A rooster crowed. Brisling threw off his blankets and staggered across the bone-cold floor to the window, head swimming. The rooster crowed again, and Brisling ripped aside the curtains. There he was, the feathered little fuck, strutting right down the middle of the road.

A frost had settled in the night. Like white rust, it covered everything, the barns, the derelict tractor across the street, the gas pump in front of the general mercantile. Even the rooster seemed to wear a silvery coat.

Brisling let the curtains fall and shivered his way to the bathroom for his morning ritual of shit, shower, and shave. Afterward, he went downstairs to partake in the breakfast portion of the bed-and-breakfast covenant: fluffy scrambled eggs cut with mayonnaise just like his mother used to do, pork sausage, more pork sausage, and fluffy buttermilk pancakes topped with sweet cream butter and gallons of real maple syrup—all the miraculous foods his cardiologist had forbidden him to eat. As if it mattered.

He mopped a puddle of syrup with a bit of pancake and wondered how long it would be before the first symptoms of JCAV hit, the hallucinations, the seizures. Would his mind unravel knot by knot, or all at once? He popped two pills into his mouth, an aspirin and another anti-platelet drug intended to keep his new coronary stents from clotting off. Then he washed them down with some orange juice. Death from JCAV might lurk just around the corner, but he sure as hell was not going to have another heart attack before then.

Senator Flaherty had made good on his promise to deliver the name of the person who took custody of the Burns Ice Man in 1992. The name, Delbert Mackai, did not sound very Indian to Brisling, but what did he know? According to Google, Mackai lived in the remote deserts of southeastern Oregon just north of the Nevada border, near a little town called Frenchglen.

Upon his arrival in Frenchglen the night before, Brisling had been greeted simultaneously by the mayor, the postmaster, and the fire chief, all bundled into the diminutive figure of a retired ornithologist who called herself Dr. Peggy, even though she only had a PhD. According to Dr. Peggy, Delbert Mackai was a real Obi-Wan Kenobi type who lived up on Steens Mountain with his granddaughter. The girl would stop by the mercantile every week on her way to play basketball in the city of Burns, fifty miles north. Once in a blue moon, the old man accompanied her, spinning a wild yarn for anyone who would listen. Most of what the Mackais needed up on the mountain they got via special delivery.

Hot coffee splashed into Brisling's cup. "How is everything?" said the owner of the Frenchglen B&B. He was tall, skinny, tanned, his jet-dyed hair and handlebar mustache worthy of a Vaudeville show.

Brisling wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. "Breakfast is amazing. But my room was colder than the nipple of a witch's tit."

He smiled then frowned. "Sorry about that. I'll bring up an electric space heater." He grimaced and worked his elbow back and forth. "Feels like weather moving in. Are you still thinking about going up on Steens Mountain?"

"That's why I'm here."

"You'd better go before it comes then. Might be snow." He produced a ravaged newspaper and slapped it down next to Brisling's elbow. "You asked if I knew any more about old Delbert Mackai. Well, read that. Strange days, my friend. Strange days."

Brisling set aside the wad of Columbus Day sale ads, adjusted his glasses, and began to read an article on the twelfth page.

Ghost Dance Returns to Harney County

On a spot of flat ground among the greasewoods near Wildhorse Springs, east of Steens Mountain, thirty men and women from the Burns-Paiute Tribe gathered in a circle under the clear night sky. An early snow had fallen up on the mountain, a pale line against the stars. Clasping hands, fingers interlaced, they danced slowly, chanting in unison, spinning clockwise as the stars wheeled overhead:

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The snow lies there - ro-rani!

The Milky Way lies there.

The Milky Way lies there.

It was the Ghost Dance, a ritual that according to local authorities hasn't been performed regularly in Oregon and Nevada for over a hundred years. Yet the traditional round dance, forever linked to Wounded Knee and Sitting Bull, has been cropping up across Harney County since the root-gathering ceremonies in May. Asked what had brought people together that night at Wildhorse Springs, tribal elder Delbert Mackai had this to say: "Funny thing. No one seems to know."

The Ghost Dance religion had its origins in the teachings of a nineteenth-century Northern Paiute mystic called Wovoka. Son of a Native American shaman from Western Nevada (modern-day Esmerelda County), Wovoka spent most of his youth working on the ranch of white settlers, who knew him as Jack Wilson.

Wovoka's career as a spiritual leader kicked off in late December 1888, when he fell into a coma (likely from scarlet fever) and regained consciousness just as the sun emerged from a total eclipse on January 1, 1889. Some people claimed he saved the sun, and the universe with it. Wovoka himself claimed he received a message from heaven that predicted an imminent age when God would clear the land of white people, return it to Native Americans, and resurrect all their dead. This "divine retribution" would be hastened by righteous living and ritual performance of the Ghost Dance. Despite the prophecy, Wovoka taught goodness and peace: "Do not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone," he exhorted his followers. ". . . you must not fight. Do right always."

Yet the Ghost Dance religion is widely remembered for its role in precipitating one of the most harrowing massacres in American History, Wounded Knee. According to Eastern Oregon Community College professor of history Ernst Kleiff, PhD, the Ghost Dance Movement of 1890 contributed directly to the massacre. "Delegates of the Lakota Sioux took the Ghost Dance religion from Nevada back to South Dakota. They interpreted Wovoka's prophecies to mean God would side with them in their war against the US government." The Lakota Sioux warriors donned specially consecrated Ghost Shirts, which they believed could stop bullets. This growing militarism, mixed with white paranoia about the "Ghost Dance Craze," created a powder keg. On December 20, 1890, a single careless shot set it off. When the smoke had cleared, over three hundred Lakota men, women, and children lay dead, murdered by the US Army at Wounded Knee Creek. It was a crushing and resounding finish for the Ghost Dance Movement and Native American militarism in the nineteenth century.

