I imagine Earth  would seem strange to  you, and worse, now  he is translating your stories  about things he has not  yet done, and he is wondering if he has any agency at all."

Leliel sighed "Teacher, to be honest, my own feelings are mostly that I miss my mother."

In her tipi Yuha had been sobbing quietly for days. Wanica tried his best to comfort her, but there was really  nothing he could do. She said, "Nearly a full moon has passed since we have seen our son. Has the Vision Quest ever taken this long?"

Wanica replied, "I will not lie to my own  wife. Ten nights the test was  for me, and no  more."Hearing this, Yuha let  the full force of her grief wash over  her, and all Wanica  could do was hope she didn't blame him personally for going through with the ritual.

Yet there had been no  choice, really. The Kuwapi were already the outcast dregs of the Oglala Sioux. If Wanica had denied the boy his test  of manhood,  he would  be outcast  even from  the Kuwapi, forever a  boy. And he would  have never  forgiven his father.

When she recovered a bit she said, "Shy Bear's last memory of us was that  even  his  mother had  a  stony  heart."Wanica  said, "A heart of  stone  is  part of  the  ceremony.  There must  be a...cutting off. There is no way  around it. This as always been the way of our People."

He remembered how  Shy Bear  always  called the  leader of  the People "Bad Heart Bull" and how  even he had to  agree. Tatanka piled upon Wanica daily indignities, until even his great inborn patience had been tested nearly to the breaking point. This day was no exception.

Chief Tatanka barged into  the tipi  unannounced and  pointed a finger at Wanica. "You have brought no food into this camp for a moon, Hole in Cheek!""It is  the fire," Wanica said. "It still burns the grasslands to the south. The animals are on the other side of it."

"Then take your hunters and go  around the fire or  you will be Hole in Neck.""It will take two days' ride to find the animals," Wanica replied. "Then a day to kill and  field-dress them, then two days' ride to bring the carcass back. The meat will go bad."

"The nights are cold now. The  meat will keep. I  grow tired of eating jerky. Go!"Before the Chief left the tipi he let his eyes wander over Yuha's legs. She saw his gaze and tucked  her legs under a  bison-hair  blanket. When Tatanka  departed,  Wanica retrieved the Golden Gift from the  place he had hidden  it. He had shown no one the weapon  he received from Wakan  Tanka, not even his wife Yuha. He knew that while he was hunting, nothing might restrain Tatanka from pillaging his tipi.

Leliel felt no great  urgency to rush  her recital. Yeshua had told her when she was finished  she would be sent  to Earth and leave all that she had known far behind.

For his part Jashen, too, did not feel rushed, though he longed to return home. He believed the Teacher spoke truly, and would return him to his parents after  only a single moon  passed for them, no matter how long he tarried here in this place he called Kemen.

So it  fell to  Mark  to  drive them  along  in  their task  of translating the  scroll, as  he wished to  be reunited  with his wife, and he was filled with rue for every day that she thought him to be missing or dead. And at times the labor grew tedious. But the blank pages of the Green Book were steadily filled with words from Leliel's scroll even as Leliel steadily improved her ability to speak and understand English.

So there came a day in Kemen when Leliel  opened her oven-fired clay pot and  returned to  it  her cylinder  of parchment  that seemed to be bleached white. And Mark placed his fat codex into a leather satchel. They were all quite finished with  the task set out for them, and this they told the Teacher.

And when the Teacher spoke of the pilgrimage to come Mark said, "Lord, my flock has already been uprooted once  before and most of us are worse than destitute.  We've gone into debt to pay for homes we built  on land we don't  even own. None of  us have the means to leave once again."

Yeshua said, "Mark, do you think that I, intending to build this tower, have not first counted the cost?"

"Far be it from my thoughts, Lord!"

Mark watched Jashen fill the satchel with much money. Greenbacks lined the interior and formed a cushion for the green book.

The Teacher said, "Be a good steward of this currency, Mark, for there are some among the Brethren who would only feign to follow you for the love of this money. Others will  turn their back on you when you  read from the Green Book. You  already know how it argues against the  Bible on many points, and few  of your flock will care to  accept it, as the Brethren take  the New Testament to be the  sole rule of their  faith, or at least  they say they do. But  neither I nor  Bat-El never  asked anyone to  write the works that are  collected in Bible in the first  place, so there let matters unfold as they will."

Wanica and his hunters prepared  their horses for  the journey, and packed their share of the People's dwindling supply of dried meat. Wanica mounted his own horse, Kaleetan, and for the first time he pondered that his horse had a right name but his own son did not. The fires were burning far away, even from the vantage of the Island  in the  Sky, but  Wanica led  the hunting  party away south toward  that  small mountain  to  better survey  the devastation and to see if the  cairn they built to  Wakan Tanka was in need of repair.

The party crossed over  an abrupt line  to the  grasslands that were burned and  ascended  the  Island in  the  Sky, which  was entirely seared black. When they reached the summit Wanica saw that his son  Shy  Bear was  restoring the  stone  he had  once removed to take shelter. He was still dressed in the ceremonial dress that Yuha  had made  for  him, but  it was  altered in  a curious way  to fit better,  and had been  covered in a  riot of colored beads that was clearly no artifice of the Kuwapi, though it echoed the craftsmanship of the People.

Leliel stood next to him. Wanica and the hunters found her to be striking. Although she appeared to  be  a young  woman of  the People she was a full  head taller than  the tallest of  any of them. Leliel, too, was attired in something  much like Jashen's raiment, but more simple.

Before Jashen sealed the cairn, Wanica saw that  the white dome was still contained  within. A tame bison  was also  trodding slowly on the summit of the Island in the Sky amid the blackened ground, wondering perhaps if  there was  any green  thing lying around to eat.

Wanica searched his son's face and saw that he  seemed a little taller himself, and a little older. He was so overjoyed to see him that he forgot he took away his name and turned him out into the night. "Shy Bear!" he exclaimed, and ran toward the boy to embrace him.

But Jashen was having none of that. His body language halted his father at a single pace. He extended his hand and  gripped his father by the lower arm near his elbow.

