Chapter 8: Echoing Thunder

The Family

Cole and Ashley had taken a four-wheeler to the upper pasture and returned upset. This had the potential to turn into another range war. The Forest Service had cancelled their lease.

“Those fuckers can’t do that,” Ashley stormed. “We’ve leased that land for forty years. We’ve cared for it. Now they want us off so the cattle don’t interfere with the oil company. How many people do they think they’ll feed with oil?”

“Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference,” Cole said. “Kids, we’re going to have cattle coming back down next week. Rafe and the boys will be rounding them up this weekend to start the drive. We’ll have to share the pasturelands. What do you think we can sustain?”

“The horses don’t graze the land down as badly as cattle do. We’ve never had to supplement in summer before. We put four hundred head of cattle out there with the hundred rescues and we’d have that pasture so bare it won’t be fit for grazing for two years.”

“I don’t want to risk your operation,” Cole said. “Yours is the future. We’ll drive the cattle to the Alexander pens and I’ll ship them to the auction house.”

“Don’t do that, Pa,” Kyle said. “We’ve got an option on the Calhoun ranch. We’ve been dickering over terms for near a year. If we go in with a cash offer, we could own 2,000 more acres next week. We can sustain the cattle for two weeks without doing any damage.”

“So, you want cash?” Cole said.

“Pa, you aren’t fifty yet,” Ramie said. “It was never our intention to put you out of business. We want your cattle to thrive. The Calhouns haven’t run anything on their range in the two years since Obert died. It’s a good move for the cattle and it’s good for the land.”

“You’re right, as usual,” Cole responded.

“Cole, you know you’ve wanted that piece of land forever. Your kids got an option on it. Bankroll them.”

“Let me make a couple calls. How soon is dinner?”

Third Live Report

“Earth Sister, you’ve threatened the oil company with buffalo and with elk. Yet they disappear after a brief appearance. Ron Grisholm, the president of Shale Oil Inc., says that you are dealing in illusions,” said reporter Sarah d’Angelo as she interviewed Earth Sister.

“He is avoiding the inevitable,” Earth Sister said. “This site will be returned to Earth Mother. He needs to salvage what he can and retreat. And not only from this site. The Rocky Mountains are Earth Mother’s backbone. She will shake herself and rid the mountains of this abomination like a dog shaking water off her back.”

“The Park Service has indicated that their investigation revealed no tracks to match herds the size we have seen on the rise over there,” the reporter insisted. Earth Sister turned to face the camera and pulled the right sleeve of her blouse down her arm. The faces of both wolves were revealed. The exposure of her skin was only barely within the limits of broadcast television.

“Today, the wolves,” Earth Sister announced. On cue, the drums in the village began.

Buffalo and herds of elk, deer, and sheep had made no sound in the past. But the howl of wolves on the hunt preceded the appearance of the first heads over the rise. Nearly a hundred wolves were known to inhabit the greater Yellowstone area. Three times that many came over the rise. Nor were they alone. Foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and cougars came with them. And behind them came bears. Black bears loped on all fours as grizzlies rose on their hind legs and bellowed. In the lead came a massive silver gray wolf.

“It’s Wolf!” Ramie exclaimed. “She’s called Creator Wolf!”

“I don’t think she’s doing the calling,” Mary Beth said. “She’s the voice of the Twin Wolves. Our children are out there somewhere.”

The animals stopped after they had crossed the rise, just as the herds of buffalo and elk had done. They continued to howl and snarl, however, as the silver wolf loped toward Earth Sister and the frightened reporter. From nearly twenty feet away, the wolf sprang. The cameraman was backing up steadily, but kept the camera focused on Earth Sister and the frozen reporter.

The wolf landed lightly with massive paws on the reporter’s shoulders as she screamed. She dropped to her knees in front of the wolf.

“Don’t kill me. Please, don’t kill me!” the reporter cried out.

The wolf paced around her, glancing at the cameraman, who backed away farther. Then, in complete disdain, the wolf raised a leg and pissed on the reporter. He loped away and the wolves, foxes, coyotes, bob cats, cougars, and bears retreated over the rise.

“Explain that illusion to the president of Shale Oil Company,” Earth Sister said to the reporter, still on the ground in front of her. “I am sad for the men and women who stand between The People and the scorpion,” she continued, pointing at a distant line of security guards surrounding the fenced in site of the pseudo-fracking machinery. “Tomorrow we darken the sky.”

The Family

“We backed your offer and the Calhouns accepted it.” Cole said as the family settled into office to read. “I don’t know what’s coming, but Mandy—Earth Sister—said every site would be destroyed. I don’t know how they’ll do it, but I know the Yellowstone site is only one of twenty-three sites that have they’ve surveyed in the mountains. I just pray that our children have not been trapped by the ancients.”

