the death and decay. How do you know the name of this animal?”
I explained about Stella’s breeding plans and her hopes that this stallion would take her bloodline to major championships. I paused. “You don’t think this horse was the real target, do you?”
“I don’t know what to think. Days in and we still know little.” FireWind touched my shoulder and we backed away, my flash falling for a moment on his face. He was as distraught as I was, but in the moment the light fell on him, there was something more there too. Vengeance.
We reached my car. I turned off the flash and placed the gear on the hood. I let the big boss have a moment of introspection, his eyes closed, his face lifted as if he was smelling the slow breeze. I thought it smelled like rain and autumn. And then the wind shifted and all I smelled was the stench of death and decay. His face was grieving and reluctant and oddly full of recognition, as if he had been searching for answers and had found them. I said, “You’ve seen something like this before, haven’t you.”
He took his time to answer, lowered his head, and seemed to focus on me in the dark. “Perhaps. In a little town near the Mexican border,” he murmured.
I shifted to show I was listening.
“The town was supposedly cursed by a witch, though not a witch in the white man’s meaning.” I waited and eventually he went on, his cadence and cant dropping into that of a storyteller, slow and painstaking. “It began when four white prospectors came into town for a night of carousing and drinking. While there, they saw a girl from a local tribe, who was bringing jewelry to sell to a white store owner. They took her. Raped and beat her.
“Her name was Sonsee-array. She died several days later.” His voice was without inflection, yet carried weight and power in the soft syllables.
“The girl’s mother was a woman of power among her people, wise in the ancient ways, but willing to trust the white man’s law to deal with this murder. She went to the sheriff.”
I didn’t know what all this had to do with death and decay or a dead stallion, but I had no desire to interrupt. The quiet words drew me in.
“The sheriff laughed at her.”
I flinched at the stark words.
“The grieving mother fell into the trap of pain and grief and anger. She called to the spirits for vengeance. The spirits did not answer as she intended. They counseled peace and forgiveness. The grieving mother turned to the dark spirits instead. They answered her, whispering dark knowledge.
“At dawn three days after Sonsee-array died, the town woke to find the witch sitting inside a circle drawn with white chalk, in the middle of the town crossroads, beating a small drum. Her hair had turned stark white in the days since her tortured and dead daughter had been returned to her. Her eyes had gone white. Her hands had become lined and wrinkled as if she had aged into a crone.
“The townspeople gathered around her chalk circle. The mother, now a witch according to her tribal ways, stopped beating the drum and put her hands flat on the earth. She spoke in her native language, a chant that was bleak and despairing. Then she took her hands off the earth and began to beat on the drum again, while she spoke words the white man did not understand. She beat the drum and chanted those words all day, without stopping, over and over, beneath the hot sun, until sunset, when she stood and stepped over the circle. She walked away.
“In the circle where she had sat was a bone-handled knife with an obsidian blade. The sheriff stepped over the chalk circle and took the knife. Put it into his belt. The next morning, the sheriff fell off his horse, dead. The people of the town began to fall ill. The animals began to fall ill. Chickens, a pig and piglets, a milk cow, all died. The townspeople died. Within a week they were all dead, even the ones who tried to run away.”
I was watching FireWind’s face as he talked, his expression stark and barren.
“I found a dying man on the road to the town and from him heard of the witch and the curse she called down. I left my horse in safety and I walked into the town on the tenth