"You forget yourself, Father.  No more  am I  to be  called Shy Bear.  My name  of manhood  is Jashen.  I have  brought my  wife Princess Leliel,  who is the  daughter of Wakan Tanka  and Queen Lilith. Her father has commanded us  to return to the People and live among them for a season,  but there will be much coming and going between here and his lodge in the sky."

In the camp of the People word spread that the hunting party was arriving days before they were expected, and it was feared they would bring news that  it was impossible  to reach  the roaming herds by reason of the fire. Yuha was among the women who went to greet them.

What she saw brought her joy beyond measure, such that she, too, forgot herself and cried out the boyhood name of  her son, "Shy Bear!" which she repeated many  times as  both mother  and son embraced. "Jashen, mother," he told  her gently. "I am to be called Jashen."

Yuha's hands roamed over her son as she tried to assure herself he was not a spirit. When they stopped at the horns on his head he gently took his mother's hands in his own and stood apart, so that she could see what had been added to her beadwork.

Her eyes then turned to Leliel, who stood over even the tallest men in the camp, wearing  something like a ceremonial  dress of har own but skillfully fitted for  har curves, and she, too, had horns. "Mother," said Jashen, "this is my wife, Leliel, who is a princess among her people."

"I greet Yuha, mother of my husband," Leliel said. "In the lodge of my father not a day passed that Jashen did not speak of both you and Wanica with a love that  could not be hidden. And it was not long before his love for me could not be hidden, much though he tried!"

The return of Wanica with his hunters was news  big enough, the return of the boy Shy Bear as the man Jashen  after a full moon was bigger news, and that he  brought a giantess of  a wife was the biggest news of all, but Chief Tatanka cared little for all those things. That evening, when the People  were sharing their communal meal once more, the  Chief wondered why his  women did not bring the horns of the bison  to add to his  war regalia as before. He said no words of gratitude to Wanica for bringing the kill in one day rather than five.

Instead the missing horns occupied his mind and  pushed out all else. He waxed more and more  angry, until he flat  out accused Wanica of hiding the bison's head. Wanica said nothing in reply, but he did not  take his  eyes away from  the Chief  after this accusation was made. Tananka, already wroth, grew infuriated at the defiance. The leader of the People took out  his knife once more. It was an genuine steel  blade he claimed he  took as war booty from a white trapper, but he really took it from a corpse he had stumbled upon by mere chance.

Chief Tanaka brandished the only steel blade  among the People. "This will loosen your tongue, Hole In Heart!" he cried, and he moved toward Wanica, fully expecting the hunter to run as he had done so many times before. But Wanica knew he had the favor of Wakan  Tanka. So Wanica  stood his  ground  fearlessly,  which unnerved the Chief. Everyone saw him hesitate. The Chief lost precious "face' with each passing heartbeat, and he knew it.

Wanica calmly  reached into  a  hidden  pocket in  his  leather garments and withdrew the Golden Gift.

Tatanka's rage boiled over. He closed the gap  between himself and Wanica but he never reached striking distance. On the hunt Wanica only took  the animal's  head,  offering it  to the  Sky Father rather than allowing it to be dishonored by Tatanka. But here before the eyes of all the Kuwapi he  took away the Chief, the whole Chief, and nothing but the Chief, all the way down to his moccasins, leaving the very ground he stood upon untouched.

The group of men who had been with Wanica on the recent hunt had seen the Golden Gift in action, but the rest  of the People had never seen such an  obvious and deadly  display of  real magic. Even his own squaw Yuha was afraid. Even so, she came to stand at Wanica's side. To Wanica's left stood his son Jashen, arrayed in the  fine  ceremonial  dress  that  had  been  painstakingly embellished by artisans  in Nyduly  Wood over  the course  of a year. And towering over them all at nearly seven feet in height was his wife, the Ophan Leliel.

"I sent the Chief to answer to the Great Spirit," Wanica said in a loud voice. "I will lead the People now." Wanica crossed his arms regally, with the Golden Gift cradled in one of his hands. One by one the hunters, warriors, and braves of the Kuwapi sank to their knees before Wanica, with hands open to show they carry no blade. Their wives, the widows, and unmarried girls  of the People hit their knees  before Wanica  and before  his standing family as well.

Wanica then gave his first  command as  the new Chief. "In the morning we will decamp and march south, to dwell  at the Island in the Sky, near the place  where the Great Spirit came and made himself known to us and where my boy Shy Bear came back to us as the man Jashen."

So it came  to  be that  the  Kuwapi, first  among  all of  the original inhabitants of the high plains and the only ones to do so of their  own free will, ceased to be  a wandering people and awaited the coming of the followers of Mark Lange.

Early in Wanica's chiefdom the Northern Raiders paid their last visit to the  People. When Wanica  confronted them  he used  a gradually tightening squeeze so the  black spear of wind emerged from the Golden Gift at a  visible rate. At full extension the beam ballooned out like an umbrella. The enemy saw that it was Chief Wanica's magic which absorbed the arrows fired at him and sliced their leader in half, he and the horse he rode in on.

Wanica knew the Northern Raiders operated like pack animals with no stomach for sticking around once they lost  their own Chief. And sure enough they fled  into the grasslands north,  never to return to the  river ford at the  foot of the Island  in the Sky claimed by the People.

A bison gets  thirsty eating  grass all  day out  on the  Great Plains and Squaw River was a  reliable source of water. A herd came near to  the source  at the  Island in  the Sky  where the stream was narrow. When the herd was taking drink Wanica struck with the Golden Gift, taking just one of them  according to the needs of the Kuwapi People. It was done in such a stealthy way the rest of the herd barely noticed. In this way the Kuwapi were able to sustain themselves without ranging far afield to hunt.

Later the People saw the first  white settlers use the  ford at the river. The whites used their fire sticks to drop some of the animals merely to clear the way and they did  not even take the animals for food. Fair enough, Wanica thought, there is plenty for all. But by the second year the herds  had grown noticeably thinner, and many of the People remembered the fire sticks.

The year after that no large game animals were seen at all. The People had to scratch  a living  from small  game, or  from the scrawny solitary black-tail deer they sometimes chanced upon. A few of of the hunters murmured openly,  recalling with fondness the time of Chief Bad Heart Bull, perhaps  forgetting that even during that Golden Age it was still Wanica who led the hunts.

