Chapter 37

The rooster crowed again, and Brisling threw off his blankets. Shuffling across the ice-cold floor to the window, he ripped aside the curtains. There he was, the feathered little fuck, strutting right down the middle of the street. A frost had settled in the night, covering the town in a blanket of white rust, the houses, the barns, the tractors, the single gas pump outside the general store. Even the rooster seemed to wear a silvery coat.

Letting the curtains fall, Brisling checked his phone then headed to the bathroom for his morning ritual of shit, shower and shave. He dressed for a cold day and went downstairs to partake in the breakfast portion of the bed-and-breakfast covenant, fluffy scrambled eggs cut with mayonnaise just like his mother used to do, pork sausage, more pork sausage, and fluffy buttermilk pancakes topped with sweet cream butter and gallons of real maple syrup—all the miraculous foods his cardiologist had forbidden him to eat. As if it mattered.

Mopping the syrup from his plate with a bit of pancake, he wondered how long it would be before he felt the first twinge of JCAV. Would his mind unravel slowly, knot by knot, or all at once? He popped three pills into his mouth, an aspirin,another anti-platelet drug intended to keep his new coronary artery stents fromclotting off, and a beta blocker. Then he washed them down with some orange juice. Death from JCAV might be lurking just around the corner, but he sure as hell was not going to have another heart attack before then.

Senator Flaherty had made good on his promise. He had provided Brisling with the name of the person who in 1992 took custody of the Burns Ice Man, a ten-thousand-year-old body found preserved in cave ice—the same body Carl Lundquist was studying when he became infected with JCAV. According to Flaherty, a local Native American tribe had sued for custody of the Ice Man, claiming him to be an ancient ancestor. Eventually, the tribe won their case, and the body, along with all research materials and data, were handed over to an attorney representing the tribe, one Saul Gordon. According to Flaherty, Saul Gordon lived on Steens Mountain, deep in the arid southeastern corner of Oregon, close to Nevada. The nearest town was Frenchglen, population twelve, a roadside oasis that offered gas, a small general store and an old two-story ranch house converted into a hotel. In the spring, the Frenchglen Hotel served birdwatchers visiting Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and in the fall, hunters headed for Steens Mountain.

When Brisling had arrived the evening before, he was greeted by Frenchglen's mayor, postmaster and fire chief all bundled into the diminutive figure of a retired ornithologist who called herself Dr. Peggy, even though she only had a Ph.D. According to Dr. Peggy, Saul Gordon lived with his teenage granddaughter, Demi, on a house up on the mountain. They were probably the only Jews for a hundred miles in any direction, but rumor had it Demi was half-Native. She was a peculiar girl, "touched" people said. Dr. Peggy called her "neurodivergent," whatever the hell that meant. Twice each week, Demi would stop by the general store on her way back from playing basketball in Burns, fifty miles north. On occasion, Saul could be seen visiting folks around the county, offering pro bono legal advice.

Hot coffee splashed into Brisling's mug. "How's everything?" said the hotel's owner. He was tall, skinny and deeply tanned, his jet-dyed hair and handlebar mustache worthy of a Vaudeville show.

Brisling wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. "Breakfast is amazing. But my room was colder than a witch's tit."

"Sorry about that. I'll bring up an electric space heater." He grimaced and worked his elbow back and forth a few times. "Feels like there's weather moving in. Are you still thinking about going up on Steens Mountain?"

"That's why I'm here."

"Then you'd better go soon. Might be an early snow." He produced a ravaged newspaper and slapped it down next to Brisling's elbow. "You asked if I knew anything more about old Saul Gordon. Well, read that. Strange days, my friend. Strange days."

Brisling set aside the wad of Columbus Day sale ads, adjusted his glasses, and began reading an article on the twelfth page written by the attorney himself.

Ghost Dance Returns to Harney County

By Saul Gordon

Yet a little while, and the wicked will be no more; you will look carefully at his place, and he will not be there. But the humble will inherit the land and delight themselves in an abundance of peace.

