Lying by the opening between cave and tunnel was a neatly stacked, roughly human-shaped pile of rocks. The smell came from it. The grave was surrounded by a circle of carefully arranged acorns. It was a small grave, signifying the death of a child.
The spirits went when the world changed. The white man brought his own spirits. Let his spirits protect you, John, otherwise you’re as naked as a child.
Don’t think about it. The Indian skirted the grave and stepped into the tunnel. In doing so, he walked into a horror that nearly made him faint.
Several cubicles had been blasted out of the rock by miners and used for storage areas. Some were still in use. There was an ancient pile of pickaxes, pitons, and old candlelamp hats stacked in one, along with a fiberglass helmet stamped with the name Jameson. Some of the cubicles had also been used as graves, but of a different type from the one on the floor. Here the bodies had lain exposed. All that was left were bones, complete skeletons like none the Indian had ever seen in his life.
The bones belonged to infants so deformed that they could not have survived a single hour after birth. He turned up one tiny skull with a single eyehole set on one side, a misaligned jaw with huge incisors and a thinned layer of bone where the other eye should be. He found spines looped in circles, legs that articulated backward, doglike crouching demons with little human heads, and one skull fused tightly to a breastbone without a neck. They were tiny, pitiable bones.
His spirit was a monster. The white man had been right. The Indian had seen deformities before, mostly misbred dogs and horses, weak and sickly and crippled. Those were one-shot accidents. This nightmare had taken generations to produce.
The smoke thickened against the ceiling, flowing its silent way upward. There were cracks in the roof, through which it disappeared. The tunnel had careful, constant ventilation. The Indian followed the lights. He passed a cubicle whose roof had been chipped to a cone with a smoke hole in the center. Hickory branches smoldered on a rock shelf. Sides of meat—deer, bear, squirrel, even fish—were stacked and hung from branch crosspieces.
Around a corner was a vaulted room with a light that painted the opposite room. Upon this wall the Indian saw the shadow of the giant, elongated and wavering with each flicker of flame. He drew back his arrow and stepped in front of the entrance.
The giant was standing by a large candle. He had been waiting for the Indian.
A small niche had been carved into the wall at floor level. Surrounding it was a pile of acorns. Within the niche was a human skull propped on a metal miner’s spike that had been rammed into the rock.
For a moment the only sound was the crackle of the burning hickory branches and the beating of their own hearts. The Indian looked squarely into the giant’s face.
“Natliskeliguten,” said the Indian.
The red eyes went down to the bow and arrow. His breath wheezed out of the thin nostrils. Then the horned face looked up at the Indian again, and the mouth split in a grin revealing large yellowed molars.
“You betrayed me,” the Indian said. “You kill people. You’re no spirit. You can’t give me a name.”
The face contorted into something resembling hatred. The head swirled with greasy smoke from the candle.
The Indian stepped warily back, planning to sink the arrow in its chest in one quick movement.
The giant flicked out his arm with the speed of a striking cobra. He splashed out the candle in a sizzle of hot fat as the Indian loosed his arrow and heard it clatter along the floor.
The Indian stepped down the tunnel and kneeled on the floor, covering the doorway. The giant walked out. The Indian fired an arrow into its leg.
The giant walked away from him up the tunnel, the arrow bouncing like a poorly attached pin. His hand grasped it, pulled it free, and threw it away. The next arrow sank into his shoulder. He pulled out that one and crumpled it.
The Indian drew a third arrow and walked up the tunnel too. Blood glittered on the floor. The giant did not try to run. He did not turn to attack. He merely walked steadily up past the smokeroom as the Indian coughed his way along behind.
The giant paused at the small grave and looked down at it. Then he doused one of the candles, cutting the light severely. Then he entered one of the cubicles, and the Indian heard him moving equipment.
The Indian waited with growing puzzlement, with the string pulled back till it bisected his nose. The giant backed slowly out of the cubicle carrying a wooden box.
“Look at me,” said the Indian.
The giant looked at him. Through the peepsight of the bow, he saw the fading, flecked paint on the box reading DYNAMITE. The giant raised the box high over his head, ready to smash it to the ground.
He was killing himself! Next to the grave of the child. The last natliskeliguten, the one that Coyote missed, was ending his own life without the Indian’s help.
The Indian released the arrow and dropped to the floor without seeing where it went. He heard the box smash on the rocks, then the soft plop of an explosion that blew dynamite tubes over the floor. These exploded on impact with lazy, weakened detonations that pulled the walls and ceiling down around the giant.
When the Indian looked up he saw a groaning mass of rock blocking off the tunnel. One last light wavered on the shaft. Guttural rumbles sounded from deep within the walls.
The Indian leaped up and ran down the tunnel as the collapsing ceiling sent a plug of concussed air down the shaft, dousing the lights.
He snatched a handful of smoldering hickory sticks from the smokeroom, their weak light the only illumination to be found in the mine. He was running down the shaft, deeper into the mountain, holding the sticks aloft like flags, when thousands of tons of granite, limestone, slate, and lastly that vein of copper ore for which those rabid miners had searched in vain, came down in a long, trembling, settling, endless crunch like jaws grinding together.
Jones and Wallace were cranking gears up the back road into Oharaville when they heard the rocks coming down. They knew immediately that Colby was collapsing, fatally weakened by the shafts inside her.
Wallace grabbed the microphone and cried, “Avalanche! The mountain’s coming down!”
“Ten four,” Drake answered in a calm voice. “Take care of yourselves.”
Wallace whined into Oharaville and turned hard left up Bullion Avenue. The rockslide piled down over the mine entrance and the mass following propelled stones and trees into the air which rained down on the buildings. The truck windshield splintered, and rocks drummed on the roof. The buildings swayed and creaked under the onslaught of stone and storm. The SALOON sign flipped to the ground like a playing card as the roof was holed through, over and over. To Jones it sounded as if a hundred men were clearing the town away with axes.
The rain of rocks ceased, leaving a smell of mud which dispersed before the wind. Wallace knew that where the shaft entrance had been was now a featureless mass of muddy rubble whose edges encroached on Bullion Avenue. With a final crack, the church steeple disintegrated over the roof.
They listened to the slide continuing over the rest of the mountain. Jones called up Drake on the radio. “We’re in Oharaville, and that’s as far as we’re going tonight. The lodge road is totaled over.”
“Was there a slide on the east face, too?”
“Do fish live in the sea?” retorted Jones. “That lodge doesn’t stand a chance. It’s not so bad in Oharaville, because we’re high up. I bet it’s taken out most of Hulcher Road on the south, too.”
“Ten four. Wait till things settle down, then try to get to the lodge on foot. It looks like we’ll have to mount a rescue.”