The army of the Whites  set up an  outpost six land  miles (and twelve  river miles)  eastward of  the Island  in the  Sky. They called it Fort Price. Captain John Smalley commanded a company of mounted rifles detached north from the 6th Calvalry Regiment, and despite his bitter hatred for the dead-end post he had been assigned, snack in the middle of the biggest zone of nothing in the American West, Smalley  maintained good relations with Chief Wanica and the Kuwapi. For one reason, they all  somehow spoke passable English, and the  son of the  Chief actually  spoke it better  than  most  Whites. He considered  the  People  to  be relatively peaceful.

One day eight whiteskins came mounted on horses, cracking whips, two on Point, two on Flank, and  two on Drag, with  a cook with his own wagon in the rear and a man riding way out front picking the best path for  five hundred animals  bulkier than  any game animal save the bison. The whites drove their herd to  a large island in Squaw River where the best grass grew. They did this without the basic courtesy of offering Chief Wanica  one or two head as toll.

Miffed, the Chief dispatched  hunters to  take payment  in kind with a few well-placed arrows. The eight white men fired back. Two Kuwapi hunters were killed, which was more than Wanica could afford to pay  for meat. The Kuwapi withdrew  halfway up  the eastern flank of Green Dome and watched as the  herd was driven to the north bank.

John Morrison, the  man on  Point  who owned  the cattle,  told his boys to  stand  fast  and defend  the  herd  while he  rode hell-for-leather downstream  to  Fort Price  and  told  Captain Smalley he wanted  to "donate'  twenty head  but there  was the slight matter of  an Indian problem. Chief Wanica  knew what was coming, and made  his plans accordingly. Then he  rode back down to the island with a boy named Tashunka sitting behind him, They started to field-dress one of the fallen cows.

The bugle sounded and  Fort Price  vomited seventy  mounted men plus John Morrison. Wanica and Tashunka were slicing  the guts out of a cow, and  the rest of  his hunters, maybe  twenty men, were four hundred feet above it all. When the cavalry showed up the Kuwapi rode down the  hill and  up the river,  commanded by Jashen, with his wife Leliel leading the way on foot.

Smalley divided his  forces and  sent almost  sixty of  his men after the  hunters. This detachment  was  led by  Lt.  Lambert Welles. But Smalley, Morrison, and twelve  other soldiers begin circling Wanica and the boy.

Along the river a chase ensued. Three miles from Fort Price is a low ridge running north to south, and the Squaw River, which is really  a  large creek,  cut  straight  through  it in  a  short twisting little canyon with steep walls and no  path except for the river itself. Here Welles got his T crossed. Sixty soldiers were riding in single file and ten Kuwapi waited at the mouth of the canyon firing arrows as they came up  one-by-one. So Welles ordered a countermarch,  which was  an even  worse tactic. The other ten Kuwapi braves rolled boulders down on  them and broke the legs of their horses. After that it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

The Kuwapi hunters left one soldier alive, tied to a tree, with one hand free to scoop up river water to drink, and the knot was too far away to unravel. There were five soldiers on  the sick list who didn't make  the raid  but were  supposed to  hold the fort. They had delivered up the  ten Kuwapi women they  held as slaves and Jashen was entreated.

Back at the  river ford  Smalley and  Morrison moved  closer to Chief Wanica while four soldiers  orbited the scene at a stately trot. "God damn it Chief," Smalley said, "you  know better than to start acting like the Northern Raiders."

"What are you going to do to him?" Morrison asked.

"Take him in for cattle rustling.  That'll have to do.  The boy can go free.  The rest of these red fellows  too. They were just following orders  and they  got families to  feed. Now  they can pick themselves a new chief."

Wanica, from the English  taught to  him by  Jashen, understood perfectly what Smalley wanted to do to him, and  he decided not to go peacefully. He had the Golden Gift in his hand and pointed it right at the captain. The black shaft leaped out  with its hideous sound and sliced off the head of  Smalley's horse. Then Smalley himself was rendered in  two. That black line remained there, drinking in  light  and air,  while  five more  orbiting horses and men ran right into it, including Paul Morrison.

After that Wanica used the Golden Gift to get rid of the bodies of the men and  the horses  he had slain. He knew the killing range of the  Golden Gift  was not  much longer  than a  spear. Against a troop  of whites  armed with  firesticks he  would be helples. Little did he know  his son Jashen had  already solved the problem for him.

The pilgrims of Five Corners  Free Congregation arrived  at the lower slopes of Green Dome  at dusk,  their journey at  an end. There they saw four fallen  warriors of the People,  Left Hand, Half Yellow Face, Kill Eagle, and Hairy Moccasin lying on a bier of branches taken from woody shrubs. And it was on this solemn occasion when the Kuwapi People and the settlers of Mark Lange's group were first gathered all together.

In full view of everyone Chief Wanica, with  words of reverence for Wakan Tanka, struck off the Golden Gift and made the bodies of his dead men disappear. The Whites were struck speechless. Coming as they did from a religious background,  such a display could be nothing other than the power of God made manifest.

"This is a sign!" Mark exclaimed. He recognized the Golden Gift from the translation of the White  Scroll he had made  with the help of Leliel and Jashen. It was the same weapon  wielded by Prince Melchizedek when he first encountered father Abraham. Not merely the same kind, but literally the same artifact.

"God has brought us all  together," Lange declared,  "White man and Red  man alike, in this  land of His choosing,  flowing with milk and honey." At Lange's words all the people looked around in the fading  light and  took in  the barren,  mostly treeless grasslands. Lange cleared his throat. "Here at Green Dome we all shall remain, and prosper with God's blessings!"

Lange couldn't just take the weapon outright, as it was holy, a divine gift made by Bat-El himself, so it could never be defiled by base theft. Obviously the  People led  by  Wanica and  the remnant of the Five Corners Free Congregation would  have to be permanent  and  equal  (but  separate)  partners. The Church's doctrine of mandatory cousin-marriage  would salve the settlers' horror at any race-mixing.