Psalm 37: 10–11

According to the Masoretic Text

On a recent cool evening, just east of Steens Mountain, near Wildhorse Springs, thirty members of the Burns-Paiute Tribe gathered in a circle beneath the wheeling stars, chanting

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The Milky Way lies there.

The Milky Way lies there.

It was the Ghost Dance, a ritual not performed regularly in Oregon and Nevada since the late eighteen-hundreds. Yet the traditional round dance, forever tied to Wounded Knee and Sitting Bull, has been cropping up across Harney County since the root-gathering ceremonies in May.

Asked why people were doing the Ghost Dance again, tribal elder Delbert Mackai, age 81, had this to say: "Funny thing. No one seems to know."

The Ghost Dance religion traces its origins to a nineteenth-century Northern Paiute prophet called Wovoka. Son of a shaman from Nevada, Wovoka spent most of his youth working on the ranches of White Christian settlers, who knew him as Jack Wilson.

Wovoka's career as a prophet began on January 1, 1889, when he awoke from a coma (likely induced by scarlet fever) just as the sun emerged from a total eclipse. People said he saved the sun and the universe with it. Wovoka said he had received a heavenly message. If people lived righteously and performed the Ghost Dance, he said, God would rid the land of the wicked White settlers and return it to the humble Native people."

"Wovoka was raised Christian," said Mackai. "He believed in the Bible, blessed are the meek and all that. That's how he saw the world around him."

Wovoka's Ghost Dance religion spread like wildfire across the West. Leaders among the Lakota Sioux took Wovoka's prophecies to mean God would side with them in their battles against the U.S. Army.

Emboldened by prophecy, Lakota Sioux warriors began to wear specially consecrated "Ghost Shirts," which they believed could stop enemy bullets. The state of heightened violence, combined with White paranoia about the "Ghost Dance craze" generated a powder keg. And on December 20, 1890, a single careless shot set it off. When the smoke cleared, over three hundred Lakota men, women, and children lay dead, murdered by the U.S. Army at Wounded Knee Creek. It was a resounding blow to the Ghost Dance Movement and Native American militancy of the nineteenth century.

One of the dancers that night at Wildhorse Springs was Mrs. Iris Frank, aged 98, who was alive in Wovoka's time. "Those of us who saw Wovoka and heard him remember him as a great prophet. When he died, we all expected him to come back again. But that was many years ago."

As the group dispersed beneath the bright Milky Way, Delbert Mackai pulled me aside. "I can't explain why the Ghost Dance is back, but maybe something's coming. People I know are stockpiling supplies like that, just in case."

It's been nearly a century since Wovoka's died. But maybe something is coming after all. Maybe Wovoka was right. Maybe we all should be stockpiling supplies, just in case.

Whatever lies ahead, Delbert Mackai offered this last bit of advice: "Keep dancing."

Saul Gordon is an attorney who resides in Harney County

The back of Brisling's hand smacked the table, rattling the silverware. A prophecy about God clearing the land of wickedness and returning to the righteous and the meek? It all sounded a hell of a lot like JCAV, except instead of God clearing the land, it was someone playing God with a genetically engineered virus designed to kill everyone on the planet except for two chosen people, Native Americans and Jews.

Saul Gordon had known all along, stockpiling supplies up on his mountain, just in case. The son of a bitch knew.

Stuffing the newspaper into his briefcase, Brisling swallowed the dregs of his coffee and hurried next door to the general store. He dumped an armload of snacks and bottled water on the counter, and the clerk looked up from her crossword puzzle, one blue eye on Brisling, the other off doing its own thing.

"I hear you're going up to Saul Gordon's place," she said, taking his credit card and inexplicably ringing up the total on an old-fashioned brass cash register.

"I guess word spreads fast around here."

She nodded toward the hotel. "From there to here. What kind of rig you got?"

"Jeep Cherokee."

She swiped his card. "Four-by-four or the city type?"

