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 lad who longed to ride horses and draw maps to have, but there you have it. War as camouflage, and a means of harnessing the energy of widespread psychic disorder. Perhaps young Todd was drawing a bigger map than he realized.
In any case, all these diversions and perversions streamed through his mind on the edge of that overly exuberant rivulet because of what he could not escape in his field glasses. Because of who or, rather, what he saw, relaxed and waiting for him as if his arrival had been long anticipated.
He was looking at a still young man of around thirty, not much older. He was not an Indian—it was hard to say his breeding—and he was mounted on a donkey, but a donkey that was twenty hands high. The man wore some kind of military costume, but unlike any Todd had seen before. It was not a Civil War uniform. Nor was it was some old Mexican uniform from the war of 1845. When he looked more closely, he saw that the emblem on the man’s chest depicted a wheelbarrow with flames rising from it. On the man’s head was a kind of hat made from the pelt of a skunk. Then, to Todd’s astonishment, the hat stirred and the young cavalryman realized that the skunk was still alive! The man was wearing a live skunk—like a hat. And a very ceremonious headdress it appeared, too. The acid in Todd’s stomach roared like the creek.
In the Man Beyond’s rifle sheath was a firearm that appeared to be made of glass and in his belt, like a saber, hung a weird-shaped hunting horn, while on the pommel of his saddle perched a powerful pure white gyrfalcon.
The thing Todd found unaccountable was that the man, the skunk, the hunting bird, and the donkey all waited as blithely as could be amid a large herd of smoldering black bison, the biggest Todd had ever seen. Even standing still (and as if at attention), the massive horned and hump-shouldered animals looked more like fur-draped locomotives than even gargantuan ungulates.
Then, through the field glasses, Todd watched as the man raised his arm. The bison did not react, but the falcon flung itself into the air with a strength that Todd could feel all the way across the creek. Beating its wings ferociously, the raptor soared up over the grassland and came at him. The horse soldier was so surprised that he nearly dropped his binoculars. Faster and harder the fierce white bird came, so that Todd was compelled to reach for his Colt revolver—but then, by God, the man on the donkey waved at him!
Todd got distracted and had to duck as the falcon plucked his hat clean off his head. Unfortunately, in veering to escape the clutching talons the lieutenant slipped out of his saddle and fell on his ass, which startled his steed further and made him see red for a moment. (In fact, the falcon had nicked him.) By the time he was seated astride his spooked horse again, staunching the faint trickle of blood from his hairline, the man across the creek was holding his hat. The man then offered the cavalry officer’s brim back to the beak of the bird.
This time the falcon swooped out over the creek and released the hat into the water. Todd let out a slight cry at