The small search party peered over the edge of the rock outcropping at the western end of the rapids on the Colombia River and looked down at the small encampment below. A pirogue of a fur trader was stretched out above the river line, having been portaged around the rapids earlier in the evening. It would go into the river in two days after the two men by the campfire below had recovered fully from having taken it out of the water above the rapids and carried it around the obstruction.

Mighty Rapids, chief of the fierce Ravenclaws, had told the scouting party of warrior scouts, his best men, to come to this point and to bring the dark god back. He had dreamt that there was a dark god here who would bring his son, Pony Boy, into his maturity in the tribe among the warrior class. The men who had come out had not questioned that they would find a god here, as Mighty Rapids had decreed they would. Mighty Rapids was as close to a god that they had in the tribe. If he dreamt something would be so, it would be so.

Still, Great Spear, leader of the scouts, the tallest and strongest of the warriors, in his physical prime, had secretly doubted. What he saw below, though, erased all doubts.

The two men—one a white man and the other one dark, such as Great Spear had never seen before—were in plowing congress beside the fire. The white man, naked below the waist, a rawhide jacket loosely covering his back, was on his hands and knees on a blanket. He was a large man, heavily bearded and hairy all over, muscular but with a lot of meat on his bones. Still, he was on his knees, in supplication, to the god--it had to be a god, Great Spear now believed--who was mounted on his ass, grasping the white man’s hips in his hands, and was rhythmically fucking the white man in the rear passage.

The god was nothing that Great Spear had ever seen before. He was black and he was tall and stately, with a muscular body that rivaled Great Spear’s. And when he pulled out of the ass of the white man, Great Spear gasped. The god was built like a buffalo, thicker and longer than even Great Spear himself, who had earned his warrior name by natural right. The god had withdrawn from the white man’s ass only to turn the white man onto his back, hook the white man’s ankles on his shoulders, pull the white man’s pelvis up to him, plunge inside his ass, and plow him hard and deep. The white man cried out in pain-pleasure and kept on crying out, as well he should considering the size of the black god, as he was fucked hard and long.

Surely this must be the dark god we have been sent to fetch, Great Spear thought, his own shaft engorging and twitching as he watched the dark man dominating the white man. The warrior was sent into mixed emotions. When he’d been sent by Mighty Rapids he knew that Pony Boy’s initiation was close to hand. After being initiated, Pony Boy, under a newly minted warrior’s name, would be turned over to Great Spear to train and plow for four years. Pony Boy caused Great Spear’s shaft to harden each time he looked at him. Great Spear’s ability to ride Pony Boy’s ass was near to hand. Conversely, this god had a shaft that made Great Spear’s inferior. Great Spear had enjoyed being the best endowed male in the tribe. If the dark god came to the village now and initiated Pony Boy, Great Spear wanted to ensure that the dark god did not remain to make Great Spear second in endowment.

The black giant was holding the white man at such an angle that the warriors could see from above the thickness of the root of the cock the dark man had buried in the ass of the white man—the root being as thick as a warrior’s wrist—and they could get a sense of how impossibly long the shaft was as the dark man released the body of the white man to slide down on it before pulling it back up to become completely buried in the passage again. Although Great Spear didn’t want to acknowledge it, this dark-skinned being with the mammoth cock surely must be a god. And they were sent to bring a dark god back.

At the signal from Great Spear, the scouting party pulled back from the edge of the rock outcropping—reluctantly for some, who knew the ritual well but had never seen a black god of magnificent proportions perform it before—and hunkered down to await their opportunity.

Down near the river’s edge, the French-Canadian fur trapper, Jean Jock Gallante, was finished being serviced by his black slave, Jonas, rolled over to a seat position while Jonas pulled his trousers back on and buttoned up his fly, and reached for the whiskey bottle. Within fifteen minutes Jean Jock would be asleep and snoring in the bottom of the pirogue while Jonas, probably the first black man—and slave—to have come this far toward the mouth of the Colombia River in the Northwest Territory, would putter around the campfire for a half hour more, straightening up and preparing the site for night before he took two blankets over to a soft-earth spot just outside the circle of light the waning fire illuminated and lay down on one blanket and pulled the other one over him. He was wearing just his trousers and moccasins.

