Pleased initially as he was to have some sense of discovery and a chance to demonstrate his capability, it seemed outrageous to him that he had no more than what amounted to a stick-in-the-dirt scrawl that had been acquired not from a past scout mission or any approved federal expedition at all but from a saucer-eyed man he guessed had been a deserter in the War Against the South and had fled North and West to live with mountain lions and night spirits-whatever could stand his stink. That the wretched fellow had expired on the armory floor of the now distant fort at the end of some sort of epileptic fit shortly after unwrapping the sweat- and whiskey-stained excuse of the map did nothing to inspire further confidence.

No, there was something not right about all this. Something was at work in this region, between the Badlands and the Black Hills, that did not follow the pattern he had been accustomed to. Before he had crested the rise and come upon the creek, which was not where it should have been according to the map, or anything he knew about topography, he had had a creeping intuition that there was some presence in this area that posed a far more dangerous threat than any Indian war party.

Now, staring with rock-hard pupils through his binoculars into the wave of subalpine early-summer gaseous green snow grass, he knew with a solar plexus-compressing pressure that he was right. As his old chum Claudius Speerwort back in Turnip would have said, he was “shit certain.”

But before we consider what it was in his binoculars that had brought his gastrointestinal system so to the fore (and there is nothing quite as paralyzing-except perhaps a stroke, a heart attack, momentary blindness, or a pulmonary seizure, all of which he felt were impending), we need to understand that he was not just some young upstart in a stiff blue uniform a long way from the nearest outpost of encroaching civilization.