After verifying there had been no more developments at the Yellowstone standoff, the family gathered again to read. Ramie claimed the polished box and plopped herself in her father’s chair. Then getting up so Kyle could sit down, she settled in his lap with Aubrey cuddling the babies next to her.

“I think I need a bigger chair,” Cole laughed as he settled on the sofa with Ashley and Mary Beth cuddled against him.

“Sometimes I just need to be closer to my family than others,” Ramie said. “I need to read. I’m getting too fidgety to listen.”

“Go ahead, daughter,” Mary Beth said.

Caitlin: Making Thunder

For a long time, Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising waited, looking at the herd of buffalo. It was a rich valley that supported thousands. We made camp and built a hut of sticks and mud. We set to work taking a cow from the herd and smoking the meat. We stripped the hide and cleaned it. An old doe from a herd of whitetail approached our camp. I leapt into her mind and she offered herself. We took her and thanked her spirit for this gift. I searched for roots, berries, and wild grain that we gathered into our camp, preparing for a long winter, even though it was still the long days of summer.

The alpha female of the pack was sitting by our fire when I came out in the morning. I’d almost become used to seeing the wolves, but I still fingered my hatchet. I hacked a piece of buffalo from the meat we were roasting and tossed it to the bitch. Phile and I sat to eat our roast and berries for breakfast. I seldom tried to touch the mind of a wolf, but I could feel her reaching out to me.

“It is time,” she said. “White Mouth awaits.”

She led and we followed. It was unusual to be led by the wolves without having the whole pack with us. Having just one made me nervous. I reached out to Mandy in Lame Deer in now-time and she gladly came into my head.

“This is it?” she asked. “I will be quiet and watch. Tread with care, my loves.”

The wolf led us to a small clearing high on the mountain. Above us, I could see an indent in the rocks and was certain there was a cave entrance on the far side. The wolf approached us and in an unusual gesture, licked our faces. She bade us farewell. No one fronts a bear in his cave.

We sat at the edge of the clearing and stilled our hearts. In now-time, Phile and I hid in the barn so we could focus all our attention on Oxėse.

We waited.

We cast out our minds and felt the grizzly deep in the cave. And then he began to growl. He was deep in the cave when the sounds began, but we could hear them clearly, both in our minds and in our ears. He lumbered forward until his bulk filled the cave entrance. We sat as small and as still as we could. This was no ordinary grizzly bear, though even an ordinary one would have frightened me. This boar was Grandfather White Mouth. He weighed a ton and stood twelve feet tall when he walked on his hinds.

And when he roared, the thunder echoed from the mountain.

When we touched his mind, he let us glide around the edges. What we got was that he was a bit of a showoff. He liked being the biggest animal on the mountain. He was one of the few who could stand a buffalo charge and hold his own. He normally ate small things—fruit, berries, grubs, and an occasional mole or rabbit. He traveled down to the river to fish. He had frozen a small elk with his roar and killed it with a single swat of his massive paw. He feasted on that flesh just before hibernating.

He loved to hear his own voice echoing through the mountains.

“How can we make that sound?” Phile asked. We’d been to the clearing to observe the great bear three days in a row. I tapped on the deer hide we had stretched at our camp to dry. It thudded.

“Have you ever used a drum?” Wolf Riding Woman asked.

“Sweet Medicine gave our people small drums so we could dance and celebrate,” Wolf Rising answered.

“Drums,” I whispered in now-time. Phile squeezed me in our bed.

“Onéhavo’e. We need big drums,” he said.

Drums were not unknown to our people. But we were migratory. We followed herds and moved across the prairies and into the mountains. We did not collect a lot of things that were hard to move. Wolf Rising and I had made and discarded countless bows, clothes, and dwellings. When we rode north on the buffalo herd and when we ran with the wolves, we took nothing with us but the clothes we wore, our hatchets, and our wolf skin robes. We had abandoned our tent in Oklahoma, our wigwam in Wyoming, and sleeping skins whenever we had to move. Even our horses roamed wild until we called them with our minds. Drums were small things among our people. We held them in one hand while we beat on them with the other.

Drum-making is hard work. We studied in now-time and practiced in Oxėse. It would be days before we could experiment. We had a deer hide stretched, but not tanned. We cut branches and wove them into a hoop and then stretched a circle of rawhide across the hoop. We wet the hide to shrink it and let it dry in the sun.

Merv had left his trading post in the hands of a cousin and we visited to buy a pair of small drums. He explained that they were Ute drums, but made a pleasant sound. He didn’t treat us seriously when we said we were interested in Cheyenne drums. I scowled at him and we bought the pair of little drums for a price that Merv never would have charged.

These were hollow log drums. They had skins stretched across both ends of a cylinder. We could beat them with our hands or with a wrapped stick. For little drums, they had a pretty big sound.

