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By Root 818 0

to him that he had no more than what amounted to a stick-in-the-dirt scrawl that had been acquired not from a past scout mission or any approved federal expedition at all but from a saucer-eyed man he guessed had been a deserter in the War Against the South and had fled North and West to live with mountain lions and night spirits—whatever could stand his stink. That the wretched fellow had expired on the armory floor of the now distant fort at the end of some sort of epileptic fit shortly after unwrapping the sweat- and whiskey-stained excuse of the map did nothing to inspire further confidence.

No, there was something not right about all this. Something was at work in this region, between the Badlands and the Black Hills, that did not follow the pattern he had been accustomed to. Before he had crested the rise and come upon the creek, which was not where it should have been according to the map, or anything he knew about topography, he had had a creeping intuition that there was some presence in this area that posed a far more dangerous threat than any Indian war party.

Now, staring with rock-hard pupils through his binoculars into the wave of subalpine early-summer gaseous green snow grass, he knew with a solar plexus–compressing pressure that he was right. As his old chum Claudius Speerwort back in Turnip would have said, he was “shit certain.”

But before we consider what it was in his binoculars that had brought his gastrointestinal system so to the fore (and there is nothing quite as paralyzing—except perhaps a stroke, a heart attack, momentary blindness, or a pulmonary seizure, all of which he felt were impending), we need to understand that he was not just some young upstart in a stiff blue uniform a long way from the nearest outpost of encroaching civilization.

He knew a great deal about the biting scent of nitrogen in good soil. He knew how to shoe horses and maintain tack, and how to get an ox to budge and not bolt. He had shot his first pheasant with a turkey gun when he was but six, and he knew the perfect temperature for a root cellar. He had a fine eye for the constellations, and the sight of blood did not faze him. He made an excellent and not overly offensive-smelling liniment from fish guts and mallow, and he could recite no fewer than twenty verses of the King James Bible (one of which was on his tongue just then). He was decent on horseback, acceptable with a saber and a rifle, and superior at navigation, having taught himself back in Illinois. This practice, combined with his innate geometric leanings, had led to some not inconsiderable precision as a surveyor. Plus, despite his still tender age, he had savored and been scared by something of the bigger world beyond his father’s farm, including more than a whiff of Lavinia Thorndike’s bodice and at least a hint of the ravages of war—the War Between the States, in other words. (Was a truer name ever given a conflict?)

While too young in his crick-back father’s eyes to avoid his duties on the land at the eruption of the violence, he had finally risked being nailed to their barn door like a squirrel skin and run off ragtag-drummer-boy fashion to join what had become more a river running against him than one forging south and high. It was by then a tide of blood and a tide of terror spilling back northward. What he actually saw to the south was more the flotsam-let’s-go-get-some aftermath of the crisis, but it forever dispelled any youthful fantasies about the nobleness of battle. All too much of it would never leave his dreams.

He remembered a starving boy stealing an amputated limb from a surgeon’s tent to gnaw. The horrors were as common as the bullet-flecked tree trunks, and no one took any notice. Some of those he watched, skulking and limping through burned-out orchards, seemed more machine than human—beast mechanisms escaped from some delirium. He could remember thinking to his young self, War is an excellent way of hiding deformities and criminal behavior. It is a harvest of madness.

Now, that may seem like an unusual thought for a young turnip-and-potato-growing