After the  funeral there  followed  a  good old-fashioned  mass conversion of  the  entire  Kuwapi people,  followed  by  their assembly-line baptism in the  cold waters  of the  Squaw River. They were each plunged into the stream three  times using total immersion, since Lange was at  heart still  a Dunker. So a new congregation was born, the Church  of Green Dome, with  a White Wing and a Red Wing, "Two  lungs by which the  united people of the Creator draw new breath," Lange declared.

That night Wanica's people returned to their  encampment at the 4,650 foot level of Green Dome, on a wide  bench on the eastern side of the hill. In the morning, aided  by the  Whites, they began to turn it into a permanent village.

Gary Bergin and his wife Marge chose the valley  of Squaw River due south of Green  Dome and  begin pulling  up dead  stumps of burnt trees to  establish a farm, aided by  their children Dale, Owen, Linda, Grace. Baby Megan was still far too young.

Alfred Porter,  his wife  Caroline,  and  their three  children George, Ida, and Rachel established their farm a  little to the north of the river ford. Water was plentiful there, diverted by a ditch from higher up the slope, and they  grew a wide variety of green stuff as though they had an extended backyard garden.

Thomas Henry, his wife Melanie, and their four younger children Kenneth, Jane,  Faith,  and  Susan  choose  a  spot  for  their homestead at elevation 4,400 feet, a little below the village of the People. At first they grew oxen, taken from the animals that accompanied them on the pilgrimage, but they  also planted rows of apple and pear trees. Their eldest son Lee Henry, together with his new bride Tamara,  raised a few sheep,  purchased from another drive of livestock  that used the  ford soon  after the Stiffnecks arrived. The following summer  a cattle  drive also used the ford and the  Henrys bought dairy cows. Their animals grazed in the shade of their family's fruit trees.

David and Ann Krause, with their crowd of children Edwin, Linda, Gail, Robert, Carl, Helen, and Tom settled to the  south of the river ford took to raising horses, having received back most of the horses they loaned to make the pilgrimage.

The 6th Cavalry  Regiment came  up from  Texas looking  for the bloodthirsty warriors who wiped out a whole company of their men and found only a  docile tribe of  newly-Christianized converts helping white  settlers  grow  some crops. When pressed,  the farmers said they knew there was an empty fort  nearby, but did not know how it came to be abandoned, and there was no evidence to give lie to their testimony. The bodies of the men and horses which fell along the river were  now totally gone. So the Army broke up the fort and left, marking the whole thing down as one of the spookier mysteries of the high plains.

The white settlers who did not take up the plow instead platted out the town of Headwater on both sides of  the river crossing. In the beginning these were Harry and Hester Hilling with their four children, Brandon, Oscar, Roy, and Nancy, who built and ran a general store. Ivar and Anna Zinter  operated a  blacksmith shop. Like the Zinters, Mark  Lange and  his wife  Joanna were childless, but not for much longer. In a few years a boy named Clark was born to the Langes, closely followed by David, who was born to the Zinters.

Mark built a tabernacle on the summit of Green  Dome, which was just under 5,000 above sea level, but only about 900 feet above the plains. From there one could see nearly forty miles out over the grasslands, in  every direction. The tabernacle was built over the cairn of  the Artifact,  commemorating the  very place where Wanica and Jashen came face-to-face with God.

The Green Dome Tabernacle was  the gathering place for  all the people, Red and White, every  Sunday. With each homily Prophet Lang and Apostle Wanica established the wall of Church doctrine steadily, like laying bricks. One of the doctrines,  which was really a concession to  the Kuwapi  people, was  that everyone, both male and female, must wear their hair long and tied into a pony tail. After a time, the members of the Green  Dome Church were called Ponies by outsiders, and later  even the Stiffnecks called themselves that. The Kuwapi were also introduced to the Western concept of  surnames. Jashen remembered his  original given name of Shy Bear and chose the last name of Shybear.

In 1869 the rumor of gold was heard tell  along the Squaw River and Headwater swelled with the influx of prospectors hungry for the shiny  yellow  stuff. Some got  rich,  but  most  of  the Sixty-Niners struck out. Some of these stayed in  Headwater as converts to the Church. After the rail line connected Headwater to the new Union Pacific line running across the country it was easy for cousins of the new converts to make  their way west to new  lives as  wives  of  the former  prospectors  and even  the children of the original settlers. The tabernacle on Green Dome was expanded into a much larger wooden  and whitewashed edifice called the Green Dome Temple. When it was complete Prophet Mark Lange was fifty-three years of age. Secondary tabernacles were established throughout the  United  States but  all Green  Dome funerals still took place at the original site.

Chief Wanica died at  the age  of 84. He lay in state  in the Temple sanctuary for fourteen days. Many Greendomites scattered across the country journeyed by train or even by the newfangled horseless carriages to pay their last respects. When the Prophet Lange committed the  Chief's body  directly into  the hands  of Bat-El it  was a sight that  few but the oldest  members present had ever seen, for the Church grew far beyond the dreams of her founders. During the Last Rites Lange announced that Wanica’s son Jashen  Shybear  was  the  new Apostle. For most  of  the attendees it was a  ceremony they  would not  otherwise witness until they were well into  middle-age when their  parents died, and of course everyone prayed they would never  have to attend. But the Green Dome  Church had  grown so  large that  every day except Sundays the Temple was booked for farewell Rites.

But not everything was so grim. During the fair held in honor of the Prophet's sixty-fifth birthday a barnstormer  came to town, offering rides in his biplane. Absolutely fearless, Mark Lange stepped up to be the first  to fly, to the  delight of everyone present. Few religious leaders have been so beloved. A newspaper reporter named Rupert Keller, however, considered Greendomism to be a dangerous cult, on the same order as Mormons, Satanists, or even the deeply-despised Roman Catholics. Keller said they were sun-worshipers who rejected the truth of the  Bible and married their close kin. And truth be told, Keller was absolutely right.

Two years later  the  Great War  broke out  in  Europe and  the pacifist Church of Green Dome, with its German roots, sought to keep America  out of  the conflict. Mark Lange traveled  to the German embassy in Washington  DC to  express his  concerns over possible U-Boat attacks on passenger ships traveling in British waters. The Ambassador assured him only warships and freighters were fair game, but at the behest of Lange  he posted a warning in fifty American newspapers. And Lange, for his part, expressed his belief  in the  assurances  of  the ambassador  by  booking passage on the British express liner Luisitania,  which was due to depart New York for Liverpool in a week. He wanted to visit the Church of Green Dome mission field in Great Britain.

