TCC

C0

"Make no threatening moves," Lange cautioned his followers. "Touch no rifle. Trust the Lord to protect us."

The Pawnees swarmed around their wagons out of pure curiosity, inspecting the hatchets and mallets they found within and took turns to lie on the feather-bed mattresses one-by-one. They took no food or tobacco, and eyed the weapons stored inside but let them be. Some of them took a very close look at the women, perhaps the first white females they had ever seen, but they kept their hands to themselves. If such were the orders of their chief they were a very disciplined force at the very least.

When they had mounted their horses once more the chief scanned the whole scene, drew himself up in his full battle regalia, crinkled his face, and plugged his nose. All the braves broke into laughter, then they all rode away. When it was clear they would not return, Lange led his congregation in a prayer of thanksgiving to God.

When there was no local water for the oxen and horse the pilgrims watered the animals from cisterns in the wagon. One of the oxen in the trailing wagon had thrown a shoe and no one could guess how far back along the trail it might be. Joanna Lange applied to the ox's injured hoof. He was released from pulling the wagon and two of the horses were set in his place.

After passing the future location of Kenesaw, the trail drew near to the Platte River in another seven miles, with the smell of cottonwood trees in the air. The water was silty, but let still in a bucket for an hour it grew clear. The oxen were less discerning.

At length the Stiffnecks reached Fort Kearney, the last outpost of civilization they would find until they built their own settlement. They telegraphed messages to family members left behind in Gettysburg and traded their worn-out oxen for rested ones. At the general store they obtained more chickens and many of the sundries they had consumed on the trek, but prices were dear. Two days were spent at the fort. Taking their rest, they witnessed several other wagon trails passing through. Blacksmiths willing to labor on Sunday put new iron shoes on the horses and oxen. Lange's money was depleted that much more.

During the following week the Stiffnecks passed south of the future townsite of North Platte. Had they left Gettysburg only two years after they did North Platte would be the western rail terminus and they could have begun their pilgrimage that much closer to their final destination. C1

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." C2

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. C3

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." C4

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." C5

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. C6

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. C7

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. C8

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. C9

Mark Lange led the wagon train off the Oregon Trail entirely. They struck north, cross-country, to reach a vast wilderness called the Nebraska Sandhills. This is a sea of sand dunes anchored by grass and dotted with innumerable small freshwater lakes. There was plenty of green stuff for the animals to graze, but the going was slow. No sooner did someone wonder, aloud, where the water came from than they were inundated by the first of frequent rainstorms that slowed their passage even more. The way twisted between the hills but sometimes a ridge twenty miles long and two hundred feet high lay directly across their path and they were compelled to go over it. Other times they would reach brush in draws which had to be cleared by men using axes and scythes. The Stiffnecks were to spend as many days traveling off the Oregon Trail as they had spent traveling on it.

It seemed they had entered a purgatory and only Mark Lange's diary entries prevented them from losing track of the days. But at last they reached what Mark Lange hoped to be the Squaw River and the pilgrims turned west to follow it toward its source.

When Fort Price was overrun by the Kuwapi it was witnessed only by pronghorns, badgers, coyotes and prairie dogs jumping up to check out the cacophony of hoofbeats. Ten Kuwapi women had been used as sex slaves at the fort. While were being set upon horses Jashen began to smell something strange, as did his wife Leliel who walked beside him. After that he grew filled with wonder when he saw the ten wagons of the pilgrims of the Five Corners Free Congregation plodding west along the north bank of the Squaw River. But they were still too far away to identify.

"It's not a respectable wilderness anymore!" Jashen's wife muttered to herself in the language and idiom of the whites when she saw how exasperated her husband was over what seemed to be a sudden infestation of white soldiers and now white settlers.

The Stiffnecks saw the Kuwapi approach and pointed rifles at them, but Jashen saw the lead wagon was driven by a man he recognized from his vision quest several years prior. Jashen smiled, dismounted, took off his headdress and he was recognized in turn. "We meet again, Pastor Mark Lange," he said, “just as The Teacher foretold."

And the settlers were entirely thrilled by his words, even as they had been when two other B'nei Elohim met them in Missouri.

"Jashen! Leliel!" Mark brought his own wagon to a halt and jumped down to embrace the young man. The rifles among the wagon train were all lowered and put out of sight.