Carrion Wind

In the late 1870s, three souls will discover that the prairie winds sometimes carry dark and wicked things.

***Content Warning: Contains frank depictions of genocide against Indigenous people and death by hanging. Listener discretion is strongly advised.***

Transcript

NARRATOR

Episode Thirty-Nine: Carrion Wind.

(Whipping wind sounds)

NARRATOR

The spring wind blows hard on Wright Gillespie, carrying with it the stench of a thousand putrefying corpses, the screams of a thousand anguished souls. This does not trouble Wright, or what is left of him – it is more comforting than the scent of prairie blossoms and new grass that the wind should bring instead.

In another life, Wright was a buffalo hunter, and had made a small fortune during the great killing of 1873. But something had come upon him on the vast solitudes of the Plains, something gruesome and indefinable, something the wind had brought as it carries the death-scent now. It had found him as he stood amidst the ruins of a hundred bison, stripped of their skins and left to rot, nearly half a million pounds of meat spoiling beneath the harsh sun. It had permeated his being, and now he drifts seemingly without purpose, his clothes dusty and rumpled and ragged, his hat a shapeless grey lump on his head, his mare thin and ailing. Both horse and rider show brown and rotting teeth, gritted against the furious gusts. The only items in his possession that show any sign of care are the Sharps rifle scabbarded upon his worn saddle, and the long knife and Remington-Beals revolver tucked into his belt. The long buffalo robe that he wears in spite of the warm, snow-melting wind, is tattered and with ugly bald patches where the fur has been either worn or ripped away, and it flaps at his sides like a pair of monstrous wings.

Slowly, the shape of a village rears amongst the flat plains alongside the small river he has been more or less following, and he recognizes the style of the tipis as likely Lakota, or possibly Cheyenne. Yet there is something odd about the village: only a few horses wander aimlessly nearby, and there is neither sight nor sound of the inhabitants. Many of the tipis are in disarray, and some seem to smolder, as though cookfires have been left too long untended.

Wright coughs violently against the back of his hand, defiling it with a smear of what looks like tobacco juice, though he ran out of tobacco long ago. He wipes it off on his robe without even looking at it. His stomach growls violently, but a deeper yearning stirs within him, and he goads the horse toward the village.

Drawing nearer, he can see where the earth has been trampled by many hooves, or scored by mountain guns, or tousled by the footwork of hand-to-hand struggle. Bullet holes and saber slashes pock the standing tents, and here and there the young grass is dewed with the reddish brown of drying blood.

Wright dismounts and wanders through the village, inhaling deeply. It is like drinking in the savory aroma of a bubbling stew after a long fast; intoxicating, but far from satisfying. He tries to imagine the roar of the guns and the screaming of the women and children, the shouts of men with terror and anger thrumming through their bloodstreams, but his mind is hatefully silent.

Since he forsook bison, Wright has pursued a more elusive sort of game. He has killed many times, white men and Black, Natives and Mexicans, men and women and even a few young ones. He has killed, and it has sometimes made for a proper meal, but most times it is only a single bite, serving only to further whet his razor-sharp appetite.

When he finds a toppled rack of drying meat, he kneels and starts with the least dirtied of the strips, cramming them into his mouth and chewing greedily. So engrossed is he with filling his shriveled stomach that he does not hear the young woman’s steps behind him, does not hear the intake of breath as she pulls the bone-handled iron knife from the beaded sheath that hangs between her breasts. Only when she cries out in the instant before striking does he begin to turn from his ravenous gorging and see what is about to befall him, far too late to ward off the blow. The point of the blade bites into his neck, coaxing forth watery brown blood that reeks of dank decay. She screams and strikes again, and again, spattering the foul fluid over her hands and chest and face, and still Wright does not resist, but sits there gurgling and, she is horridly sure, laughing through a ruined throat.

After a dozen more risings and fallings of the knife, the kneeling figure finally crumples and is still. Tahcawi’s heart pounds wildly and her breath comes in ragged spurts, and she cannot bear to look upon the hideous devastation the knife has made of the man’s flesh. She notices now the vile fetor of the blood that speckles her skin and her dress, and she walks unsteadily away from the dead man, turning her steps not toward the north where the rest of her people have fled, but toward the small branch of the Powder River near the village. She drops the knife upon the bank and wades into the water, scrubbing vigorously at the foul blood until she can see no trace of it. Still, she feels unclean, and she simply stands there, shivering in the cold stream until her thoughts calm and she remembers that the white soldiers from which she hid will likely return. Tahcawi turns and emerges from the river, walking back toward the village to try to find dry warm clothes before she follows the rest of her people. She does not pause to collect the knife, though it is a valued possession – she cannot bring herself to touch it again.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Private Fleming is eager to volunteer for the return expedition to the ruined village, and is thrilled to revisit the scene of the small battle. He thinks of it as a battle, though it was in truth more of an ambush; already he is rewriting the experience in his mind, turning his few wild shots at fleeing elders and women into heroic struggles with fierce warriors. He only hopes that upon their return he can find a few bodies to scalp, so that he can bring proof of his heroics to the naysayers back home.