When the ship was in the frigid waters south of Ireland she took a torpedo from  the German  submarine U-20,  which triggered  a secondary explosion shortly afterwards. The liner listed sharply to her side, drowning her starboard lifeboats. Frantically, the lifeboats on  her port  side  were  laden with  passengers  and released but there were not enough for everyone and no chance of raising the  floundering ones  on  the  other side. Women and children were saved first, and then old men. Prophet Mark Lange was placed in the last lifeboat,  but before it was  lowered to the sea he spied his nemesis  Rupert Keller standing on the deck of the doomed ship, contemplating  death. Lange bounded out of his  place and  offered his  seat to  the unrelentingly  hostile reporter. "Happy birthday, son," he said with a gentle smile.

Lange was not  joyful, since  all living  things seek  to avoid death by their very nature, but he was encouraged by his memory of Kemen and the promise  of Lord Yeshua  that he would  see it once more. He spread his encouragement around to the rest of the doomed passengers on board. In this way he made their passing a little  bit  easier. There was  enough time  for  six  of  the forty-eight lifeboats to get away before the ship took everyone aboard down to the frigid and murky depths of the ocean.

The sinking spurred the American public to enter the war.

Mark Lange’s very kind offer of a seat on  the last remaining lifeboat on the doomed Luisitania was wasted  on Rupert Keller. Returning to New York he wrote an account of the disaster which had the Prophet  kicking little  girls off  a lifeboat  to save himself and his gold, resulting in the sinking of the lifeboat, the death of Lange, and  the death  of everyone else  with him. Indeed, Keller said the presence of the gold must have been the reason the ship was torpedoed by the Central Powers in the first place. Lange had not an ounce of gold, but no matter.

Keller’s widely published lies did their intended damage. Many former supporters soured on the religion, and the growth of the Green Dome  Church  slowed  to a  crawl. Shortly after  that, by popular  referendum,  Nebraska  joined  a  dozen  others  in banning marriages  between first  cousins and the  first serious persecutions of Greendomites  began. That is not  to say  the Church of Green  Dome  did not  continue  to conduct  marriages between first cousins. They merely performed them on the Wyoming side of the Tri-State marker, nigh at hand, to make it legal.

Upon the death of  Lange the Apostle  Jashen became  the second Prophet. And for years Jashen could find  no suitable candidate among the whites to replace him as Apostle. Something had been lost with the passing of Mark Lange, a principle  of unity that bound the two sides. The members of the White Wing began to tie up their ponytails into buns as a subtle act of separation from the native faithful. Ultimately they refused to worship with the Red Wing at all and met  seperately in the Temple  on Wednesday nights, led by one Klaus Hansen who bubbled up to lead them.

Erik Zinter was one of the merry but homesick doughboys who went into battle in  1918  whooping  with all  the  enthusiasm of  a football team  pouring out onto  the field just  before kickoff. They came with six hundred aircraft plus one hundred forty-four tanks under Col. George Patton. Three thousand pieces of field artillery unleashed  by the  Allied  side  and countless  bombs dropped from the air  tore the  battlefield into  a pock-marked pigsty filled with mud.

The Germans  withdrew  but  they  fought  a  rear-guard  action with a ferocious  bite. Erik took two  rounds from  a Bergmann Maschinenpistole 18/1 that shattered the bone in his upper left arm and he developed gas  gangrene in the field  hospital lying just out of range of enemy fire. The amputation was performed in less-than-ideal circumstances. Afterward Erik rode a  train to Paris  with a  hundred  other casualties. The same train  then carried soldiers fresh off the boat back to  the Western Front, which had become a vast machine for mangling and killing men.

In Paris Erik  met  a Red  Cross nurse  whose  name-tag bore  a surname  he recognized. While she changed  his dressings  Erik learned that Clara was of the  Hursts who had stayed  behind in Pennsylvania  when  the  wagon  train  went  west  so  she  knew very little about  his Church. But after talking about  their respective family trees for a whole they discovered they shared the same great-grandmother. They were second cousins. That and her all American girl next door good looks interested Erik.

For her part  Clara  was  pleased how  Erik  maintained a  good attitude despite  his  misfortune. He didn't feel  sorry  for himself, even after losing an arm. There was pain but right on through it Erik  maintained a wicked sense of  humor. They could not talk for long but Clara passed along to  him the address of her  parents in  Pennsylvania  after he  declared  he wanted  to stay  in touch  with  her when  they went  home. Their pen pal relationship blossomed into something they thought was love.

In 1922 Erik drove halfway across the country in his Model T. It took a full month. He used the Yellowstone Auto Trail and aside from two big auto repairs  his outlays averaged five  dollars a day. Part of this money came from his veterans' "bonus' of sixty dollars but  some employers  went  out  of  their way  to  give returning veterans seniority  in hiring. Erik accepted  a job in Headwater  painting houses  using his  remaining arm,  and spent three years laying some of this money aside for the wedding.

In Clara's hometown Erik sold his tin lizzie to make up for what he still  needed to  pay  for  the nuptials. Pennsylvania was the first anti-cousin  marriage state,  but only  first cousins couldn't get  hitched,  not  second  ones. And they  were  so obviously in love both of Clara's parents gave their blessing.

But Erik's parents back in Headwater were a  harder sell. After the train ride west he became the black sheep of the family for passing over  a perfectly  good  (but  horsefaced) local  first cousin for a beautiful second  cousin from back east. One aunt said, "Why, any heathen could do as much!"

Kimberly Zinter was born to Erik and Clara in 1925. Kim knew her two best friends Sofie Krause and Dory Twofeathers from as early she could remember, as far back as the economically frothy days of 1928 when  they shared  the  same nursery  while even  their mothers found work. By 1932 the  Depression really  started to bite. Clara was fired  first, but soon  even Erik  was jobless. Builders found applicants with two good arms suddenly willing to paint. Still, Erik retained the good spirits  that had endeared him to Clara in that Paris hospital.

