Blackwolf's Redemption

Half an hour, and he could ride out of this place and never look back.

His ancestors had come here to celebrate their gods. He had come to say goodbye to them. There was no room in his life for nonsense.

He hadn’t planned on this final visit. What for? A summer solstice was a summer solstice. The earth reached the top of its northernmost tilt and that was that.

His ancestors had figured it out and they’d venerated the process. They’d made a big thing out of these final minutes that marked the start of the longest stretch of daylight in the year.

Not him.

It wasn’t belief in superstition that had brought Jesse here. On the contrary. It was disbelief. Looking at this foolishness as it happened seemed vital. He’d accepted it as a boy but he was a long way from boyhood. He was a man, older and wiser than the first time he’d ridden out to view the solstice.

The big gray stallion snorted softly. Jesse’s hard, chiseled mouth turned up in what might almost have been a smile.

“Okay,” he said, “maybe you’re right. Older? Absolutely. Wiser? Who knows.”

The horse snorted again and tossed his massive head as if to say, What are we doing out here when we both should be sleeping? Jesse couldn’t fault the animal for that. Trouble was that an hour ago, he’d awakened from a fitful sleep, taken Cloud from the warmth of his stall, slipped a bridle over his head and obeyed the sudden impulse to ride out to the canyon and watch the sunrise.

Damn it, Jesse told himself coldly, be honest!

He was here by plan, by design, by the need to sever, once and for all, whatever ties remained between him and the old ways.

Impulse had nothing to do with it.

He’d known that the solstice was coming. You didn’t have to be part Comanche and Sioux for that. His mother’s Anglo blood was more than sufficient. So were the three wasted years he’d spent at university. The sun reached a certain declination, a certain height and angle in the sky, and twice a year, you had a solstice.

Solstices were real.

It was the god myths that were bull.

The stuff about the renewal of the earth, of the spirit. The nonsense about what it meant to a warrior to be on this very spot at the moment the sun rose behind the jagged peaks of Blackwolf Mountain, shone its light between the two enormous stony slabs on the rocky shelf some forty feet above the ground, then centered on the spiral the Old Ones had etched into the horizontal stone between them.

The idiocy about how viewing this particular rising sun could change a man’s life forever.

Jesse gave a bitter laugh.

His father had believed in all of it, as had his grandfather, his great-grandfather and, most probably, every Blackwolf warrior whose DNA he’d inherited.

For most of his thirty years, he’d believed in it, too. Not all of it—a twentieth-century man with the better part of a university degree under his belt wasn’t about to buy into mythology.

What he had believed in was respecting the old ways. Respecting the continuity of tradition. And, yes, he’d even believed in honoring, if only a little, events like the solstices.

What harm could there be, even if a man knew the scientific reasons for why such things occurred?

His father had brought him to this place when he was twelve.

“Soon the sun will rise,” he had said, “and the light of time past and time yet to come will fall on the sacred circle. The vows a man takes at the summer solstice will determine his true path forever. Are you ready to make a vow, my son?”

At that age, Jesse’s head and heart had brimmed with stories of his warrior ancestors. His father had told those tales to him all his life; his mother—born in the East, to parents who had never met an Indian until they met their new son-in-law—had read them to him from the children’s books she wrote and illustrated.

And so, of course, Jesse had been ready.

As soon as the sun began its slow rise into the heavens, he’d tilted his face to its light, arms outstretched, hands open and cupped to receive its gift of brilliance and warmth, and he’d offered himself, everything he was, to the spirit of the warriors who had gone before him.

His father had smiled with pride. His mother, told of his vow when he and his father rode home, had hugged him. Even as he grew older and slowly began to understand that the old stories were just stories and nothing more, he’d been glad he’d made the vow, glad his father had included him in this ancient tradition.

But by the time Jesse was in college, everything seemed changed. There was a war taking place in a distant land. Boys he’d grown up with were dying in it. He would not be drafted; college kids were not going to be put in harm’s way.

It seemed wrong. He was descended from warriors. What was he doing, hiding away in stuffy classrooms at a university where some had taken to ridiculing everything he believed?