So he is disappointed when the Crow scouts report back that the village hosts only the bodies of a handful of warriors, and realizes that it’s unlikely he’ll be able to take the scalps unnoticed. Still, there is said to be a great deal of meat, buffalo robes, and weapons left behind, and he takes some solace in the possibility of looting some small valuables.

Yet within the first half hour of combing through the village for any stragglers or wounded, the captain commands that everything be burnt. While the men begin to set fire to the tipis, which prove reluctant to burn, he slinks away from the party, concocting an excuse about bad bowels should his absence be noticed. Ambling toward the river, he sits and takes a dip of tobacco from the tin in his pocket, and chews morosely. He hears one of the men swear loudly in the village, then a loud crack as one of the fires meets a store of ammunition. Fleming chuckles at the men’s misfortune, and wonders if any of them have been hurt without any stirring of sympathy.

As he turns away from the wind to spit, a faint gleam catches his eye, and he picks up the knife he finds lying in the grass. The iron blade is of good but relatively plain make, but the bone handle is truly exquisite. Its heft feels good in his hand, the grip fitting perfectly into his palm, and there is some other appealing quality about the knife that he cannot quite define. All that mars it is the brownish stains upon the blade, which he at first takes for rust. When he wipes at them, though, they come away too easily, and he rubs the faintly moist substance between his left forefinger and thumb curiously. Still uncertain as to what it may be, he sniffs at it, wrinkling his nose slightly. Still, it is easy enough to wipe away the rest of the filth on the grass, and then he uses his handkerchief to safely wrap the blade and stows the knife in his satchel.

Looking back toward the tipis, he finds that the ordered conflagration has begun in earnest now, and rises to begrudgingly return to his unit. The wind has risen unpleasantly, and the stink from the dark filth he wiped from the blade lingers in his nostrils. The knife in his satchel remains in his thoughts, and he longs to hold it, wonders what it would be like to sink it into soft flesh. Unconsciously, he finds himself reaching into the satchel to caress the bone handle, and draws it back out hurriedly, worried that someone might see and ask what he has found.

As they regroup and depart the village, he watches the Crow scouts that ride out before them, and thinks again of the knife and its good sharp edge. But no, he reminds himself, the scouts are wary of white men, and are seldom alone, and certainly if he were caught depriving the Army of a valued asset he would be punished.

Still, when he at last climbs into his bedroll that night, he dreams of taking scalps, of fashioning a robe from them. Beside him, his companions whisper shared complaints about the loud smacking Fleming makes in his slumber, as though in the fantasies of sleep he is greedily feasting upon some rare and unguessable delicacy.

(Unsettling music)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

The Sheehan boy stares in rapt attention at the man upon the scaffold, about whom he has asked his parents repeatedly before his father finally cuffed him and told him to keep quiet. He has heard about what the lawmen supposedly found in the condemned man’s cramped and squalid house, and would again press his father for confirmation were he not certain it would lead to harsher reprimand.

So he settles for gazing at the man, marveling at how small and unassuming, even weaselly, the ex-soldier appears. The boys at school told him that the man had started making the thing during his years in the army, but even once he had left, could not seem to stop, growing more reckless and indiscriminate with each crime. They said that the last contributions to his grisly tailorage had come from his own elderly parents, and from his wife and two small children.

When the sheriff asks the condemned if he has any final words, he looks at the Sheehan boy, whose milky freckled skin and fair hair excites him with the most lurid fantasies. Yet there is also something else in the boy, something in the occasional sidelong glances he directs at his parents and his sisters, that draws his eye. And, moved by an insight he only partially understands, he cries out his final utterance while gazing at the boy. Most of the onlookers are puzzled by them, but he sees the glint of understanding in the face of the Sheehan boy, and offers a wide and rotten brown grin to the crowd before the hangman slips the cloth sack over his head. After the noose has been placed and the trapdoor dropped, the man dangles and struggles for several minutes, as something dark and putrid stains the cloth bag and oozes down his rumpled shirt.

The boy watches with morbid fascination, and smiles. He knows now where to find the promised treasure, and he will not risk that anyone else work out the riddle of Fleming’s final words and retrieve it before he does. As soon as the dead man swings limply from his noose, the boy turns and runs, ignoring his parents’ and sisters’ surprised shouts even though he knows he will suffer for it later. He races through town, toward the place beside the white clapboard church where they found the ruined bodies of Fleming’s children, and begins to dig. He gasps in pain as he cuts his fingers on the buried knife, as old brown mingles with his bright red blood. As he draws out the knife, smearing crimson over the yellow-white of the bone handle, he begins to laugh with wild delight, while a cold and carrion wind curls down from the north to ruffle his blond hair.

(Bleak, dark music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

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[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]