There were rich seams of bituminous coal inside Green Dome hill and under Headwater itself but the  geology of the area  was so folded  and jumbled  there will  never be  an economical  way to reach it by drilling a straight shaft. The coal was exposed only in certain spots, and most of these were inaccessible.

During the  Great  Depression   Erik  Zinter  created  twisting passageways through the bulk of Green Dome, though  at the time no one knew how he managed the feat, and  he absolutely refused to speak of  it. By day other  men followed  in  his wake  to reinforce the  tunnels with timber  and remove the coal. In the heart of the  Great Depression,  Headwater experienced  a boom. Great heaps of black gold  from the mines  began to pile  up on docks in Chicago and San Francisco.

Suddenly the unemployed, unemployable  Erik Zinter had  a brand new brick red Ford Model B, his first  automobile since selling his Model T, and he also  completely paid off his  modest home. There was enough money left over to send Kim  to the Green Dome parochial school to be with her friends.

In 1937 Sofie, and  Dory were  in that  wonderful last  year of their tweens when their bodies  were gathering power for the big changes soon to come. They talked about boys in abstract terms that had little  to do  with  the little  barbarians that  were actual boys. At slumber parties the girls practiced necking with each other so long as it was understood that one of the neckers had to be a boy in theory.

Sofie Krause "at great personal  sacrifice" played the  role of beau nine  times out of ten,  especially when Doriel was  up. At their private  school the  tight  group  of girlfriends  passed flowery love letters to each other. Girl-love at age twelve is of  such a  high  order that  it knows  no  jealousy. Share and share alike, everything from  lunch to masterpieces  of amorous soliloquy.

Doriel Shybear had  black eyes  and  jet black  hair just  long enough for a pinch of  it to be  tied in the  obligatory Church pony tail. The first of the three to start growing knockers, che was, already, at just age twelve, a full six feet tall. Dory was going to be a giantez. Che aimed for straight Bs to please hez father Jashen, the Prophet of the Church, while not appearing to be too bookish. And Dory heard voices. When che was younger it was  a fun  game, but  over time  Dory came  to dislike  being a telephone switchboard. Eventually, Dory insisted the Voices keep it limited to important calls. Che enforced this by threatening to keep the Voices up at night with voices of hez own.

Sofie Krause was  a tomboy  who  kept her  ash-blond hair  even shorter than Doriel did, with no Church-mandated pony tail. When she grew older she was the only girl on the football team. Like Kim and Dory, Sofie was required to wear woolen skirts to class rather than trousers, which  always annoyed her. One Halloween morning Dory came dressed as  a pirate's wench. Sha had ripped har dress into long strips  so hez pinup-model legs  could poke out when sha  walked. When Sofie saw that  she  felt a  sweet electric shock  and  knew  she had  graduated  to  full-service tribade.

Kimberly Zinter had long  auburn hair halfway  between mahogany and carrot-top. She had light green eyes and a  pretty face but she was a little  chubby, or perhaps  just Rubenesque. Kim was compelled to wear  her  hair in  a ponytail  at  all times,  of course, like her mother and father and elders and all other good little Greendomites, male or female. But Kim was an infidel. She didn't really believe any of that stuff about  Chief Wanica and the Golden Gift written in the Green Book,  which was testimony to how tightly her father Erik was capable of keeping Jashen’s secret. But she wasn't ready  to let  down her  father so  she gritted her teeth, wore the damned ponytail in a  bun, and when she ventured  outside of  Headwater  she  tried to  ignore  the comments at the edge of her  hearing like, "Oh hey,  there goes another Bunner, look at her hair.'

For science  class  the  teacher paired  everyone  off  as  lab partners. Kim ended up with Sofie,  and Dory ended up  with hez sibling Gabriel. But Sofie kicked Gabriel out of  hez seat with "no offense pally" and sent hem shambling towards Kim, a slight adjustment in the teacher's choice.

As time went on  Gabriel went  so far as  to hold  Kim’s hand skating at Lake 13 when  it was frozen  over. By the time they were fourteen Sofie and Dory were asking if Kim and Gabriel had pitched woo and what it was like. "We did indeed pitch woo," Kim said. "He feels like a rubber wet suit stretched over a suit of armor. Soft  on the surface but  with a hard core  underneath. I like it."

In the summer the same Lake 13 used for ice skating was used for skinny-dipping and since bathing suits for kids were unknown in the  1930s. So there was  no  more keeping  the Shybear  family secret. Kim and Sofie learned that both Gabriel and Doriel were, each of them, both a boy and a girl at the  same time. The four of them stood naked in a square, ten yards out  into Lake 13 up to  their thighs  in  cool water  with no  body  modesty at  all because they were good friends  and nobody else was  there. The boy part of Gabriel was doing what fourteen year  old boy parts typically do around girls.

Kim asked about the one ball. "The other ball is inside me, Kim, it's a real ovary. I  could get  pregnant." Kim glanced at hez small breasts and nipples, which didn't look like they were just for decoration either. Still, she looked skeptical, so Gabriel moved hez scrotum to one side to display the labia hidden behind it.

"Gabriel is what we call an jen," Dory said. “A nephil. I'm a nephil too, except I'm an  ambe." Kim  and Sofie could  see the bits dangling below Dory's labia. Che had the same organs as hez sibling, but they were reversed  in position. Both Kim and Sofie were stunned to silence.

"Recall your scripture," Gabriel said. "Genesis six four. There were giants in the earth  in those days.  When the sons  of God came in  unto the daughters of  men they bore children  to them. The same became the mighty men of old, men of renown."

Dory said,  "We're saying  we  each  have  a  copy of  mom's  Z chromosome." When hez friens continued  to remain  silent Dory looked askance at both of her friends. "None of this should be new to you, right Kim.  Right, Sofie? Don't you believe what’s written in the Book of Green Dome?"

"Of course I believe all that  stuff in the Green  Book and the Bible,"  Kim answered,  annoyed at  the insinuation  she was  an apostate. "Kemen, miracles, the resurrection, everyone believes it happened, back then. But nobody believes it happens now."

Sofie said, "Everybody knows that stuff doesn't happen anymore, but nobody is ready to admit they know it."