Jean Jock was in such a deep post-coital and drunken sleep, Jonas was sleeping far enough away from him, and the Ravenclaw warrior scouts were quiet enough that they were upon Jonas, had forced the cloth with the stupefying herbs over his nose before Jonas could fully awaken, and had carried him off with Jean Jock having no idea that his slave had been taken away.

In his tent, Mighty Rapids, high chief of the Ravenclaws woke with a start. He had been dreaming of his son, Pony Boy. It had been a fitful sleep, as he worried about the boy—a boy whose ceremony to mature into a training warrior should have been the previous season, when he’d been alive thirteen seasons. That was when a Ravenclaw youth started the process into becoming a warrior. As son of the high chief, Pony Boy was expected to become high chief as some point himself. That meant his transition had to be a special one, one that the tribe would remember and would not question as the proper transition for a high chief.

Now it was a year later for Pony Boy than a prospective warrior scout should be initiated and--others in the tribe were beginning to question whether he should become a warrior scout and hence the premier chief--at all.

That special sign that Pony Boy’s transition would be memorable had not come when the boy was of age. But now, through the dream of the dark god, Mighty Rapids believed it was upon them--just a season later than expected. If the transition was special, the fact that it delayed a year would also be considered to have been special--and right.

In the Ravenclaw tribe, the sons of low and high chiefs went into the special warrior scout service. If Pony Boy didn’t do that, the family would be disgraced and even Mighty Rapids would lose his leadership position and fall back to being a minor chief. In the tribe, women and congress with woman, were for procreation only until a man entered his mellow years. At the change from childhood, a designated boy for the warrior scout status was to be initiated, as congress with a woman would be, by a notable chief of the tribe or, legend held, by a god. This was to be one initiation only. Then the boy would be given a man’s name and turned over to a warrior scout to train and plow for four years, upon which time the initiate became a warrior scout himself and would be given a youth in transition to train and plow for four years.

Mighty Rapids’s problem with Pony Boy was not in a notable warrior scout to turn Pony Boy over to. Great Spear had already been chosen for that position, because he was the premier warrior and he was the most heavily endowed to the warrior scouts. The youth trained and plowed by him would be considered in the most favorable position. The problem was that the Ravenclaws were a ferocious and belligerent tribe, perpetually at war with all of those around them. They had had a successful war season, but it had taken its toll. Several of the chiefs ranking just behind Mighty Rapids had expired in battle or were so wounded that they were incapable of initiating a youth in transition.

What Mighty Rapids’s needed to avoid the embarrassment of Pony Boy being initiated by an inferior chief was for a god to appear to consummate the ceremony. That’s the miracle The Ravenclaws needed at this juncture to give them strength to face the future. Mighty Rapids had been having many disturbing dreams--most recently the dream that the intrusion by the white men, which heretofore had contained itself to men going doing the great river and having goods to trade with the tribes, would become a flood of white men who would take, not give, and would spread across the land.

The dream of the dark god appearing to initiate Pony Boy was the first hopeful dream Mighty Rapids had had in some time. On this night, when he abruptly woke and sat up from his pallet, he did so with a smile and a sense of joy. In his dream, the scouting party he had sent out with Great Spear had indeed found a dark god.

Although it was the middle of the night, he rose, left his tent and rousted the others of the tribe from their slumbers.

“Prepare the ceremonial tent and Pony Boy, he called out. Tonight is the night Pony Boy becomes Black Stallion.”

The women of the tribe began to ululate and rush around preparing the ceremonial tent, while the lower chiefs went to wake Pony Boy to paint his body for the ceremony and to tie him to the sacrificial altar.

The tent was large enough to hold the whole tribe, but only with them wedged haphazardly together--or so it seemed. Of course there was a pecking order and specific sections where all were located, but, to Jonas, when, in somewhat of a stupor, he was brought into the tent between two warrior scout escorts, the tent, permeated with a sweet-smelling cloud of smoke, was just a sea of savage faces squatting and dressed in buckskin and watching him enter.