Wolf Rising located a hollow log and cut a length to fasten a skin to for a drumhead. He broke the first one by swinging his hatchet too hard. We learned from that to make tiny light strokes.

After weeks of work, we took our little drums to the cave of White Mouth. When we heard him start his morning grumblings, we answered with beats of our drums. He came lumbering out of the cave on all fours and stood before us to roar. I thought we had offended him. It was hard to read the mind of this primitive and egotistical creature. He grabbed my hoop drum out of my hand with his teeth and lumbered back to the cave. He dropped it on the ground and turned to roar again—a roar that echoed throughout the valley.

I heeded his call. Wolf Rising and I approached the cave mouth. We had never come fully into the clearing before. This was the home of the great spirit bear. I picked up the drum from where he dropped it. He stood on his hind legs in the mouth of the cave and roared. Then I could feel it. The massive sound was echoing from inside the cave and out the mouth as an amplifier. I thumped my drum and it was ten times louder echoing from inside the cave. Wolf Rising joined me on the log drum he had created and with White Mouth leading us, we duplicated the subtle changes of his mighty voice. As we beat our drums in concert with the great bear, I could see reality waver and the great valley beneath us was filled with animals that disappeared when I stopped beating the drum.

And for just a moment, I saw my other self.

Wolf Rising and I had to hunt to have food for the winter. It appeared we would be in this location for a long time. But hunting gave us rawhide for drums. And in now-time, we found the meaning.

Phile and I went to Lame Deer under the pretense of checking on a couple new horses. Kyle and Ramie had thrown themselves into the upkeep of the ranch so thoroughly that I don’t think they noticed we were gone. It was nearly five hundred miles, but we drove it on Friday, expecting to return on Sunday. By Friday evening, Mandy was in our arms.

“My darlings, I’ve missed you so much,” she panted. “Not that there is anything wrong with mental orgasms, but I want my arms around you as we make love.”

“Mandy, my love,” Phile said. “You might get your arms around all of us.”

“How?!”

“We think we’ve learned how to make thunder echo from the mountains. At the moment, it’s just a little thunder, but it might be enough,” I said.

“What happened?”

“We made drums in Oxėse. We don’t have time to make drums in now-time, but we’ve bought some. When we experimented a few days ago, we actually saw each other,” Phile said excitedly.

“Saw? You mean you saw Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising? Could you touch?” she asked.

“Almost,” I said. “Mandy, my Earth Sister and my voice, I think we need you as our catalyst. I don’t think we can cross between times without you.”

Mandy hustled us to her cabin and we spent the night in each other’s arms as we explained what we believed was happening. We wanted to try it immediately, of course, but Mandy suggested we wait until Saturday night.

“There will be a powwow with dancing, singing, and drumming,” she said. “Let’s use the group music to augment our own. Please, please, let this work!”

It was mid-August. The nights were warm and the skies were clear. Over a hundred tribal members gathered to celebrate first harvest. The drumming and dancing started in the middle of the afternoon. At first it was just the old men who gathered. Younger people started to arrive at dinner time and the tables were spread with tons of food. We joined and were welcomed. We made a show of drumming and learning some of the traditional dances. Mandy, of course, had been practicing all summer. But after dark, we slipped away to her cabin with the various drums we had brought.

We stripped ourselves in both timelines and sat with our drums, three of us in Mandy’s cabin and two in front of the bear cave. We started tentatively, but the strong rhythm set by the drummers in the circle outside filtered into our hands and we all five started to play on our drums. I was lost in the rhythms and seemed to float on the drumbeats. And then I felt lips on mine. Soft and sensuous. I thought Mandy had moved to kiss me, but when I opened my eyes, I saw myself looking back at me. My lips sought the lips of Wolf Riding Woman and she touched my soul. Beside me I saw Phile in a very unexpected embrace with Wolf Rising. Then all four of us turned to Mandy, who stared at us in disbelief. Our drums were forgotten as we embraced our dear love.

“It’s real. You are all here with me,” she gasped as Wolf Rising kissed her deeply. “I am beloved by all four and I love you equally. Take me. Make me your lover and your woman.”

There was remarkably little confusion as we celebrated our love physically for the first time. I don’t know if it was Phile or Wolf Rising that penetrated me for the first time. I don’t know if it was Phile’s come or Wolf Rising’s come that I licked out of Mandy and Wolf Riding Woman. I know that I felt every rise and every release of each of my lovers.

I was sixteen years old. I’d had my share of orgasms, diddling my clit with my fingers. I’d had a good share of orgasms with either Phile or Wolf Rising doing the diddling. I’d joined with Mandy as we pleasured each other. But having five souls wrapped together, all experiencing not only their own orgasm with the other four, but experiencing the other four as well...