"But Wovoka believed in peace," Mr. Mackai emphasized. "And redemption through righteous living and hard work. Who can argue with that?" About the resurgence of the Ghost Dance, he added, "I can't explain it. Maybe something's coming. Maybe not."

But Mackai told me he was stockpiling provisions at his Steens Mountain home. "Just in case."

As the dancers at Wildhorse Springs quietly dispersed under the bright Milky Way, I caught up with the eldest of the group, Mrs. Iris Frank, 98, of McDermit, who was alive during Wovoka's time. "Those of us who saw Wovoka and heard him remember him as a great prophet," she recalled. "When he died, we all expected him to come back again. But that was many years ago."

And now, a century after Wovoka's death, the Ghost Dance is mysteriously cropping up at ranches, churches, and backyards across Harney County. Maybe something is coming after all this time. Maybe Wovoka was right. Whatever lies ahead, Delbert Mackai offered this last bit of advice:

"Keep dancing."

The back of Brisling's hand smacked the table, rattling the silverware. An imminent age when God would clear the land of white people and return it to Native Americans. That sounded a hell of a lot like JCAV, except instead of God clearing the land, it was someone playing God with a genetically engineered virus. Delbert Mackai had known all along, stockpiling provisions up on the mountain, just in case.

The son of a bitch knew.

Stuffing the newspaper into his briefcase, Brisling swallowed the dregs of his coffee and hurried next door to the general mercantile. He dumped an armload of snacks and bottled water on the counter, and the clerk looked up from her crossword puzzle, one blue eye on Brisling, the other off doing its own thing.

"I hear you're going up to Mackai's place," she said, taking his credit card and inexplicably ringing up the total on an old-fashioned brass cash register.

"I guess word spreads fast around here."

"From there to here," she said with a nod at the B&B. "What kind of rig you got?"

"Jeep Cherokee."

"Four-by-four or the city type?"

"Four-by-four." He had driven nothing else since the ice storm, since losing Judith and the baby.

"You'll do fine then. Just take the north road." She plucked a Bureau of Land Management map from the rack, spread it across the counter, and marked the route. "But don't stray too far from the road."

"Why not?"

"Deer season opened last week. There's already been three accidents. It's like folks just lost their senses. Besides, my brother's up there, and he can't hit the broad side of a barn sober."

Brisling paid for the map and went to his Jeep. It was coated in a dense rind of frost. As he shivered and waited for the defroster to kick in, something dark clouded his peripheral vision, a black SUV pulling up to the gas pump across the way. Out stepped two men who might as well have had "Feds" stenciled in yellow letters across the backs of their dark jackets—Senator Flaherty's minders, no doubt. Both wore dark sunglasses. The driver was a greasy little bugger with long black hair slicked into a Mafioso-style ponytail. The passenger was a real meathead, six foot five in his long black overcoat, with short gray hair and dark skin, probably Mexican.

The north road to Steens Mountain was so riddled with washboards Brisling thought he might lose a filling. The mountain, he decided, hardly deserved the label, at least not in comparison to the majestic volcanoes around Seattle. Climbing up through the stunted trees, he emerged on a sprawling waste of gray and brown, here and there streaked with golden-leaved trees. The land seemed to tilt skyward, ending abruptly at a long, craggy summit that scraped the leaden sky.

At a fork in the road, he turned left, away from the summit, and down toward the head of Little Fish Creek where Delbert Mackai lived. A narrow drive plunged through a stand of those golden-leaved trees, aspens maybe, and delivered Brisling to a long meadow of tawny grass, pale with frost. A drab two-storied ranch house nestled in a pocket of trees at the back. The house was in need of painting, but someone had gone through the trouble of installing solar panels. Three wind turbines towered over the trees behind the house, their titanium-white blades churning in the chilly morning breeze like giant eggbeaters. Despite the impressive show of alternative energy, wood smoke curled invitingly from a stovepipe in the roof of the house.

Grabbing his briefcase from the front passenger seat, Brisling approached the house, mounted the front porch, and knocked on the door. He waited in the cold, rubbing his hands together, taunted by the sweet smell of home-fire smoke. At last, the door opened to a stout little man in his eighties or nineties. He had a wizened brown face and coal-black eyes. His thick buzz-cut hair was completely white, but his eyebrows were still black. He wore plaid wool slippers and a cozy flannel shirt tucked into dirty blue jeans.

Brisling introduced himself and handed over his King County Hospital ID. "Are you Delbert Mackai?"

"I am," he said in that high-pitched voice some men acquire with age. He eyed Brisling's Jeep.

"Can I ask you about the Burns Ice Man?"

Delbert Mackai stretched his arm across the threshold, palm flat against the jamb. "Are you some kind of scientist?"

"Yes. No. Please, I just need to ask a few questions." He buried his hands in his armpits. "Could we talk inside?"

"That depends."

"Look, I'll cut to the chase. I know you buried the Ice Man's body. You, personally. And I know you took custody of all the scientific data as well."

"Who the hell told you that?"

"US Senator Joseph Flaherty."

"Did he send you here?"

"As a matter of fact, he did. So can we talk?"

Mackai lowered his arm and gestured for Brisling to come inside. "I don't know why Senator Flaherty saw fit to give you my name, but this better be important."

"Believe me, it is."

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