"Four-by-four." He had driven nothing else since losing Judith and the baby in the ice storm.

"You'll do fine then. Just take the north road." She plucked a free Bureau of Land Management map from the rack, spread it across the counter and marked the route. "But don't stray too far from the road."

"Why not?"

"Deer season opened last week. There's already been three accidents. It's like folks just lost their minds. Besides, my brother's up there, and he can't hit the broad side of a barn sober."

A rind of frost coated Brisling's Jeep. As he sat inside, shivering and waiting for the defroster to kick in, something dark clouded his peripheral vision. A black SUV pulled up to the gas pump across the way. Out stepped two men who might as well have had "Feds" stenciled in yellow letters across the backs of their dark jackets—Senator Flaherty's minders, no doubt. Both wore dark sunglasses. The driver was a greasy little bugger with long black hair slicked into a Mafioso-style ponytail. The passenger was a real meathead, six foot five in a long black overcoat, short gray hair and swarthy skin, probably Mexican.

The north road to Steens Mountain was so riddled with washboards Brisling thought he might lose a filling. The mountain, he decided, hardly deserved the label, at least not in comparison to the majestic volcanoes around Seattle. The road climbed gently through stunted trees, eventually emerging onto a sprawling waste of gray and brown, here and there streaked with golden-leaved trees. The land seemed to tilt inexorably skyward, ending abruptly at a long, craggy summit that seemed to scrape the leaden sky.

At a fork in the road, he turned left, away from the summit, and down toward the head of Little Fish Creek where Saul Gordon lived. A narrow drive plunged through a stand of those golden-leaved trees, aspens maybe, and delivered Brisling to a long meadow of tawny grass, still pale with frost. A drab two-story ranch house stood nestled in a pocket of trees. The house needed repainting, but someone had gone through the trouble of installing solar panels on the roof. Three massive white wind turbines towered over the trees behind the house, their egg-beater blades churning in the chilly morning breeze. Despite the impressive show of alternative energy, wood smoke curled invitingly from a stovepipe in the roof of the house.

Grabbing his briefcase from the front passenger seat, Brisling got out of the Jeep and approached the house. He mounted the front steps and knocked on the door. Several pairs of shoes and muddy boots sat on a rack to one side. Between the house and detached garage, someone had created a half basketball court complete with freestanding hoop and three-point arc. Brisling waited in the cold, rubbing his hands together, taunted by the sweet smell of home-fire smoke. At last, the door opened to a shortish, barrel-chestedman in his eighties or nineties. He wore plaid wool slippers and a cozy flannelshirt tucked into blue jeans. Freckles dotted his tanned and wrinkled face,dark-brown eyes darting from side to side beneath bushy red eyebrows. But his hair, lush and wavy, had gone completely white.

Brisling introduced himself and handed over his King County Hospital ID. "Are you Saul Gordon?"

The man examined Brisling's ID then returned it. "I am," he said in clear, high-pitched voice.

"I was wondering if you could answer some questions about the Burns Ice Man."

The attorney glanced over at Brisling's Jeep, frowning. "Depends on what you want to know."

Brisling sighed. "Can we just talk?"

"We're talking right now, doctor."

Brisling shivered. "I meant, inside."

"Tell me why I shouldn't just slam the door shut and lock it?"

"Look, I'll cut to the chase. I know who you are. I know that you represented the tribe. And I know you personally received the Ice Man's body and all related research materials."

"And who told you that?"

"Senator Joseph Flaherty of Massachusetts."

"I see."

"So, can we talk? It's important, believe me. Important enough for a U.S. Senator to unseal federal records. Millions of lives are at stake."

The old man studied Brisling's face. "Alright then. Come on in."

Brisling sighed.

"But take your damned shoes off first."

______________________

Author's note:

Thank you for reading Chapter 37!

If you're interested in reading more about Wovoka and the Ghost Dance Religion, I suggest Michael Hittman's Wovoka and the Ghost Dance, Expanded Edition, University of Nebraska Press.

-Frode