The Man From Forever. Dawn Flindt

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СКАЧАТЬ far as he could run in a long day, the horizon a union of sky and earth. Knife gripped in fingers strong enough to build a fine tule canoe, he balanced his weight on his powerful thighs and spun in a slow circle. Shock sliced into him, almost making him bellow.

      The mother lake that had always fed his people had shrunk! Shock turned into rage, then beat less fiercely as the emotion that had brought him out here reasserted itself.

      The enemy.

      Only, if he could believe his senses, this unknown thing wasn’t a soldier or settler. The knowledge tore at his belief in who and what he was in a way that had never happened before. The morning the army had set fire to the tribe’s winter village, he’d felt as if the energy of a thousand volcanoes had been unleashed inside him. This, too, was a volcano—heat and fire.

      Sucking in air, he forced himself to seek the source of the heat. For a heartbeat he thought he’d spotted a deer or antelope, but his keen eyesight soon brought him the truth.

      A woman was out there, so far away that he could tell little about her except that she was unarmed, lean and long, graceful. She walked alone, stepping carefully and yet effortlessly over lava rock and around brush sharp enough to tear flesh.

      The enemy, this woman?

      She stopped, head cocked and slightly uplifted. Her arms remained at her side, yet there was a tension to them that struck a familiar chord inside him. He viewed the world of his childhood and his ancestors’ childhood through untrusting eyes. She was doing the same, trying to make sense of something that kept itself hidden from her.

      Let her be afraid.

      He slipped around rocks and bunchgrass until he was close enough that if he had bow and arrow, he could bring her down. She was too skinny to survive a harsh winter, and yet he found something to his liking about that. He imagined her under him, arms and legs in constant motion. She would wrap herself around him, nipping, digging her fingers into his back until the volcano she’d turned him into exploded. She’d absorb his energy, share hers with him, her cries echoing in the distance.

      Angry, he forced away the dangerous thought. This was no willing Maklaks maiden. The strange woman wore clothes he’d never seen, her sturdy shoes made from an unknown material. She didn’t belong here, was so stupid that she stood alone and vulnerable on land fought over by Indian and white.

      Didn’t belong here? Yes, her bare arms didn’t know what it meant to be assaulted by winter cold and summer heat, and yet she looked around her with wanting and loneliness, her eyes and soft mouth telling him of the turmoil inside her, tapping a like unrest inside him. Had her emotions reached him somehow and pulled him from the place where he believed he would spend eternity?

      Why?

      Chapter 1

      Six months later

      Home.

      No, not home, but understanding, maybe.

      It was going to be a glorious day—hot but unbelievably clean—the kind of day that made a person glad to be alive and put life into perspective. At least it did if that person had a handle on herself. On that thought, Victoria—Tory—Kent opened her car door and stepped out. Although night shadows still covered the land, the birds were awake. Their songs filled the air and made her smile.

      This land was so deceptively desolate, miles and miles of blackened rock. When she’d first seen the Lava Beds National Monument of Northern California, her impression had been that the country was a harsh joke, a massive, lifeless testament to the power of volcanic eruption and little more. But it wasn’t lifeless after all. She would have to share it with other visitors and park personnel. At least it was too early for anyone else to be at the parking lot near the site that had been named Captain Jack’s Stronghold, after the rebel Modoc chief who once lived here. For a little while, her only companions would be the deer and birds and antelope and scurrying little animals that somehow found a way to sustain themselves on the pungent brush and scraggly trees that found the lava-strewn earth, if not rich, at least capable of sustaining life.

      A distant glint of light caught her attention, pulling her from the persistent and uneasy question of what she was doing here when the opportunity of a lifetime waited on the Oregon coast. Concentrating, she realized that the rising sun had lit distant Mount Shasta. Although it was June, snow still blanketed the magnificent peak. This morning, the snow had taken on a rosy cast, which stood out in stark contrast to the still-dark, still-quieted world she’d entered.

      What was it she’d read? That the Modocs who once roamed this land, and who had murdered her great-great-grandfather, considered Shasta sacred. Looking at it now, she understood why.

      “Are you still around, spirits?” she muttered softly, not surprised that she’d spoken aloud. Ever since her too-brief visit last winter, the isolated historic landmark had remained on her mind—although haunted might be a more appropriate term.

      While at work, she’d managed to keep her reaction to herself, but no one was watching her today. In fact, even her boss, the eminent and famous anthropologist Dr. Richard Grossnickle, didn’t know what she was doing. She’d tell him once she joined him at the Alsea Indian village site, maybe.

      After making sure she had her keys with her, she locked her car and started up the narrow paved path that would take her through the stronghold, one of the high points of the monument and where some one hundred and fifty Modoc men, women and children had spent the winter of 1873. She’d taken no more than a half-dozen steps before turning to look back at her car for reassurance. It was the only vehicle in the parking lot, the only hunk of metal and plastic and rubber amid miles and miles of nothing. Behind the car lay a surprisingly smooth grassland and beyond that the faint haze that was Tule Lake. The grasses, she knew, existed because years ago much of the lake had been drained to create farmland out of the rich lake bottom.

      Ahead of her—

      The land tumbled over on itself, a jumble of hardened lava, hardy sagebrush, surprisingly fragrant bitterbrush, ice-gray rabbitbrush. The plants’ ability to find enough soil for rooting here made her shake her head in wonder. She knew they provided shelter for all kinds of small animals and hoped her presence wouldn’t disturb the creatures.

      It probably would. After all, this time of day—fragile dawn—belonged to those who lived and died here, not to intruders like herself. Intruder? If your ancestor had fought and died here, his blood soaking into the earth, did that give you some kind of claim to the land?

      Was that why she hadn’t been able to shake it from her mind and had to come back? Because she had some kind of genetic tie to this place?

      After a short climb, she found herself at the end of the paved area. Day was emerging in degrees, as if one layer after another was being lifted to reveal more and more detail. From the relative distance of the parking lot, the stronghold had looked like nothing more than a brush-covered rise, but she’d reached the top and was fast learning that depth and distance here obeyed different rules. One minute she was walking on level ground with nothing except weeds to obscure her view. Then, after no more than a dozen or so steps, she’d dropped into a lava-defined gully. The rocky sides trapped her, held her apart from all signs and thoughts of civilization.

      There’d been a box filled with pamphlets at the beginning of the trail, and after depositing her twenty-five cents, she’d taken one of them. A wooden post with a white number 1 on it corresponded to a paragraph in the pamphlet. She was standing at the site of what had been a Modoc defense outpost. From strategic СКАЧАТЬ