they sleep. not down in the grave but on the soft, loose mound born of it. the hole is filled in, tamped down, but they couldn’t quite return the dirt they originally took. for the first night since they fled near on two months ago, lucy sleeps heavy. dreamless. though she doesn’t remember sam coming to bed, there in the morning is sam’s body beside hers, dirty and stinking of life.
wet has visited overnight, those distant clouds issuing damp breath. sam’s face is beaded. dirt’s thickened to mud on their skins. when lucy tries to clean sam’s cheek, her finger leaves a streak of even darker brown.
she cocks her head, raises a second finger. draws a second streak parallel to the first.
two tiger stripes.
“good morning,” lucy says to the skull that guards the grave. it ignores her, of course, as it ignores the western hills behind. it faces the mountains’ end. on this morning, the air boding a new season, it seems lucy can see farther than before. squint, and can’t she see the peak of the last mountain? squint, and don’t the clouds resemble lace? squint, and can’t she see a new white dress, and broad streets, and a house of wood and glass?
lucy presses her fingers to her wrist. her thighs. her cheeks and neck and chest, avoiding the new soreness there. on the surface she’s no fatter and no thinner than she was the night before, but something inside has changed, laid to rest with ba’s body. wet on her cracked lips. she smiles, small at first, wary of tearing dry flesh. then bigger. she licks her lips.
water is coming back to the world.
quietly, so as not to wake sam, lucy moves through the camp unmaking the home sam built for burial. she unweaves the grass mats and lays the blades over the grave to hide it. she drops the stones back in the stream. she plucks up the branches and smooths mud over their holes. she packs their gear. she saddles nellie.
by the time sam sits up, looking around in bewilderment, lucy has made ba’s gravesite look wild once more, as he liked.
“wake up, sleepyhead. it’s time to go.”
“where?” sam says thickly.
“onward. to hot meals. white bread. meat. a nice long bath.” lucy claps her hands. “clean new clothes. a bandana and pants that fit for you. a new dress for me.” she grins at sam, who blinks in that sticky way. lucy faces the tiger skull and points. then she pulls her hand up. squints down its line as if down a gun’s barrel. she aims at the horizon. “once we get past the mountains, we’ve plenty of time to find a new home.”
and sam says, “we arehome.”
sam stands. walks east as lucy wants. but sam stops too soon. plants a foot on the tiger’s skull.
“here,” sam says, clearly now.
one foot raised, head thrown back, hands on hips: sam doesn’t realize the image this calls up. lucy’s history books were filled with conquering men who stood this way. flags waved behind them in land emptied of buffalo and indians
lucy drops to her knees, trying to nudge sam’s boot away. sam stands firm. gone the tapping impatience.
“spurs!” lucy says. “a proper town will have proper spurs.”
“i don’t need ’em for nellie. just like we don’t need any old town.”
“we can’t survive out here. there’s nothing. no people.”
“what’d people ever do for us?” sam runs the tip of a boot over the skull’s teeth. an eerie music rises from the dead mouth. “there’s tigers here. buffalo. freedom.”
“dead tigers. dead buffalo.”
“once upon a time,” sam says, and what can lucy do but listen?
once upon a time, these hills were barren. and they weren’t hills yet. they were plains. no sun, only ice. nothing grew till the buffalo came. some say they crossed a bridge of land over the western ocean, and that the bridge sank from the weight of their passage.
the buffalo’s hooves plowed the earth, and their breath warmed it, and in their mouths they carried seeds, and in their hides they carried birds’ nests. their hooves made gullies to hold the streams, their wallows made valleys. they spread east, south, through mountains and plains and forest. across the territories so that there was a time they walked near every inch of this country, bigger with every generation born, stretching up to fill the open sky.
and then, long after the indians, came new men, from a different direction. these men sowed bullets in place of seeds. they were puny and yet they pushed the buffalo back, and back, till the last herd was rounded up in a valley not far from here. a pretty valley with a deep river running through. the men intended to rope the buffalo instead of killing them. they intended to tame them, and mix them into their cattle. shrink them down to size.
but when the sun rose, the men saw that hills had risen overnight.
those hills were the bodies of a thousand thousand dead buffalo that had walked into the river and drowned.
the hills stank so high the men were forced to leave. even after birds picked the buffalo clean, the river never flowed again, and what grew back between the bones wasn’t the same green grass. it was yellow, cursed, dry. no good for planting. no one can settle these hills the proper way till the buffalo decide to come back.
a dozen times lucy has heard this story. it was ba’s favorite. but teacher leigh laughed and showed, in a book, the truth of the last herd of buffalo, kept in a rich man’s garden far to the east. the creatures in the drawing did not stretch skyward like these ancient bones. captivity had diminished them to the size of docile cows. pure sentiment, the teacher chided. a pretty little folktale.
after that, when ba told any story, lucy no longer saw buffalo parting the grass with broad shoulders, or tiger stripes slipping through shadow. she saw only the empty space in ba’s lying mouth, where once there was a tooth.
“like you said,” lucy reminds sam. “this is cursed land.”
“what if we’renot cursed? the buffalo came from across the ocean—just like us. and the tiger marked ba special.”
“you can’t trust everything ba said. besides, things are different now. the territory’s been civilized, improved. we can follow suit.”
the tiger’s snarl sits in sam’s mouth. this time it points at lucy.
