Skull Moon

Longtree shrugged. "No, I wasn't. I had to be sure. I had to know what I was hunting. The truth, not double-talk. Red Elk was just a dead man when I examined him. He was no beast."

Longtree had been thinking long and hard about what he'd seen in that burial ground. He still didn't buy any of that business about Blood-Medicine, but that mummy had risen from the grave and it had been more beast than man. There was no getting around that; the impossible had happened. But whatever else he might believe, he would never accept that the creature he'd seen was even remotely human. Not even a medicine man could look like that.

"These are interesting tales we're swapping here, girl," he finally said. "Very interesting stuff about the Skull Society, Blood-Medicine, and your grandfather. But they're just tales, aren't they?"

"The Skull Society exists," she said angrily.

"Course they do. But do you really expect me to believe these men are changing themselves into monsters? What I saw was no human being. Wanna tell me what it was?"

"It wasn't Blackfoot."

"I gathered that," Longtree smiled. "No family resemblance…thank God."

She fixed him with a steely glare. "This isn't something to joke about."

"Tell me."

She swallowed. "What you saw, Joseph Longtree, was something my people once worshipped. Something from the beginning of time. They were called the Lords of the High Wood. They were here before men."

"Before the Indians?"

"Before anyone." She pulled her robe tighter around herself. "You were digging in a sacred plot. The place where the last of the Lords were interred countless centuries ago."

"There was an empty grave-"

"And I think you know why. What was in there, now walks again."

"How?" he asked incredulously.

"The Skull Society once worshipped them, ages ago. They would have ways to resurrect them. I know nothing more."

"Don't you?"

She looked angry, mellowing then by degrees. "I commit a sacrilege against my ancestors. I hope they will forgive me. The white man tells us that the Blackfeet Confederacy has only been in this part of the world for three or four hundred years. But that is wrong. We have been here for untold millennia. Our oral traditions reach back thousands of years. Long ago, in what is called the Dark Days, our people came to these mountains. It was so very long ago that the mountains were hills. There were other mountain ranges then that are no more than foothills now. In the Dark Days, the Blackfeet came here, following the herds of beasts upon which they hunted. What they found was a huge forest, a gigantic forest that covered the world. The trees were so tall they touched the sky. And beneath those trees, in the sacred groves and hollows, there was darkness and shadow in which many strange creatures lived. Tradition tells us our ancestors discovered the ruins of ancient cities of stone, all crumbled and collapsed. But these ruins and the dark woods beyond were the hunting grounds of the Skullheads. There were hundreds of them. They were known not only as the Skullheads, but as the Cannibal Giants, The Mountain Lords, Kings of the Hunt, the Eaters of Men.

"Our people made war with them, but the Skullheads were fierce, they were devil-warriors. The only way we were allowed to live and hunt in their forests and glens was by making sacrifice of our children. A dark practice administered by priests who were to become the Skull Society. It went on like this for many, many centuries.

"Eventually, the forests thinned, the swamps dried-up, sunlight penetrated the lairs of the Skullheads. The ruined cities were dust blown away by the winds. Things had changed. Our people grew numerous and strong, but the Skullheads weakened and died. By the time of the dog days, there were but a handful. And these were laid low by our medicine men, bound by the old ways, held and imprisoned. They were buried alive. But they never died. They could not know death as we do. They only waited as the centuries passed. Whenever our people were wronged, one of them was resurrected to dole out punishment, to seek justice. And this is all I know. There is only two or three of them now up in the burial ground. And one of those, walks."

Longtree found it all compelling, a glimpse of prehistory, of the antediluvian world handed down for thousands of years from father to son, mother to daughter.

"Those ruins you spoke of," he said. "The cities-who built them?"

She shook her head. "They were dust long before the Blackfeet came, but the Skullheads did not build those cities, it was another race."

Longtree figured none of that really mattered. "The Skullhead who walks…it'll have to be destroyed."

"I wish you luck."

Longtree nodded. She had said he soon would have bigger enemies than just Lauters. And what did that imply? Was this Lord of the High Wood going to come after him now? He put this to her.

"Possibly," she admitted. "If the Society learns you have opened the grave of one of their gods…"

He sighed. "Then I'd better get him before he gets me."