High Plains Tango

Chapter One Not exactly a dark and stormy night, but nonetheless: a strange, far place in a strange, far time, distant buttes with low, wet clouds hanging across their rumpled white faces and long, straight highways running somewhere close to forever. In a settled land, the truly wild places are where nobody is looking anymore. This was a wild place. Enigmatic sign pointing west. Why did the eagle die? Did anyone remember? Some did, but they weren't talking. Red dirt road perpendicular to the highway, heading into the short grass and disappearing over a low rise a half mile out. Other signs, every thirty miles or so, pointing to other roads hinting travel through invisible walls and into other times. If you had a vehicle with enough stamina, maybe turn off on one of them, just for the hell of it. We've all had a fleeting urge to do that. That's what Carlisle McMillan did. He was in no hurry, a traveler without design, a temporary drifter by his own choice. After turning his tan Chevy pickup off westbound pavement onto what the locals called Wolf Butte Road, he headed south past the Dead Eagle Canyon sign. After a while, he stopped his truck and got out, miles from the nearest little town. Late August cool. Mist. Carlisle McMillan stood there for a few moments, boots becoming grass wet, sky water on his face and hands. Easy wind came, went, came again. Silence. Cattails bending, yellow clover riffling as the wind chose. Like a film without a sound trackthe silenceonly deeper. More like a stone coffin at nightfall when the mourners have left and dirt has been shoveled over you. The Cheyenne believed this was sacred ground. Sweet Medicine said it was so. The hawk sitting thirty fence posts south of Carlisle McMillan believed it. Anyone who happened on this place believed it. The smart money would come with food and water, perhaps a sleeping bag, in case an engine failed or a tire relented and the spare was empty. For nothing out here cared about you, that much was clear. Nothing cared whether you lived or died or paid your bills or danced on warm Pacific beaches and made love afterward. There was nothing except silence and wind, and they would be here long after your passing. The Early Ones were buried here in mounds, giving the appearance of sea roll to the prairie. They shuffled across the old land bridges from Asia when the continents were connected in the high north. A century ago, others were buried in this place. Buried where they fell in the wars of Manifest Destiny, the great westward push. You could still find metal buttons from cavalry tunics if you scuffled around in the gravel and looked close. Other things, too, old knife handles, human shoulder bones splintered by lance and bullet, pipe stems. If you dug, you would find more, a lot more. Six inches behind Carlisle McMillan's left rear tire was a tunic button half buried in the mud. The winds of a hundred springs uncovered the button, rain washed it into a creek. The creek carried it onto a sandbar. A bird picked it up and flew toward a nest, dropping it when it turned out to be hard and tasteless. That particular button once fastened the coat of Trooper Jimmy C. Knowles, Seventh Cavalry, who rode behind a man they called Son of the Morning Star. Trooper Knowles thought well of his yellow-haired general and aspired to be a cut-and-paste copy of him. He would have ridden into hell with Son of the Morning Star. And he eventually did. If you can get past the wind, listen beyond the silence, there are old sounds reverberating here. Distant bugles, squeak of cavalry leather, maybe the low thrum of time itself. And faint images of old riders from a long time ago, mounted on fine Appaloosas, breaking from the shadows of Dead Eagle Canyon, running hard across the roll of green prairie, and turning their ponies for aWaller, Robert James is the author of 'High Plains Tango', published 2005 under ISBN 9780307209948 and ISBN 0307209946.