"If you were just talking about the Bible you'd  have a point," Gabriel said. "Half the Green Book is corrections to the stories in the Bible. More than half. But the new claims in the Book of Green  Dome? Everything  in  there really  happened, exactly  as written. It's like no other holy text ever put together."

Kim and Sophie  accepted  this rebuke  and  nodded their  heads silently. They were unprepared to call their friends liars, and unwilling to do in  any event. Besides, the hard  evidence was literally there for them  to see standing  between the  legs of Dory and Gabriel.

Gabriel, Kim,  Sofie and  Dory  were  all firmly  middle-class, evidenced by their attendance  at the Church's  private school. Their parents were sufficiently well-off to provide instruments when they took band class, except Kim's only instrument was her own voice. She was a member  of the  Green Dome  Temple Girl's Choir, an expressive mezzo-soprano with  a voice that belied her fifteen years and verged on being too breathy  and sensuous for spiritual music. Listeners compared her favorably to Peggy Lee.

Dory played  a  double-bass  standing on  an  end-pin  che  had lengthened to be more comfortable. Sometimes sha set down har French bow and  plucked the  strings pizzicato  with meandering bass lines, a  soundtrack  to  daydreams sha  was  a black  cat slinking around at night.

Sofie Krause pounded the skins with all the power that made her a formidable  offensive  guard,  yet sha  ran  effortlessly  in and  around  Dory's  machine-like  bass,  averting  expectations and punctuating her  licks  with sixteenth-note  drum fills  as endlessly unique as snowflakes.

Gabriel Shybear had no  innate musical  talent but  che figured that was the reason che was taking band class, after all. After a semester learning scales  on a recorder  Gabriel took  up the sax. Kim started dabbling on piano and soon the kids had a basic jazz combo on their  hands. Sophie Krause and Dory  formed the constant pulsing heart of the act. After Sophie changed her name to Hunky the band would, in fact, be named Hunky-Dory after the rhythm section.

Word arrived  of  the  Doolittle  Raid  after  five  months  of unrelenting bad news following Pearl Harbor. In celebration, the conductor of the  Green Dome  Temple  School band  class led  a recital of patriotic John Philip Sousa marches, attended by half of Headwater. For an encore the class tore into  a cover of the classic Duke Ellington standard "It  Don't Mean A Thing  (If It Ain't Got That Swing)' with Kim soloing on vocals and Gabriel on sax. It was the first real triumph of the future Hunky-Dory.

For Kim the only downside in all this was how her father didn't make the recital despite his solemn  promise to do so. She could see her mother sitting out there in the gym and  how she kept a seat saved for him,  but even to the end of  the encore the seat was never filled. Erik Zinter did not come home all that night and even the next morning.

In the middle of the school day Kim was pulled  out of class by Deacon Paul Bergin and driven home, where Clara paced silently.

Kim started crying again in  sympathy, pleading for her  Mom to speak. After a time  Clara looked  directly  at her  daughter, building up the willpower to blurt  it out to her,  and finally she did: “Your father is dead!” They both cried until there was nothing more to give, and even when Kim’s  eyes were bone dry she was still wracked with sobs that trailed  off at length to silent grief. It was long before Clara gave Kim answers.

According to Prophet  Jashen  Shybear, Erik  was  killed by  an ancient relic  called the Golden  Gift, something Kim  and Clara assumed was merely an allegorical  literary device to  move the plot of the Green Book along, perhaps like the whale in the book of Jonah. In the scripture of the Church of Green  Dome heaven was a real  place with  walled cities  ruled by  angelic kings. Michael once sent  Prince Melchizedek  down to  Earth with  the oracles of God, and the prince bore the same Golden Gift.

Jashen revealed he had lent  Erik the relic to  honeycomb Green Dome with  tunnels to  access  coal. Thus Headwater prospered through the Great Depression. But overnight there was a cave-in that smashed Erik’s helmet lantern and plunged him into total darkness. Somehow he got turned around and bored deeper into the mountain rather than back out towards the way he  came. As Erik created a greater volume of space to walk through the remaining oxygen was stretched too thin. At dawn men with picks and spades broke through the cave-in and reached Erik’s body.

Jashen assured Clara that her husband died without any pain. He simply fell asleep and never woke up again. Also he praised the memory of Erik for never violating a sacred trust  that some in the Church  were saying was more  than even the Prophet  had the authority to grant. Jashen was asking Clara to accept that the Golden Gift was real, and  the scriptures were  literally true. Beliefs were for uniting a Church, not to actually believe.

“When you attend the Final Rite you will come  to see see the wisdom of it,” said Jashen. “But try to be strong, Clara. In days to come some will tell you that God  punished your husband with death for misusing his holy gift to the Church.”

In the aftermath of her  father’s death Kim stopped  going to school. Sofie and Dory came over after a couple  of days to see if their friend was  well. She was not  well, but  their visit elevated Kim from her grief a tiny bit and her mother noticed.

After Sophie’s mother came to pick her daughter up Clara asked her to wait until Dory’s mother arrived as  well, because she had a request to make of all of them.

When everyone was together Clara said, “I’d  like Sofie and Dory to be with Kim for her father’s funeral.” Susan Krause shook her head. She said,”They are just  school girls  and a funeral is a very solemn thing.”

Dory’s mother  Leliel agreed. She said,  “This should  be family time for Clara and Kim.”

“But we have no family  here,” Clara said. “My folks are back east.”Leliel pointed  out that  Clara still  had in-laws in Headwater. But Clara  shook her  head. “They’re Bunner Incarnate. They always held me at arm’s length. Kim is taking the death of Erik very hard but when the girls came over today I saw how they were like a family to her.”

Leliel said, “I’m not  worried about Doriel. I’m worried more about Sofie and Kim. When you are on the other side of the Final Rite, Clara, you will no longer have the child-like faith that our Lord  said  was more  blessed than  the  faith of  who believe because they have seen.”

It was a gentle negotiation. Clara got permission for Kim’s friends to be with her at the funeral but Leliel persuaded Clara to have Kim and her friends sit out the actual Final Rite.

It would have been unseemly to run around playing while the body of Kim’s father was sent  to his  long home along  with three other Greendomites from around the country, so  they sat around in the Temple basement.

