Skull Moon

Longtree's skin went cold. The back of his neck went rigid with gooseflesh. "Just a wolf," he said dryly.

Bowes licked his lips. "I surely hope so."

Longtree fed a cigarette into his mouth, lit it. Bowes joined him. They were in a bad place here and they needed very much to steel their nerves. Somehow. Longtree was used to trouble, he fed off it like a leech off blood. He was not scared of it, it was part of who and what he was. But this…Jesus, this place, the atmosphere was simply noxious, simply rotten and pestiferous. Longtree felt for sure they were not alone, that cold and malefic eyes scanned them from the mists. He couldn't seem to shake it. A hush had fallen over the surrounding hills and woods. Shadows rose up and paraded around them.

Longtree felt like he was carved from wood.

"You feel it don't you?" Bowes said.

"Yes."

The images of that burial ground at night were locked hard in Longtree's mind where, he supposed, they'd linger now forever, showing up in nightmares and at four in the morning when he jerked awake with the sweats. The moon gleamed sickly off the graves and cairns of stones, casting huge, nebulous shadows. Crooked, black trees rose up from the frozen, cracked ground, their skeletal limbs like dead fingers scratching at the sky. There were great towers of rock and broken slabs fringed with frost and carved with grotesque images of animals and nameless gods. They raged underfoot and climbed into the dismal sky. And everywhere, a strange mephitic odor of mold and rot.

"Can't say I like this place much," Longtree said.

Bowes looked at him with a cold glare in his eyes and looked away.

There were bones everywhere, animal bones. The skeletal trees were decorated with them. Some were fresh, bleached white with bits of meat clinging to them, others gray and cracked with age. All were covered with frost. They were from large animals. Longtree saw a few horse skulls, half-buried in the uneven ground.

"Why the bones?" he asked.

"It's a custom with these people to kill the deceased's favorite horse upon burial of its master," Bowes pointed out. "Sort of a sacrifice, I guess. That and the Skull Society, maybe."

"Up there," Longtree said, gesturing to a low bluff crowded with dark shapes.

"That's the place," Bowes said.

The graves of Crazytail's clan were set on a long, low bluff of misshapen, craggy trees. Wooden frames-some new, some old, others impossibly ancient and crumbling-were set about, covered in tanned buffalo hides scrawled with drawings and weird letters. Other frames carried the stretched and sunbleached hides of wolves. There were wooden staffs driven into the hard earth, decorated up with feathers, paint, and beads. On them were the skulls of wolves and men. Dozens and dozens of them. They were all yellowed, cracked, ancient.

Bowes set the lantern down atop a cairn of stones. It was a recent piling. These stones didn't have the weathered, arid look of the others and they weren't covered in blankets of furry, winter-dead moss and fungus.

"My guess is Red Elk's under here," Bowes said.

Longtree, the tails of his coat flapping in the wind, said, "Let's take a look."

It took them about thirty minutes to remove the stones, most were frozen in place and only a good blow from a shovel would loosen them. Longtree then took the pickax and broke through the frozen ground. None of it was easy. The frost line went down a good ten inches and the earth splintered with each blow like flint.

"That's good," Bowes said. He took the shovel and carefully dug through the soft, sandy earth. "The Blackfeet don't bury their kin very deep. Shouldn't have to dig down," he grunted, "more than a few…feet."

When they caught sight of a flap of cloth, Bowes used his hands to clear away the soil. Red Elk had been wrapped in a blanket. Bowes, with what seemed genuine respect for the dead, gently pulled the blanket open. Beneath, there wasn't a body, but something that looked like a buffalo skin shroud, stitched up and painted with images of the sun and moon.

"We'll have to cut this open to take a look at him, " Bowes said, like it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

Longtree kneeled next to the body, pulling his knife from its sheath. "Just one quick look," he said. He cut the buffalo sinew stitching as far down as where he figured Red Elk's waist would be. With one look at Bowes, he pulled back the skin shroud.

"Are you going to tell me what we're looking for now?" Bowes asked.

"You'll know it when you see it."

Red Elk had been buried in his finest. He wore a shirt of soft antelope skin and leggings of the same. Both were decorated up with dyed porcupine quills, feathers, beads, and little bells. The women who'd prepared him for burial, as was the custom, had painted up his face with intricate streaks of white clay and earthen yellows and blacks. A war club ornamented with eagle feathers was sewn up in the shroud with him, as were his tobacco pouch and medicine bundle, both of the softest unborn buffalo calfskin.