Hunting the Ghost Dancer

 

Spretnak lifted his gaze into the wide morning sky. He noticed in the clouds that the day's heat had turned the wind.

Men are like the clouds, he thought, moved by invisible forces that rise out of the earth and descend from the heights. The clashing of these forces shape men as wind shapes clouds. Great men learn to read the wind and to partake in their own shaping. No one, not even the greatest of men, can choose their way. Acceptance, and with it participation, are the only choices beyond ignorance.

He thought this good. Life existed simply as one found it, beautiful and terrible in its simplicity.

Clattering noises among the briars behind him interrupted his thoughts. He twisted about in a fright, half-expecting to confront the brawny hatchet-faced men who called themselves the Eyes of the Bear.

Instead, he spotted the glossy black wings and red legs of a chough exulting in the briar over its capture of a large mudbeetle. Spretnak blew a relieved laugh at this demonstration of what he had been thinking: Life gives no choices to the chough or the beetle, to the Eyes of the Bear or to me.

From Hunting the Ghost Dancer

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