The medicine was gone. Gone also was the tribe’s strength. The strength of generations past, handed from father to son, had gradually seeped away until nothing remained but weakness. That inbred tribal strength had survived famine and drought and a near annihilation at the hands of the Comanche; but today, perhaps because of the stone’s failure, the tribe’s strength was nearly spent. Like a grizzled, winter-weary buffalo facing its last Colorado blizzard, the tribe stood poised at a moment when the passage of just a few years could write the last, tragic chapter in its history.

Strong Hand couldn’t help but reflect upon past failures as he allowed his horse to pick its way along the winding, uphill trail. He was on a fool’s errand, perhaps, trying to resurrect yesterday’s fortunes, but if no one made the effort, the tribe would wither like a frost-stricken plant.

Stone Finder, whose function was to care for the tribal bundles, had measured the tribe’s decline by the waning power of the stone. The White-eyes, who did not believe in talismans and stones, had played a large share in the tribe’s recent misfortune, but the stone bore a responsibility too. It had failed to protect them.

This should be Stone Finder’s task, Strong Hand thought, as he continued to climb. But Stone Finder had refused the charge. “The squaw was your wife, and it was her stone,” Stone Finder had explained, without compromise. “Now, it is yours. It is you who must seek the answers.”

“You’re the Shaman,” Strong Hand had reminded him. But in the end, it was Strong Hand who had gone.

It had been a gradual thing; a change so subtle that nobody saw it coming. There had even been seasons when the tribe had prospered. But as the stone’s brightness faded, so ultimately, had the fortunes of the Jicarilla. Stone Finder believed that Strong Hand’s wife had taken the stone’s light with her when she died, and perhaps she had. Yet, during Strong Hand’s time with her, it had been obvious to him that she was being drained herself. If she had been capable of drawing strength from the stone, she would have done it while she was still alive, Strong Hand felt. But she hadn’t. In Strong Hand’s opinion, his wife had been as incapable of taking as she had been at giving. She had left him a son, but had given nothing else. Perhaps she and the stone had drained each other.

Now, for whatever reason, the erosion was complete. The yellow-legged soldiers had taken their last scrap of land, reducing the tribe to beggary. They now relied upon tainted meat from uncaring or uninformed Indian Affairs Superintendents to feed their children.

Strong Hand continued climbing until he found himself well above what used to be the high plains home of the buffalo. Sadly, the brawny buffalo was gone, too. Instead, White-eyes’ cattle cropped at the short, thick grass carpeting the high mesas.

Another loss.

Strong Hand’s heart bled for the stalwart beast that had so faithfully fed and clothed generations of his people. But that loss was irreversible, and it was useless to dwell upon it. He knew that he must ignore past tragedies and focus his thoughts on his tribe, lest, like the luckless buffalo, they fall by wayside too.


Still, he climbed. Past the tree line of stunted jack pines and up into eagle country. He ascended high into the mountains, into craggy, rock-strewn land, where the eagles nested and where his grandfather had come to die.

At sunset, he arrived.

He stopped at the edge of a precipice overlooking a sheer drop-off of several hundred feet. Sliding off his horse, Strong Hand set his bow and quiver of arrows by the ghost of an old campfire that had once burned, several feet from the edge of the cliff. Other than the bow, his knife and the sacred tribal pipe, which would be used to communicate with the spirits, he had no other items with him. He was not allowed food; the warmth of blankets he would do without. Bones lay about underfoot, mostly from small spirit animals such as rabbit and prairie dog, and he was careful not to place his feet on them lest he disturb the spirits of his forefathers. Part of him recognized that the bones were remains left by eagles, and he was saddened. Even the tribe’s small spirit animals had not been immune to misfortune.

He quickly built a small fire, the wood taken from a cache that had been carried to the site on a previous trip by the tribe. The fire was necessary – not for warmth, but as a beacon to the Great Medicine, advising that a petitioner required a Medicine Vision. The power dream he hoped to experience was the tribe’s last resort. For years, perhaps since the stone’s arrival, the Sacred Spirits had ignored the prayers of Strong Hand’s people. As a consequence, the tribe had been reduced by the forays of rival tribes who had seen no virtue in racial solidarity. It had been reduced further by the yellow-legs who had taken their land and imprisoned them on a reservation.

The tribe had been reduced by the stone’s failure.