Volunteers prepared dinner for the families of the dead. Gabriel finally broke away from a group of Kuwapi boys smoking outside. Che seemed to know a lot  of secrets about the  Temple. Gabriel led the girls into  a supply room  which wasn’t  locked. Kim, Sofie, and Dory went along because there was nothing else to do.

There was no electric  light in the  temples storeroom,  only a window  with closed  blinds  and  it was  a  gloomy January  day outside. There was an old piano which was  probably broken. Kim avoided the urge to play it. There was a map of Headwater and many of the usual church odds  and sods. The kids found unused hymnals, stacks of old temple bulletins, empty  mason jars, and dozens of stacked folding chairs. Sofie found a cane carved from gnarled wood and shifted it from hand to hand to get the feel of it. Gabriel stopped moving and went, “Shhh! What’s that?” The children froze but the only thing they heard was organ music and the  choir  bleeding  through the  ceiling  from  the  main sanctuary up-stairs.

“Very funny,” Sofie said, giving Gabriel  a friendly shove. One of the walls was unfinished. Gabriel moved aside a piece of plywood which had concealed another dark space beyond. It was so black inside it drank their vision like a sponge.

“I’ve never been in there,” Gabriel admitted. None of the girls wanted to  go  in there  but Gabriel  dared  them to  go. Naturally Sofie was the first one  through. Gabriel immediately followed Sofie to show che  wasn’t afraid. Dory and Kim were afraid of the dark hole and they were also unafraid to admit it, but they didn’t want to be left alone so they squeezed in too.

Gabriel burned through ten matches before Dory went to the outer room again and brought back a candle. The kids found they were in a space that was about four times larger than the first room but there was no wooden floor, just dirt and pebbles.

Something like a  rocky  igloo reached  halfway  to the  wooden ceiling, which creaked as someone  walked to and  fro overhead. Gabriel did a complete circuit of  the space, then che  said to Dory, “This is part of our family history, sis!”

Dory said, “This  must  be  the very  summit  of Green  Dome. Grandpa built that cairn, and also the altar right over it.”

When Gabriel saw  the  blank faces  of Sofie  and  Kim che  was astonished. Che said, “Did you forget what they  taught us in Sunday school? The temple is built  on the  Island in  the Sky where God gave Chief Wanica the Golden Gift.’

Kim rolled her  eyes  and  said, “God  gave  Moses the  stone tablets too. Only there was no Moses, so he didn’t.” She had a point. The Green Book itself denied the existence of Moses.

Dory pointed to the ceiling. “What do you think is happening up there right now?”

Kim considered her answer, because she didn’t  wish to offend her friends, and especially not Gabriel, who was a bit more than a friend. She said, “It's a cremation of my  father’s body and the bodies of three other folks, spiced with ritual.’

Dory said, “Kim, we all know you've seen Gabriel, close up, in all hez glory and you still think the Green Book is just a bunch of stories they invented?”

“I went to the  library and looked  that up,”  Kim replied. “Gabriel and Dory are hermaphrodites. It happens sometimes. It’s not a big deal."

"I don't know about your  birth defect idea, Kimmie,"  Sofie said. "Gabriel and Dory both? Maybe it's a family trait."

Gabriel rolled up hez sleeves and approached Kim, flipping both hands over a  few  times to  show they  were  empty. Che said, “Hold out your hand.”  Gabriel clasped  her hand,  and when che took it  away  again  Kim was  holding  a  stack of  silver half-dollars. ‘Explain that, if you can.”

Kimberly put the coins in her purse because money was money and if Gabriel wanted to  give her  ten bucks so  be it. She said, “Magic tricks, Gabriel, just like what they’re showing Momma upstairs right now. I don’t say there’s  no God,  but why can’t people just be amazed at what God really did do?”

Dory threw up har hands in mock despair at  hez heathen friends and muttered something about White Wingers. Gabriel moved toward the cairn. “We’ll never  have  the chance  to  be in  here again,” che said. “I want to see if it’s really there.”

Sofie warned, “If you do that you’ll go to hell.”

“There’s no hell in Greendomism,” Gabriel snorted, and che chose a boulder likely to  be easily  moved. Sophie gave hem a hand. he boulder slowly swung  open like  a hinged  door, just enough that they could squeeze inside the stone igloo  one at a time. Dory brought light. A plain white dome lay inside.

"God doesn’t look like much," said Kim.

“This isn’t God,"  said Gabriel,  "but God  made this. And don’t say God made everything, Sofie, even you know better.”

They all stood  there silently  for a  time, each  one of  them buried in thoughts about the artifact. No one dared to touch it. After that, by unspoken agreement, they began to slide back out of the cairn, but they heard footsteps in the storage room next door. Dory put out the candle as everyone held their breath and tried not to make a sound.

Deacon Paul looked into the  dark gap  and could just  make out their silhouettes. Bergin screamed at them to get out.

Blushing, Gabriel,  Kim,  Sofie  and Dory  scrambled  out  from beneath the altar, then out of the supply room. After that they sat in the  basement lunchroom. The deacon locked the  supply room, and true to Gabriel’s words they never returned.

Dory said,  “Thanks for  that  little  adventure, Gabe. I always knew the avatar of Chokhmah was real, but actually seeing it was something I’ll never forget.”

Just then the attendees began to filter in from upstairs. During the shared meal  after the  Final Rite  Kim thought  her mother seemed very different. The grief was gone. Clara said, “It’s all true, Kim. Everything in the Green Book is really true!” She no longer needed faith for the things taught by the Church.

Kim knew her mother had been a nurse in the First World War and had seen things in France so terrible she refused  to even talk about them, things which  would crush the  faith of  anyone who believed in a good God. It was good to see some semblance of joy restored in her. But Kim and Sophie needed more convincing.

The demonstration was already  in the  pipeline. Kim and Sofie grew bumps on the front of their heads. Dr. Wahkan said not to worry  about them. He said they were  benign and  some of  the Kuwapi also  had  the  condition. But when  they  turned  into outright horns it startled Clara to the point of  taking Kim to Lusk in Wyoming  for a second opinion. Two days later Sofie’s parents brought her to Lusk also but the doctors there could do little more than watch the girls  get worse. Soon after that the girls were under federal quarantine in parts unknown.