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Beside him Virginia Kane drew a sharp breath. "Hunkalowanpi!" she said.
"And what would that be when it's up and about?" Edain murmured.
"It's the making-relatives-ceremony. Red Leaf must have been really impressed with you guys. You're about to be adopted."
The platters went around again. Ritva contemplated a cracked marrow bone, decided not to, and belched gently.
"So, the big one with the brown beard is your guy?" one of the Lakota girls asked her.
She was Red Leaf's sister's daughter, and her name was Winona-which actually turned out to be a Sioux name, and meant something like First Female Kid -but she looked a little different from her uncle, her eyes much narrower and more sharply slanted, and her nose nearly snubbed.
"No, he's my sister Mary's," the Dunedain said. "She won the toss when we flipped for him. I still say she cheated."
Everyone laughed. There were a couple of dozen of young Ogallala women within earshot, watching the men dancing in a way that involved hoops, drums, flutes, chanting and some extremely acrobatic maneuvers, and the feasting was at the stage Dunedain called filling-up-the-corners. The drink was mainly herbal teas and the vile, and vilely weak, airag, but there was beer and some just-barely-passable wine in jugs as well. She took a mouthful of frybread; one of the stews had enough chilies to pass for hot even in Bend.
And all of these girls are just as curious as I would be in their shoes… or out of them.
"I did not cheat!" Mary chided. "You just have no skill in coin-flipping, Ritva. Anyway, I won paper-scissors-rock for him, too! Plus, I had to catch him all on my own."
"Hell, I always said you should make 'em chase you until you catch them," Virginia Kane said.
"Or until they catch you and you scalp them," Mathilda said dryly.
I don't think she likes Virginia much, Ritva thought. Don't worry, Matti, Rudi will always love you best. Though yo u 're driving him up the wall, poor boy…
There was another laugh at that, but there was a trace of uneasiness in it, and the glances Virginia got were halfway between admiring and apprehensive.
"That's nice dancing," Ritva said.
"Oh, that's nothing. You should be here for the Sun Dance-the costumes are gorgeous."
"So, your fellah is the tall, good-looking one with the hair like a sunset?" the teenager said to Mathilda, returning to the subject with terrier persistence.
"Ah… well, we're very good friends."
That produced more giggles. "I'd like to be his good friend too," one young woman said.
"Oh, looks aren't everything," another said. "He might be one of those I-am-a-buffalo-bull types, bone clear through the head."
Mathilda bristled, and Ritva smiled as she went on: "Well, he's smart, too, and a fine swordsman"-her blush went up to glowing-coal levels at the laugh that got-"and a good hunter and he has a wonderful singing voice!"
"But can he cook?" one asked teasingly.
"He'll get a chance to hunt," another said. "The itancan says the buffalo need trimming."
That brought a bit of a groan. Ritva raised her brows. "You don't like hunting?" she said.
"The men get all the fun, and we get to do all the work."
We'll see about that! Ritva thought.
TheScourgeofGod
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Blood yields life, the land's deepest gift
Is taken and given From: The Song of Bear and Raven
Attributed to Fiorbhi
"It's different, seeing so many together," Rudi said quietly. "They're impressive enough one by one, but it's something else here."
The rise they were on was a hill only by prairie standards, but it gave them a good view. The bison were in clumps and straggling groups and lone individuals, grazing their way across the rippling plain and working gradually northward; the grass was fetlock-high before them, and cropped to an inch or less behind. The morning sun cast their outlines eastward, until the shape was like cloud shadow moving over the plains.
And as you raised your eyes there were more, and more, and more. .. almost to the edge of sight. The wind was from the south, and it brought the scent of them, like cattle but harsher, a wild musky smell. Birds flew about the great animals' feet, snapping up the insects they stirred; a twenty-strong pack of wolves hoping to cut out a calf had sheered off to the westward when the mounted humans arrived. Several pair of golden eagles swept the sky above, seven-foot wing-spans tiny with height, waiting for the herd to flush something bigger. As he watched, one of them folded its pinions and struck like a bronze-colored thunderbolt.
Rudi mentally drew a box, rough-counted the buffalo within and multiplied.
Eighty or ninety thousand head, he thought. I don't think I've ever seen that many of anything breathing but birds in one place before.
He could feel his hair starting to bristle; the low rumble of their hooves was like a vibration that echoed in the tissues of his lungs and gut. And he could hear the sound of their feeding, nearly a hundred thousand pairs of strong jaws tearing at the Western wheatgrass, needle-and-thread and sagewort.
"Pretty, aren't they?" Red Leaf said, looking down at the mass of moving muscle and bone and horn and smiling with delight. "Never thought I'd see anything like it when I was your age, except in a movie. This is a cow-calf herd-cows, calves, yearling and two-year bulls. The big herd bulls mostly stay away until the rutting season, in another couple of months."
" Awesome was more the word I was thinking, not pretty," Rudi said. "And so many! Weren't they rare before the Change?"
"There were a couple of hundred thousand around, on ranches mainly," Red Leaf said. "And they can double every three years, if there's room, even if you harvest a third every year-you just take the bulls. They only need one for every twenty or so cows. There's another herd twice as big as this a few miles north; millions altogether."
Mathilda blinked. "Do they go away in the winter?"
"No, they just scatter a bit. Storms that'll kill half the cattle on a range don't even bother 'em-they don't freeze and they can get at grass through any ordinary snow."
"Why hunt a lot of them now, then? Why not a bit at a time when you need them?" she asked.
Red Leaf nodded. "We do take a few every so often, for fresh meat; and we have a winter hunt, for robes-that's when the hair's best. But this is the best time of year to make pemmican; you dry the meat, grind it up to powder and flakes, mix it with melted fat and pour it into rawhide parfleche bags. It'll keep for three, four years if you're careful. It makes great soup base, with a little dried onion."
Mathilda nodded gravely in her turn; she'd tasted the results. Rudi had the same thought: pemmican was convenient and nourishing, and that was about all you could say for it.
Red Leaf raised a brow and waved at the prairie. "I know what you're thinking. But this has been a good year; good rain, good grass-third good year in a row. Sure as fate, though, we get bad droughts every so often. Sometimes for years at a time. Then most of the herds will die, cattle and tatonka both, or we have to slaughter everything except some of the breeding stock to let the grazing recover faster. So we keep a couple of years' food on hand. That way after a dry-year dieback we can harvest less. Then they'll breed back faster."
Mathilda nodded thoughtfully. "Very sensible," she said.
"Pemmican isn't hump steak by a long shot, but it beats starving to death," the itancan said. "Which is what the wolves do when the rains fail."