Re: Episode 8-2: Brought to a Head
Sky Dog had tied the tin horse into the black beast's mane and come to watch, taking a little time to salt the bodies. He crouched some yards from Mansfield, then apparently thought better of it and made himself useful, tugging over a corpse and divesting it of anything potentially useful or tradeworthy as thoroughly as a Comanche.
"It is said as it was, straight as my back," he remarked to Mansfield with a bemused grin, running his blade neatly along the superficial muscle and pectoral attachments from an incision at the hollow of the throat. "They do not often try to take white people, the kind of plague-demons I speak of-"
Putting his weight behind the blow, Sky Dog knelt over the dead man's chest and buried his large knife in the corpse's sternum with a wooden 'thunk'. Using the blade as a lever, the shaman worked and heaved the thing's chest apart as he talked. "-but medicine, it does not know one kind from another, yes? I hope."
"The ones that cause the plague with the...ah, blisters? -they come with the white people. Where I am from, they come with the traders, looking like white women with red hair, and the traders do not see them. In asking the chief trader how many are in the party, that one will not be able to count the demon. Sometimes they look and they think they see, and the count is different, but they cannot see her." Sky Dog turned his blade to prop the gap he'd made, simply reaching in and tugging the half-rotten mess from its moorings to cast it into the fire before retrieving his knife. His sister came to sit on his shoulder and tried to polish her coin still further on his head.
"By the time the demon has been seen, it is too late for the village - they will all die from the plague unless a shamán or a strong medicine-worker steps up to fight it. The old shamán that taught me..." Sky Dog paused, getting off the body and wiping his hand on the ground, otherwise unmarked.
"...he fought one in my sight, saving my life also: you have different ways, perhaps, but when he called out to the demon and she rose up, uncoiling herself into a thing of red hate and iron claws, he fought her with salt and with silver, with his strong songs and dancing, and his own knife." Sky Dog mimed the hack and slash at that terrible foe, Korpi fluttering on to his head to stay clear of the action.
"She spat the boiling blood from her belly, and tried to blind him - I watched this from the woods, with the baby we had come to bring under my own coat, for its mother was too weak to leave the camp - blinding with spitting and the claws, yes? Two days, he danced, and at last she was weakened enough for him to call in a helper spirit other than his grouse, so he called the black wolf, and it jumped on her for the dogs of the camp to tear her up. Then there was no disease. He was a good man, my master. Until he took to alcohols, a good man." The Siberian stood, and wandered over to the lawmen, hearing their discussion.
"I do not think it will be easy to move the dead horse...but if we go on some small way, the wolves will take the dead ones for us. They are already here, yes?" He looked about, though no wolves were bold enough to be obvious quite yet. "Always, little wolves in America. Wolves and chairs!"